Black Eyed Vermillion Featured On NPR, Speaking About SXSW In Austin, TX

Black Eyed Vermillion Featured On NPR, Speaking About SXSW In Austin, TX

Publicity can come from many angles, but it's even better when it pops up on a nationally syndicated radio channel. Huge props to Gary Lindsey of Black Eyed Vermillion for having an brief but on point interview on NPR and also getting the song Box Of Pine featured as a report on SXSW.

Pick up Black Eyed Vermillion's latest album

You Are Not Entitled To Make A Living Off Of Music

Want to survive in the music business, prepare to shed some blood

The idea of having a certain amount of entitlement is just plain bad for business. This could be your personal business or maybe that of you as a musician, for this quick discussion. Who cares if you have toured thousands upon thousands of miles and have fans in every state of America. If they are not buying your music and the audience isn't growing or sustaining your career, call Houston, because there is a big problem.

Will Youtube Sink Indie Music Labels?

Will Youtube Sink Indie Music Labels?

Nothing in life is fair or balanced. As much as we wish it to be, some things just don't add up, especially when the almighty dollar is involved. Myspace was a major hit in the mid 2000's especially for bands. Now the migration has shifted to Facebook, but the one constant since 2005 has been the omnipresence of Youtube. 


Sooner or later youtube would tighten its grip on the its service of world domination and it seems those days are coming sooner than later. Below is quite the interesting read and or listen about how this will affect indie labels such as Rusty Knuckles Music. Do yourself a favor and keep up to date with these tech stories as music promotion and listening habits are as much as in flux as listening tastes of the music audience we are all a part of.

Stream Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires On NPR

Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires'

Link to article on NPR

"In north central Alabama, punk rockers often know as much about football as they do mosh pits. A guy with an arm-sleeve tattoo will open the door for a woman and call her "ma'am." Self-identifying as a blue dot in a red state doesn't preclude Sunday brunch with relatives whose own cars boast confederate-flag stickers. Such differences can arise anywhere, but they can feel more pressing in the Deep South, where history is sticky, like a 90-degree rainy day, and intimate, like Grandma's questionable advice.

Lee Bains III grew up in Birmingham, and he still loves that troubled, currently revitalizing city. "Paris and New York don't have honeysuckle vines like the ones on 32nd Street," he sings to a lover who'd like to go elsewhere in "The Weeds Downtown," as the Glory Fires' members choogle behind him as if they'd just dropped in from Muscle Shoals. But Bains' loyalty doesn't prevent him from calling out Birmingham's political scandals and anti-preservationist sprawl. In the scathing, White Stripes-like "We Dare Defend Our Rights," he calls for justice for the four little who died in the city's notorious Civil Rights-era church bombing, as well as the Latino kids who saw their parents harassed by police during the state's recent conflicts over immigration.

This is what Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires' second album, Dereconstructed, is all about: the fight to claim a home that sometimes drives you crazy. Sounding like Creedence in "The Kudzu and the Concrete" and a little bit like Tom Petty in "Mississippi Bottomland," Bains and his band — the versatile, testy guitarist Eric Wallace and the speedball rhythm section of brothers Blake and Adam Williamson — join a lineage of rock bands who, as another song says, "keep it on the ." In the process, they meld rock's iconoclasm with working people's values: local fun, family ties, the honor of knowing where you fit.

This isn't a new space for Southern rock; in many ways, it is Southern rock, made by rebel sons who question that identity from the Allman Brothers through Skynyrd and on to Drive-By Truckers and Bains' former band, The Dexateens. Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires are intense enough to fully refresh the legacy they've joined. Produced for maximum fuzz and punch by garage-punk elder , Dereconstructed addresses eternal questions with an earnestness and conviction reflective of this century's, direct-action-oriented activists.

This is political music, but it's also here to party. The Glory Fires' members understand that rock's garage is big and full of hidden treasures: Boogie, funk and swamp blues mix with hardcore and classic British snot in their songs. Bains has a voice that could go full country, but he smokes it up with spit and vinegar. If there's one tradition Bains and the Glory Fires unquestioningly uphold, it's the Friday-night custom of burning down the house. They even once got thrown out of a club for being too loud. . "We're going to wash ourselves in fire and water," Bains announces in "Burnpiles and Swimming Holes." Dereconstructed is worth the plunge."

Two Obsessed Guys And A Radical Motorcycle Design, From Marketplace

Bienville Studios calls their designs "art," and they think of the final products - from motorcycles to cars - that way too.

Follow this conversation on Marketplace

"Ten years ago JT Nesbitt was one of the top motorcycle designers in the world. His picture graced the cover of magazines. Celebrities sought out his extravagantly expensive machines. But in 2005, while he was visiting a prince in the Middle East, hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and destroyed Confederate Motorcycles, the company that built Nesbitt’s bikes. Seven years later, his career hadn’t recovered. He was about to take a job waiting tables in the French Quarter, when a stranger showed up on his doorstep and turned his life upside down.

The stranger was a fan of Nesbitt’s work. He wanted to see his latest motorcycle projects. But, Nesbitt explained, he hadn’t designed a bike in seven years, and he was broke. The stranger looked around the shop and offered to buy Nesbitt a drink. So the two of them took a walk down Decatur street, to a French Quarter bar called Molly’s .

They took a seat at a table and ordered beers. And then the stranger asked Nesbitt a question.  “He says, 'What would you do if you could do anything?'”

The stranger says he asked the question on a whim, “I just honestly wanted to know, and [Nesbitt] was momentarily dumbfounded because nobody had asked him that. But strangely, as if it were rehearsed, he had his notebook with him.”

Nesbitt always carries his sketchbook with him.  And so he pulled it out. But before opening it, he made the stranger swear on his grandmother’s eyeballs that he wouldn’t tell anyone about what he was about to show him. The Stranger agreed. So Nesbitt opened up his sketchbook.

