Just posted, an interview with Son Ambulance‘s Joe Knapp and Jeff Koster in anticipation of SA’s CD release show tomorrow night at Slowdown Jr. (and Saturday night at Lincoln’s Box Awesome). Joe and Jeff talk about what happened to SA after the release of Key in late 2004 and how the band slowly regenerated itself to its current glory. Check it out. The marathon interview focused almost entirely on the making of Someone Else’s Déjà Vu, which very likely will make my year-end list of favorite albums of ’08. Sitting in on the discussion were two new members of SA, bassist Dereck Higgins and multi-instrumentalist James Cuato. I’ve been a fan of Son Ambulance stretching back to the first time I saw Joe perform (along with Landon Hedges and Matt Whipkey) at McFoster’s back in 2000. Here’s hoping that this new one gets the attention it deserves.

Last week I posted the Pitchfork review of Déjà Vu (here). Now the good news. All Music posted its review, and gave the disc four out of five stars, declaring it an “AMG Album Pick” (read the review here). Popmatter just gave the CD an 8-out-of-10 rating, here. Crawdaddy also gave it a positive nod, here.

* * *

O’Leaver’s is unveiling its new fancy/schmancy beer garden tonight — a good thing. The new no-smoking policy impacted O’Leaver’s more than any other club I’ve visited since the ban began. It’s not affecting their business — it’s affecting their… smell. O’Leaver’s needed that smoke to mask the bar’s unique, um, aroma. Now with the new beer garden, you can step outside and get some fresh air all over again. I’m told there could be a new routing situation in terms of how you enter the bar — i.e., the old entrance is now the beer garden entrance, so that entrance by the pool room will be the new front entrance. Don’t know if they implemented that yet or not. Guess we’ll find out at tonight’s show, featuring Dance Me Pregnant, Minneapolis’ Vampire Hands and Daughters of the Sun. $5, 9 p.m.

Also tonight (next Thursday, oops.), David Matysiak’s Telephono Project (described here) is celebrating the release of its 5-record set at the Bemis Underground at 8 p.m. Local artist and Saddle Creek Records designer Jadon Ulrich will be doing live visual interpretations as the records are playing in sequence.

Meanwhile, tonight at Slowdown Jr., Jake Bellows and McCarthy Trenching are opening for touring band I Was Totally Destroying It. $5, 9 p.m.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

I’ve had a subscription to Magnet for a long time. Over the years, I’ve also subscribed to Option, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Volume, CMJ, Alternative Press, The Big Takeover, Raygun and a few others that slip my mind at the moment. The only two I still get at home are RS and Magnet. Like the sampler, Magnet also is beginning to outlive its usefulness, thanks to the Internet. But I’ll keep my subscription as long as they keep printing it…

Column 181: Audio Polarity
Remembering the glory days of the Magnet sampler.

It’s been a slow week with little to report so humor me for a few moments as I rasp romantically on the past and point out yet another way that discovering new music has changed forever, thanks to the Internet.

The journey up to the family farm in Fort Calhoun is 20 minutes of over-hill-and-dell driving. For the trip this past Independence Day, I brought along a CD that arrived in the mail the prior day with the latest copy of Magnet magazine.

Magnet, for those of you who aren’t obsessed with college music, used to be the bible of indie rock, the arbiter of all things good in the indie music world, a saddle-stitched signpost that revealed the latest and greatest music that you’d never get a chance to hear on your radio if you lived in a backwards town like Omaha, where the only thing on the FM dial is Freedom Rock and screamo goon metal.

Magnet was the Pitchfork of the late ’90s. Getting into the pages of Magnet was like getting into Rolling Stone. Actually, if you were in an indie band, it was even better, because people who read Rolling Stone could give two shits about indie music. Magnet readers, however, were the laser-targeted demographic of every indie band. A good review in Magnet meant CD sales. A feature in Magnet meant you probably were already a well-established band that had toured the U.S. a couple times. Making the cover of Magnet put you on the same league as Elliott Smith, Guided by Voices and PJ Harvey — the next step was either signing to a major label or breaking up (or going solo).

Like the College Music Journal and the pre-metal version of Alternative Press, Magnet began to mail free sampler CDs to its subscribers, adding real-life Technicolor to their reading material. Look, you can describe music all you want, but no written word can capture the actual audio experience. And back in the ’90s, getting a free CD was big deal, a substantial bonus. My how things have changed.

The first Magnet sampler was issued sometime around 1996 or ’97. I’m not sure of the exact date because there’s no date on the generic cardboard CD sleeve which I hold in my hand. Glancing at the band list is a head-jerk trip back through time. Vol. 1 included Knapsack, Cranes, Ex-Action Figures, Danielson Family, Dots Will Echo and Number One Cup. Things got even better with Vol. 2, which came out a month or so later: Walt Mink, Beth Orton, Novocaine and a little-known Omaha band by the name of Commander Venus — the track, “Jeans TV,” also was the opener for their one and only full-length, Uneventful Vacation, released not on Saddle Creek Records, but on Thick Records. Inclusion of the track on the Magnet sampler was probably the band’s biggest exposure to that point.

