It’s maybe a little unfair to compare 1972’s “Bull Island” Festival to Fyre Fest, the music festival scam so egregious it warranted dueling documentaries on Hulu and Netflix. But “Bull Island” — or what was originally called the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival — was an epic catastrophe, maybe the worst in music festival history, and well deserving of its own media franchise. Still, its organizers had every intention of following through on the event. What happened wasn’t entirely their fault, but partly the result of a campaign to route thousands of hippies out of the state of Indiana.

Promoters Tom Duncan and Bob Alexander had previously staged a successful festival, the Bosse Field Freedom Fest, in Evansville, an event featuring Tina Turner, Edgar Winter, Dr. John, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker. Eager to top themselves and bring a “bigger-than-Woodstock”-sized happening to the Midwest, they booked “a blockbuster collection of artists” for their next event, writes Patrick Chamberlain at Everfest, “including Black Sabbath, The Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Ravi Shankar, The Eagles, and even Cheech and Chong.”

Before securing all the permits, they placed ads and started selling tickets. The two eager 20-something organizers both suffered from the tragic flaw of youthful overconfidence, which blinded them to the fact that there was no way their next festival was going to happen in Evansville, or anywhere in Indiana, for that matter. The error led to what may be, as Bandsplaining explains above, the worst music festival of all time. “The lack of preparedness, the lawlessness, the desperation of the crowd; it’s like the bad-acid trip version of Woodstock where [spoiler] everything burns down. [/spoiler].”

Although reports from locals mostly characterized the duo’s previous outdoor festival at Bosse Field as peaceful, Evansville Mayor Russell Lloyd vowed it would never happen again. Yet Duncan and Alexander plowed ahead with planning the Eerie Canal Soda Pop Festival, as Sean Mcdevitt writes at the Courier & Press:

Contracts were signed, helicopters were rented, and holes were being dug for some 500 portable toilets. More than 30 rock groups were booked, and tickets went on sale in several cities around the country.

Oblivious to their fate, the organizers sold almost 9,000 tickets. “Just eight days after its announcement, a restraining order was issued against the event,” followed by a string of similar ordinances in neighboring counties as other locales got wind of the projected 50,000 to 60,000 attendees expected to show up. Soon, those numbers swelled to the hundreds of thousands. Alexander and Duncan went on TV and begged authorities to let the show proceed to prevent mass civil unrest.

Forced to move the festival out of state, they settled on a place called Bull Island, “not in fact an island, but rather a collection of swampy fields,” Chamberlain notes, “under the legal jurisdiction of the town of Carmi, Illinois, but only accessible through Indiana.” When 200,000 hippies arrived on Labor Day weekend, it caused a traffic jam 30 miles long, and they were forced to abandon their cars and hike for miles on foot, resembling “a defeated army,” NBC Nightly News reporter Edwin Newman put it.

Some of the acts — including Ravi Shankar, Ted Nugent’s Amboy Dukes, and Black Oak Arkansas — did make it, choppering in to play a set, then swiftly leaving. “Cheech and Chong were helicoptered in, performed for fifteen minutes in a deluge of rain, cut their set short,” and got out, surely sensing bad vibes everywhere, caused by strychnine-laced acid. Big acts like Rod Stewart and Black Sabbath had already canceled, leaving long stretches of silence between sets.

For most festival attendees, the open-air drug markets stood out most in their memories. “The dope district looked like double rows of fish stands at the county fair!” one remembers. “It was easier to buy drugs than it was to buy water,” recalled another attendee. The police, vastly outnumbered, left well enough alone and stayed outside the fence. Jemayel Khawaja at Ozy paints the scene:

Inside, chaos was already in full swing. The stage was half constructed, and the campgrounds — crammed with over four times as many people as expected — were lined with open drug markets. Hawkers set up stalls selling marijuana, mescaline, LSD and heroin. “I never saw so many drugs in my life,” attendee Ray Kessler recalled to local newspaper The Mount Vernon Democrat. With only six outhouses and half-dug wells to serve as sanitation, thousands instead took to relieving themselves en masse in what became known as “The Turd Fields” and bathing in the Wabash River.

What happened was surely inevitable. Price gouging caused attendees, rabid with hunger and thirst, to attack vendors. Some caught pneumonia in the torrential rains on the third day. One attendee drowned in the Wabash, another was run over by a truck but survived, many were beaten and robbed, one overdosed, one gave birth. By that evening, “the crowd had endured enough,” Chamberlain writes. “The lasting image many have of the festival is the crowd setting the stage on fire. It was a fitting ending. By this point, the populous turned to mass exodus, during which commons themes were intoxication, breakdowns, theft, long drives, and comedowns.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Creative Commons image via Wikimedia Commons

Back in 2013, Brian Eno gave a talk at the Red Bull Academy, the lecture series that has hosted fellow musicians like Tony Visconti, Debbie Harry, and Nile Rogers. Asked when he knew a piece of music was finished, Eno let drop that he currently had 200,809 works of unreleased music. (The actual answer though? “When there’s a deadline”).