Part of JT Nesbitt's sketchbook

The "Stranger’s" name turned out to be Jim Jacoby and in many ways, JT Nesbitt and Jim Jacoby are opposites. Jacoby loves technology; he thinks it can be used to better mankind. Nesbitt shuns most modern conveniences. He doesn’t have phones that can text. Jacoby is soft-spoken, an introvert. “Even having a conversation like this is outside of what I would find comfortable,” he said in a recent interview. Nesbitt can be blunt and abrasive. “Dude, that’s a stupid question,” he once responded to a question I asked.

But one trait they both share is obsessiveness. “This is the only thing that I think about,” said Nesbitt referring to his design project, “and the only thing I’ve thought about for the last eight years.”

Jacoby says he asked to see Nesbitt’s sketchbook simply out of curiosity. What he saw were the drawings of a bizarre looking motorcycle. But the more he thought about them, the more began to see the motorcycle as a solution to a much bigger problem: The decline of industrial design and craftsmanship in America.

“It's unacceptable,” said Jacoby, “that somebody like JT would be sitting here waiting, unable to do what he’s capable of doing. And if we don’t capture this in people like JT and many other incredibly talented people who work with their hands first and then transfer things to computer, we’ll have lost something incredibly valuable.”

Jacoby is a successful entrepreneur who started a company in 2001 called Manifest Digital. It builds websites and does social marketing for large corporations like McDonalds. He built it from nothing and had 140 employees working for him. But he was starting to have doubts about the life he had built around his company.

“A company that needed to be profit driven and hit certain numbers... and I was trying to [save] the world... those two things are hard to square,” said Jim.

The meeting with Nesbitt pushed him over the edge. He made the decision to quit the company he founded.

And then he took his life savings and handed them over to Nesbitt to fund the building of three prototypes of this unusual machine. But the motorcycle commission is just one part of something bigger.

“The goal is to separate the drive for profit from the act of designing,” explained Jacoby. He wants to remove the corporate constraints that normally hinder industrial designers like Nesbitt.  Nesbitt doesn't have to worry about things like keeping the cost of materials down or designing for mass appeal.

One of the reasons Nesbitt was on the verge of going back to being a waiter is that he is unwilling to compromise.

“If Jim hadn't shown up I would be serving you lunch,” said Nesbitt, “and that’s OK. There’s honor in that. I’d rather be the guy serving you lunch than a guy who is building a compromised motorcycle for mass consumption.”

Jacoby has not given Nesbitt any design restrictions for this motorcycle. Nesbitt has complete and total freedom. “So I don’t have to worry about 'Will people like this or that?', which frees me up to do pure design, pure art.”

JT and Jim are trying to create a new type of patronage system. They compare it to the Medici’s, the wealthy banking family that birthed the Italian Renaissance. They call this system the ADMCi, short for "The American Design and Master Craft Initiative".

“I think we're at the beginning now of what could be another Renaissance,” says Jim. “You have more money sitting on the sidelines through private equity and venture capital and in business profits than has ever existed. My goal is to lead through example and inspiration, and say, 'Let’s believe in great craftsmen first, and put that money to work with them.' And the byproduct will create all kinds of other business opportunities.”

The ADMCi is made up of three entities. One of them is a nonprofit called The Master Practitioner Foundation. This entity will apply for grants, and most importantly seek out wealthy donors, or patrons. JT is building three prototypes. When they are finished, JT and Jim will likely sell them for about $250,000 each. But whoever buys one won’t own it outright. They will be more like stewards of the motorcycle. In the same way an art collector might purchase a painting to be on display to the public, the motorcycle may be part of a traveling museum exhibit.

JT Nesbitt and Jim Jacoby

David Lenk is an industrial design expert who also designs museum exhibits for a living. Lenk thinks the ADMCi could help reverse the decline of industrial design and manufacturing in America, which, he says, peaked in the mid 1950s: “You can walk through any flea market aisle today and find a Sunbeam blender or an Emerson fan or Bakelite Xenith radio from the late '40s to early '50s and, not only do they look good, they probably still work.”

But, said Lenk, things started to change in the mid-50s. “The Harvard MBA grads started fanning out with their evangelizing of planned obsolescence, and finance became more important than corporate traditions of design or quality. And by the mid 60s it was all gone. It’s just junk.”

Lenk believes that if the ADMCi’s first commission is a big enough success, if it makes a big enough splash, it could be a model for a new way to fund innovation and design, an alternative to traditional profit-driven investment models. It’s part of a decentralization that’s occurring, he said, “sort of an anti-corporate, structures that are like virtual teams of suppliers that come together to support efforts that will allow individuals with ideas such as JT Nesbitt to produce.”

Lenk’s involvement in this project happened entirely by chance. Nearly two years after JT first showed Jim his sketchbook at Molly’s, the two of them were back at the bar in their usual spot when Lenk happened to sit next to them. “It was a real motorhead moment. Within two sentences we were talking about French Coach work of the 1930s.”

And then JT told David about his motorcycle prototype which by this point was nearly complete. It was in his shop just a few blocks away.  The conversation ended, said Lenk, with an invitation to visit JT’s shop that Saturday, “but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.”"
 

First Listen: Sturgill Simpson, 'Metamodern Sounds In Country Music'

Sturgill Simpson featured on NPR - First Listen for Metamodern Sounds In Country Music

Listen to the full streaming album on NPR

"There are so many "whoa, stop" moments in the first three minutes of Sturgill Simpson's second album. A few selected quotes, which Simpson delivers in a stretched-out Waylon croon: "I've seen Jesus play with flames ... met the devil in Seattle ... met Buddha yet another time," "Don't waste your time on nursery rhymes and fairy tales of blood and wine," "Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, DMT, they all changed the way I see," and "There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane / where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain." Wait, what?

