Solipsistic Sounds from the Center of the Universe: A Lil Edit We're-All-Paying-Attn-to-Him Mix
Mr. Roberts digs into the vinyl shortage for L.A. Times
It’s a tedious process, making bespoke variants at Erika. For swirled vinyl, which when finished resembles tie-dye, each record takes a few minutes to manufacture. On this day, employee Guadalupe Herrera was setting a puck in what looked like a big waffle maker. But instead of batter, it was a pliable polymer disc; he sprinkled it with glitter, added another puck, pulled the top down and squished the vinyl to imprint microscopic grooves containing sound waves onto it. Another employee, Denise Hernandez, was inserting, by hand, newly minted “Madvillainy” records into each jacket.
Read Mr. Roberts LA Times story on the vinyl demand in Southern California: As superstars cash in on vinyl LP boom, small labels and manufacturers struggle to meet demand
Foodman: 'Hoshikuz Tenboudai'
THE ONLY 2021 @LILEDIT PLAYLIST YOU'LL EVER NEED*
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CMJ's Beat Box chart from July, 1988
Biz Markie’s ‘The Vapors’ shoots into the Top 10 in its first week out!
Mr. Roberts goes long on Lonnie Frisbee, hippie Christians and 'The Jesus Music'
Mr. Roberts, raised in whatever subsect of Presbyterianism doesn’t teach children that one of the founding tenets of the faith was the morally dubious belief in predestination, reported out a story on the birth of Christian rock in Southern California.
Writes the writer who pays the bills around here:
The birth of contemporary Christian rock and pop music in America can in part be traced to a vision received by a 17-year-old runaway from Costa Mesa named Lonnie Frisbee.
After stripping naked and taking LSD in 1967 near Tahquitz Falls outside of Palm Springs, the young man called to God.
As water from the falls crashed, Frisbee, who wore his hair and beard like the archetypal Jesus Christ, saw himself standing beside the Pacific Ocean, Bible in hand, staring out at the horizon. But instead of water, the sea was filled with lost souls crying out for salvation.
“God, if you’re really real, reveal yourself to me,” Frisbee, who died of AIDS in 1993, later recalled pleading. “And one afternoon, the whole atmosphere of this canyon I was in started to tingle and get light and it started to change — and I’m just going, ‘Uh oh!’”
Uh oh indeed! Acid will do that to you!
You can read the rest of the story HERE.
But while we have you, below is a song by the All Saved Freak Band.
PS: Here’s a conversation that Roberts had with percussionist Russ Kunkel:
Joni Mitchell asked this L.A. drummer for help on ‘Blue.’ The rest is music history
That time Mr. Roberts rode a towboat down the Mississippi pushing 60,000 tons of grain
Editor’s note: In 2004 while a staff writer at the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, Mr. Roberts stepped aboard a working towboat called the S.S. Parsonage and journeyed south down the Mississippi River. Documenting the rituals and routines of the boat’s crew, he spent six days crawling down America’s artery. We are republishing it below in its entirety. Reading time: 10 minutes.
It is near midnight on the Mississippi River, 100 miles south of Memphis, and a towboat pushing 35 barges creeps like a bead of sweat down America's spinal cord, this "strong brown god -- sullen, untamed and intractable," as T.S. Eliot once described the massive 2,350-mile-long waterway. Up above, the Arkansas moon shimmers off the river and a trillion stars faintly define a scribbled line of poplar trees rising from both banks.
Bloated with more than 60,000 tons of coal, corn, coils, sand and stone, the Christopher M. Parsonage directs the load from the rear. Eight thousand horses of pushing power kick up a never-ending vibration like a heavy-duty washing machine on spin cycle. A gently swaying community of eight men and a female cook live inside this eternal rumble. They are in the middle of 28 consecutive days aboard. Not once will they step ashore.
Read morePsyched for this!
Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney Zoomed w/ Mr. Roberts About Superwolves
The best parts of the conversation were about Jonathan Richman’s assessments of Will Oldham’s live performances and a gig that Bonny “Prince” Billy did in Louisville with Blowfly opening. Turned out Sweeney was at that show too, and it was the night of “The Sopranos” season finale. Huh! Neither made the final edit.
READ ABOUT THE GREAT SUPERWOLVES ABOUT HERE, VIA MR. ROBERTS IN THE LA TIMES.
Mr. Roberts resurrects his 2002 love letter to St. Louis
Mr. Roberts wrote this in 2002, when he edited the Riverfront Times ‘Best of St. Louis’ issue. Five years later he abandoned St. Louis for Los Angeles. This essay recently came up in a conversation and the staff figured it’d be a good time to republish it.
Losers, crybabies and unsettled souls love to blame St. Louis for their frustrations, as though something as nebulous as a city could be held responsible for a human being’s unhappiness. “Everything would be better if I were in (enter name of hipper city here). There’s so much more action there. I’ve got my choice of two dozen vegetarian restaurants, hundreds of international markets. Amazing shows every night! A rock scene. An art scene. House and techno scenes. An amazing theater scene. Hotter boys. Sexier girls. Get this: (insert hip city here) has a store devoted only to Asian incense!”
