Ongoing History Of New Music

The layout of a tour bus is standard…first, you have the driver’s compartment…behind that is an area where everyone can hang out…a couple of tables, some seating, a fridge, a stove, a microwave and an audio-video system connected to a big-screen TV… Next is a hallway lined with sleeping bunks, usually about three per side…after that, a bathroom and maybe some shower facilities…and finally, we come to the rear bedroom… Here you’ll find a double bed, more seating, another TV and few more amenities… Sometime on December 3, 2015, Scott Weiland entered the back bedroom on his tour bus, which was parked outside a country inn and suites hotel northwest of Minneapolis…he wanted to rest up before that night’s show at the medina ballroom that night…he never came out alive… After 8:00 that night, police were called…there were reports of an unresponsive male, perhaps suffering from an overdose…it was Weiland—and by the time help arrived, he was long dead… The fact that scot weiland had died wasn’t the biggest surpri

One of my great accomplishments of the year was the construction of a new home office…after 12 years working on this program in a converted bedroom, I built a full-feature workspace in the basement… Oh, it’s lovely…for the first time since I started doing this program in 1993, all my stuff is in one place…all the computers, all the CD’s and vinyl and books and magazines are all together…it’s a marvelously efficient workspace… This, however, was not an easy project…renovations being what they are, it took a full ten weeks longer than projected…permits, trades, materials—the usual problems…and then there was the matter of all the stuff I had scattered about the house… I feel terrible for Matt and Elisha…they were a couple of interns who had to haul thousands of books—most of them hardcover—out of storage and down into the basement where they had to be sorted by topic, alphabetized and neatly put on the shelves…mat had the horrible duty of filing hundreds of CD’s that I had neglected for a couple of years… A

If anyone were to look at Linkin Park around 2011, there no reason to think that anything was going wrong… In the ten years since the band was formed, they’d sold over 80 million albums…they had millions of fans all over the world…they were in firm control of their career, planning to release a new album every 18 months or so, a schedule they, not the record label, set out… Plus they had time to indulge in all kinds of side projects, some musical, some not—like remix albums, soundtracks, even movies…DJ Joe Hahn had started to direct films …not a bad position to be for a bunch of guys still in their 30s, right?... That was the view from the outside…and for the most part, that rosey view was correct…but if anyone had taken the time to really get to know Chester Bennington, there might have been some warning signs…they would have been subtle, slow-burning, almost undetectable…but in hindsight, something was going on inside, something that would end tragically about six years later… This is the third and fina

When a musician dies, there’s a light that goes out in fans…it’s not like we knew this person, you know, personally…but it might feel that we did…that’s because the art they created expressed feelings and concepts and thoughts that we couldn’t articulate ourselves…it’s through their music that we are able to learn more about ourselves…that’s why we need artists… And we often don’t realize how deeply their music affected us and in what ways it has worked into our lives and psyches until that person is gone… We saw this when bowie died...it happened when prince left us…same thing with Chris Cornell and Gord Downie and any other musician you wanna mention…and it happened again when Chester Bennington died… Linkin Park sold tens of millions of records, many on the strength of Chester’s abilities to express how he felt, feelings that resonated with so many others…and now that he’s gone, we’re looking at how he did that on his own, with Linkin Park and with some of his side projects… This is remembering Chester

When the news first came down on the afternoon of Thursday, July 20, 2017, maybe your reaction was the same as me… “another celebrity death hoax…it’s gotta be because this doesn’t make sense”…but it as the minutes ticked by, it was soon obvious that it wasn’t a hoax…but it still didn’t make sense… By the end of the day, everything was confirmed…Chester Bennington, vocalist with Linkin Park, was not only dead, but dead by his own hand…what?... This guy was the frontman for a band that has sold somewhere around 100 million records...he was drafted in to sing for Stone Temple Pilots for a couple of years…he having fun with a couple of side projects…he dabbled in acting…and he had a loving family with six—six—kids… What happened?...and even though the news came during a long string of musician deaths, this one was one of the most shocking…totally unexpected… Let’s see if we can’t sort out what we can…and as we do, we’ll remember Chester Bennington…this is part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaph

As someone who churns out tens of thousands of words a week—everything from emails to blog posts to business documents to these radio scripts—I’ve developed a fascination with words and, for whatever reason, names…especially the origins of names… The study of word origins is “etymology”…and the study of name origins is “onomastics”… Take, for example the name Ignatius…this is an ancient name dating back to the Etruscans, the civilization before the romans…a lot of dudes were named “Ignatius” over the centuries… When Spanish came along, it morphed into Ignacio, which was often abbreviated to “Nacho”…fast-forward to 1943…Ignacio Anaya lived in Piedras Negras, which is just over the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, home to a U.S. military base… One night some American soldiers came to his restaurant looking for something to eat…with almost nothing in the kitchen, he wiped something up featuring deep-friend tortillas cut into triangles, covered in cheese and served pickled jalapeno peppers…the soldiers loved th

