Ok, it’s officially Zeppelin Friday.

John Williams is confirmed to score the seventh Star Wars movie.
It’s impossible to think of my childhood and not think about John Williams. He scored the theme songs for two of my favorite movies as a kid, Star Wars and Superman.
He also scored: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, to name a few.

A pretty awesome thing happened two weekends ago.
Some of my closest friends from grade school and high school pooled together to have Mike Doughty perform a private show for us at my friend’s parents’ house in Scituate, Massachusetts.

For those of you who don’t know who Mike Doughty is, he’s a singer/songwriter and former frontman for the band Soul Coughing—a band my friends and I loved back in high school and college. Their big hit in the 90’s was Super Bon Bon but after the band broke up, Mike went on to do some great solo work. I Hear The Bells is one of my favorites.

We got him to perform through his PledgeMusic project, Soul Coughing Songs: Reimagined (PledgeMusic is like a Kickstarter for strictly music-related projects).
Since my friends took the initiative to get Mike to play for us, I felt compelled to create some solid (and very limited) concert schwag in the form of t-shirts for all my friends and their wives/girlfriends as well as concert posters. I screen printed them myself:


The t-shirts and the posters both feature the same design, but I gave the posters and extra twist: I made them a 2-color, red/blue design, imitating the old form that 3-D graphics used to take back in the day.
We called the event “3D” because every year, my friends have a 4th of July barbecue and we call it Dogs & ‘Dads. It’s a double entrendre. “Dogs” refers to both each of the dogs my friends own and the hot dogs we cook. “Dads” refers to the fact that most my friends are now fathers as well as the crawdads we ship up from New Orleans to boil and eat.
This year we had a third “D”, Doughty.
3D.
Oh, and Mike sounded awesome.

Powerful track and I’m really digging those gritty background graphics:

Via my brother, MarkMulvey.
He sorts through 95% of the shitty music out there to find the good stuff.
So you don’t have to.
Welcome.

via Open Culture

My last post reminds me of one of my favorite tracks by Soundgarden:

President Obama pays tribute to Led Zeppelin.

Hell yeah. The best rock ‘n roll band ever.

After seeing a few concerts recently at the Greek Theater I began to think again about something I’ve always wondered about—are opening bands prohibited from using ‘premium’ lighting effects on stage? Or is it quite simply that most times, opening acts don’t have the budget to afford fancy visuals?

Even the sound quality of the main performer/band is always richer, as if, like the lighting, they’re given access to the better sound equipment.

It’s clear why you wouldn’t want the opening band to upstage the featured one, but I’m just curious if these are unspoken rules musicians follow, if it’s in writing or if it’s simply just not having the money to do something better.