Read moreListen: 2001 Big Pink Brains: Underwater sets from Lil Edit, Paul B. Davis & Bitch Ass Darius
In 2001, DJ Lil Edit was part of a party crew called Big Pink Brains. The St. Louis-based DJ and artist collective had 24-hour access to an empty 1000-square-foot building with two distinct rooms, and from 200-2003 threw a half-dozen parties with two sound-systems and half a dozen house and techno DJs — including members of the Oberlin-St. Louis label Beige Records (Paul B. Davis, Bitch Ass Darius, Cory Arcangel and Joe Bonn).
Two decades later, DJ Lil Edit (Mr. Roberts) is too ragged for ecstatic all-nighters. Happy 20th to Big Pink Brains.
LISTEN TO LIL EDIT’S HOUR-LONG HOUSE SET FROM 2001 HERE.
LISTEN TO PAUL B. DAVIS TAG-TEAM 2001 SET WITH BITCH ASS DARIUS HERE.
Your turntable, explained
Bern Lemke discusses recent additions to Mr. Roberts' oooovre
From the desk of Bern Lemke:
This week Mr. Roberts was locked in his office a lot and when he did come out for tuna sandwiches in the mess hall nothing good came of it. Below, what he was apparently doing in there.
There is a man named Howard who has spent more on concert tickets in SoCal than RRI’s entire entertainment budget. Howard is a dude that dances dances dances. He just turned 70 and had a crappy year because the pandemic forced him to reckon with some hard truths. Like, that Zoom dancing isn’t much fun and that, when it comes down to it, he’s an attention whore just like Troy Baker.
Read Mr. Roberts’ story on Howard in the Los Angeles Times: ‘Concerts are back, and that can only mean one thing: the return of the Dancing Man.’
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Mr. Roberts wrote about the righteous efforts by musicians to speak against the recent Israeli bombings of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. United under the banner Musicians for Palestine, more than 600 artist published a letter that read, in part:
“As musicians, we cannot be silent. Today it is essential that we stand with Palestine,” the statement says, adding that “we speak together and demand justice, dignity and the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people and all who are fighting colonial dispossession and violence across the planet.”
You can read the story (if you haven’t used up your LA Times paywall).
Patti Smith, Questlove among 600 musicians calling for ‘solidarity with the Palestinian people’
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Mr. Roberts worked on a Saturday this week, which The Man requires him to do a few times a year. Yesterday morning he made his coffee and went straight to his office, shut the door and started listening to Susumu Yokota way too loud. (We’d get demerits if we listened to our music at such a volume!)
He wrote about A Martínez being named as one of four co-anchors for NPR’s ‘Morning Edition.’ On the phone, A told Mr. Roberts that the bookish types didn’t appreciate some sports radio dude infringing on their turf.
“I always joke that I was the last possible choice — a lifetime sports-radio guy — to jump into public radio. The blowback was very intense from radio listeners about someone like me being on those airwaves.”
Read about A’s new thang here: ‘Sports-radio guy’ to NPR ‘Morning Edition’ co-host: A Martínez’s public radio journey.’
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And: E Little contributed a playlist to In Sheep’s Clothing:
Essential Ambient Works by Susumu Yokota.
Thank you for reading.
Love,
BERN LEMKE
Music news from Troy
Sylvester
On Michael Hurley's Wolf Songs
Note from E Little: This essay on folksinger Michael Hurley first appeared in LA Weekly on May 5, 2008. It has been reprinted with Mr. Roberts’ permission.
If Michael Hurley were just a little crazier, he'd be huge. If he wore a funny hat like Sun Ra, and was obsessed with, say, lawnmowers or parakeets, maybe more people would pay attention. Had he recorded 1964's FirstSongs, followed that seven years later with the perfect Armchair Boogie and then vanished like Gary Higgins, Vashti Bunyan or Karen Dalton, Hurley's upcoming show at McCabe's would be much more ballyhoed than it perhaps is.
Read moreImages from Troy #1
Troy went digging and wants to share with the group one of the images he found.
On Prince's performance of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004
Last week in the L.A. Times, Mr. Roberts caught wind of the new director’s cut of Prince at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. Lo, he wrote about 600 words on the version, which also featured Tom Petty, Dhani Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Steve Winwood, and Facebook took notice. When the post published, the clip had 18,000 views. It’s now closing in on 300,000. Nice one. (That said, us underlings at Ballpark Village strongly believe Mr. Roberts got lucky, and that Prince’s magic is what made it go viral, not some dude on the West Coast.)
Excerpt:
A few teaser angles find the artist discreetly preparing for his close-up, eying his bandmates as if he’s at a 7 a.m. pancake breakfast getting ready to suggest a basketball game. “Look at you all,” sings Petty. “Still my guitar gently weeps,” reply Lynne, Winwood and Dhani Harrison in harmony. Then the camera shows Dhani with an excited grin on his face as Prince moves to center stage.
The solo? A work so virtuosic that little red Corvettes are crammed with the bodies of writers who have attempted to describe It.
For Prince fans — and pretty much everyone with a soul who sees it — Gallen’s re-edit further underscores Prince’s genius on the electric guitar.
Read our boss’s story in the LA Times HERE.