Not that long ago, if you wanted to make an album, you needed rent a big, expensive recording studio…in addition to paying an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly rate, you need to pay for a producer, an engineer or two, all the recording tape you used and any catering that was required…it could get very expensive very quickly… But that was okay because back then, the music industry was awash in money…your label would happily advance you the money to cover your recording costs because they were just going to take it out of profits derived from the future sales of that album… Because there was so much money to be made, a lot of big, expensive recording studios were built…some were in big centres like New York, L.A., and London…others were chateaus out in the countryside or maybe on an exotic island…even a medium-sized city could boast half a dozen solid studios…. These days, it’s possible to make a very good-sounding album on a laptop in your bedroom…heck, I know of some people who have made credible-sounding r

This is part two of our remembrance of Gord Downie… We left off last time with The Hip in their golden years—a glorious run of singles, albums, tours, festivals (like edgefest, their own “another roadside attraction festival, edenfest) along with appearances on radio, TV and in movies—plus things like Junos and Much Music video awards… “Day For Night” was followed by “Trouble At The Henhouse” in 1996, which spun off five singles…the concert album, “Live Between Us” was recorded that year at Cobo Hall in Detroit… And the band continued to evolve…song structures became more complex…Gord started experimenting with different vocal styles and phrasing…and the longer the band stayed together, the more Canadian their music seemed to be with more and more references to people, events and places… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here is how we’re going to do this…we all know how important Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip have been to Canadian music, Canadian culture and Canada, period…we’ll take that as read… And when Gord died on October 18, 2017, it seemed like the whole country went into mourning…the best tweet I saw read “Canada closed…death in the family” …those six words summed things up better than anything else I saw... What I’d like to do is remember and celebrate Gord and The Hip, filling in some blanks along the way…they’ve never been interested in any kind of chronological autobiography and no book about them has ever received official authorization from the band… So, although The Hip was around for more than three decades and have some of the best fans ever, there’s still plenty of stories to be told…and along the way, we’ll remember Gord for who he was and what he did that touched so many people across this country…and we’re going to start at the very, very beginning… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho

I’d just landed at Pearson airport in Toronto after a long flight from the far east…as soon as we left the runway, I turned on my phone…the texts and the emails came one after another…blam: Gord Downie was dying…blam: brain cancer…something called “neuroblastoma”…blam: and the prognosis wasn’t good…the condition was terminal…one year, maybe two—five at best… But that same news conference also announced that The Hip was going on tour again…the Man Machine Poem tour…that turned into a massive national celebration of all things Gord, all things hip, all things rock and all things Canadian… Tens of millions of people stopped what they were doing and watched the final show that Saturday night in August…the band never said it would the “last” anything—but I think we all knew that was the case… Then came a period of denial…sure, Gord was sick, but we were still seeing him around…a couple of interviews…his “Secret Path” documentary…showing up to receive an order of Canada…things were fine, right?... They must hav

For this Friday bonus Podcast of the Ongoing History of New Music we dig deep into the OGH archieves to the spring of 2005 and have a look at one of the most influcential bands of the 80's They only exhisted for barely 4 years and released just 4 albums but without them would there be a Smashing Pumpkins? Nine Inch Nails? Marilyn Manson? White Zombie? This is a program in the "what's the big deal series?". An occasional look at why todays music sounds like it does.  This time we ask "What's The Big Deal About Bauhaus?!?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a Friday bonus Podcast of the Ongoing History of New Music. We dig deep into the OGH archieves to bring you episodes that you want to hear again. This time in Podcast form. This week it's the 2nd part of the Oral History of Madchester as told by someone who was there to see it and make it happen. Gaz Whelan of the Happy Monday's! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we sit here together, it’s been about 11 years and five months since Tool released their last album, “10,000 days”…that record came out on April 28, 2006…  Let’s put that into perspective…the last time we tool gave us a record of new material, the introduction of the iPhone was still more than a year away…Bob Barker was still hosting “The Price is Right”… And this is my favourite: that was the year when NASA launched the new Horizons Probe towards Pluto…it has since flown past Pluto and is well into the Kuiper Belt…in other words, you can travel out of the solar system in less time than it takes Tool to make an album… This isn’t the longest interval between albums from a band who has never broken up…in fact, Tool has gone out on tour multiple times, just to remain acquainted with their fans…but this has only served to underscore the point that Tool hasn’t come up with any new music since 2006… Here’s the question: why?...what’s the holdup?...where’s the new music?...those are three big questions that w