In case you need a clue as to where Simpson is coming from, the title comes in handy: Metamodern Sounds in Country Music nods to the genre-expanding Ray Charles classic Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and tells you he's going to fold country's conventions over on themselves as if he's trying to create some kind of musical space-time portal. He shows up on the cover in a photo that looks as if it had been pulled out of a Civil War-era locket, with long hair and untrimmed mustache. The background, of course, is outer space. Here's a list of the jobs held by the eight people Simpson thanks in the album's credits: molecular biologist, psychonaut, science-fiction author, astronomer, theoretical physicist, psychopharmacologist and computer programmer. The way Simpson is gunning, he's going to freak some people out.

The funny thing is, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music is absolutely country, from the roadhouse-ready "Life of Sin" to the lonesome-skyline blues of "Voices" to the revival-tent call-and-response stomp of "A Little Light." The two covers on the album are of Buford Abner's "Long White Line" (which appeared on both Charlie Moore & Bill Napier's Truckin' Favorites and Aaron Tippin's In Overdrive) and When in Rome's 1988 hit "The Promise," which appeared in the closing credits to Napoleon Dynamite. Both would sound at home at the Ryman.

Nothing on Metamodern sounds forced; Simpson has perfected the trick of distilling classic country from many eras and moving away from it at the same time. (Don't believe him in "Life of Sin," when he sings, "The boys and me still working on the sound.") That trick takes skill and affection for the history of the genre, as well as a willingness to stand alone. If nothing else, someone should give this guy a medal for coming up with the phrase, "You play with the devil, you know you're going to get the horns." But Simpson does things all over Metamodern Sounds in Country Music that seem familiar at first but blow your mind a little bit the second time you hear them."

Sturgill Simpson Is The Astral Explorer Of Country Music

Sturgill Simpson is the astral explorer of Country Music

Few bands plumb the depths of space and time in a way that challenges us the listeners to ask for me. Quite a few bands in metal tread these waters and it feels par for course due to the style of music and rebellious nature. Sturgill Simpson is asking folks on the country tip to go along for the ride and damn if it doesn't feel good to hear the fresh approach. Buy the ticket and take the ride.

Check it out on NPR

"Believe it or not: a country song can be about anything. People who seek out stories about Daddy's farm and fishing trips and Solo cups will easily find them, but the genre's most creative souls have long been interested in much more than sentimentality and a good old American time. Country and the rock that intertwines with it bears a rich legacy of artists asking The Big Questions in warm, relatable accents, from Willie Nelson and his friends at the World Armadillo Headquarters in the 1970s to the Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell today.

Sturgill Simpson is the latest to take on this challenge. The 35-year-old native Kentuckian, who played in the insurgent bluegrass band Sunday Valley before releasing last year's High Top Mountain, a dynamic (and fairly traditional hard country) solo album, didn't set out to blow minds with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, to be released May 13. He just found himself in a new place, both musically and in terms of his fascinations.

That personal paradigm shift is represented in the album's first track, "Turtles All The Way Down," the video for which debuts here. "There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane," Simpsons sings in his outlaw baritone as his band lays down a gentle arrangement reminiscent of Merle Haggard's "Kern River".

The next lyric might make you jump: "Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain." Aliens? Simpson's having fun with a cosmic-scientific meme connected to an old myth that imagines the world perched upon an infinite stack of the green-shelled creatures. Simpson invokes the Turtle in connection to his own quest for meaning, which never does let up. The song's video, created using software artist Scott Draves's distributed computing project Electric Sheep, similarly blends a straightforward, intimate performance with synapse-stimulating, AI-generated effects.

After this detonation of the treasure chest of country stereotypes, Metamodern Sounds continues to flesh out a deep and unconventional relationship between traditionalism and new ways of thinking. The groove Simpson finds with his band is loose and immediate. At times the playing gets almost psychedelic. At other times players circle back on old styles like Southern gospel and do them right. At the center of it all is Simpson, a hot guitar player and mighty singer whose insistence on being complicated makes Metamodern Sounds far richer than most emerging artists' wrestling matches with tradition.

Simpson and I recently had a conversation via email about legacies worth resurrecting and making music that's "like life."

The new album isn't exactly what people might have expected from a guy often called a honky-tonker — though those classic elements are present, too. Where did you begin with these songs?
I just reached a point where the thought of writing and singing any more songs about heartache and drinking made me feel incredibly bored with music. It's just not a headspace I occupy much these days. Nighttime reading about theology, cosmology, and breakthroughs in modern physics and their relationship to a few personal experiences I've had led to most of the songs on the album.

Dr. Rick Strassman's book The Spirit Molecule was extremely inspirational,as were a few recent highly visionary indie films and a lot of Terrence McKenna's audio lectures. The influences are all over the place but they culminated into a group of songs about love and the human experience, centered around the light and darkness within us all. There have been many socially conscious concept albums. I wanted to make a "social consciousness" concept album disguised as a country record.

"Turtles All the Way Down," is a shot across the barricades. And you've made a video that matches it. Tell me about how the video came about and how it relates to the song. Do you think CMT will play it?

I expected to be labeled the "acid country guy," but it's not something I dwell on. I would urge anyone that gets hung up on the song being about drugs to give another listen ... to me "Turtles" is about giving your heart to love and treating everyone with compassion and respect no matter what you do or don't believe. The cosmic turtle is from a much quoted story found in publications throughout modern physics and philosophy, even ancient theology, that now essentially serves as a comedic picture or expression of a much grander idea.

