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Calabasas company to market Jimi Hendrix energy drink

Submitted by Robert Daeley on Wed, 2007-01-24 09:29.

Well, this is hardly a surprise, but still something you have to shake your head about. From AP, “Calabasas company to market Jimi Hendrix energy drink”

A new energy drink doesn’t promise you’ll have the juice to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix after taking a sip, but it does hope to give you a “Liquid Experience.”

Beverage Concepts, a new Calabasas-based company, recently announced it will launch a line of nonalcoholic drinks named for the title of Hendrix’s breakthrough album, “Are You Experienced?”

I was particularly amused by this quote from the story,

“To see his image and the beautiful feelings it has created during my lifetime cheapened by base advertising … is very disappointing to me,” said bassist Michael Balzary, better known as Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Of course, that’s the band that recently licensed its music to play on Disneyland roller coasters. Disneyland. On the other hand, those guys are still around to say yes or no, unlike Hendrix.

This isn’t even close to the first product licensing Hendrix’s ghost (e.g. witness that awful Pepsi commercial of recent years), but it seems a particularly loathsome idea considering his, ah, pharmaceutical choices in life, not to mention the manner of his death.

My wife Denyse and I were talking yesterday about the way generations are being sold and marketed — currently the 80s are the hot ticket, which is particularly surreal to me. Last it was the 70s, and before that the 60s. It won’t be long now until the 90s are the thing.

Can you imagine a Kurt Cobain energy drink?

Like Hendrix, or Cobain, or any musical ghosts being disturbed by marketing, none of the mountebanks involved can take away the beauty of the music — as long as you mute the incessant commercials playing bastardized versions of the songs. ;)

Nothing can take away the beauty of these words,

If you can just get your mind together
Then come on across to me
We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sun rise
From the bottom of the sea

Can you hear the innovative guitars playing backward? I can, and I always will.



Modern Age -- or, Why The Strokes Rock

(From 2003. Check out the song and artist links via iTunes.)

In a classic case of retrospective predestination, I was talking to a friend a few months ago about the dearth of good albums lately. Note the use of “albums” rather than “music.” There is some awesome music being produced, some great songs, nowadays. But I was lamenting the lack of latter-day Joshua Trees, Neverminds, Siamese Dreams, and Vs’ses.

Then fate intervened with The Strokes: Is This It? The various copies of iTunes I have tell me I’ve listened to the entire album well over 50 times in toto (if one adds in CD and iPod listens), over the past few months. I cannot get enough of it. This is a Good Album.

Robert Hilburn, LA Times Music Critic and Ye Olde Bob Dylan Comparer, had an article in the Times: Strokes delight, but is this it? Managing to not mention Bob Dylan once in this (admittedly short) article, he asks,

One of the more intriguing questions in pop these days, however, is whether the Strokes will eventually be a chapter or a footnote in this movement.

“The movement” of course refers to The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Vines, The Hives, and numerous other less-MTV‘d bands who, for whatever reason, don’t suck as much as their immediate predecessors on the conveyor belt. Somehow, Hilburn manages to compare The Strokes to both The Velvet Underground (agreed) and The Cars (borderline).

The reason these four bands in particular Don’t Suck is that you can hear actual emotion in their songs. That’s right, folks, real-life emotion, not Emotion® or Emotion© or Emotion: My Story (as told to my ghostwriter).

Hilburn decries the lack of depth in The Strokes’ freshman effort, and I can hear what he’s saying. These are not complicated songs with complicated stories, nor needing complicated deconstruction to understand. However, I would point out that most old-school rock is not too complicated (something which Hilburn talks about a bit in the article; could it be more wishy-washy?). And I could write another 1000 words on how important music+emotion is to me/us/everybody. But instead, I’ll leave it to a stanza in that U2 re-make of a Dylan song,

All I got is a red guitar / Three chords and the truth.

Or better yet, how about this from the Velvet Underground:

Jenny said, when she was just five years old
There was nothin’ happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothin’ goin’ down at all, not at all
Then, one fine mornin’, she puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn’t believe what she heard at all
She started shakin’ to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock’n’roll

Despite all the imputations
You know, you could just go out
And dance to a rock’n’roll station
And it was all right, hey baby,
You know, it was all right

The Strokes rock. That is it, and that’s all right.



Obsessions on Cinco de Mayo

Submitted by Robert Daeley on Sun, 2003-05-04 23:00.

First of all, for those who aren’t familiar with it, Cinco de Mayo (5th of May) is a Mexican celebration of defeating the French army in 1862 at the Battle of Puebla. It’s pretty much a national holiday in California now, too, and a lot of fun. Would you like to know more?

And without further adios, here are my current obsessions:

On a island somewhere in the Southern Pacific lies the headquarters of the top secret organisation International Rescue. Their mission…to save the world from disaster. Go!

In Brave New World, ‘soma’ is the hypnotic drug everybody takes to, ah, feel better. According to WordNet, soma is the ‘personification of a sacred intoxicating drink used in Vedic ritual’ or the vine used to make the drink. It’s also the name of ‘listener-supported, commercial-free, underground/alternative radio broadcasting from San Francisco’, AKA SomaFM.

One of the cooler features of the new iTunes is adding album artwork. Thanks to Clutter (especially the newest beta), that process is easy. Warning: if you’re at all like me, don’t plan on getting anything else done for the rest of the afternoon. And by the same token, if you’re anything like me, stay the fsck away from the Music Store. :)

While my previous obsession with The Royal Tenenbaums movie has abated somewhat, the soundtrack is still going strong. What do you do if you’ve almost (but not quite) over-listened to the album? You find the lyrics and obsess on them.

Speaking of music, I’ve been amassing some more American Roots music. Like Ralph Stanley, probably most famous for his haunting ‘O Death’ on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. His voice will rip you apart. It’s a very old song you might have heard covered by Camper Van Beethoven on Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. Also on the Americana front: Bill Monroe, king of bluegrass, and Leadbelly, king of everything.

Nirvana fans will remember the band’s MTV Unplugged album, and perhaps especially the final track, listed as ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ The song is actually an old traditional titled ‘In The Pines’, the sadness and creepiness of which you can feel even just reading the lyrics. (Here is a ‘standard’ version of them.) Leadbelly’s take on it added a new dimension of referring to the girl in the song as ‘Black Girl’, while Bill Monroe’s bluegrass ballad was less haunting yet still sad. And of course Nirvana’s version was loaded with subtext. You can hear Leadbelly’s on Where Did You Sleep Last Night: The Lead Belly Legacy, Vol. 1 (1996), Smithsonian Folkways and Bill Monroe’s on either of the 20th Century Masters - Millennium Collection: Best of Bluegrass or Best of Bill Monroe CDs.

Next on the Obsessions hit parade is getting ready for my upcoming reclamation of fitness after quitting smoking and last year’s bout with hyperthyroidism. (Make a note to yourself: never, ever, ever get hyperthyroidism.) A big part of that has already been bouncing around town on my Specialized cycle, with which I am obsessed. It’s a two-year-old Hardrock, a combo bike, which means it does pretty well both on road and off. More on fitness another time.

Lastly, when I need to chill out, nothing works better than some combination of these three: the Drone station on SomaFM; some white-noise environmental tracks (forest, waterfall, ocean surf, traffic, etc.); and the Conet Project, quite possibly the coolest thing the CIA, MI6, and KGB ever did. Or didn’t do. We may never know. :)

(This must be what happens when your brain starts to get oxygen. ;)



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