At some point, all of us will shuffle off this mortal choir and join the choir invisible…doesn’t matter who you are, how much money you may have or how famous you might be…in the end, we’re all mortal… This really hits home when musicians we love disappear forever…it’s not like we personally know these people, but because their music helps us know ourselves, a little piece of us dies with them… The circumstances of their passing’s vary…misadventure, accidents, overdoses, suicide…some can be explained away while other deaths will forever remain a mystery… With that in mind, let’s take a look back on the last hours of some of those musician’s who have left us… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here are a couple of musical terms you may have heard of… Earworm: that’s when a clip of a song keeps running through your head on a loop over and over and over again. Mondegreen: a misheard lyric…a great example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…he sings “’scuse me while i kiss the sky”…some people hear that as “’scuse me while i kiss this guy”…there are lots of mondegreens in popular music… I propose we need a third term…it’s that opinion that overcomes us when we believe one song sounds almost exactly like another… I know you know what i mean…you hear a new song and a brief sense of déjà vu fills your head as your brain tries to correlate its musical database with what you’re hearing…and when all the processing is completely, you might think (a) “hey! Someone ripped off [artist x]!”…or (b) “someone’s gonna get sued!”… But you know something?...it’s not that simple…far, far from it…welcome to the murky world of unfortunate sonic coincidences… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad

It is so hard to have a hit record these days…hell, with all the music out there it’s nearly impossible to attract any kind of attention…all the noise and distractions and competition… If you’re a new band with a debut record, you’ve got anywhere from six to thirteen weeks to make an impression once that first single comes out….if you fail to achieve significant traction with radio and retail and with fans during that short window, you’re in trouble…and if your record label doesn’t make it happen for you with the second single—well, I hope you didn’t quit your day job… It wasn’t always like this…back in the day when music was harder to come by, a record label could afford to wait for a band to develop and mature through two, three, four, five albums… Look at U2…they stumbled through their first two records before settling down with “War”… Look at the Red Hot Chili Peppers…warner brothers let them discover themselves through three albums before they could deliver the a little breakthrough with “Mother’s Mi

You probably know someone like this: a guy (or a woman) who through having loads of talent or tons of luck or both has become successful…they have everything anyone could ever hope to have…money, notoriety, stuff…access to all kinds of pleasure and adventures and opportunity...everyone you know wishes they cold be this person… And then they screw it all up…not by bad luck or illness or any other misfortune, necessarily…they just make some bad decisions or questionable moves that damage or destroy their careers and their lives… Sometimes this downfall happens in slow motion over a period of weeks or months or even years…but sometimes, the crash comes in seconds…and in the end, there’s no one to blame except the person themselves…. This sort of things happens in music a lot…ego, bad advice, hubris, arrogance, drugs, stubbornness, being out of touch, mental illness—all these things can lead to tarnished legacies at the very least and full-on catastrophes at worse… These are stories of spectacular acts of sel

The last few years have been rough for music fans…Scott Weiland, David Bowie, Prince and a dozen more have left us…2017 has also had its share of loss…Chuck Berry…Gregg Allman…Chris Cornell—and now Chester Bennington of Linkin Park…  A new ongoing history show about Linkin Park is on the schedule for the fall…but in light of the events of the past week, we’ve pulled out an older show dating to 2008…this tells the story of Chester and Linkin Park to that point… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being in a band seems straightforward…you pick up some instruments and start playing…but it’s much more complicated than that…the music that you end up making is influenced by so many outside forces…where you grew up…what music you listened to as a kid…what music you listen to now…the city in which you’re writing songs…the city in which you’re recording those songs… All these factors (and more!) Affect the music you make…but how?...and fans love this stuff…they love to know what other bands influenced their favorite musicians…it’s all part of the understanding and discovery of music… The Foo Fighters know this…and they set out to document all the stuff that goes into one particular album: Sonic Highways…eight songs recorded in eight different cities…and not only did they make a record, but they made an HBO tv series documenting the whole process… Here’s how it worked:  the band set up in a new city for each of the eight songs on the record…they’d hang out, talk with musicians from that city…and then at the

We’ve all done something that we’ve later regretted...it seemed so right at the time, you know? In hindsight, though, it turned out to be really, really dumb… Maybe we were misinformed or lacking all the information we needed…maybe it was emotion or ego that prompted us down that path… or maybe we just disobey what our gut was telling us… “Hey! What’s that big wooden horse outside the city gates! Let’s bring it inside!”…that kind of thing… Prohibition…New Coke…the Ford Edsel…the U.S. invasion of Iraq…. Or the doofuses at mars refusing to allow M&M’s to be used in the movie “ET”…that’s why Elliott ended up using Reese’s Pieces… Listen, everyone has regrets, right?…the best we can do is minimize the number we have...so how can we do that?...the first thing we can do is study the mistakes of other people…if Hitler had learned anything from Napoleon and not decided to invade Russia during the winter, what kind of world would we be living in now? Then there all the bad decisions we’ve seen in the music indus