The video is a tightly budgeted attempt to capture or represent a visual simulation of that idea. After some correspondence with Dr. Strassman and Andrew Stone at www.cottonwoodresearch.org I was introduced to visionary software artist Scott Draves, creator of Electric Sheep. After a few emails and hearing the music, Scott was generous enough to offer his assistance with the project. A friend of mine, Dex Palmer, knew some pretty tech-savvy kids at Cineshot Productions that I enlisted for the chore of filming and editing this thing.

As for CMT playing the video, I honestly never gave it too much thought. What they do is great to a lot of people, and it creates jobs for a lot of people, but mainstream country avenues weren't really a goal for me with this album. I'm interested in exploring various forms of newer media that might allow those who otherwise don't listen to country to find and connect with my music.

The song's title invokes Ray Charles's classic album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music — which was a huge, loving and very successful challenge to the genre. This album poses challenges too, and not just the obvious ones. It's not slick like mainstream country, but it also has a more adventurous and looser spirit than a lot of Americana music. How do you think these categories need shaking up right now?

Part of me still feels like I've never had the opportunity to properly express all my earliest influences, so for now I find isolation to be my biggest influence. Somebody told me once it takes an Americana song five minutes to say what a country song says in three — so I try to write country songs. But really, all good music is just soul music.

You're working with a traditional sound but your music still has a roughness and immediacy to it that's very vital. How do you protect that?

I want to make records that feel like life. So in terms of recording, I am very much a live performer and I've learned to treat the studio as an extension of that only with a much broader sonic palette to paint with. I cant even use headphones. We just set up extremely tight in one room and set the levels ourselves naturally with dynamics. This is how all my favorite records were made.

You cover of a song called "The Promise" on the new album and it sounds like a classic country weeper. I thought it was a Mavericks song when I heard your version. But it's a 1988 electropop hit by the English band When in Rome! Tell me about taking a song that's so different stylistically and finding the country in it. 

I believe it's one of about three thousand brilliant compositions from the 80's that got lost in production. I always thought the lyrics to "The Promise" made for a very beautiful, sweet love song and decided I'd like to lay down a somewhat "Countrypolitan" version.

You also have a trucking song on the album: "Long White Lines," written by Buford Abner but better known from a version by '90s country star Aaron Tippin. Mainstream country is full of trucks, but never mentions trucking — trucks in songs today represent leisure, not work. You turn that around here.

CB radios were a big part of the early 80's. They sort of became an obsession after Smokey and the Bandit. My grandfather had one in his truck when I was a kid and I would play on it constantly, in the garage or going down the road, until truckers started telling dirty jokes and he'd make me turn it off. Since the album is a figurative trip, I figured it needed a road song. I became familiar with the tune years ago on an old Charlie Moore & Bill Napier bluegrass trucker album by the same title. We started working it up on the road last year and it just keeps getting looser and funkier every time we play it. At this point it's basically hip-hop.

There's nothing more traditional in country than invoking family, but nostalgic songs about childhood can be so very corny. You have one on this album, "Pan Bowl," that avoids cliché by employing what seems like real details from your life. And you grandfather "Dood" Fraley announces the title of the album at its very beginning. How do you manage to invoke family without getting too sentimental?

Yeah, I wrote that song a few years back and honestly it probably doesn't belong on this album. I just felt that by the end of the record most folks might need some sort of "return to innocence," so I added it as a hidden bonus track. Every word of that song is true. As for the album intro, really I just wanted my grandfather to emcee the album, almost entirely for sentimental reasons, and I thought it made for a nice juxtaposition.

There are points with the band where you almost get into jam-band territory on this album. Is this a reflection of where you're going live? It's a different kind of stretching out than what you did with your old band Sunday Valley.

There is still so much room for sonic exploration in country music. You always have to serve the songs and the songs have to serve the records. Someday, if I ever get to a point where I find that I am repeating myself, that's when I'll know I'm done."

WUKY Feature Interview With Justin Wells of Fifth On The Floor

Fifth On The Floor ready to conquer any stage they encounter

Link to post over on WUKY

"In 2006 Justin Wells moved from Richmond, Kentucky to Lexington with one goal; start a band. In July of 2006 Wells found what he was searching for in the creation of Fifth on the Floor. Since then, the band has amassed a dedicated following not just in Lexington, but across the country as well. Wells attributes the dedication of the local fan base and the approach of trying to stay locally connected to a success he says not a lot of other touring bands have.

“Not everybody is successful with having a good draw in their hometown which seems kind of strange, but I think a part of that is that we didn’t start out as a touring band, we kind of learned how to be a band and learned how to be in a bar first unfortunately and the first couple years we just kind of played the area.”

The success of the band has continued to grow. Fifth on the Floor is currently signed to Entertainment Music One which is the largest music label in Nashville. The band released their latest album Ashes and Angels in March of 2013. The album itself was produced by Shooter Jennings, the son of the legendary Waylon and it charted number 63 on the Billboard country charts. While the band has gone through some personnel changes Wells believes there is a new fire in the band and that their success will continue as long as the band works for it.

“For all the people who complain about the music business and how ‘oh it’s so hard and it’s just a matter of luck’ I just kind of disagree, I think it’s like any other business in that if you work hard and you push and you go after those opportunities rather than wait on them to fall in your lap, you’re going to get some measure of success.”

Fifth on the Floor will be performing at Busters on December 14th. Fifth on the Floor’s album Ashes and Angels is available in stores and online. More information about the band can be found at Fifth on the floor dot com."

Fifth On The Floor hits the road with George Thorogood in 2014

Kid Rock Battles The Scalpers

Nothing could be worse than going to any big stadium shows and seeing the scalpers selling the fake shirts and over priced tickets to the shows. We aren't against anyone trying to make an honest buck, but this isn't honest in the least when it comes to the fans. Is it fair that venues over charge either? Nope, not at all, but that is a whole other story.

