Adventures in Americana, Indie, Jam and Groove

I’ve been playing with free streaming music service, Spotify, for a few weeks now (ever since the Stockholm-based service launched in the U.S). I now wonder if there’s a reason to buy music ever again.

Spotify does not have every track one might desire in its library of 15 million tracks, but I’ve been able to locate 90% of what I’m looking for — mostly albums I don’t own from artists that I know I like. When I find the albums I want, I merely drag them over to the left-hand sidebar to create a new playlist. Then the album is always there for me when I open Spotify, without paying a thing for it.

See you later, iTunes.

Cupertino’s got to be hating this. Spotify’s user interface (UI) even looks like iTunes’.

According to Los Angeles Times, Warner Music chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., is one music exec not hating Spotify (note: Warner, three other major record labels and an independent label own a little over 17% of Spotify).

He predicted that Spotify, which is currently paying more money for music royalties than it makes in subscriptions and advertising, would be profitable if it can continue to induce its free users to spring for the premium service.

“The kinds of levels that Spotify is currently achieving in Europe is also extremely encouraging,” Bronfman said. “If that keeps up, they will be a very profitable business themselves.”

Presently, 1.6 million mostly European users pay for Spotify’s premium service, which lets them use the service on mobile devices and home audio systems such as Sonos. The free stream is ad supported.

Subscriptions run $9.99-a-month in the U.S., or about $120 a year. I used to spend $120 in a month with the iTunes store, but all that ended when I changed my iTunes store ID in the fall of 2008, an unfortunate step that rendered all the songs I purchased from Apple unplayable on all my Apple devices. No, I’m not joking.

But back to Spotify, I have to say it’s a great music discovery engine, as well. I’m currently listening to YACHT, for instance — something I might not do if I had to pay for the privilege. Should YACHT or the other bands I’m discovering on Spotify become new favorites, I’ll eventually pay to seem them live, and I’ll no doubt end up writing about them and/or telling friends about them.

By the way, this is the service MySpace could have launched but didn’t. It’s also much more intuitive than Last.fm, Blip.fm, HypeMachine and a host of other start-ups that have tried to advance in this space. If I want a random playlist based on past preferences, there’s Pandora. Other than that, I’m looking for music on Spotify.

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On Tuesday, Dawes’ new album Nothing Is Wrong was released by ATO Records.

The L.A. folk-rock quartet recorded the disc at producer Jonathan Wilson’s Echo Park studio late last year in between touring commitments. Jackson Browne appears on the record and band leader, Taylor Goldsmith, says the band was aiming for an “American rock & roll” sound inspired by artists like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Bob Seger.

I really like the first song on the record, “Time Spent In Los Angeles.” In an interview with Street Date Radio, Goldsmith is asked if there intentionally a California vibe to this album?

Goldsmith: It’s not an intentional thing, I just write about what I feel like I have a good concept of and everybody feels like they have a close relationship with the world that they come from…It’s not like I’m trying to represent California, I’m more just trying to represent me and I happen to be in California when I’m not on the road. “Times Spent in Los Angeles” (and this goes for anyone from anywhere, I just happened to use the town LA), but when there are a hundred people in the room and two of them are from LA, I believe that they can kind of pick each other out. I think that the environment that we all come from dictates who we are and I feel like there is a complicated quality to someone from LA. It is half cynical and half just devastatingly realistic and I have a complicated relationship with it. I think that exists anywhere and I love that.

Darby and I saw Dawes last year at this time, when they opened for Josh Ritter at The Wonder Ballroom. This is a band that’s making progress and I expect their new album to be well received by skinny jeans-wearing hipsters and old folk rockers, alike.

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My cousin Joshua Cain Daugherty came to town last week with Wammo vs. Forsyth, an offshoot of the Austin-based band, Asylum Street Spankers. It’s fun to see Joshua in action as a rock and roll tour manager. For such a laid back dude, he gets the musicians where they need to be, when they need to be there.

Before the show, Joshua was hyping Guy Forsyth a bit, saying what a pro he is and how he practices a lot and has great stage presence. I wondered if I would see the craftsmanship on stage at The Alberta Rose, and I did. Forsyth, it turns out is a gentleman and a songster. He reminds me of an old-time kind of guy that rides the rails and tells the tales.

MP3 Offerings: “Piece Of The Pie” a track from Live at Gruene Hall and “Things That Matter” live at the Mucky Duck in Houston (recorded by Joshua on 2/12/11).

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I decided to purchase The Chicago Transit Authority from Amazon the other day and the 1969 release from this hugely popular band is definitely worth the every penny. You might even call the double album a masterpiece of jazz fusion and rock.

Released in April 1969, the album (sometimes informally referred to simply as “CTA”) proved to be an immediate hit, reaching #17 in the US and #9 in the UK. While critical reaction was also strong, the album initially failed to produce any hit singles, and the group was seen as an album-oriented collective until their producer James Guercio later shortened some of the tracks for radio.

While clicking around these tubes to learn more about the band’s origins, I found fragments of a documentary that features Chicago in their native studio setting, the 4000 acre Caribou Ranch near Nederland, Colorado, which was purchased by Guercio for $1 million in 1971.

According to a page on Invicta Records’ website, Chicago filmed a network television special there, “Chicago: High in the Rockies” in 1973, the year Caribou Ranch opened. A second TV special “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,” was broadcast in 1974.

Elton John’s 1974 album Caribou was recorded at, and named after, the studio. Other artists who made records at Caribou Ranch include Earth Wind & Fire, The Beach Boys, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Joe Walsh, John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Carole King, Waylon Jennings, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Ozark Mountain Daredevils, America, Chick Corea, Deep Purple and the list goes on. Chicago recorded a total of five studio albums in Nederland: Chicago VI, Chicago VII, Chicago VIII, Chicago X, and Chicago XI.

My research also revealed that Guercio founded Country Music Television and is a major landowner in Colorado and Montana. He also has his hand in cattle ranching, as well as energy and mineral investments. He has also amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of Gen. George Custer’s papers.

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Grateful Dead hasn’t played a show in 16 years. Yet the band just sold through all 7200 individually numbered, limited edition versions of EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS in four days. Each box set sells for $450.

When you do the math, that’s $3,240,000. And this is merely the opening round. The band will continue to offer the 72-disc collection for $450, it just won’t come with all the cool packaging and shit.

“Well love is love and not fade away.”

The now sold out limited edition version comes housed in a replica steamer trunk reminiscent of the ones prevalently used at the time. Along with the music–a vast majority of which is previously unreleased–the travel chest contains tour memorabilia, a coffee-table book with never-before-seen photos and a comprehensive essay by noted author Blair Jackson. Both the limited edition and CD-only versions are set to ship in September.

EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS offers a snapshot of a band at the top of its game, still ascending in the wake of three straight hit albums—Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, and the live Grateful Dead a.k.a. “Skull & Roses”. It had been a year since the lineup had gone to its single-drummer configuration, six months since Keith Godchaux had been broken in as the group’s exceptional pianist, and this marked the first tour to feature Donna Godchaux as a member of the touring band.

I’d like to see the band makes other definitive tour collections. Europe ’90, for instance, would be one I’d make room for, given that I was in Stockholm, Essen, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Paris and London to hear every note.

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