Category: musica

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Flaming Lips to Perform The Soft Bulletin and Dark Side of the Moon at Hollywood Forever Cemetery

the flaming lips dark side of the moon at hollywood forever cemetery
It’s likely that The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne will one day be buried inside that bubble (photo by chasingfun via flickr)

The Flaming Lips is coming to town this summer for two special nights at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Bouncing in on a tagline from the single “Do You Realize” — “Every One You Know Some Day Will Die” — the Lips’ wildly entertaining psycho-pop shenanigans will attempt to bury you on June 14th and 15th.

And there’s a bonus: On the 14th the band will play its [mainstream] breakthrough 1999 release “The Soft Bulletin” in its entirety and the following night will perform Pink Floyd’s breathtaking 1973 album “Dark Side of the Moon” from front to back.

flaming lips the soft bulletin dark side of the moon hollywood forever cemetaryTickets for the performances go on sale this Friday at 2 p.m. (2-night package for $80) and Saturday at 2 p.m. (single nights at $40) and will sell out quickly. Hollywood Forever is a bring your own blanket, wine, and picnic kind of place. But be sure to leave no trace, for there are zombies.

The concert takes place on the cemetery’s Fairbanks Lawn. Gates are at 7 p.m., wickedly brilliant guitarist and songwriter Marnie Stern opens.

The Flaming Lips tweeted evidence this week that a live version of “The Soft Bulletin” is forthcoming, allegedly with bonus tracks.

In the last week of 2009 the band digitally released “The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon.” The Flaming Lips’ 12th studio album (since 1986), “Embryonic,” was released in October 2009.

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Record Store Day 2011 in LA

record store day Record Store Day exclusives seen in the Coachella tent, 2009 (Photo by Andy Sternberg/LAist)

This weekend is all about music and you don’t even need to venture out to the Coachella Valley to take part. April 16th is the fifth annual (fourth global) Record Store Day and it is being celebrated at more independent record stores around L.A. than we even knew existed. The limited-edition special releases and in-store parties and performances begin at midnight!

What’s so special about Record Store Day? Everything. Record Store Day is not merely an appreciation of indie music stores (whether vinyl- or CD-centric) and the lengths many go to to showcase and promote local bands and artists. It’s a celebration of the art of recording and packaging for retail and best of all, the true music fan’s lust for getting a hold of limited edition releases and one-offs. This year’s exclusives include a motherlode of special releases from the likes of Bad Brains, Daft Punk, Phish, Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, Beastie Boys, R.E.M., Pinback and more.

Participating stores in and around L.A. include:

View Record Store Day in L.A. April 16, 2011 in a larger map
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‘lectrifying last week of january ’11

peter bjorn & john downtown la secret show january 20112011 has been ramping up — slowly but surely — to be huge. Perhaps coincidentally, but as the Chinese New Year approaches, things are getting busy. The Year of the Rabbit ready to run.

Was lucky to hit a few fantastic live events over the past week and want to share some highlights / video / photos in a post.

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Dr. Martin Luther King’s Inspiring Street Sweeper Speeches (Audio)

One recurring theme in many of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s speeches that always inspires involves the job of street sweeper as a parable for self-fulfillment. I’ve always admired Dr. King’s ability to affect not just churchgoers or civil rights activists but humans of all kinds, secular and otherwise, and the “street sweeper” element and its metaphorical allusions to the arts is my favorite example of this.

…[E]ven if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry…

This sentiment is reminiscent of the anonymously-penned poems, “Be the Best of Whatever You Are,” (often attributed to Douglas Malloch) which Dr. King cites in the sermon. In my searches tonight reflecting on Dr. King, I really appreciated how he introduced the street sweeper at the 50th anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha in Buffalo, 1957 – “The Birth of a New Age.” A great blueprint for any commencement speech.

“We need more people who are competent in all areas and always remember that the important thing is to do a good job. No matter what it is. Whatever you are doing consider it as something having cosmic significance, as it is a part of the uplifting of humanity. No matter what it is, no matter how small you think it is, do it right. As someone said, do it so well that the living, dead, or the unborn could do it no better.

More and more multimedia from Dr. King’s sermons and speeches in the ’50s and 60s continues to crop up and it’s sometimes stunning how much more impact the words have when spoken by the reverend himself as opposed to reads on the written page or website.

MLKs Street Sweeper (4/9/67) [ 3:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I could not find the Buffalo ’57 audio, however I came across audio of a King speech that includes the street sweeper riff in the King Institute archives at Stanford. This 3.5-minute clip was taken from the full “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” sermon delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois, on 9 April 1967. Another recently web-published sermon of note is this one from Temple Israel, a Jewish synagogue in Hollywood from 1965 which popped up a few years ago.

In addition to the King Institute archives, find more audio of Dr. King’s speeches here, here, and here.