Years ago I used to have deal with these bums on a regular basis as I was working at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. What would aggravate me the most was hustling the true fans who really wanted the tickets and shutting out those who couldn't afford their prices. The other big aspect is that the ticket hustlers were in general flat out arrogant assholes. Really stoked to see someone on the level of Kid Rock taking a solid stand to these folks. Read more on the post below or listen to it over on NPR.org.

Kid Rock takes on the scalpers, from NPR

"Kid Rock is tired of scalpers taking tickets away from his biggest fans. One way to stop that: Raise ticket prices. If Kid Rock charged more for his tickets, scalpers wouldn't be able to sell them at such a big markup. But Kid Rock doesn't want to raise prices.

"I don't want to break you by coming to see me, " he says. "I want to make as much money as I can, but I don't need to drive around in a tinted down Rolls-Royce or Maybach and hide from people because I felt like I ripped them off."

Kid Rock wants his tickets to be affordable, and he's lowered his prices. On his latest tour, you can get a ticket for $20 (plus $9.25 in fees). It sounds great — but he knows a fan-friendly ticket price is appealing to scalpers too.

"My tickets are cheap. That's right. That's why the secondary market would work," he says.

So Kid Rock's got a couple tricks up his sleeve to keep tickets out of the hands of scalpers:

1) More shows. For scalpers to make money, there needs to be more demand than supply. Kid Rock's upping the supply by doing more shows. He is doing alone.

2) Beat the scalpers at their own game. Scalpers want the best seats in the house. Kid Rock's raised the prices on these, and he and the folks at Ticketmaster are constantly adjusting prices based on what they see happening in the secondary market.

3) Go paperless. To sit in these really good seats, the pricey , you have to you bought them with at the venue.

4) Don't sell the first two rows. Kid Rock and his team are reserving the first two rows for die-hard fans only. No matter how much money you've got, you can't buy your way into them.

"They are not for sale, " Kid Rock says. "I'm tired of seeing the old rich guy in the front row with the hot girlfriend. And the hot girlfriend, you know, with her boobs hanging out,with her beer in the air, just screaming the whole time. The old rich guy is standing there like he could[n't] care less. It's a very common theme at Kid Rock concerts."

Being able to keep tickets cheap isn't just a good deal for the fans. It's a good deal for Kid Rock, too. On his current tour, he gets a cut of all the beer and merchandise sold inside the venue. Cheaper ticket prices mean fans will have more money to spend on this other stuff.

"If you give people a fair price, I think they'll feel better about spending their money," Kid Rock says. "They might spend just as much because they don't feel like someone is trying to get one over on them."

So is it working? Jared Smith of Ticketmaster North America says there's an unusual way to tell. In this case, a show that isn't totally sold out is actually a good sign.

"If you underprice all your inventory at the time the tickets go on sale, there is a huge incentive for other people, who are buying with the intention to resell, to gobble up as many as they can as quickly as they can, " says Smith. "If you get closer to market-based pricing, it slows down that incentive... I think the fact there are still a few tickets out there in some premium places is indicative ... that we are closer to market-based pricing.""

Makers Row And What Is Made In USA All About

During this year long process of creating unique tool rolls for your vehicle or for your music gear, we have had to do an incredible amount of sourcing. From seeking out fabric manufacturers, to upholstery companies and onto marketing, it is a huge endeavor and one that isn't for those just dabbling with an idea.

After a good while of exhaustive research we stumbled onto what is called Makers Row. It is a website that provides state by state listings for manufacturing facilities and also by what is their specialty. Luckily for us, we were able to find our new manufacturer for the tool rolls set to go into production and now passing along this information to anyone deems it valuable.

Find out more on Makers Row

Link to article on NPR.org 

The Wrench N' Roll starts production as of June 1st 2013 - Rusty Knuckles © 2013

The String N' Roll starts production as of June 1st 2013 - Rusty Knuckles © 2013

"Hundreds of people died when a garment factory collapsed last month in Bangladesh. The tragedy is a reminder of the unsafe working conditions in overseas factories that produce so much of the clothing we buy.

Some people want more clothing to be made in the United States. A new website is connecting American designers and American manufacturers who want to produce high-quality fashion.

There's a scene in the movie Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne has to order 10,000 Batman masks from a company in China — but they all come back with defects.


This is actually a common problem with outsourcing fashion. And if you're not a billionaire crime fighter — if you're just a small businessman in Brooklyn like Matthew Burnett — you can't write off 10,000 defects.

A few years ago, Burnett was making fancy designers wristwatches. He thought the only way to manufacturer them was to use foreign companies. It turned out to be a nightmare.

"There were the language barriers," Burnett says. "There was the time zone differences. So I would be waiting up at 1, 2 o'clock in the morning to respond to emails."


Matthew Burnett co-founded Maker's Row after deciding it was too difficult to find information about U.S. clothing factories.

For his next company, a clothing line, he wanted everything to be "Made in the USA." The orders could be smaller. If there were problems, he could easily call up the factories. But he had no idea how to find factories in the United States. At one point, he went to local trade show and looked through a print catalog. For a guy raised on the Internet, a printed page can be frustrating.

"You have about a 2-inch-by-2-inch square to describe your specialty — and that's ridiculous," Burnett says.

So he and his business partners created a website where people who design things can find people who make things. The site is called Maker's Row. It's like a combination of The Yellow Pages and Match.com.

American manufacturers can put up a listing and even a video introduction. So let's say you want to find someone who prints T-shirts. You might turn to Neil Breslau, one of the owners and president of First2Print, which is featured on the website. Or if you're a belt designer, you might check out Universal Elliot Corp., a family-run business in New York City.



