The biggest running joke is all of rock music, of course, has become the imminent release of the next Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy which is due to come out, either any day now or never. Even Syd Barrett was able to make a couple of solo albums after he went crazy, Axl.

However, Neil Young fans know that the wait for Chinese Democracy is nothing compared for how we’ve been waiting for Archives, the career-spanning box set that he’s been promising since — shit — Guns N’ Roses was just becoming the biggest band on the planet. We’ve been waiting for so long that his length of time that Archives can cover has actually doubled.

While some performance CDs have been released (the awesome Live at the Fillmore East and the not quite as awesome Live at Massey Hall, the bulk of the material assumed to be on Archives has only been available on bootlegs. Well, yesterday, Neil has made his latest announcement concerning Archives. The first 10 discs are coming out this fall. Whoo-hoo! On Blu-Ray. D’oh!

So despite the fact that I’ve been looking forward to this for nearly 20 years, right now I’m kinda disappointed.

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A while back, Kirk wrote an article called “Prepare for the Worst: 4 Simple Digital Media Backup Solutions.” One of the options was the digital Music Locker at MP3tunes, where you could upload your music and store it, secure and password-protected.

This is not file-sharing. File-sharing is, of course, the digital equivalent of what music fans have been doing since the dawn of time: turning other people on to music they love. This is really the exact opposite: it is more akin to locking your music in a safe deposit vault, where only you have the key.

Apparently, EMI didn’t think so, and sued MP3tunes, essentially trying to shut down online storage of music for any purpose whatsoever.

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Previously, on An Early History of R.E.M.: We have complex, life-long relationships with the bands we love . . . It’s a piece written in 1991 . . . R.E.M. is discovered via Trouser Press flexi-disc . . . Chronic Town was their first EP . . . Murmur becomes an obsession . . . The R.E.M. lyric-deciphering party . . . Later on came Reckoning . . . The great American rock underground coalesced . . . R.E.M. is the “acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff,” so they’re on a lot of TV shows . . . Interviewing Bill Berry . . . Fables of The Reconstruction of The Fables . . . R.E.M., back in Fresno . . . Their big rock albums . . . The long wait before Out of Time . . . How do you reconcile huge success, when you were originally a group of arty college-age bohos who somehow got world famous for doing exactly what you wanted to do?

And now, the exiting conclusion to An Early History of R.E.M.!!

Written in March, 1992. Published in Rotting America in Summer, 1992

It’s been almost a year since I first posed that question (which just goes to show you how things really work in the wild, wooly, unedited, and unpaid world of ‘zines), and since then R.E.M. have racked up the accolades for Out of Time. They have become the mainstream — winning MTV’s video awards, Rolling Stone’s readers poll, and even a Grammy for “Best Alternative Album.”

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Kassia is fond of saying that around ‘Loper HQ, April Fools isn’t a day, it’s a season. However, this year, real life has gotten in the way, so in honor of that, I’ve decided to point out a few actual real things that are far more absurd than most of the jokes you’ll see today.

Let’s begin, shall we.

• Continuing Record Company Cluelessness About the 21st Century
  Last week, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly about the rush-release of the new Gnarls Barkley album. Apparently, the fact that it leaked online a few weeks early caught Atlantic records by surprise.

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Longtime readers of this site (that would be Will and John) know that there are consumer products to which we’ve never been very kind. These products include Microsoft’s Zune, anything from DuroSport Electronics and of course SpiralFrog, the major label-sponsored website that allows you to download DRM’d music for FREE! All you have to do is ignore some ads.

After first making fun of the concept, then making fun of the amazingly long time to market, and finally, making fun of the thing itself, I figured that I was done with ever writing about it ever again. Hell, I thought I was done with ever thinking about it again.

Until last night.

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Just six months after the launch of its mp3 music service, Amazon has emerged as the number two digital music retailer. While Apple still has a huge lead, that lead seems to be dwindling quickly.

The major labels may see this as some form of progress in their efforts to break Apple’s perceived monopoly in the digital music market, but the truth is they are very likely creating a new problem for their industry.

Despite the fact that the majors have begun licensing the rights to distribute DRM-free tracks to multiple retailers, Amazon seems to be the only company that has a clue about building a successful online marketplace. As a result, Amazon could quickly become something of a de facto monopoly for legal mp3 downloads. That’s astounding when you consider that the marketplace for unprotected music downloads should be wide open and highly competitive.

The formula for building a successful digital music marketplace seems relatively easy. Consumers want access to a wide selection of reasonably priced DRM-free music, presented in a well organized marketplace that supports all computing platforms. Retailers who expect to compete should offer decent search and discovery capabilities, and maybe even a few social features. This is 2008, after all.

