mailing list in action! mj update! and more

By Robbie on February 7, 2010

After fifteen years of dedicated R&D and delicate fine-tuning -- the automatic e-mail notification of the rf.com mailing list is up and running! If you are within 50 miles of a place I'm playing, you'll get a note in your e-mail box. You should already have gotten a note about my show tomorrow night if you live in, for instance, Mundelein or Gary or Hinsdale. If you are used to driving long distances to see me, I imagine it's not too much more work to take a look at the tour dates on this site now and then. We don't really want to harass the good people of Iowa City every time I stop in St. Louis. Thanks are due to the webmaster extraordinaire, John Gibbons. He has done more for me down through the years than all my managers and lawyers, plus a couple of my booking agents, combined, at about one one-hundredth the cost. John, I salute you!

I said a few months ago that my Michael Jackson cover record would be out in January or February, and so...uh...excuse me, a raccoon just went up on my roof.

Okay, back again. What was I talking about? Oh no, there goes the e-mail bell, I'll be right back.

That was Mary Gunn, the designer from North Carolina. She sent me a pdf of the artwork for the Michael record, and it looks awfully savory. Lots of cheering colors, musical images, an unfortunate shot of my navel, and a very fortunate one of the semi-engorged loins of drummer Dowd, not-too-opaquely encased in sheer brown nylon. A little clipping and tweaking and we should be good to go -- go to itunes and to the replication plant, which will be another month or three. "Back half of May" is now an optimistic but not unreasonable forecast. I know, I know. It is just taking forever. Something about this particular record has turned it into my "Ishtar." Christ in a green hat, I started working on the g(*&%^ned thing in 2000! And the saddest thing is that the longer the wait, the more the buzzing and expectations mount, and to be candid, it's not that great. It's good enough for five years of hype and delay but not ten. Personally I can't listen to five consecutive seconds of it anymore. Do me a favor and forget I ever mentioned it. I'll press fifty, mail them to the saps who played on it, and call it a massive tax write-off.

By the way, have you ever gotten excited about one of those Amazon musical excerpts, enough to order the CD, and then when it arrives you find out that it's actually a bunch of junk? Aside from the more accurate impression gained from the thing close up and in full, and the fact that the best way to fall out of love with anything is to buy it, I think there may be another in factor in play -- some new music actually sounds its best in MP3 form on teeny laptop speakers. It loses power as it gains dimensionality, you might say. It's clearly impossible for highbrow mixers and masterers to carry on as though low-resolution formats weren't constantly gaining ground, and though I wholeheartedly welcome the MP3's instantaneity and ease of use, the future of finely textured, dynamically sophisticated popular recordings appears fraught, and this is sad.

On the other hand, a handful of well-recorded and otherwise meritorious new music has come into my ken recently, some records you might want to hear in longer-than-fifteen-second segments. Specifics to come...