For designers, this is pretty exciting. Erica Murphy, a recent college grad, spent six frustrating months trying to start a line of children's clothes. "It's very difficult as a new entrant into this community to get information and to find contacts," she says.

Then she learned about Maker's Row. She went on the site and quickly found a company in South Carolina that makes elastics. "I contacted them and they got back to me, and they told me about their product and they gave me information about it," Murphy says.



Nicole Levy is one manufacturer who likes the new website. Her small factory, Baikal, makes fashionable handbags in Manhattan. She got a lot of calls from designers who saw her video online. She even had to hire more workers to keep up with demand.

"It could revolutionize the industry domestically because it could create a lot of labor for domestic factories and keep them around," Levy says.

Also, a "Made in the USA" label could be a good selling point for American consumers who want to avoid ethical questions about overseas manufacturing. But there are still some kinks to work out.

Some new designers don't quite understand how domestic manufacturing works. Their rookie mistakes and naïve questions can be irritating to an old-timer like Terry Schwartz. His company, Sherry Accessories, has been in New York's Garment District for decades.

"The ones I can't handle are the ones who are making a product, who want to know why I can't make it for the same price as the Dominican Republic," Schwartz says.

He did take a few jobs from these new designers, and he's impressed with their creativity.

"I do have some things that are very unique," Schwartz says. "I honestly never saw things like this before, and I'm trying to create these for these people, to make them work."

And the Maker's Row site is still evolving, trying to be a better matchmaker. In less than six months, it has enlisted 1,700 manufacturers from across the country. Each factory is getting about 30 calls a month from potential clients."

Enough With The Cover Songs, Let The Real Talent Shine

After perusing the news on NPR I happened to find this article about a whole new wave of musicians that use youtube to cover pop songs, in order to gather attention for themselves as actual artists. Does this sound like a crock of shit? Why yes it does. Matter of fact, I believe it's the absolute reflection of the shallow throw away culture that the internet has spawned and encouraged to blossom. This whole article reflects exactly what is wrong with pop music and corporate radio. I enjoy finding and reading articles such as these, due to the fact that it reconfirms our goals. The bands we work with and as a label, our goal is to leave a legacy, not just a ripple after walking through a rain puddle.

Read and comment on the article over on NPR.org

Tyler Ward is just one of the many problems with pop music karaoke

"The online video sharing site YouTube is this generation's MTV. Artists like Gotye and PSY have found mainstream success after their videos went viral. Yet the number of cover songs — from toddlers singing The Beatles to teens tackling Led Zeppelin — eclipses original work by a long shot. Between those two extremes is an alternative universe of aspiring professional musicians who use cover songs on YouTube to build fan bases of their own. What these musicians once did for love and fame is starting to pay off in cold, hard cash.

If you search for a song called "Payphone" by Maroon 5, you'll find the original, and you'll find the Jayesslee version, the P.S. 22 version and one by Tyler Ward, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter from Denver with an all-American look and a sound that lives somewhere between indie pop and country. Ward uses YouTube to promote his music career — he posts covers trying to draw new fans.

"I started, actually, doing cover songs in the bar, trying to make ends meet every weekend," he says. "So when I figured out what YouTube was, I just figured I could put these online, see what happens."

What happened was an opening slot for the Jonas Brothers, a performance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and a headlining tour through Europe, the U.S. and Canada. But he could have made more money back at the bar singing those same songs.

"The challenge is, when an artist decides to cover a song, they don't actually have the rights to make money on that song," says George Strompolos, the CEO of Fullscreen Entertainment. Tyler Ward is one of his clients.

He explains that, because YouTube is free in the same way that broadcast TV is free, all of the money that musicians, record labels and music publishers make right now is through advertising that runs with the videos. Until recently, cover songs were the exception. YouTube couldn't run ads on those videos. An aspiring musician like Ward could put hours of work into a video, hoping for attention, but not get a single dollar.

"The problem is," says Strompolos, "neither will the original songwriter, because, again, there are no advertisements."

The issue is the legal rights to the song. That's held by publishers or songwriters, and if anyone wants to make money on a recoding of a song, they have to make a deal. This can be tricky when talking about the thousands of people who upload covers to YouTube.

Enter Fullscreen and one of its rivals, Maker Studios. They're in the business of connecting YouTube creators with possible advertisers. These companies put talent agents, producers and ad sales all under one roof.

Earlier this year, Fullscreen and Maker struck a deal with one of the largest song rights holders: Universal Music Publishing Group. This opened up Universal's massive catalog — decades of music from Fleetwood Mac to Adele — for a revenue sharing plan. Now the musicians who work with Fullscreen and Maker can earn money on covers.

"What we've done with teaming up with Universal Music Publishing Group is allow the artists who cover those songs to have the license to run the advertisements," Strompolos says. "And that way if their cover songs on YouTube get hundreds of thousands or millions of views, it's actually worth money to that cover artist, and the original songwriter is also compensated."

None of the parties involved in the deal will disclose exactly how the money is shared, so I asked Josh Cohen, founder of online video news site Tubefilter, to give me a sense of how this all works for the YouTube musicians.

"The general revenue split for advertising on YouTube is 45 percent/55 percent. That's 55 percent to the creator, 45 percent to YouTube," he says. "There may be varying deals depending on the company that YouTube's working with, but that's pretty standard."

Ads pay content creators — that includes the creators of cover songs — based on what's called CPM, which is cost per 1,000 views.

"Content creators on the low end are making a $1 or $2 CPM from YouTube," Cohen says. "The benefits of signing up with a company like Maker Studios or Fullscreen is that those content creators can get guaranteed higher rates for their videos. So Maker Studios or Fullscreen might offer them a $2 or $3 CPM, or even higher for a period of time, which is more money than they'd be making from YouTube alone."