Usually we have to wait for posthumous releases to hear such music, like what is currently happening now to Prince’s “vault” of music. Eno is not waiting. He got the deadline.

Sonos Radio HD, the music division of the speaker and audio system company, announced last week that Eno has curated a radio station that will play nothing but unreleased cuts from his five decades of making music. There’s so much material, the chance of a listener hearing a repeat is slim. (Still, the station promises hundreds of tracks, not hundreds of thousands.)

Now, this is not an advertisement for Sonos, but a heads up that in order to promote “The Lighthouse,” as Eno has called the radio station, Sonos has dropped two Eno-led radio shows where he shares just a fraction of the unreleased material, with a promise of two more episodes to come. One features an interviewer, and the other is just Eno talking about the tracks. (And you *can* get one month free at Sonos if you sign up.)

“(A radio station) is something I’ve been thinking about for years and years and years,” says Eno. “And it’s partly because I have far too much music in my life. I have so much stuff.”

The tracks have been purged of titles and have been instead given the utilitarian monikers of “Lighthouse Number (X)”. Anyway, titles suggest too much thought. “Some are pretty crap titles,” he says. “The problem with working on computers is that you have to give things titles before you’ve actually made them…Sometimes the pieces often quickly outgrow the titles.”

If you’re expecting nothing but ambient washes and generative music, you might be surprised at the variety. In the first Eno-hosted show, he plays a funky jam (“Lighthouse Number 002”) co-composed by Peter Chilvers and stuffed with r’n’b samples; and an almost-completed song featuring the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart on guitar, called “All the Bloody Fighters,” aka “Lighthouse Number 106”.

Why call it “The Lighthouse”? “I like the idea of a sort of beacon calling you, telling you something, warning you perhaps, announcing something.” He also credits a friend who told him his unreleased music is like ships lost at sea. The lighthouse “is calling in some of those lost ships.”

As a bonus, listen below to Eno’s recent interview with Rick Rubin, where they talk about the Sonos project and much more.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

“Piano education is important for teaching polyphony, improving sight-reading, consolidating the knowledge of harmony and gaining much more musical abilities,” write Turkish researchers in the behavioral sciences journal Procedia. The student of the piano can advance solo or with another player in duets, playing what are called “four-hand pieces.” But learning “to gain the attitudes of duet playing” poses a challenge. Researchers Izzet Yucetoker and Koksal Apaydinli suggest a possible intervention — overcoming the difficulties of playing four-hand pieces by learning to play what are called “three-hand pieces.”

How, you might wonder, does one play the piano with three hands? It does not take an extra limb or a partner with one hand tied behind their back. Three-hand technique is a dextrous sleight-of-hand developed in the 1830s, most prominently by pianist Sigismond Thalberg, a rival of Franz Liszt who could “apparently not only counter Liszt’s legendary fire and thunder with subtlety,” Bryce Morrison writes at Gramophone, “but who played as if with three hands. Three hands were heard, two were visible!” Might this somehow be easier than playing duets?

One contemporary reviewer of Thalberg’s playing described it as “myriads of notes sounding from one extremity of the instrument to the other without disturbing the subject, in which the three distinct features of this combination are clearly brought out by his exquisite touch.” The Polish pianist and student of Liszt Moriz Rosenthal claimed Thalberg adopted the technique from the harp. “Such legerdemain quickly had novelty-conscious Paris by the ears,” Morrison writes, “and an elegant white kid-glove rather than than a mere gauntlet was thrown down before Liszt.”

Liszt would have none of it, deriding three-hand technique as a trick unfit for his virtuosity. Nonetheless, “in 1837, Liszt, arguably the most charismatic virtuoso of all time, was challenged for supremacy by Sigismond Thalberg…. Stung and infuriated by what he saw as Thalberg’s aristocratic pretensions… Liszt replied with corruscating scorn.” He agreed to meet Thalberg, not in a duet but a duel, at “the home of Countess Cristina Belgiojoso — lover of Lafayette, Heine and Liszt,” notes Georg Prodota at Interlude.