It was through Magnet sampler CDs that I discovered artists like The Wrens (“Pretty OK” from Vol. 4), Caustic Resin (“Once and Only” from Vol. 5), Eels (“Last Stop: This Town” from Vol. 5), Cobra Verde (“One Step Away from Myself” from Vol. 8) and Pinback (“Tripoli” from Vol. 10). Where else were you going to hear bands like Radar Bros. (“Open Ocean Sailing” from Vol. 9) and Enon (“Believo!” from Vol. 10)?

Sure, there were plenty of duds on each volume. But it wasn’t as if the editors of Magnet were painstakingly selecting the tracks themselves. Labels paid to have their bands included on the sampler, and it wasn’t cheap. But it was an effective way to get your band heard before they climbed into the van and hit the road. So for every Tom Waits (“Chocolate Jesus”) and Friends of Dean Martinez (“Ethchlorvynol”) there were duds by Marky Ramone and the Intruders, The Fly Seville and Garmarna. It didn’t matter. You made a note of the best songs, and then checked to see if The Antiquarium or Drastic Plastic had a copy of the full length. In my case, I used my computer to send something called an “e-mail” to the label, and lo and behold, they usually sent back a promo copy. Being a music critic had its privileges.

I know what you’re thinking — the Internet was very much alive in 1998 (in fact, ’98 was the year that I launched Lazy-i.com). But bands and labels had yet to fully embrace the technology. There was no such thing as MySpace. Today, there’s too much MySpace. Free music doesn’t mean anything to anyone anymore, and bands and labels certainly don’t need to look toward old-fangled technology like a compilation CD to get their music heard. Or do they?

As we drove through Washington County last Friday, we listened to Magnet New Music Sampler Vol. 49, with Teresa giving thumbs up or thumbs down as we skipped through forgetful tracks by Victorian Halls, The Fervor, Rachael Sage, Hopeless, Mr. Gnome and 15 other bands I’ll never hear again. Teresa’s thumb stayed firmly pointed in the downward direction.

Except for track No. 10, a quiet, clever folk song by a band with the unfortunate name of The Boy Bathing called “The Questions Simple.” We went back and listened to the song again. It was pretty good. The next day I went online to find out more about the band and listened to a few songs on their MySpace page. And I thought to myself, how else would I ever have found these guys? Not by aimlessly clicking through millions of MySpace pages. Certainly, not on my radio. In an era when free music has become the norm, the sampler CD — as a medium — still has a few years left in it. Let’s hope the same can be said for publications like Magnet.

You may or may not have heard that The Good Life is opening for Feist at this Saturday’s concert in Memorial Park, which I predict will have a higher attendance than normal due to the storm that wiped out the .38 Special/Kool and the Gang concert a couple weeks ago. People who would have never gone to this will just to get their fix of free outdoor entertainment. The Good Life also will be playing a warm-up show at The Barley St. Tavern the evening before the park show. Barley St. has a capacity of, what, around 75? Expect this $5 show to sell out quick. You can get your tix here, for now. Unfortunately, it’s the same night as the Son Ambulance CD release show at Slowdown Jr. More on that show tomorrow…

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

My only comment about last weekend: The Song Remains the Same needs to lose the Beatles/Aerosmith interlude in “Communication Breakdown.” Go ahead and keep “War Pigs” though. There seemed to be mild concern among TWR staff when it became obvious that the band wasn’t going to get through their last-song medley before 1 a.m. The new sound guy ran up and told Weber-Page that they had to stop. They somehow managed to get through it all without Jim pulling the plug…

Glancing at the coming week. There’s an early in-store show tonight at The Antiquarium Record Store featuring cosmic S.F. headtrip rockers Sic Alps (Siltbreeze), Iowa City experimental noise band Wet Hair, Omaha screech-punkers Yuppies and Mr. Wizard. Show starts at 7 and you’re asked to drop some cash into the hat for the touring acts.

Wednesday The Waiting Room has This World Fair, a Minneapolis indie band that’s clearly targeting a major-label alt rock career. Their claim to fame is a song on the Disturbia soundtrack. Opening is Barcelona. No, not the Arlington, Virginia, New Wave band who recorded such classics as “The Downside of Computer Camp,” “I Have the Password to Your Shell Account,” and “Studio Hair Gel.” That band broke up in 2001. This Barcelona is from Seattle and sounds like another run-of-the-mill alt rock band. Too bad. Comedian Todd Barry is at Slowdown Wednesday, and while I don’t go to stand-up gigs, I applaud Slowdown for trying it out. Are rock clubs the comedy shops of this generation?

