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MySpace.com Introducing New
Music, Demise of Tower Records, & Elaine Paige
MySpace.com
The old traditional model of
hearing a song on the radio and going into a record store to buy a single or an
album with the song seems to be dying off. Don’t get me wrong, I will still be
one who loves albums and the packaging that goes with them but it’s becoming an
interesting world when it seems like radio is less and less of an introduction
to new music. Especially since I joined the iPod generation, it’s rare my radio
is ever playing anything being broadcast over the air anyway.
MySpace.com is becoming quite a
hub for exposure to music, and while I’ve had a page for about a year, I view it
kind of as a novelty and not really anything I’ve put any time and effort into.
I still haven’t done a blog, I barely have even bothered with creating a profile
for it. But I started it mainly as an excuse to keep up with a singer I already
know and like, her name is Chantal Kreviazuk who hails from Canada.
Later when a run of people on
ABBAMAIL’s mailing list posted their MySpace pages I’ve added a few more friends
and other artists I enjoy. But eventually one of the unfortunate downsides to
MySpace is that you tend to get solicitations for friendships and or invitations
to groups by bimbos who seem to want you to think they’re interested in you for
sex or inviting you to some weird kind of fetish group. I deny all those kinds
of requests because those aren’t the kinds of people I want as friends on my
page.
However, an interesting friend
request popped up in my e-mail one day. The friend request was from a “CJ
Palmer” and I just assumed it might be another one of these bimbette friend
solicitations, only to discover, “CJ Palmer” isn’t a bimbo, it’s a band from
Sweden. Now as a fan of ABBA and Roxette and several other Swedish bands, I was
intrigued, by this unsolicited friend request. After checking out their song
samples from their MySpace page, I decided to add them as a friend as I quite
enjoyed their songs. I even added a comment that I’d try to order an album by
them when I placed my next order with a Swedish music store.
Within a day I got a response
from the band thanking me for my comments about how much I enjoyed their samples
and to let me know their album isn’t yet available. I haven’t the slightest clue
how they found my page on MySpace to send me the friend invite in the first
place, but I’m really impressed that I got an opportunity to try a new band that
I really would like to hear more from and it didn’t involve having to hear them
on my local radio station to try them out. If you’d like to check them out, I
highly recommend the four songs posted on their MySpace page at
http://www.myspace.com/cjpalmertheband
Demise of Tower Records
October 2006 saw the final nail
in Tower Records coffin of bankruptcy as the company was sold to a liquidator
that intended to sell off the companies assets and shut down all operations.
It’s mostly bittersweet for me
because I will always have fond memories of Tower Records as for much of the
1990’s I was in one of their local stores at least once or twice a week. At the
time I started becoming a regular customer of Tower Records, there were four
stores here in San Diego. One of which was very conveniently located a few
blocks away from San Diego State University when I was attending classes there.
It was not unusual for me to be found there on breaks between classes or
stopping at any of the other stores on my way home from classes.
Tower holds special memories for
me in terms of my ABBA collection in that at the time I was getting into ABBA,
Polydor USA didn’t yet have ABBA’s albums released domestically and Tower was
where I ended up buying import copies at fairly reasonable prices for imports.
It was because Tower stocked a Japanese import of ABBA: Live In Concert on
laserdisc that I ultimately ended up buying a laserdisc player and building a
collection of what now are mostly useless discs that I parted with a number of
because I had since replaced them with DVDs. But I’ll always remember Tower for
being the place where I bought my first. And it was in Tower Records in Las
Vegas that I discovered ABBA had Spanish recordings. In Las Vegas, there isn’t
enough demand for Spanish language stuff to warrant a separate section like here
in San Diego, so ABBA Oro was in with the English language recordings and I
immediately bought it. I would never have thought to look in the Spanish section
of my local Tower at the time.
