MARK BURGESS live in Philadelphia on Tuesday, August 11th. Read on!
NEWS1>> T.V. Smith (Adverts) in session, live in the studio and interviewed on “Rabid in the Kennel,” airs this Monday, hear it now!
NEWS2>> Big Takeover Magazine new address (Update your records!)
NEWS 3>> Big Takeover August-long blowout Moving Sale! Buy one, get one free, half-off sale all month long for back issues and CDs, including our complete sets of issues 1-64! What a sale!
Once again the big news is that Big Takeover #64 Spring 2009 issue with The Decemberists on the cover (and concluding part twos of our awesome Death Cab for Cutie, Sloan, and Devo interviews) was completed in San Francisco in April! (A full description of its contents is just below!) It will begin shipping this week likely, so you should see it quite soon! And remember, we only come out twice a year, every Spring and Fall, so you don’t want to miss one of our jam-packed 200-page issues! Below is a quick description of its contents.
The best way I know to quietly plug my weekly radio show at breakthruradio.com is to let you know what you missed—or hopefully enjoyed—this past year for the last seven months, by listing all 475 or so songs I aired. That list is herein!
All 30 shows (and the first new one this year) are easy to listen to any time you like. Just go to breakthruradio.com, then click on “Multimedia Archive” and scroll down on “All DJs” til you see my name—then click on the “Search” Button. Voila! / I never met Ron Asheton—whereas I’ve met his bandmates Iggy Pop and Mike Watt a dozen times each and interviewed both of them a few times—but as I’ve often noted, The Stooges’ first two albums with Ron on guitar were obvious punk landmarks, and the third-album 1973-1975 lineup is the one band I have never, ever gotten tired of listening to, and can enjoy every single concert recording of. Asheton’s hot as hell bassplaying was a key reason. I will always be amazed at the Raw Power / Rubber Legs Stooges as the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band ever. Ever!
Shocking news of the heart attack death on December 23 of longtime New Model Army manager Tommy Tee, who did more for one individual band than anyone I’ve ever seen, and did it for years and years and years. (He ran their business from top to bottom and went on the road with them as a tour manager and overall handler.) / Here’s a reminder that the new Big Takeover issue 63 is out. And here is again the full info, with some spicy sample quotes from its pages:
Hey again, Big Takeover readers! Our new Fall issue #63 is coming soon, and details of that are inside. (Subscribers, don’t forget to update your address if you’ve moved!) But first, here’s the latest update on the SPRINGHOUSE East Coast tour we are doing supporting MAGNETIC MORNING starting this Thursday in Chapel Hill, NC, with more info on it, including the new ATLANTA date with FOR AGAINST (Yes!!!!!!!!)!: Click here for full info!
Big Takeover #62 with R.E.M. on the cover is on the stands! Look for it in your favorite store near you that carries good music magazines! Below is a slightly longer description of its contents than what I sent previously, with some good quotes from the issue! Like this one from R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe: “”I think that future generations will look back on this time in American history, it will be as foreign to them as slavery is to us. So I’m 48 now and I’m looking [back]; we were right in the middle of women’s liberation, we’d just come through Civil Rights, and I was in an environmental science course in seventh grade talking about pollution and how we’d gotten into this mess, and how we can easily get out of it with alternative energy sources. And we were going to change the world, and guess what? It didn’t happen!”

IKE TURNER died December 12, reportedly in his sleep. He was 76 years old. Was he a good man? Seems unlikely. Was he a good musician? Hell yeah. The man invented rock ‘n’ roll. Really.

Of course the beauty of music is in the listener’s reaction to how it sounds. Why is this stated like a revelation? Is this also part of the super-saturation of image marketing, identity-politics, fashionable rebellion, and Marxist signifiers?
Over the next three days of SXSW I saw some bands I love repeatedly and caught some for the first time.
It’s odd that a younger generation of consumers is being punished for (and threatened) for exactly—or a very similar—thing that thrived in the repressive JOE MCCARTHY era …
For a true music geek, SXSW is a dream come true. It is all about seeing bands you already love and discovering new ones to love in the future.
The musical portion of my Friday began in late afternoon when I went to the Pop Culture Press party at a pub a short trip from downtown. Ostensibly, I went to meet up with my friend Michael Krumper and to see the Hoodoo Gurus, because Michael and I had seen them together on their first tour of American twenty three years before. To the great credit of the Pop Culture Press people, the lineup of bands playing at the party was outstanding (and the fish and chips weren’t bad either—although someone stole my beer when I set it down and turned my back for a minute.

At some point, those other sleeping giants are going to be awakened by the clamor in the music industry and start to rattle the cages of our imperial federal government. They will demand action and they will get it.