Thursday is coming together shaping up nicely…

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout booking no nightclubs, but I always think it’s odd that there rarely are any shows booked on the night of holidays that are followed by day’s off. Tonight is a typical example. It’s a Friday night, most of us have had the day off and have tomorrow off, too. Sure, we’ll be bushed from lighting off all those fireworks and drinking all that beer, but that wouldn’t stop us from seeing a show at one of our favorite nightspots (after we’ve made sure no stray skyrockets have landed on the roof and caught the house on fire). And yet, tonight there are no shows going on anywhere. Why isn’t Ladyfinger — a band named after a firecracker — at least playing a gig at O’Leaver’s? Instead, nothing.

Well, I guess we’ll have to wait until tomorrow night, when Satchel Grande and The Song Remains the Same light up The Waiting Room (9 p.m., $7) or The Whipkey Three and Brad Hoshaw play at Mick’s ($5, 9 p.m.).

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

Catching up with the Internet:

Billboard reports (here) that Conor Oberst will be recording a collaborative album with Jim James and M. Ward sometime in the near future. Wonder who’s going to put it out?

* * *

Pitchfork weighed in on the new Son, Ambulance album. You guessed it — they didn’t like it. Rating: 5.4 — consistent with just about every other Saddle Creek release Pitchfork has reviewed over the past few years. Oh well. Read it here, and go ahead and skip the review’s obtuse, poorly written first paragraph.

* * *

Newsweek has a great interview with Billy Corgan about the nature of rock stars and the lack of them these days. I was never a big Smashing Pumpkins fan. Corgan’s voice is what Carol Channing would sound like if she were a man — shrill and annoying. But you can’t deny some of his more catchy stuff (“1979” “Drown,” “Tonight, Tonight” come to mind). Or the fact that Corgan is one smart sumbitch.

Excerpts:

On the next icon: “What we’re going to see now is a different archetype rise up. It’s not going to be the Elvis archetype; it’s going to be something we can’t even imagine. It’s going to be someone, maybe, who’s more spiritual, somebody who doesn’t want anything to do with corporate industry. Somebody who’s an Internet star. Some kid who makes tapes in his bedroom and says, ‘F—the world. This is my version of it.’ And then people will latch on. All the music factories in the world can’t manufacture that kid.”

On culture: “When everything is everybody’s, then nobody owns anything. This culture, I don’t think, values the song. It doesn’t value the icon. It values the moment and whoever feeds that moment. But we lose that it’s human beings creating the moment. And when the culture thinks that it’s the puppet master, then, of course, why wouldn’t you have ‘American Idol?'”

Read the whole thing here.

* * *

Speaking of icons, tonight at Slowdown, ’90s icon Black Francis a.k.a. Frank Black plays the big stage. Opener is Omaha icon Brad Hoshaw. 9 p.m. $15. Also, at The Waiting Room, it’s the return of Stillwater, Okla., band Colourmusic (you remember, they opened for British Sea Power back in March). Opening is Oui Bandits. $7, 9 p.m.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

You can read the SPIN feature here (see page 118).

Column 180: Omaha Spin
Another national looks at our scene.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to say this, but the Omaha music scene has made it into the pages of a national magazine (again). This time it’s the July issue of SPIN, in the form of the rag’s monthly “Rock City” feature.

Rock City highlights a different town’s music scene every issue by compiling its Local Heroes, Bars and Clubs, History and Bands in a two-page spread tucked away in the back. The Omaha version of Rock City, written and reported by former Reader editor Tessa (We miss you) Jeffers broke it down this way:

In the Local Heroes section, Simon Joyner (troubadour/genius), Marc Leibowitz & Jim Johnson (1% Productions), Robb Nansel and Mike Mogis (Saddle Creek/ARC Studios), Lallaya and Trey Lalley (The Brothers, Capitol Bar & Grill) and true godfather of the Omaha music scene, Dave Sink, were the subjects.

Under Bars and Clubs, the once-active now-fading Sokol properties got the money shot, followed by The Waiting Room, Slowdown, O’Leaver’s and Barley Street Tavern. In the History category, Tessa wrote about the late, great Cog Factory, the Wal-Mart-ed Ranch Bowl and Omaha’s historic jazz scene, while the featured bands included Tilly and the Wall, The Show Is the Rainbow, Outlaw Con Bandana, Sarah Benck and The Robbers and Ladyfinger (NE).

It’s a terrific article — a serious, accurate summation of Omaha music’s highlights and little-known gems. But what really made this feature stand out among the dozens of “gee whiz, ain’t Omaha cool” articles that have appeared in pubs like The New York Times, Filter and Time is how it mentions people, places and things that reside outside of the usual Saddle Creek scene-o-sphere (despite the fact that the article’s “tour guides” were Tilly and the Wall’s Neely Jenkins and Jamie Pressnall, who, though not on Saddle Creek, fall into the Creek classification by default since they’re on Conor Oberst’s Team Love label).

Now here’s a back story behind the article. SPIN editor David Marchese originally approached little ol’ me to put this piece together. He apparently found me by stumbling upon my website, Lazy-i.com. E-mail was exchanged. Eventually I sent an outline, which either was never received or (more likely) was rejected, as weeks and weeks went by without a response. Eventually Tessa told me she got the gig, which was a good thing since she did a much better job than I ever could.

So what did I propose to SPIN? Under the Local Heroes category, which Marchese said should focus on “non-musicians who are integral to the city’s music scene” I suggested Sink and the guys from 1 Percent and Creek, but also included Homer’s Records President Mike Fratt and 89.7 The River’s Sophia John.

Marchese said featured bands shouldn’t be well known outside Omaha. “Bright Eyes is a no-no. If possible, a mix of different styles is good here… shouldn’t be five earnest indie rockers.” I figured Tilly also was a no-no — they’ve been on Letterman, after all. My list:

— Eagle*Seagull. “Actually, it’s a Lincoln band, which would disqualify them if we’re only considering Omaha. They play here all the time, however.”
— The Terminals — “A garage-punk band, their last album came out on Dead Beat Records.”
— Capgun Coup — “Recently signed with Oberst’s Team Love label. Touring all over the country. Has ‘next big thing’ status.”
— Brad Hoshaw — “Under-the-radar acoustic singer/songwriter.”
— The Monroes — “A self-described ‘tractor punk’ band.”
— Honeybee — “A female-fronted indie five-piece, on upstart Slumber Party Records (distro by Saddle Creek).”
— The Whipkey Three — “A twangy Americana band.”

Sarah Benck and the Robbers and The Show Is the Rainbow were the only two Tessa and I had in common.

History, Marchese said, should include “some interesting pieces of local music lore.” As an example, he cited Rock City Toronto, where the writer talked about the El Mocambo rock club where the Stones played a secret show recorded for a live album. Like Tessa, I suggested The Cog Factory (how could you not?), but also included The Farnam House.

“This small apartment building was home of Omaha’s mid-’80s era punk scene, and hosted shows by Millions of Dead Cops, The Adolescents and a variety of Omaha punk bands,” I explained. “In the late-’90s, the house became Gunboat/The Jerk Store and was the home to Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Clark Baechle (The Faint) and a handful of other Creek bands, who hosted regular house shows. Today, the house is known as Hotel Frank and is the indie scene’s central house-show venue for traveling and local bands, including Capgun Coup and Flowers Forever. Gentrification could force it to stop hosting shows in the very near future.”

Some young millionaire needs to buy the Farnam House and declare it a local landmark and safe haven for up-and-coming musicians. Conor, are you listening?

I also suggested The Lifticket Lounge, saying it “was a central Omaha club that hosted, among others, Nirvana (circa Bleach), Soundgarden and a ton of other national grunge and punk acts. It closed later in the ’90s and became a biker bar. It reopened last year as The Waiting Room, a primary music venue.”

Finally, for Bars and Clubs, Marchese asked for “places you might catch some of the bands you mentioned.”

Along with Slowdown, TWR, O’Leaver’s and Sokol, I added The Brothers (“Not a live music venue, but the center point for everyone involved in the local music scene”) and Mick’s (“Acoustic / folk venue, also located in Benson”).

Tessa and I could have suggested a dozen more in every category. But the problem with these “list” stories is that, inevitably, something or someone misses the cut. Ironically, this time the bands that got left out are the ones our scene is known for. Something tells me, considering all the press they’ve received over the years, that they won’t mind.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

Some random notes…

Tonight at The Waiting Room it’s Maria Taylor with Johnathan Rice and Nik Freitas — one of the best line-ups I’ve seen in a while. And for just $9. I’m surprised it hasn’t sold out (yet). Starts at 9 p.m.

The Omaha Arts and Entertainment Awards — or the OEA’s — have announced the bands for their July 18 showcase. Judging by the list, they’ve either moved away from indie music or indie bands decided not to register for the showcase. Midwest Dilemma and Sleep Said the Monster are the only two indie acts I recognize on the list. Take a look.

Finally, The Boston Phoenix has published its inaugural 50 bands/50 states list, where they select each state’s all-time best band, best solo artist and best new band. For Nebraska, Bright Eyes was named all-time best band, Elliott Smith (yes, he was born in Nebraska) was named best solo artist and Tilly and the Wall took best new band honors. The first question that came to mind upon seeing this: Who cares who The Boston Phoenix thinks is the best band in Nebraska? I guess it’s time for The Reader to come out with its list of the best all-time bands in 50 states, too. Anyway, see the entire state-by-state list here.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—