And my most recent ABBA related
purchase at a Tower Records store was ordering copies of the US pressing of
ABBA: The Movie on DVD as they had them on sale for $10 when my local Best Buy
store wanted $20 for it. A lot of the CD singles I own were purchased at Tower
Records as they used to get the best imports in town. Over time their selection
started to diminish and it became easier to just import directly from the
countries selling the CDs I wanted because I couldn’t guarantee Tower would get
them, I kind of quit going to Tower. It wasn’t that I wanted to quit going they
just weren’t getting all the products I wanted and if they did they weren’t at
prices I was willing to pay for them. It’s a shame they weren’t able to find a
better way to compete with lower priced retailers, and it seems that had they
have continued to focus on having extensive catalogue material and having people
passionate about music working there, they’d still here because I’m more willing
to pay a premium when I know a store is going to have obscure things I want in
stock, and someone there to tell me about them and make additional
recommendations. Rest in Peace Tower Records.
Elaine Paige
Elaine Paige, known as the First
Lady of British Theatre, has finally gotten off her duff and recorded her first
full length album in over a decade. While the last decade has been littered with
compilation after compilation with token new songs here and there and even the
opportunity to see Elaine in both Salt Lake City and Pasadena in 2000 and 2002
respectively, she’s been hesitant to record any full albums of new material or
at least material that was new to her repertoire.
So with seemingly little
fanfare, mid October 2006 in the United Kingdom saw Elaine release an album
called “Essential Musicals” featuring show tunes from some shows voted the most
popular by listeners of her weekly radio program that she hosts for the BBC. It
was with little surprise that several shows Elaine had once starred in had been
selected as fan favorites in her audience. But I suppose to a degree the level
of popularity of Chess probably served as a reminder to Elaine that when she
originally played the role of Florence, there was a song added to the Broadway
version of the show that she’d never recorded or performed herself. That song
“Someone Else’s Story” despite the dismal failure of Chess on Broadway has
transcended the show and is often used by women as a song in their auditions for
Broadway shows to showcase their vocal talent, so much so that it’s now
considered cliché for someone to sing the song in an audition.
So now, twenty two years since
the original concept album was released and twenty years since Elaine graced the
stage as Florence Vassy in London’s West End, Elaine has finally sung the song
her character is now most know for in all subsequent versions of the show since
Broadway. And I wish I could say the performance was worth the wait. It seems
that Elaine decided to perform the song as a “pop” song instead of a
“theatrical” performance and as a result she doesn’t even attempt to hit the
emotional levels she’s capable of. Elaine is a performer who is capable of
dragging her audience through every high and low of the emotional roller coaster
when she sings dramatically and here her performance of “Someone Else’s Story”
leaves you feeling like you got on the kiddie coaster at the amusement park
instead of the thrill ride that’s going to leave your lunch in another part of
the park.
While the performance is a
little lackluster, the more I’ve listened to it the more it’s grown on me and I
can appreciate the beauty of a pop style performance, but the simple fact
remains is that I was ultimately hoping to add Elaine’s performance to my ipod’s
playlist including the original concept album making it seem as though the song
was always meant to be there, however, Elaine failed to capture the sense of
drama she added to every song on the original concept album and it doesn’t blend
in as nicely as it could if she had given it a little more sense of emotion.
Also on the album Elaine tackles
“You Must Love Me” from Madonna’s movie version of “Evita” and I’m curious if
Evita fans find her performance of the new song as lackluster as this Chess fan
found her performance of “Someone Else’s Story”. Additionally one of the nice
renditions I enjoyed from the album was Elaine taking on “Hopelessly Devoted to
You” from Grease. Elaine does a nice job but she’s no Olivia Newton-John.
In all, I do appreciate finally
being able to have a version of “Someone Else’s Story” done by Elaine Paige as
the original Florence, as her version is far more tolerable than Judy Kuhn’s
version on the Broadway Chess cast album and Karin Glenmark’s version in “Chess
In Concert” but it seems the true definitive version in my book, is by Benny
Andersson’s current vocalist-extraordinaire, Helen Sjöholm, who played Florence
in the recent Swedish cast of Chess. Her English version is not commercially
available, but well worth hunting down as it truly is spectacular. Elaine comes
in second with a more than adequate interpretation.
Ryan |
