Porcupine Tree Announce Fall U.S. Concert Dates

British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree have announced the dates for an American tour this fall, in support of an as of yet unnamed new album. Porcupine Tree's last American dates were in 2007 behind the release of their critically acclaimed Fear Of A Blank Planet album.

Since then, the band has been relatively quiet -- at least by their usually very prolific standards -- releasing only the FOABP companion E.P. Nil Recurring, and the acoustic live release We Lost The Skyline. The group's leader Steven Wilson has however been typically busy with his side projects No-Man, Blackfield, and Bass Communion, as well as releasing his first ever solo album, Insurgentes this past February.

Tickets for Porcupine Tree's fall American shows will go on sale April 17, except Boston and Chicago, which are on sale April 18, and San Francisco, on sale April 19.

In the meantime, fans can get the jump on tickets by registering for membership in ROABP, Porcupine Tree's fan club. Those who do so can buy advance tickets for the fall dates, as well as receive a copy of Ilosaarirock, a live album recorded on Porcupine Tree's Fear Of A Blank Planet tour. Details are available at Burning Shed, who are also the official online store for all things PT.

Here are Porcupine Tree's fall American tour dates:

Tue Sep 15 SEATTLE, WA MOORE THEATER
Wed Sep 16 PORTLAND, OR ROSELAND
Fri Sep 18 SAN FRANCISCO WARFIELD
Sat Sep 19 LOS ANGELES CLUB NOKIA
Mon Sep 21 CLEVELAND, OH HOUSE OF BLUES
Tue Sep 22 CHICAGO, IL VIC THEATER
Thu Sep 24 NY, NY TERMINAL 5
Sat Sep 26 PHILLY ELECTRIC FACTORY
Sun Sep 27 BOSTON, MA HOUSE OF BLUES

The Rockologist: Concert Hippies, Beer, And Rock And Roll

With the summer concert season just around the corner, let's be honest here -- this is also the time when the hippies start to come out of the woodwork.

Personally, I've no idea what these long-haired leftovers from the psychedelic era do for the remaining nine months of the year -- least of all, how they are able to support themselves. But come summertime, the freak flags fly high once again, and particularly so on the outdoor concert circuit.

You know the ones I'm talking about, too.

They are most often seen during the festival season, at places like Bonnaroo, Coachella, and perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent at Lollapalooza in Chicago. The women sport way too much underarm hair and wear long flowing granny dresses (when they aren't going topless anyway), and they do that inexplicable fertility dance thang that they do.

The guys? Well they go mostly shirtless, gray, and hairy as hell, with their braided ponytails batting you about in the face at right about the point you just want to see Sting singing about "Roxanne" during that first Police encore.

You know them. You love them. They are the concert hippies.

And here in Seattle at least, this year promises to be a particularly big one on the concert hippie circuit. Out at the Gorge Ampitheatre overlooking the Columbia River, we've not only got the annual Dave Matthews Band Labor Day shindig -- there's also a two-night stand with perennial concert hippie faves Phish, and a triple bill with the Allman Brothers, the Dead, and the Doobies. The view will be panoramic, the music will be great, and the hippies -- well, they'll be there too.

Why? Because we're talking nothing less than concert hippie heaven here.

Now here's the thing. As a longtime concert veteran, I've been interacting and otherwise dealing with concert hippies for years. Generally speaking, they come in several varieties -- but what I've largely found is that the stoner guys can be a lot of fun, while the drunk guys are much less so.

During a Rolling Stones show around 1990 for example, I had the unfortunate instance of having a drunk hippie seated next to me in my seventh row seat at Seattle's Kingdome -- a seat I paid some pretty decent scratch for I might add. The guy stank something fierce of the same sort of rot gut wine I drank as a teenager for one thing (who besides me out there remembers Mad Dog 20/20?).

But on top of that, he kept bashing his ponytail into my face, whilst flailing his arms madly about and singing along with Mick to "Jumpin' Jack Flash." It was bad enough having to sit through the opening set by the Spin Doctors. The last thing I needed was this hippie jackass giving me a fucking encore.

Okay, so those are the bad hippies. There are also your good hippies. And the thing is, the good hippies can be a lot of fun to party with. You do have to be careful though.