The Countess “gave a charity event for the refugees of the Italian war of independence, and the contemporary press compared the concert to the battle between Rome and Carthage.” Countess Belgiojoso herself (as did the press) pronounced the outcome a draw:

Never was Liszt more controlled, more thoughtful, more energetic, more passionate; never has Thalberg played with greater verve and tenderness. Each of them prudently stayed within his harmonic domain, but each used every one of his resources. It was an admirable joust. The most profound silence fell over that noble arena. And finally Liszt and Thalberg were both proclaimed victors by this glittering and intelligent assembly. Thus two victors and no vanquished …

History was not so kind. Liszt is now celebrated as “the most charismatic virtuoso of all time,” while Thalberg is hardly remembered. And some of the most celebrated examples of pieces played with three-hand technique come not from Thalberg but from Liszt, such as “Un Sospiro” (“A Sigh”), the last of his Three Concert Études, composed between 1845 and 1849, not only as performance pieces, but — as it so happens — for the general improvement of a pianist’s technique. Hear pianist Paul Barton play three versions of “Un Sospiro” above and download the sheet music for the piece here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Over the years, we’ve featured The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performing covers of various rock classics–from the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Bowie’s “Heroes,” to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Recorded in London back in 2005, this clip features the Orchestra performing The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go.’  The performance is an outtake from the DVD, Anarchy in the Ukulele, which is available in digital format. Enjoy.

via Laughing Squid

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What was the Velvet Underground? A Kim Fowly-like art project that outlived its impresario’s interest? A main vehicle for Lou Reed, rock’s egomaniac underdog (who was no one’s ingénue)? Was it three bands? 1. The Velvet Underground and Nico; 2. The Velvet Underground with John Cale; and 3. The Velvet Underground with Doug Yule after Cale’s departure. (Let’s pass by, for the moment, whether VU without Reed warrants a mention…)

Each iteration pioneered essential underground sounds — dirgy Euro-folk rock, strung-out New York garage rock, junkie ballads, psychedelic drone, experimental noise — nearly all of them channeled through Reed’s underrated guitar playing, which was, perhaps the most important member of the band all along. Whoever taped the Velvets (in their second incarnation) on March 15, 1969, on the last night of a three-show engagement at The Boston Tea Party in Boston, MA, seemed to think so. “The entire set was recorded by a fan directly from Lou Reed’s guitar amplifier,” MetaFilter points out.

The mic jammed in the back of Reed’s amp, a Head Heritage reviewer writes, produced “a mighty electronic roar that reveals the depth and layers of Reed’s playing. Over and undertones, feedback, string buzz, the scratch of fingers on frets and the crackle and hum of tube amps combine to create a monolithic blast of metal machine music.” Known as the “legendary guitar amp tape” and long sought by collectors and fans, the bootleg, which you can hear above, “serves as a testament to the brilliance and innovation of Reed’s guitar-playing — both qualities that are often underrated, if not overlooked entirely, by critics of his work,” as Richie Unterberger writes.

It should be evident thus far that these recordings are hardly a comprehensive document of the Velvet Underground in early 1969. Except for Mo Tucker’s glorious, but muffled thumping and some of Sterling Morrison’s excellent guitar interplay, the rest of the band is hardly audible. Songs like “Candy Says” and “Jesus” — on which Reed does not create sublime swirls of noise and feedback — chug along monotonously without their melodies. “It is frustrating,” Unterberger admits, “to hear such a one-dimensional audio-snapshot of what is clearly a good — if not great — night for the band” (who were far more than one of their parts). On the other hand, nowhere else can we hear the nuance, ferocity, and outright insanity of Reed’s playing so amply demonstrated on the majority of this document.

The tape circulated for years as a Japanese bootleg, an interesting fact, notes a Rate Your Music commenter, “considering this bears more similarity to recordings from the likes of [legendary Japanese psych rock band] Les Rallizes Dénudés than most of the Velvet Underground’s other material.” The recordings may have well paved the way for the explosion of Japanese psychedelic rock to come. They also demonstrate the influence of Ornette Coleman in Reed’s playing, and the liberating philosophy Coleman would come to call Harmolodics.

“Alla that boo-ha about whether Reed really was influenced by free jazz,” writes one reviewer quoted on MetaFilter, “can be put to rest here as he pulls the kind of wailing hallucinatory shapes from the guitar that it would take the goddam Blue Humans to decode a couple of decades later.” It may well overstate the case to claim that “Lou Reed single-handedly invented underground music,” but we can hear in these recordings the seeds of everything from Television to Sonic Youth to Pavement to Royal Trux and so much more. See the full tracklist below, a “classic setlist,” notes MetaFilter, “from around the time of their 3rd LP.”

I Can’t Stand It
Candy Says
I’m Waiting For The Man
Ferryboat Bill
I’m Set Free
What Goes On
White Light White Heat
Beginning To See The Light
Jesus
Heroin / Sister Ray
Move Right In
Run Run Run
Foggy Notion

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness