Mr. Roberts would like to remind you of this Lil Edit mix on Soundcloud.
… and also inform you that new cassette mixes have piled up and await dispersal —IF TROY WOULD GET HIS ACT TOGETHER IN THE AV DEPT.
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Throwback from the RRI Library: The Butler Miller, a Cocktail Classic
On occasion we are tasked with dredging up writings from Mr. Roberts’ past. It feeds his ego. Below is something he penned regarding a drink called the Butler Miller. You don’t know what a Butler Miller is?
Here’s the Drink of the Week from the May 17, 2006 edition of the Riverfront Times, the St. Louis newsweekly where Mr. Roberts was an editor and writer from the mid-1990s to 2007.
The Butler Miller
When Butler Miller walks through the posh lounge at the Ritz-Carlton in Clayton, Missouri he does so with confidence. Cruising past diamond-encrusted heiresses sipping from Champagne flutes, Miller, dressed business-casually, takes a seat at a bar table with the knowledge that all the money in Clayton couldn't buy what he's got. He's in love, and in a few weeks he will be married. The newlyweds are looking to buy a new house. His family's in the barge business, which provides ample income. But that's all gravy.
A handsome server arrives and places little bowls of mixed nuts, wasabi peas and sweet potato chips on the table, then takes Miller's order:
"I'll have a Butler Miller, please," says Butler Miller.
"A Butler Miller?" responds the server.
"Yes," says Miller matter-of-factly, "it's a vodka gimlet with Chambord. A Butler Miller."
The server repeats the order and walks away.
It's an exclusive club, those who have drinks named after them: Harvey Wallbanger. Shirley Temple. Arnold Palmer. Suzy Wong. Brandy. Tom Collins. Bloody Mary. Butler Miller.
One night in New Orleans a few years ago, Miller was having dinner at Jacques-Imo's Café with business companions. Miller had been drinking gimlets, and started fiddling in his head with recipes. After dinner at the bar, a lightning bolt zapped out of a thundercloud: "I saw the Chambord and ordered what I called a ‘Chambord gimlet.' After experimenting a little bit, I decided to make it my own, and in my typical modest way, decided to name it after myself."
The Butler Miller can be prepared a few different ways. As a martini, combine vodka, lime juice (preferably fresh) and Chambord in a shaker and serve in a cocktail glass. The Royale in south city offers their Butler Miller on the rocks. "Pour the Chambord in first," explains Miller, "then rocks, then vodka, then lime juice." Miller says that twists are optional, "and not really necessary. Rail vodka is as good as brand. The Royale has fresh lime juice, rather than Rose's, and it makes the drink more tart, but still flavorful. The Ritz-Carlton gives you raspberry garnish, a nice touch."
Indeed, the Butler Miller that the server delivers is a winner. It glows purple. Chambord does that to everything it touches. The tart, shocking black-raspberry liqueur is a transformative ingredient and adds a measure of sophistication to the otherwise utilitarian gimlet. The berry blunts the lime's acidity and provides a tang that's perfect for spring.
"The Butler Miller can make you look a little frou-frou," acknowledges Miller, "but if you are not confident to drink the drink that you like, regardless of its looks, then maybe you are not enough like Butler Miller to enjoy a Butler Miller."
Miller and his betrothed, Megan Flaskamper, will be serving Butler Millers after their wedding, which will occur on May 27 at the historic Trinity Lutheran Church in Soulard. They will be honeymooning in London, where they will enjoy theater. They already have tickets to see Hayfever, starring Dame Judi Dench. While inhaling the city, the Millers will no doubt waltz confidently into pubs across town and express shock and astonishment that London bartenders don't know how to make their favorite drink.
Mr. Roberts speaks with Sam Gendel re: 'Fresh Bread,' 'Satin Doll' and alleged Clown Core involvement
The facility was excited when Mr. Roberts mentioned speaking with Sam Gendel. During the pandemic, his music really kept the community here at the Village calm and pretty much well behaved. But according to WL Mintner, the allegations of Gendel’s involvement in Clown Core are just that: ALLEGATIONS.
KCRW facing charges of racist behavior: a report by Randall Roberts and Daniel Hernandez
A white-founded institution faces reckoning over alleged racist behavior. This time it’s KCRW. Read the story here.
