The NIN/JA tour is in KC on Wednesday. I’m feeling a road trip coming on…

It will be all I can do to get up there and get in. But I wish I could afford one of these packages. Trent’s using his formidable marketing skills to help out a fan in need. It’s an interesting contrast to the Britney Spears promo I posted about a while back.

So yeah, not only a great musician and marketing genius, also a class guy.

I haven’t been posting much the last couple weeks because this has been sucking up all my free time. UStream is a site that lets people stream live video and audio from their webcams. There are all kinds of applications (I’m planning on using it to deliver real-time lectures to my online students this summer). Enter the Haggis has been using it to stream the majority of their shows live for the last couple weeks. What makes this different from taping a show to play on YouTube or something similar is the interactive aspect. There’s an associated chat room where fans (or students) can interact with each other or with the person on the live stream. There are all kinds of features I haven’t explored yet, too. If an indie band is lucky enough to have a tech geek for a member, this is a great promo tool.

In other news, I have a huge list of bands that I’m slowly checking out. I started with an old band that’s new to me, The Tragically Hip. I vaguely knew they were Canadian and folk-rock esque, but that was about it. I mentioned to my husband that I’d heard a Hip song that I liked and his answer was to produce everything the band had done up to the year 2000 from his CD collection! He was a big fan growing up, apparently. The things you learn about your spouse… So I’ve been working my way through their older catalog and have plans to get the seven (!) CDs we need to complete our collection.

One thing I love about the Haggis Head community is the widely varying musical tastes of the folks who hang out there. Here’s my list so far of bands to check out: Tegan and Sara, Metric, Eisley, Missy Higgins, Jump Little Children, Dar Williams, the Abrams Brothers, the Decemberists and I have a whole other list somewhere that I can’t lay my hands on at the moment. I’m going to be a busy girl…

So what’s in your MP3 player today?

This band started following me on Twitter a couple days ago. I checked out their website and streaming audio and I’m intrigued. From what I gather, this is a sort of conglomeration of artists, all out of Ireland, who play together every once in a while. Sort of like the world’s most professional Irish seisún. Several of the musicians come from “the world famous musical dynasty ‘The McPeake Family’” as their website puts it and all have a resume of performances with bands from the Corrs to the Irish Tenors.

Of the four songs available on their website, two are instrumental and two are vocal. The lead singer, Peter Wallace, has a pleasant, raspy tenor and though the lyrics are simplistic, he delivers them with conviction. The two vocal tracks have a light, poppy feel that would be right at home on any pop or perhaps country radio station, but retain a pleasant Celtic flavour.

The group’s real strength is in their instrumentals, both of which have an airiness about them yet stop short of Clannad-style new aginess. It’s here that McPeake’s piper, Francis McPeake IV, really gets to stretch out and shine. His skill on the uilleann pipes (an instrument I once heard described as a cross between a hot water bottle, a bassoon, and a brassiere) provided my primary motivation to check out more of their music and perhaps buy a CD.

Unfortunately, it seems that’s not possible at this time. The store page on their website is empty and a search of iTunes came up empty as well. Were this group to produce a CD (or if they already had), it would be at worst pleasant background music and at best a real showcase for a talented Uilleann piper. I, for one, will admit to being curious.

This article from Sunday’s Washington post made me laugh, cringe, and reluctantly admire some of the ideas concert promoters are using to “put butts in seats” as the article so delicately puts it. Admittedly, some of the ideas verge on brilliant. Why, for example, has no one ever come up with idea of offering layaway for such high ticket events as Bonnaroo and Rothbury before now? No Doubt’s strategy of offering their entire catalog for download if you purchase one of the top tier-tickets is equally savvy. Considering anyone can download their entire catalog for free anyway (albeit illegally), why not offer that enticement and make some real money?

What I found laughable (besides the ridiculous headline…when have concert promoters ever been interested in ‘helping’ fans with anything besides emptying their wallets?) was the excuse that the bad economy is affecting concert ticket sales. Excuse me, but except for the top tier acts like Springsteen, U2, etc., sales for most large-scale concerts have been declining for years (the article even cites a figure that 40% of seats go unsold). It ain’t the money, people. It’s the utterly lame, canned experience that most stadium shows have become combined with the ridiculously exorbitant prices these self-indulgent promoters and acts think they’re entitled to command.

Which is why it made me snort Diet Coke up my nose when I read that Britney Spears expects people to pony up $500 for the privilege of sitting on couches *on* the stage to watch her perform on her upcoming tour. For $500, I’d expect a private show complete with a pole-dance and happy ending (oh, come on…we all know Brit isn’t gender picky…). I mean, everyone’s got their thing. If I had the cash, I might pay that much for the same privilege at the upcoming NIN/JA tour but honest to god? Britney? $500 would get me into anywhere between 25-50 shows by some damned fine indie bands.

I will probably make another post about this, but I came across this excerpt from an interview with the mythologist Joseph Campbell this morning. He explains, better than I ever could, what it felt like to be in the crowd at a Dead show.

Joseph Campbell :

“The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say, is the answer to the atom bomb.”

“I had a marvelous experience two nights ago. I was invited to a rock concert. (laughter in the audience) I’d never seen one. This was a big hall in Berkeley and the rock group were the Grateful Dead, whose name, by the way, is from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And these are very sophisticated boys. This was news to me.

Rock music has never seemed that interesting to me. It’s very simple and the beat is the same old thing. But when you see a room with 8000 young people for five hours going through it to the beat of these boys … The genius of these musicians- these three guitars and two wild drummers in the back… The central guitar, Bob Weir, just controls this crowd and when you see 8000 kids all going up in the air together… Listen, this is powerful stuff ! And what is it ? The first thing I thought of was the Dionysian festivals, of course. This energy and these terrific instruments with electric things that zoom in… This is more than music. It turns something on in here (the heart?). And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids. Now I’ve seen similar manifestations, but nothing as innocent as what I saw with this bunch. This was sheer innocence. And when the great beam of light would go over the crowd you’ d see these marvelous young faces in sheer rapture- for five hours ! Packed together like sardines! Eight thousand of them ! Then there was an opening in the back with a series of panel windows and you look out and there’s a whole bunch in another hall, dancing crazy. This is a wonderful fervent loss of self in the larger self of a homogeneous community. This is what it is all about!

It reminded me of Russian Easter. Down in New York we have a big Russian Cathedral. You go there on Russian Easter at midnight and you hear Kristos anesti! Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen! It’s almost as good as a rock concert. (laughter) It has the same kind of life feel. When I was in Mexico City at the Cathedral of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, there it was again. In India, in Puri, at the temple of the Jagannath- that means the lord of the Moving World- the same damn thing again. It doesn’t matter what the name of the God is, or whether its a rock group or a clergy. It’s somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all, that’s a terrific thing and it just blows the rest away.”