One of my earliest memories of partying with the good hippies came in my pre-teen years during an early seventies outdoor concert called the Rainier Sunbust in Seattle. A group nobody reading this has ever heard of called Bighorn were the headliners, but the openers were a soon-to-be-famous Seattle band called Heart.

Unfortunately, I pretty much missed their set because I ate the acid that the nice hippies offered me, and spent the next several hours trying to be talked off of a three foot high platform that I was convinced was as high as Mount Rainier.

It was my first, and last experience eating acid at a concert.

With that unfortunate incident several years behind me as an adult, I soon decided it was time for the ultimate acid test -- only minus the acid. I decided it was high time (no pun intended) for my first Grateful Dead concert.

I've never cared for the Dead personally, but much like Bruce Springsteen (who conversely, I like a lot), I'd always heard how the Dead's concerts are must-see events. So I took the plunge.

What I remember most about the concert (and yes, I was both stone sober and straight), was a lot of really boring jamming that had me glancing at my watch often. This was the five hour concert that simply refused to ever end. On the other hand, the crowd not only lived up to, but in fact totally exceeded my expectations.

For example, there was the girl offering to sell me a taco. I was actually quite hungry about the time she did too, and at a buck a taco the price was right too. But something about her sales pitch just completely ruined my appetite. Here she stood, literally caked from head to toe in mud, selling her tacos from what to the best of my recollection was a greasy oil pan from a car.

Can you say "yum?"

So a few years after that, me and some friends of mine decided to go camping out at the Gorge the same weekend as a Steely Dan concert. None of us had tickets, but we went anyway. And you know what? We actually had a blast partying with a bunch of concert hippies into the wee hours of the night.

What I mainly remember is a lot of dust and flying tents once the wind kicked up.

I also remember one of my friends nearly falling face first into a fire; a lot of really bad music being played; some guy named "Nathan" screaming into my face at 4 AM when I was trying to crash; and one of "Nathan's" junkie friends eyeing a can of pork and beans on our picnic table like it might be her last meal.

The next morning, I can also recall us high-tailing it the hell out of there at the crack of dawn. I'm not sure I remember exactly what the reason for the rush was, but who am I to ask questions?

While a lot of these memories are hazy ones, the one thing I mainly remember is that it was one hell of a party. I gotta admit that I kind of miss partying with the summer concert hippies.

Which is why I'm considering a trip to the Gorge this summer for Phish.

Do I give two shits about Phish's music? Absolutely not. Which is why I wont be buying tickets. And am I getting too old for this shit? Without a doubt -- which is why I gotta do this while I still can. I can smell the stale patchouli oil of those old hippie chicks now.

See ya' out at the Gorge this summer.

New PJ Harvey: Album Of The Year? Maybe...

Music Review: PJ Harvey & John Parish - A Woman, A Man Walked By

I've always really liked Polly Jean Harvey (better known to the world as just PJ).

It has also been really amazing to watch her development as an artist over the years. From her early days as a sort of heir apparent to Patti Smith on early albums like Rid of Me, to the more fully developed sound of albums like Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the one constant in PJ Harvey has been her passion.

Just lately though, PJ Harvey has also been stretching her musical vision. On last year's brilliant White Chalk, she pared it down to a really stark-sounding song cycle, which -- for the very first time in a lot of ways -- revealed her to be a truly amazing vocalist. The poetry was always there, but amid the stark setting of White Chalk, PJ Harvey also displayed her rather amazing vocal range. The songs themselves were hauntingly beautiful enough, but the vocal delivery -- well, that was something else.

On A Woman, A Man Walked By, PJ Harvey is reunited with sometime collaborator John Parish (Dance Hall at Louse Point), and the results are both startling and, frankly, pretty damned amazing.

Here, Harvey's often starkly-worded poetry is wedded with Parish's music for an album which lies somewhere in between the minimalist beauty of White Chalk and the more fully realized arrangements of an album like Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.

Musically speaking, A Woman, A Man Walked By is all over the place and, in this instance, that is definitely a good thing. Songs like the opener "Black Hearted Love" and "Pig Will Not" find PJ hearkening back to the minimalist punk-rock roots of albums like Rid Of Me.

