Snap, Crackle, Pop! Young Lucifer himself shilled for Rice Krispies in the ’60s.

Cyberdelic

Flower-powered webcaster streams patchouli for the ears

By Bruce Robinson

Haven’t heard enough Quicksilver Messenger Service lately? Craving a little extra Moody Blues? Still can’t believe that Moby Grape never made it big? Have I got a radio station for you!

The Technicolor Web of Sound (www.techwebsound.com) boasts not just an amazingly comprehensive play list of flower-powered tunes, but augments the music with occasional vintage news bites (usually aghast at some hippie’s drug use or other antics). Even more entertaining are the time-warped commercials, most of which feature bands singing the praises of products from Coke to cars (yes, that really was Mick Jagger crooning a paean to Rice Krispies!). And infrequent DJ drop-ins from such notables as Tom Donahue and B. Mitchell Reed (often reading commercials) add still more “underground FM” veracity.

Apparently the obsessive passion of one Paul Maze and emanating from an undisclosed location in the Midwest (he’s operating on Central Time), the Technicolor Web of Sound was launched in 2001, getting a substantial boost soon thereafter when some paisley-loving programmer at Apple included it in the presets for iTunes, which is how I happened to find it.

It doesn’t take long to get a sense of the programmer’s orientation. There is a regular salting of reasonably familiar tunes from the Beatles, Traffic, Spirit, Cream, Jethro Tull, Buffalo Springfield and their chart-topping contemporaries, but unless you are a truly obsessive fan of the era, you’re often more likely to recognize the band than a particular track. Which is another way of saying that, exactly contrary to most contemporary commercial radio, this free service is dedicated to promulgating a deep, broad sampling of the music. Sure, it’s fun to revisit, say, side two, track three from an old Jefferson Airplane LP, but it’s cooler still to discover rare live cuts from the Great Society. And they’re both here.

Then there are many of the most interesting cuts from what I think of as the midlevel bands of the day, groups that cut a couple of memorable songs, even decent album or two, and maybe made it onto a classic Fillmore poster. Acts like Nazz, Fever Tree, the Kaleidoscope, Orpheus, Sopwith Camel, the Charlatans and their trans-Atlantic counterparts that somehow never found much favor stateside, such as Family, the Pretty Things, Small Faces or Status Quo, all receive regular airplay.

Best of all for dedicated music geeks of a certain age or Woodstockian inclination, this is the mother lode of obscure nuggets of psychedelia, tracks from bands you (or at least I) have never heard of before, many with wonderfully evocative names: Tangerine Zoo, the Druids of Stonehenge, Neon Pearl, the Plastic Cloud, Lazy Smoke, Jack and the Beanstalks, Opal Butterfly and scores more. Expect one or two of these per hour, too.

While listening, you can also scroll though the play list, which not only identifies each of the hundreds of tracks that could surface at any time, but features full color thumbnails of the album covers (and, when feasible, Amazon.com links for the acquisitionally inclined). And the “What’s Playing” page offers a running list of the past 20 selections at any given time.

It is also worth nothing that the entire enterprise is refreshingly free of even the mildest taint of commercialism (aside from those antique ads, which hardly count, in my estimation). There are no pop-up ads, no banners, not even a tasteful invitation to voluntarily send a few bucks in support. You’re welcome to sign the cyber guest book (which evinces a considerable fan base on at least four continents) and offer comments and suggestions, but that’s it. A genuine free ride.

Of course, we fanatics can always quibble about perceived shortcomings in the play list (too little Procol Harum and too much Monkees; only one song from It’s a Beautiful Day?), but the miniblog that tracks the gradual growth of the library indicates that this is a perpetual work in progress, so it’s hard to fault the guy, really.

The only downside, at least for this longtime radio fan, is the absence of any audible human presence. After a while, the endless stream of music can begin to seem a bit hollow without a bit of personality to make it more companionable. But when that feeling hits, it’s well past time to get up from the keyboard and revisit the rest of your life.

The endless Technicolor Web of Sound will be there- waiting, whenever you’re ready, as we used to say, to “feed your head” again.

From the March 30-April 5, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Last Angry Man: Henry Rollins has no truck with liars, thieves and scoundrels.