Mr. Roberts presents: The Best of Light in the Attic Records
MR. ROBERTS PRESENTS: THE BEST OF LIGHT IN THE ATTIC RECORDS
Spotify playlist: 100 Great Rock & Roll Songs
Mark Mothersbaugh recalls his wild COVID-19 experience, replete with hallucinations
Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
Frank or Not?
Frank Sinatra has a sandwich.
Mr. Roberts tells the story of a mysterious “Frank Sinatra” acetate that may or may not be a previously unknown pair of a cappella recordings by the so-called Chairman.
Random .gif for the readers
Mr. Little Editor makes a playlist for late night and/or early morning listening
A conversation with Genesis P. Orridge on life, death, power, gender and
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge photographed by Beatrice de Gea for the Los Angeles Times
In advance of his recent visual art show Pandrogeny II, the musician and gender revolutionary discussed the men who rule the world.
How to explain it? First of all, the people who are in control, the worst of the worst who are attacking us with anger, brutality, deception, exploitation, suppression, intimidation — all those things that are tools of control — those people, like myself, are old. They’re at the end of their time, too. And it’s almost like the thrashing of Tyrannosaurus rex. Its tail is crushing and wiping and swiping. It’s hitting people and other creatures and hurting them. But it’s dying.
And all around us are wonderful young people who have realized that definitions are meaningless and that they are individual beings who choose to become self-created. They are our hope. The younger generations, they’re not fooled by this plutocracy and this awful, awful political system that’s regressing into authoritarianism again. They know better.
So the question is, can we as a species survive long enough for that to happen? And that’s an open question, because we have lunatics all over the place right now. Ignorant ones, which is the worst kind of lunatic.
Rainbo Records closes: The life and death of a Southern California vinyl institution
Inside Rainbo before its sad demise, a wall in the printing room was festooned with misprints.
The Canoga Park-based vinyl, CD, flexi-disc, cassette and 8-track manufacturer Rainbo Records has closed. It’s legacy, dating back to 1939, is something to celebrate.
In Dec. 12, Rainbo’s longtime general manager Steve Sheldon retrieved the last-ever record to be pressed by Rainbo: a blue vinyl reissue of “The Other Side of Life” by the Moody Blues.
“I’m pretty distraught over it,” Sheldon said a few days before production stopped. “Up until the eleventh hour, I thought a white knight was just going to come along.”
Tall and skinny, with pale blue eyes, Sheldon has worked at Rainbo since 1971 and has been its general manager for 34 years. Like many aging lanky guys, the 67-year-old slouches a bit more than he did a few decades ago; at times his posture seems to reflect his current mood.
Were he 20 years younger, Sheldon says, he would have worked to uproot the whole enterprise to Texas or Tennessee, where the cost of doing business is lower. But a move would be pricey — and it’s not his company.
So Sheldon has spent the last several months informing customers of the closure, talking to employees (most of whom have already taken other jobs or have been let go as duties wind down) and asking clients to retrieve their stored assets.
RR’s story can be accessed over at the Los Angeles Times.
The Apollo fire and its aftermath: a report from Banning, Calif.
(Cal Fire)
Mr. Roberts travelled to Banning, Calif. for the LA Times to report on the fire that destroyed the Apollo Masters blank lacquer plant.
One morning last week just after 8 a.m., as Sarabjeet Ubbu was starting the day behind the counter of his 7 Star Food Store in Banning, Calif., he noticed black smoke billowing from the roof of the building across the street.
The unassuming beige facility houses Apollo Masters. Owners of a manufacturing plant and a closely held formula for making and mounting a specific mix of lacquer onto aluminum discs, the company supplies a reported 75% of the world’s blank lacquers, the shiny circular plates essential for the production of vinyl records.
The vinyl sector is a small but vital part of the music industry. Though it was impossible to know from where Ubbu stood, the smoke pouring from the windowless plant signaled a kind of doomsday scenario. The business of selling vinyl albums, in the midst of an unexpected 14-year surge in sales, could have been facing its biggest existential threat since the rise of the compact disc.
Read his definitive story on the fire and its aftermath.
