Thursday, June 14, 2012

MUSIC NOTE: Party at Muchmore’s tonight (and DIONYSIUM in one week – plus a WBRU musical mystery and more!)


In one week, I will host another Dionysium (this time featuring Catholic author Dawn Eden, comedian Daniel Somarriba, and musician Hannah Meyers) – but TONIGHT, at the very same location, come to the grand opening of the bar that shall host the Dionysium: Muchmore’s, at 2 Havemeyer St. (just three blocks east of the Bedford Ave. subway stop, the very first L stop into Brooklyn on the subway if you ride from 14th St.).

Not only shall there be one hour of free beer starting at 8pm, there will be multiple hip bands afterwards for a trifling $5 (including Future of What, Dust Engineers, Ancient Sky, and She Keeps Bees – which combined, sound more than a little like a plot synopsis of Prometheus, which Julian Sanchez makes a good – and very spoiler-filled – case for disliking, though I enjoyed it anyway).

This week also reportedly brings sci-fi-sounding new albums from Rush (Clockwork Angels) and, more hiply, Metric (Synthetica). 

Hipper still, in a few weeks, scads of bands perform in a festival honoring the late punk-friendly club CBGB’s.

And on what some might consider a less-hip note, I think my article about the conservative rock band Madison Rising will shortly be in the July cover-dated issue of Newsmax – but for Flag Day, here’s their “Star-Spangled Banner” video

On an intriguing but perplexing musical note, I notice that Wikipedia’s entry on the Brown University-affiliated radio station WBRU (which was the nation’s first professional alternative rock format station) says something that is surely wrong:


Between April 17 and April 21, 2006, WBRU played their entire music catalog by title from A-Z, starting at 5:30 p.m. with "About a Girl" by Nirvana on the 17th and ending around 11:15 on the 21st with "Zombie" by the Cranberries. The songs ranged from new music (by such bands as Panic! at the Disco and Zox), 1980s and 1990s pop rarely played by the station (such as Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy") and classic punk (i.e., Sex Pistols and New York Dolls).


And while I did find a news article claiming they played their whole library starting on the first date noted above, if they really ended when claimed by Wikipedia, that's only 102 hours of music.  Surely they have far more albums on hand than that. 

Even if the “catalog” only means a few designated tracks from each album, that short a span can’t be right, can it?  I mean, even if it was usually just one track per album, we’d only be talking about something like 1,000 or 2,000 albums.  Heck, I knew individual Brown students with that many albums.  But now I’m intrigued about what really went down and when it ended – if indeed it has ended!

Shouldn’t someone at WBRU be editing that entry in between mastering the station’s Twitter and Facebook accounts?

(At first, I suspected “their entire music catalog” here merely meant “whatever they happened to decide to play during that alphabetized four-day period,” which is definitely not that exciting a claim.  But the news article definitely said they played the station’s entire library – though the news can be wrong.  In retrospect, by the way, I probably should have recorded the entire U2 library when WBRU played that over the course of a day once back when I was there – though I got a lot of it.  U2 also gave away an iPod, when those were still novel, containing all their songs, and it was dubbed the UPod.)

One thing I suspect is not being played at Brown often is this “redneck cover” of Ice Cube’s “Straight Outta Compton” (h/t Andrea Pisani).

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