YouTube pays the music publisher and original songwriter, and the cover artists get a little money. They also get to make names for themselves while riding the popularity wave of hit songs. Meanwhile, businesses like Fullscreen and Maker Studios are, in a way, becoming de facto A&R departments for the music industry.

Maker recently got a $36 million injection of cash from Time Warner Investments. Courtney Holt worked with MySpace Music and is now the chief operating officer of Maker Studios. A serious music fan, he believes there are infinite possibilities to mine the back catalogs of the music publishers. The YouTube generation, after all, hasn't heard everything yet.

"I think in some ways we have a responsibility to reintroduce this generation to really great music, not just new music," he says. "Because if we have one talent who loves Justin Timberlake, maybe they haven't really discovered the Michael Jackson catalog or the Motown catalog or the Stax catalog. And you start to think about, 'What if I go back a little further? What am I going to find?' "

What musicians are finding is that cover songs can simultaneously launch their YouTube careers while helping to cover the bills. No more spending your post-college years singing in bars while living in your father's basement, like Tyler Ward did.

"He was like, 'You've got two years, son. You've got two years, and then you're going to have to get a real job,' " he says. "About a year and a half later, I started doing the cover thing and my whole world changed. I was able to move out to L.A., support myself, buy a car, buy a house — that kind of thing."

Music to any aspiring musician's ears."

Rock Hall Nominations: Who, Why And How Likely Are They To Be Inducted? Repost From NPR.org

"I need my TPS reports ASAP. You are my rock star, make it happen"

Categories are forever binding an idea or item into segmentation, thus putting said item under controlled observation. What we are speaking of specifically, is the boondoggle of a place known as the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame.

Defining what or who can exactly be labeled as rock n' roll, is about as simple as saying that everyone who cooks, with any sort of panache, is a chef. Every year the debate begins again about who are the on short list for induction and then there are those who think, that someone such as Donna Summer, should be in the rock n' roll hall of fame.

We can only scratch our head in amusement, as the categorizations about "Rock N' Roll" even include corporate offices telling employees they are rock stars, for a job well done. Corporate schmucks, we ask kindly, find another term and quit ruining something as sacred as America's greatest invention. Maybe your corporate board even voted for Donna Summer. 

Someone, anyone, please save this sinking ship.

Below is a post from NPR about the Rock N' Roll hall of fame. It is quite insightful about the selection process and the huge back log of bands that have been snubbed such as Deep Purple, Dick Dale, Jethro Tull, MC5, Motorhead, T. Rex, Thin Lizzy and the list goes on and on.

Link to original post on NPR.org

Donna Summer performs in October 2011. Summer, who died in May, is nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year for the fifth time. Ethan Miller - Getty Images

"Let's be fair: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is never going to satisfy everybody.
When it comes to the annual griping over the list of acts it enshrines — actually, two rounds of griping, the short list of nominees in the fall and the final list of inductees in the winter — some grievances are fairer than others.

Complaining about the Hall's overemphasis on a certain strain of blues-based, Boomer-friendly guitar act? Legit. Bitching that Madonna or Grandmaster Flash don't belong, because hey, it's not called the Dance Hall of Fame or the Rap Hall of Fame? That attitude is even lamer than the Rock Hall at its lamest. (And those who claim rock 'n' roll shouldn't be in a hall of any kind? You have my sympathies, but come on — that ship's sailed. Let's at least make them get it right.)

Still, most of the Rock Hall's perception problems are of its own making. Acts become eligible 25 years after their first record release — a reasonable cutoff, but then certain acts coast in during their first year of eligibility while other, greater acts are left cooling their heels. Die-hard fans of a band keep close tabs on when they become Hall-eligible (heads up, fellow Pixies lovers: Come On Pilgrim just turned 25 last month), and every year past that date adds to the mounting fan resentment.

Moreover, by creating a voting system whereby only six to eight acts get in annually, the Hall has generated a huge backlog of snubbed artists they'll never catch up with. You can understand why they don't want to start inducting 15 to 20 acts a year; it would make the award less special, and the televised induction ceremony would be eight hours long. But it also means KISS fans are going to be waiting a long time before the Rock Hall has worked its way through enough overlooked acts to let Gene Simmons strut across the ceremony stage.

All this leaps to mind when perusing this week's announcement of the 2013 nominees, 15 acts in total. It's one of the better lists of recent years, with no outright howlers like the Red Hot Chili Peppers last year. (Inducted on their first ballot — and The Replacements remain un-nominated? Insanity.)

But that doesn't mean the list isn't littered with grievances. In fact, the tally of 2013 nominees mostly reads as an effort to right past Hall wrongs. Fewer than half of the nominees are first-timers; there's a lot of long-overdues here. And even some of the first-timers are long, long overdue — including one Canadian trio that has arguably been the biggest subject of fan derision against the Hall in its history. More on them in a minute.

Let's break these artists down into categories, themed around Hall predilections and biases. In most of these categories, only one or two acts will make the final list of inductees next January; I'll offer my modest predictions.
 
Leftover '60s Acts, or We're Running Out of Past: Albert King, the Marvelettes, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Procol Harum
Number likely to be inducted: Two

 

Every major rock or pop act that peaked in the 1960s is already in the Hall — even low-selling legends like The Velvet Underground — so the nominating committee is casting an ever-wider net for nominees that will appeal to the electorate's Boomer skew. Given that well-known bias, figure on at least two, perhaps even three of these acts getting in. All are certainly worthy, but the Marvelettes (of "Please Mr. Postman" fame) aren't exactly The Supremes or The Ronettes. Only the late Butterfield has been nominated before, and his band suffers from a bit of also-ran status: no radio hits or top-selling albums, living in the shadow of better-known electric-blues acts like The Yardbirds — but they're good and they're due, and they backed Dylan at Newport. The late King is one of the last of the stately blues guitarists (he peaked in the '60s but predates rock) not to get inducted, and again, he lives in the shadow of his inducted peers, B.B. King and Buddy Guy. The best bet? Oddly, it's probably Procol Harum, a near-one-hit-wonder — but Holy Church Organ, what a hit: "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is already enshrined in the Hall's greatest-songs list. Figure on them, Butterfield and possibly King getting the nod.