Sonny Curtis on how ‘Love Is All Around’ became the theme to ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’
Mr. Roberts: How did you come to write “Love Is All Around”?
Sonny Curtis: It was a deal that happened all in one day. I had a very good friend who worked for the Williams-Price Agency, and they managed Mary Tyler Moore. He called me one morning in the summer of 1970 and asked me if I would be interested in writing a song for Mary Tyler Moore. He said they’re going to do a sitcom on her and they all need a theme song.
At his lunch break, he dropped off a four-page treatment that one of the writers or somebody had put together. It wasn’t a script. It was a treatment that didn’t have a lot of information. Like, “A young girl from the Midwest gets jilted and left at the altar” or something like that. “She’s in the big city of Minneapolis and gets a job at a news station and rents an apartment she has a hard time affording,” that sort of thing.
I wrote the song in about two hours and called him back and said, “Who do I sing this to?” He sent me to James L. Brooks — he and Allan Burns were the executive producers — who was over there on Ventura Boulevard. I don’t know if you ever saw “Gunsmoke,” where they have all those big Quonset hut-looking buildings? That’s where their offices were.
Read the rest of the Q&A at the LA Times.
Mr. Roberts explores the rich, cocaine-fueled history of Village Studios in West Los Angeles
Christine McVie to Studio D, the recording suite inside this one-time Masonic temple. It is history.
“It’s almost eerie, you know?” Buckingham says. “Almost too familiar in a strange way… A time warp. You walk into the bathroom, the tiles are the same. Everything.”
“Stopped in time,” echoes McVie, sitting on a couch next to him.
Buckingham and McVie, together to make their first duet album after decades of Fleetwood Mac collaborations, have returned to the Village Recorder, now called Village Studios, the same place where four decades ago they made their 1979 double album “Tusk.”
Inside the studio’s wood-paneled suite, which they helped design while riding high on “Rumors” royalties, Buckingham and McVie are prepping for a vocal session. But first comes a photo shoot. Beyond the mixing board on the other side of the glass, drummer Mick Fleetwood’s imposing kit stands at the ready. McVie’s lyrics are piled on a music stand not far from Buckingham’s amp and guitar. In an isolation room is a baby grand piano.
A scrum of colleagues facilitate needs of the two longtime bandmates, Buckingham in blue jeans, a black leather jacket and flip flops, McVie in jeans, a T-shirt and a blazer.
“It feels like coming home,” she says.
Read the rest of Mr. Roberts’ history of Los Angeles recording studio the Village at the LA Times website.
Ozomatli, Myanmar and the Politics of Musical Diplomacy
April 2009, Yangon, Myanmar— Four days into a five-day tour of Rangoon, Burma, we thought we’d had our fill of weirdness. But after Ozomatli are led through Kawechan School for the Blind’s darkened hallways and up a flight of stairs, the sound of a flailing guitar solo and the thump of a bass drum punch through the corridor. Around a corner, standing on a stage, four conservatively dressed men wearing sunglasses and matching pink-and-blue polo-type shirts are banging out a rock song. They look like a ’60s surf band, the Ventures or something — square and stiff.
Ozomatli, a band born in Los Angeles in 1996, are scheduled to perform a few songs for students, orphans and disabled kids as part of an outreach program arranged by the U.S. Department of State. They didn’t count on any competition, and they watch from the side as a band called Blind Reality, facing 100 people of varying degrees of disability, creates a chaotic, freakazoid sound that only four sightless rock dudes living in the pocket of one of the world’s most beaten-down countries could possibly make.
New-genre alert: Burmese blind-metal.
Ulises Bella’s jaw drops. Wil-Dog Abers gasps, and Raúl Pacheco, a thoughtful former Tom Hayden political intern with “Chicano” tattooed on the back of his hand, witnesses, eyes agape, as the guitarist does a double-fingered fret run that would make Eddie Van Halen shift uncomfortably in his seat. The members of Ozomatli have a catalog of mind-blowing images stored from the two years they’ve been working as musical diplomats for the U.S. Department of State, but this one surely ranks: an expert Blind Reality guitarist whose main influences, he will tell the band, are fretboard gymnasts Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai.
Read morePlaylist: Unicorns in Paradise
Photo by Jonas Unger