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December 3, 2007
A Chastened Imus Returns to Radio
By JACQUES STEINBERG (NY TIMES)Nearly eight months after he was fired for making a racially and sexually disparaging remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Don Imus went back on the radio at 6 a.m. today and vowed he would not say anything like that again.
He also introduced two new cast members — a black woman, Karith Foster, and a black man, Tony Powell, both of them comedians — and said they would join him in conducting “an ongoing discussion about race relations in this country.”
“I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me,” Mr. Imus told an audience that was listening in person at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, and at home and in their cars on WABC-AM, his new radio home. “And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anyone think I did not deserve a second chance.”
Still, in many ways, it felt as if the clock had been turned back before last April, when Mr. Imus said what he said and was fired by CBS Radio and MSNBC, which had simulcast his program on cable television. On stage at Town Hall this morning, he was flanked on his right by his longtime news reader and sidekick, Charles McCord. Seated to his left, with a microphone conspicuously in front of him, was Bernard McGuirk, the producer whose initial reference on April 4 to the Rutgers team as “some hard-core hos” had prompted Mr. Imus to pile on by calling them “nappy-headed hos.”
The roster of announced guests was familiar to any regular Imus listener. They included Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who is seeking the Democratic nomination; the author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin.
And some long-time advertisers, too, came back, including the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey; NetJets, the corporate aircraft leasing company; the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, and Bigelow teas. The house band was led by Levon Helm, who had played for Mr. Imus on April 12, which had wound up being his last day.
“Dick Cheney is still a war criminal,” Mr. Imus, 67, told the audience, in an effort to reassure them that he did not intend to completely alter his style, or curb his tongue. “Hillary Clinton is still Satan. And I’m going on the radio.”
Mr. Imus wore a tan cowboy hat, a gold-colored vest under a tan barn jacket and worn boots. In his initial remarks, Mr. Imus spoke to the audience from a lone microphone positioned at center stage. At some points, he was defiant, acknowledging that the Rutgers team, which met with him the night of his firing, had found it easier to forgive him than had some of his detractors.
“We signed for five years,” he said of his contracts with Citadel Radio, the parent of WABC, as well as with RFD-TV, which will simulcast his program. “That’s how long it’s going to take to get even with everybody.”
And yet, for all his bravado, Mr. Imus acknowledged that he had been chastened and, at times, humiliated these last few months, and that he ultimately deserved his punishment.
“I think things worked out the way they should have worked out,” he said. “We now have the opportunity to have a better program, to obviously diversify the cast.”
He added, though: “The program is not going to change.”
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/movies/21ther.html
“To slog through the present requires no particular wit, vision or art. But a certain kind of artist will comb through the old stuff that’s lying around — the tall tales and questionable memories, the yellowing photographs and scratched records — looking for glimpses of a possible future.”
Yes, indeedy. 8)
@bigsubi wrote:
I hope to buy anyone in the web after the tour. 😯
I’m not sure that’s legal, b-subi… 😉
I’ve heard good things about the Roky doc, Ray. It’s on my “to view” list.
Also, would like to see…
Hello, Doctor 🙂
Others will know more certainly than I, but I think Fionn played once or twice during the NYC shows. Not sure he enjoyed the experience.
http://www.playbackstl.com/content/view/6839/157/
Interview excerpt:
You’ve been around a lot of amazing musicians over the years, including Neil. Who are the biggest inspirations for your musical style?
Lucinda Williams is one of my favorites. One of her songs is the first song I recorded, actually; that didn’t make it on this record, but it’s in the vault. Billie Holliday is a big influence; I love the truth of her singing, it’s so real and honest. Joni Mitchell—now here’s an incredible writer, player and singer. I admire her.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/arts/09dylan-sub.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
November 9, 2007
Music Review | ‘I’m Not There’
A Tribute to Bob Dylan, Both Reverent and Rowdy
By JON PARELESThere weren’t many pretty voices at “I’m Not There,” a tribute to Bob Dylan at the Beacon Theater on Wednesday night tied in with the coming Todd Haynes film. Mr. Dylan wasn’t there, but echoes of his voice were. Singers rasped, cackled and near-yodeled, and the songs thrived on the treatment. They were written to provoke, not to soothe.
The concert didn’t push Mr. Dylan’s adaptable songs very far. It was a night of folk-rock, full of strummed acoustic guitars. Some singers were backed by the Southwestern mariachi-rock band Calexico; others had the Million Dollar Bashers — led by Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and including the guitarist J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. and the keyboardist Al Kooper, Mr. Dylan’s 1960s sideman — which aimed for what Mr. Dylan once called the “wild mercury sound” of “Blonde on Blonde” and got fairly close. Another Dylan sideman, David Mansfield on fiddle and pedal steel guitar, sat in throughout the concert.
The two dozen songs in the set mingled the familiar and the obscure, protest and picaresque. The concert didn’t include Mr. Dylan’s newly released song “I’m Not There.” But Mr. Ranaldo performed another rarity: a love song, “Can’t Leave Her Behind,” that Mr. Dylan is shown writing in 1966 in the movie “Eat the Document.”
An expanded Yo La Tengo unearthed “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (from Mr. Dylan’s “Biograph”) and romped through it, with Ira Kaplan applying full nasality to the words, while Terry Adams (from NRBQ), on electric piano, and the Louisiana zydeco kingpin Stanley (Buckwheat) Dural, on organ, tossed keyboard jibes back and forth.
There was a slight generation gap. Older performers treated Mr. Dylan’s songs like rowdy pals. Mr. Adams drawled through “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” with some casual lyrics of his own, some two-fisted barrelhouse piano and an appropriately stoned-out attitude. Mr. Kooper sang “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” with bluesy familiarity. He made lines stretch or crack, like Mr. Dylan with a touch of Ray Charles, while chords puffed up from his electric organ, and the Uptown Horns riffed behind him.
Chris Bailey, from the 1970s Australian garage-punk band the Saints, belted “Maggie’s Farm,” backed by the Million Dollar Bashers, with its defiance intact. And Yo La Tengo turned “4th Time Around” inward, making it a hypnotic waltz behind Georgia Hubley’s serene voice.
Younger performers were more reverent toward the songs. Tift Merritt, who had the night’s purest voice, sang “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” with cresting drama in each verse, bringing out both the song’s revelations and its touches of lullaby. Ian Ball of Gomez sang “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” with a blended nonchalance and resentment, pausing in the refrain after “Don’t think twice” for a little tension.
Jim James, backed by Calexico, sang “Goin’ to Acapulco” (from “The Basement Tapes”) with such mournful insistence that its humor completely disappeared. Later his own band, My Morning Jacket, brought pealing, celebratory Southern-rock chords to “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You.”
The showstopper, as it was at a previous Dylan tribute from this concert’s producer Michael Dorf, was the Roots’s version of “Masters of War,” which starts with the melody of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and later borrows riffs from Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. It was Dylan completely revamped, not just revived.
Would’ve enjoyed seeing J Mascis in action