On the former, the robustly-punk sound plays in sharp contrast to Harvey's gorgeous vocal. On the latter, Harvey just out and out shrieks the lyrics "I Will Not!" behind a wall of punk-rock noise, augmented by an eerie, late-night-horror-show sort of keyboard sound. Yet, on the very next track, "Passionless, Pointless," she goes all reflective on your ass with some gorgeous poetry.

This is typical of the musical contrasts found on A Woman, A Man Walked By. But it is the lyrics that are the most telling here. From all that I have heard, the songwriting process of this album involved Parish laying down music tracks, and PJ Harvey simply writing the lyrics off the cuff. In other words, this is some stream-of-consciousness stuff. The result are songs that sound like they were ripped straight from PJ Harvey's soul.

On "Leaving California," Harvey intones how "no one but me is walking under palms that give no shade," before concluding that "California killed me." On "The Chair," Harvey takes on the mantle of a mother grieving for her son in lyrics that simply rip your heart out, like "pieces of my life are gone, washed away in the water that took my son." On "April," which seems to be a centerpiece of this album, PJ Harvey turns in an absolutely gorgeous vocal performance, wailing away about how these days "just seem to crush me."

A Woman, A Man Walked By is, quite simply, a stunning record that displays PJ Harvey's talents as both a great vocalist and songwriter. It is, at this point, an early candidate for the best record that I have heard this year.

I can't wait to hear what's next.

Aren't the Osbournes Fifteen Minutes Just About Up?

TV Review: The Osbournes Reloaded

Aren't the Osbournes fifteen minutes just about up?

I mean I enjoyed watching the antics of the "first family of rock" on MTV a decade or so ago as much as anybody. Watching Sharon, Kelly, and Jack fumble and cuss their way through a dysfunctional household life where the parents stumbled through dog poop, the kids smoked pot under Mom and Dad's noses, and everyone involved swore like drunken sailors on shore leave was just too much fun to pass up.

I especially enjoyed the way that the show transformed heavy metal "prince of darkness" Ozzy into the lovable sort of burnout, better known for barely knowing where he was than for the sort of satanic musical fiendishness that once raised the hackles of fundamentalists everywhere. The bumbling drug casualty of MTV's Osbournes was a far cry from when Ozzy's days in Black Sabbath made him public enemy number one of the religious right.

But there are limits where shocking, if essentially harmless fun can cross the line from being funny to simply being sort of sad.

Fox's new Osbournes Reloaded, even edited down from its original one hour run time to forty minutes is such an instance. Basically, it just wasn't very funny. Occasionally, it was also very mean-spirited in a big time, spoiled brat celebrities thumbing their noses down at all of us "little people" sort of way. Do the Osbournes really need to do this? You have to wonder just what they were thinking.

The gags -- like pulling the old switcheroo from hot chick to old lady during one hapless contestant's blindfolded makeout session -- were not just humorless and stupid, they were also kind of tired. When Sharon offered to up the ante to $500 for another round of blind man's love, the guy wisely declined. Let me guess, it was gonna' be a guy next, right?

The skits involving a pair of grade-school-aged Osbournes acting like foul mouthed brats during a movie, and Ozzy farting his way through a dance routine in leotards were also just stupid. Another bit where the Osbournes worked at a fast-food drive-thru, screaming things like "are you fucking deaf?" at the customers also seemed to show the family's contempt for the same working Joes who made them so rich.

In the worst example of this, a clearly planned "random" selection of an audience member to receive a marriage ultimatum from his girlfriend fell particularly flat. After the poor sap painfully accepted, a WWE style ceremony followed (anyone remember when wrestling did the gay marriage story a few years back?). Here again, the sole point seemed to be just to ridicule common folk, showing a strange and rather spiteful side of the Osbourne clan that I must have missed back when they were stumbling and swearing their way through dogshit on MTV.

Fox has reportedly ordered a five episode trial run of the Osbournes Reloaded. This writer for one, will be amazed if it makes it that far. Speaking of those fifteen minutes...

The Rockologist: Confessions Of A Music Burnaholic

I can't help myself. I love burning music off of the internet. However, it does get me into trouble sometimes.

A couple of years back for example, I loaded my computer up with so much spyware downloading stuff off of peer to peer sites like Limewire and Bearshare (remember them?), that I managed to fry my hard drive and had to buy myself a brand new computer.