Wait, They're Not in Yet?: Deep Purple, Heart, the Meters, Randy NewmanNumber likely to be inducted: One

 

Three of these four '70s-vintage acts are on their second nomination (Deep Purple is the debutante). While it's not entirely shocking that none has been inducted, compared with their already-inducted peers it's a little insulting — Heart are at least as skilled as Aerosmith, The Meters are every bit as influential on the New Orleans scene as Dr. John and Randy Newman in his Sail Away period was twice the songwriter Jackson Browne was. Deep Purple, Heart and Newman are likely suffering from perceived latter-day sins: the two bands' reinventions in the '80s as leather-studded MTV acts; and Newman's '90s–'00s success as Pixar's hacky soundtracker. The Meters are more like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: undeniably amazing, too far under the radar. Of the four, I see Newman as likeliest to get the nod, assuming enough left-leaning Hall voters recall what a sardonic firebrand he used to be. But Heart is the dark horse thanks to Ann and Nancy Wilson's just-released and well-timed memoir, which chronicles how they survived the horribly sexist rock world.

Okay, Okay, We Accept That This Dance Stuff Isn't Going Away: Chic, Kraftwerk, Donna Summer
Number likely to be inducted: One shoo-in

The Hall has fundamental problems with certain subgenres, including metal and progressive rock — but one receiving particularly shoddy treatment is dance and electronic music, especially disco. Sure, Madonna got in on her first ballot, because she postdates disco, and because she's Madonna; and the Bee Gees made it in after several years of eligibility. You start to wonder whether some of these Hall voters are hiding secret pasts among the rioters at Comiskey Park in the summer of '79, when you consider that Chic, the single greatest band in dance music history, has been nominated seven times without induction. (Props to the nominating committee: they keep putting Chic forward, and the voters keep blowing them off.) I wouldn't bet the farm on Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers getting their due this year, either. Teutonic electro-rock godfathers Kraftwerk stand a somewhat better chance in 2013, thanks to last April's rabidly praised series of comeback shows at the Museum of Modern Art. But the absolute shoo-in this year also ranks as one of the Hall's all-time embarrassments: Donna Summer, who shuffled off this mortal coil last spring after four unfulfilled Hall nominations (this year's is her fifth). In the wake of Summer's death, inductee Elton John called the ongoing snub "a disgrace" and Rock Hall nominating committee chairman Jon Landau told Billboard magazine, "Our voting group has failed," and all but guaranteed a correction this year. It will be belated justice — but giving the symbolic Queen of Disco her due will, in the end, be less about her and more about the Hall. Having finally exorcised their disco demon, hopefully they'll see their way to inducting Chic's Rodgers before he follows Summer and his late partner Edwards to that velvet rope in the sky.

Entering Rap's Golden Age: N.W.A, Public Enemy
Number likely to be inducted: One

 

The Hall's history with rap is a somewhat more respectable, if mixed, record. Inductees Grandmaster Flash and Run-D.M.C. were no-brainers; the Beastie Boys, inducted earlier this year, likely got in as much for their rock versatility as their skills on the mic. Other than Eric B. and Rakim (nominated once before) and LL Cool J (twice), the Hall hasn't overlooked anybody undeniable yet — then again, old-school rappers just started crossing the Hall's 25-year recording eligibility line. With that line now at 1987, the Hall enters the widely agreed-upon Golden Age of Rap (roughly 1987–93), with two titanic crews leading the way. Given that only one rap act a year has ever been inducted, you can expect either Public Enemy or N.W.A to get in this year, but not both. N.W.A boasts two living hip-hop legends in Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, but their recorded legacy is a mixed bag. PE is the more obvious first-round pick: several great albums in their catalog, one legendary single ("Fight the Power") and two irrepressible frontmen that voters will want to hear from at the induction ceremony — Chuck D will give a stately speech, and Flavor Flav will drop lines that make the next day's press.

The Elephant in the Room: Rush
Number likely to be inducted: One, if the voters know what's good for them

Rush Fans, It's Time To Rock: Band's Been Nominated To The Hall Of Fame

The difference between fans of other Hall-snubbed bands and Rush fans is that in the former category most think the Hall is basically a joke. Rush fans, by contrast, are seriously insulted that rock's ultimate power trio of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart remain excluded, a decade and a half after they became eligible. (Check out this Rush fan site's long Rock Hall page on the history of slights.) Rush's brand of muscular, expansive progressive rock has long been unfashionable with rock critics and insiders, which explains why, until this year, they weren't even nominated. But you don't have to be a fan of the band (I'm not) to see it's high time they were inducted, already. However lugubrious Rush's music often is, it's more economical than that of the Grateful Dead and less self-pitying than that of Pink Floyd — longtime inductees, both. Still, Rush die-hards are likely steeling themselves to see their heroes snubbed again. In a way, Rush have the opposite problem as a disco act: they had to get past the prejudices of the nominating committee, not the voters. Having made it out of committee, I suspect the more populist voting body will wave Rush into the Hall, the "Spirit of the Radio" spurring them on.

Addendum: That covers 14 of the nominations. Give Joan Jett credit — she doesn't fit into any of the above categories: a straight-up '80s rocker with little Rock Hall baggage. That might mean Jett and the Blackhearts get lucky on this, their second nomination, and score the Hall's last open inductee slot. I'll be rooting for Jett, but something tells me she might be waiting another year."