On Target

Henry Rollins gets the final word

By Greg Cahill

Henry Rollins has a way with words.

The punk-rock icon–the prototypical American punk and former lead singer for Black Flag, one of the most controversial bands to emerge from Southern California–has a new role as host of Henry’s Film Corner, an hour-long spot on the Independent Film Channel. In a recent review of the Alien vs. Predator DVD, Rollins reached into his vast reservoir of rock ‘n’ roll trivia to dog one of the film’s horrific stars.

“I don’t know,” he mused, unimpressed by the film’s main characters, more campy than scary, “the predator reminds me of Terence Trent D’arby in a fat-man suit.”

The man who pulled no punches as a punk rocker, and who co-starred in the supremely stupid sci-fi flick Johnny Mnemonic and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, is right on target.

On the phone from Los Angeles, Rollins is no kinder to the profession that brought him acclaim in the 1980s and ’90s. “The drag about doing anything in the music industry–or show business–is that you run into a lot of liars, thieves and scoundrels,” he says with a sneer. “And it can break your heart if you’re not careful. You have to be careful not to turn into one of them.”

Once described as the angriest man in Los Angeles, Rollins isn’t about to fall into that trap. At 44, he’s still slaying dragons with his angry, articulate and angst-ridden writing, and still carrying his uncompromising, often hilarious message to the stage as a Grammy-winning spoken-word artist.

He brings his one-man show–part pantomime, part standup comedy and part guerilla theater–to the LBC on Sunday, April 3.

In 1980, this punk survivor changed his name from Henry Garfield (to disassociate himself from a strict and “racist” father), left the East Coast–where Rollins sang for the seminal Washington, D.C., band S.O.A.–and joined the hardcore L.A. punk band Black Flag after jumping onstage during one of their shows and being invited to stay.

Rollins helped Black Flag make such genre-defining classics as 1981’s Damaged and 1985’s Loose Nut before “slowly mutating from razor-sharp skinheads to a constantly changing lineup of savage noise experimenters.”

Black Flag disbanded in 1986, but not before offending just about everyone, including the group’s legion of skateboard-toting, flannel shirt-clad fans.

“I never really felt like part of the punk movement,” Rollins says. “We never wanted to be aligned with anyone, because then you have to accept their value system. And we always felt that punk rock was very unmoving and unchanging. They had all these rules that said you had to wear your hair a certain length and had to play a certain way.

“We used to come out every year with a different batch of music and caught so much shit for everything we did. Now people say, ‘Oh, those albums [Damaged, Loose Nut] are classics!’ But at the time, we’d get attacked by these punkers who were yelling, ‘You guys sold out!’

“Yeah, right. If we sold out, then where’s the money?”

Indeed, Rollins and his band mates spent a fair amount of time sleeping in the back seat of a car during tours and usually crashed on the floor of SST’s suburban L.A. office, where they also worked helping Ginn to run the premier punk label. Despite the Spartan conditions, Rollins fondly recalls those years, which many regard as the golden age of punk rock. “In a way, it was,” he says. “After all, look at the band’s that were on the label at the time: the Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, Saccharine Trust. It was an amazing time.

“And getting to see the Minutemen three times a week, well, you couldn’t ask for better music.”

These days, Rollins–hailed by the LA Times Magazine as a “one-man publishing/recording conglomerate”–is keeping things lively. His own publishing and recording venture, 2.13.61 (his birth date), has released several works of his random thoughts and poetry, including Pissing in the Gene Pool, Hallucinations of Grandeur and 1994’s Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag, a two-CD set (inspired by the published memoir of the same name) that earned him a Grammy for Best Spoken-Word Recording.

2.13.61 also has published works by Exene Cervenka and Australian avant-rocker and novelist Nick Cave, as well as Henry Miller and other big-name authors.

“Retaining artistic control is important because if you’re going to make a little statement then you might as well make it without someone saying, ‘Well, we’ll just add a little red and pink on the corner and put a little mousse in your hair,'” he says. “‘Wait a minute! What happened to this thing I’ve been creating in the basement for the past eight months?’ Sorry. You just don’t want your vision fucked with like that.”

Henry Rollins appears at the LBC Sunday, April 3, at 8pm. 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. $20­$34. 707.546.3600.

From the March 16-22, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.