So you'd think I would have learned my lesson, right? Au' contrare, grasshopper.

Since that unfortunate incident, I've tried to be more careful. I've limited my downloading to things that friends send me, and to mostly trustworthy sources like Megaupload and Rapidshare.

I also want to set something straight right from the get-go here. I don't "steal" commercially available music. In fact, I actually prefer CDs to MP3 files and the like. A perfect case in point was Radiohead's In Rainbows. Like everybody else, I took advantage of the download option when it was offered (I paid $5. for it).

But this was only because it wasn't being offered on CD at the time. When the album finally was released on CD, I bought it the day it came out. And you know what? It sounded so much better than the MP3 version, it was almost like hearing it for the very first time.

This is why I prefer CDs to MP3s. I do know that the so-called "lossless" formats like flac and MP5 can equal CD quality. But when you are downloading music the standard for now is MP3, and until that changes I doubt very much that I'll be changing my mind.

But anyway, I digress...

The type of music I like to download is that which is commercially unavailable, or what we used to refer to back in the day as bootlegs. If, like me, you are a hardcore Springsteen fan for example, you know that his best live stuff has never been officially released and that there are numerous great radio broadcasts and soundboard recordings from his legendary tours in the seventies and eighties out there that are ripe for the picking.

Winterland 78' or Nassau 1980 anyone? Hey, I can't help it if Springsteen's management or the record company refuses to put these out -- even though they are amazing shows, and there are great recordings of them available out there with the click of a mouse.

So last week, a buddy of mine tipped me off about a site called Quality Boots.

I'm not gonna' reveal the url here, and trust me you don't want to know anyway. On his recommendation, I went there to download a Pink Floyd show I'd been seeking for awhile, where the songs that would eventually show up on the albums Wish You Were Here and Animals were still being worked out in concert under titles like "Raving And Drooling" and "You Gotta Be Crazy."

Anyway, long story short, it happened again.

My attempt to download the precious cargo instead gave me the gift that keeps on giving in the form of some particularly vicious malware. You know, the type that replicates itself all over your screen, and won't let you access anything else. It's kind of like the cyber version of waking up with an STD after that drunken night with the ugly girl you met when it was last call at the bar. You'd think you'd learn your lesson, but of course you never do.

Fortunately, I caught it soon enough this time around that I was able to save my computer -- but it did require a trip to the shop, and a $400. bill at exactly the time I could least afford it. Just color me another victim of the recession and we'll leave it at that, okay?

I was also without my computer for a week, which is not a good thing -- particularly if you are a Blogcritics editor or are looking for a more gainful full-time job. Your friendly neighborhood Rockologist presently falls into both of these categories.

So last night, I got the computer back and I'm happy to report that it's as good as new. But I also couldn't resist getting a new CD burner, and I'll give you just one guess as to the first thing I did once I got everything hooked back up.

Don't blame me. Blame Patti Smith.

After relaxing by kicking back with a few brews and watching a concert DVD of a 1978 Patti Smith concert in Europe, I just couldn't resist surfing the net to see just what was out there in the way of live Patti Smith. Sure enough, I found a great show from the same tour and burned myself a disc of it.

Patti Smith was just an amazing performer back then with her mix of punk-rock attitude and stream of consciousness poetry. I'll never forget when I saw her myself at Seattle's Paramount Theatre in 1978, or the way she knocked me clean on my ass from the opening notes of "Rock And Roll Nigger." She delivered it with all the fire and brimstone of a baptist preacher preaching a rock and roll apocalypse.

To this day it amazes me how Patti Smith can on the one hand deliver a great rock and roll song like that one, and is on the other hand the woman behind the beautifully abstract poetry of something like "Birdland" from her landmark album Horses. I'd marry her were it only possible.

Anyway, that's how it usually starts and this night was no exception.

From there it was on to Springsteen. Since I've got most of the live stuff, my latest mission has been to find the studio outtakes. And damned if I didn't locate the motherlode tonight in the form of Lost Masters, a multiple disc collection that puts the officially released Tracks collection to shame.

Seriously, this thing is a history lesson. There's really cool stuff like "Summer On Signal Hill," an undiscovered E Street Band instrumental gem circa The River, as well as songs in their embryonic stage like "Candys Boy" that later would become -- well, you know.

Then there is a guy like Steven Wilson, who releases so much music with his bands No-Man, Blackfield, Bass Communion, and his main group Porcupine Tree that it's hard to keep track of it all. Wilson is a guy who I am absolutely amazed is not a much bigger star than he is. The guy is not only multi-talented and prolific as all hell -- but he does his thing across multiple genres, from the ambient drone of Bass Communion, to the avant-pop of No-Man, to the prog-metal of Porcupine Tree.

Anyway, in this case, the only thing I found was a great concert I'd not heard yet recorded on the tour behind the last PT album Fear Of A Blank Planet. I'm just finishing that one up right now.

So, like I said, I just can't help myself.

I love burning music off of the internet. Hopefully this time around it wont get me into any more trouble. Live and learn I guess.

Tom Waits For No One


Music DVD Review: Tom Waits - Romeo Bleeding: Live from Austin

If the hallmark of a great songwriter lies in the ability to transport you into the places and the lives of the stories he tells, then Tom Waits has few equals.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened across a broadcast of Tom Waits Big Time concert on the cable network Ovation.

This is a brilliant concert movie that was filmed during Tom Waits tour behind the album Frank's Wild Years. Here Waits is captured somewhere in between the down on his luck, gravelly-voiced skid row persona of his early years, and the brilliant, more multi-faceted music that was still to come. Big Time is one of those concert movies originally released on VHS, long since out of print, that is absolutely screaming out for a DVD release.

In the meantime, thank God for DVRs.

Anyway, seeing this concert sent me scrambling to ebay and all the usual places searching for a copy on DVD to no avail. But the search was not a complete loss, as I did discover that a rare Tom Waits concert DVD -- though not from the same era -- has in fact been recently released.

Romeo Bleeding: Live from Austin is a surprisingly well done DVD document from a concert that, at least best as I can surmise, was recorded during Tom Waits tour behind his brilliant 1976 album Small Change.

The very first time I saw Tom Waits in concert was on this very tour.

The promoters marketed it as a Small Change concert (clever, huh?) with a price of $2.98 a ticket. And I remember being absolutely transfixed by what I saw.

Waits, who sat behind a piano for most of the concert, was mainly backed a small jazz trio. He chain smoked throughout the concert, and occasionally stepped out from behind his piano to tell these amazing stories about things like the infamous Chelsea Hotel in New York, and characters like a guy named "Small Change," who got "rained on with his own thirty eight."

It was just amazing shit.

Afterwords, me and my friend met Tom Waits at the backstage door at Seattle's Paramount Theatre. My buddy Dave -- a hardcore Waits Fan -- extended his hand and said "it's an honor to meet you sir." And Tom Waits, totally in character, simply replied. "no sir, the honor is all mine."

Romeo Bleeding: Live from Austin is a better document of this period than it has any right to be. It begins with Waits chain-smoking behind a pair of Union 76 gas pumps, while a lone trumpet sounds the lonely notes of "Burma Shave."

From there, Waits is usually behind the piano, croaking his way through the seedy backstreets of songs like "Romeo Is Bleeding" and "Christmas Cards From A Hooker In Minneapolis" (with a refrain of "Silent Night" thrown into the mix for good measure).

There are concerts, and there are concerts.

But there are precious few artists that place you directly into the lives of the characters behind the stories they tell the way that Tom Waits does. As an artist, Waits has long since gone way beyond the skid row persona of his Small Change years. The audio and the video -- all things considered -- are, surprisingly, also excellent.

This DVD took me right back. Fucking brilliant.

On Internet Music Journalism And The Character Of My Content

In Seattle this week, we lost a local journalism institution when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped the presses for good. The P-I was one of our two daily newspapers, and the other one -- the Seattle Times -- is also reportedly in financial trouble.

I knew the rock critics at both papers.

Patrick MacDonald -- wily old veteran that he was -- got out a few months ago when he announced his retirement from the Times after decades of covering everyone from Hendrix to Nirvana. MacDonald no doubt smelled the writing on the wall, and decided to get out while the getting was good.

As for Gene Stout at the P-I -- well, I'm not sure what ol' Gene is gonna' do.

I always liked Gene though.

When I was working in the record business in L.A., he once stayed at my apartment in Burbank, and we went to see a comedy show featuring the guy who used to play the bartender on the Love Boat.
Gene himself was always a genuinely likable and funny guy. He used to refer to beer for example as a "meal in a mug."

Definitely my kind of guy.

Word is that Gene's old paper the P-I will be trying things out as an exclusively online publication. And this, to be honest, has really got me worried on a couple of fronts. You see, much as I love the internet -- and don't get me wrong, I do love the internet -- I have also seen the damage it has done to two institutions I happen to love very much -- music and journalism.

It doesn't take a genius to see what the internet has done to the music business. While downloading has made music instantly accessible to everyone -- and in the process of doing so turned every old-school record industry marketing apparatus on its ear -- it has also done so at the expense of both sound quality and, subsequently, artistic vitality.

If MP3s and the like blew up that whole music as commerce dinosaur for good, they did so at considerable expense. Unless I'm mistaken here, the only really viable casualties have been the independent record stores and record labels once run by actual music guys. These days, the music business is being largely run out of the corporate boardrooms of megalithic companies that give less a shit about music than the suits at Sony or Warner ever did.

The result? To be right honest, I'm sick of this shit. Record store closures. WalMart Deals. Ticket prices that all but shutout the youngest and least well off fans. Artists reluctant to experiment with the infinite possibilities of the recording studio -- since the final product will likely only be heard on thumbnail sized speakers anyway, if at all. Don't expect any future Dark Side Of The Moon, Born To Run, or OK Computer in such an environment.

It doesn't take a genius to see what's happening. But this article isn't about that. This is about that other victim of progress -- journalism. Specifically, it's about music journalism.

Years before I ever embraced the whole concept of "blogging," I was a music journalist. I plied my trade at a number of publications -- most often freelancing articles whenever and wherever I could. But I cut my teeth at a Seattle paper called The Rocket.

When my editors there used to send me back for rewrite after rewrite of something as simple as a review of the new album by Sir Mix-A-Lot, it used to really piss me off too. Guys like Charley Cross and Grant Alden were tough as nails, but they were right in doing so. They not only made me a better writer, they also upheld a journalistic standard. Things like journalistic credibility, and the overall vision of the publication mattered back then.

If it was shit, or if it wasn't relevant, we either called it as such or we just didn't review it at all. The quality of the writing also had to pass a strenuous standard of quality. Our readers didn't always agree with us as a result. We we're called pretentious, elitist snobs and worse. But they did trust us.

Somewhere in the nineties, this started to change.

The thing I most started to notice was a laziness as college students writing for free music wrote reviews that read more like press releases. Because who wants to piss off a record company or publicist giving you all that free music, right? As long as the tap is running, why shut off the spicket?

Then there was the new elitism. The more obscure the band, and the less people have heard of them, the better. Which led us to the flavor of the minute, attention-span deprivation we see as being the hallmarks of both music journalism, and the music industry itself today. And people wonder why the music biz is in the dumper.

Which brings us to the internet.

With journalism, as with just about everything else, anything goes on the internet, right?
This is all fine and good when it comes to blogs. If Joe Blow wants to start Joe Blow's blog to talk about everything from his shitty date last night, to his obsession with comic books for an audience of his mom and his buddies, that's fine. In fact, God bless him for having the outlet to do so.

Unfortunately, this lack of any basic journalism 101 class standard has spread to the larger websites as well. What used to be called "writing" is now referred to as "content."

"Content" is a lot like what they used to call "product" in the old school music industry. God, I used to hate the word "product" back then. The record companies were all about pushing out as much product as possible. Didn't matter if it was the Ramones or Right Said Fred, as long as it got out there.

And it is much the same with internet journalism today. Fact checks? Truth? Fiction? Sources? Credibility? Forget about it. It's all about "content." And in the world of internet "journalism," it's a game of more is better, where quantity trumps quality every single time.

Do the incisive and thoughtful pieces still get through? Sure they do. You're reading one right now. But searching for that ever elusive needle in the greater internet haystack of articles where only the most basic standards of grammar are often applied -- if they are at all -- can be a challenge at best.

What exactly is the standard for internet music journalism today? Pitchfork? Blogcritics?

All I know is I miss Lester Bangs. And that we sure could use him now.