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Previously, on An Early History of R.E.M.: We have complex, life-long relationships with the bands we love . . . It’s a piece written in 1991 . . . R.E.M. is discovered via Trouser Press flexi-disc . . . Chronic Town was their first EP . . . Murmur becomes an obsession . . . The R.E.M. lyric-deciphering party . . . Later on came Reckoning . . . The great American rock underground coalesced . . . R.E.M. is the “acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff,” so they’re on a lot of TV shows . . .

And now, Part 2, of An Early History of R.E.M.!!

Written in March, 1991. Published in Rotting America in March, 1992

Oh yeah, something else happened in that summer of 1984 . . . R.E.M. played in Fresno. At a club called the Star Palace. And my roommate Kirk and I got to interview them.

The Star Palace, at some point in its history, used to be an Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio, and now it’s a waste of space, but for about five or six years, it was the coolest place in town to see shows. Since it held four or five hundred people it was perfect for big underground bands, and through some act of the gods which I don’t remember anymore, in June of 1984, R.E.M. and the Dream Syndicate played there.

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Whether or not you think that Radiohead’s download-only release of In Rainbows was a success or a failure; a bargain or a rip-off — and there are valid arguments that it was actually all four — you kind of knew that they weren’t the only artist of their stature who were going to try to bypass the traditional Major-Label release strategy.

And, sure enough, after what can only be described as a collective pause while everybody held their breath, in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had at least four artists with established fanbases follow in their footsteps. While each artist is doing something different, they’re all taking a piece from Radiohead’s playbook.

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People have complex relationships with the artists they love. With some artists, the love flares up and dies down almost as fast, never to be rekindled. But with others, that early flare-up settles into a life-long relationship, complete with the ups and downs of any other life-long relationship. For me, one of those artists is R.E.M. 20 years ago, they were probably my most favorite entity on the entire planet, but the post-Bill Berry years have been, er, problematic, and my ardor has cooled. However, they have a new album, Accelerate coming out in a couple of weeks, and I found a copy online and liked what I heard. So I thought that in the next couple of weeks, I would I would go back and republish a something I’ve previously written about them, and then, after the album comes out, look at how things are now. This early history was written for a Fresno ‘zine in 1991: the exact halfway point between when I fell in love with them and fell out of love with them. For better and worse, I haven’t changed a word.

Written in March, 1991. Published in Rotting America in March, 1992

If you’ve ever thought that R.E.M. has ever sold out, you are wrong, dead wrong. R.E.M. has always been one of the most uncompromising bands in rock n’ roll history. Those who have been yelling “sell out” since Lifes Rich Pageant (Fables? Reckoning?) are either A) idiots or B) so enamored of their own cloistered underground hipness and their attitude of “if is popular, it can’t be good,” that they’ve completely twisted into themselves and they wouldn’t know the real world if it came up and bit em in the ass. Or maybe not. That probably is a bit harsh, but R.E.M. has been the soundtrack to my life since I first heard the Trouser Press flexi-disc of “Wolves, Lower” in 1982 . . .

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“Certain songs,” Craig Finn sang on The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, “they get scratched into our souls.” That’s the basis of our latest feature: a look at the songs that have done just that. These aren’t necessarily our favorite songs or the songs that we think are the best, but rather songs that — every single time we hear them — instantly transport us back to a place and time in which that song is forever intertwined. This is one of the reasons we so hate the RIAA’s attempted stranglehold on the dissemination of music: you never know where that next certain song is going to come from.

You know how sometimes you hear an album — or even a song — for the first time, and without even realizing it, by the time its over, your whole perception of the world has forever been changed? That was what hearing The Clash for the very first time did to me. It was late 1978, I was a junior in at San Joaquin Memorial High School in Fresno, California, and I pretty much liked what other white, suburban males my age liked: Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Yes, etc.

But, something had happened: about a year before, I’d started reading rock magazines — Circus, Rolling Stone and most especially, CREEM. And those rock magazines were all buzzing to various degrees about something called “Punk Rock.” Punk seemed strange and weird, and it was very much unheard on Fresno radio. So even though the Sex Pistols had already crashed and burned on American soil, I actually hadn’t heard a note of their music.

But I had heard The Cars, and their debut album was the very first punk-associated thing I ever bought. But of course, The Cars were really “new wave,” which was a totally different head, man, so I finally took the Punk plunge with Rocket to Russia by the Ramones and Marquee Moon by Television. Those are still two of my favorite records, and they just whetted my appetite for more.

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