Interview Videos From "The Craft"

Frustrating! Nearly a month after the Paul Westerberg/The Craft show, the video of the performances from the show have still not been posted. However, the some of the interview portions have been posted on the RRHOF site. You can continue to check The Craft site, where some performance videos will be posted......eventually.

Wayback Machine: Paul Westerberg 1996 Interview

Check out this interview with Paul from 1996. He was interviewed by Russell Hall for "Performing Songwriter" magazine, where much of this interview appeared. But at the time, Russell was kind enough to supply us with the full transcript of the interview. Here's an excerpt:

Which come easier for you, ballads or rockers? Actually, I think I know the answer to that.
PW: Do you? Which do you think?

Well, I would assume that the rockers come easier.
PW: No. If the question is, "Which comes easier, great rock 'n' roll or a great ballad?", I think . . . (pauses) I think I can write a ballad pretty easily, but great rock 'n' roll, to me, is almost impossible to write, alone. With a band, it's a different story. And that's the whole gist of my career right now. I used to be able to write great rock 'n' roll easily, because I had a great rock 'n' roll band. Now I don't have one, so I would have to answer your question by saying that, yes, the ballads are easier because there's no one to bounce things off of. There's no one to throw a drumstick at me.

More Paul Westerberg on Jools Holland

The second of Paul's two appearances on "Later With Jools Holland" is playing on Concert.tv, which is available through On Demand (I have Comcast On Demand and can find it by going to the On Demand menu and picking: Music > Concert.tv > Later With Jools). It's the episode entitled "Tom Petty & Others". This performance of "It's A Wonderful Lie" is from 1999 and is the only TV performance Paul did to promote "Suicaine Gratifaction".

Westerberg Interview - The Craft

You can listen to just the interview portion of The Craft show here, many thanks to Small Town Vice from the board for providing this.

"Let It Be" on "Sound Opinions"

Listen to the podcast of "Sound Opinions" doing a "Classic Album Dissection" of "Let It Be", with guest Jim Walsh. Grab the file here, the Mats discussion begins at about 18 minutes in. It's funny to hear them talking about this record as a "lost" classic since pretty much none of "us" (those who care enough about PW and the Mats to be reading this) think of it as an obscure album, but rather, as music that's practically encoded in our DNA at this point.

The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting

Jim Walsh, author of the upcoming oral history of the Mats, "The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting" will be a guest on "Sound Opinions", a syndicated public radio show featuring Chicago writers Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talking music. The Oct. 5 show will be a "Sound Opinions Classic Album Dissection", this time focusing on "Let It Be". You can get more information, like what stations the show can be heard on and how to listen to it online at the show's web site.

Speaking of web sites, the Mats book has its own MySpace page. There's lots of stuff to check out there, including a list of Jim's upcoming appearances, a bunch of glowing blurbs from the back cover ("The Replacements were superheroes: They rescued a whole planet from ’80s music. Jim Walsh’s loving, engrossing oral history is the book they deserve."— Nick Hornby), and a few choice excerpts from the book.

Those of you in MPLS should keep Nov. 28th open for the book release party at First Avenue, with Twin Cities bands doing Mats covers. Bands include: We’ll Be You (featuring Jon Eller, Kevin Bowe, Steve Price and Jerry Anderson), The Alarmists, The Honeydogs, Birthday Suits, One For The Team, and many, many more.

Paul Westerberg/The Craft BitTorrent

For those of you who have an account on DimeADozen (aka EZTorrent), the audio for Paul Westerberg -slash- The Craft show has been uploaded as a torrent. If you don't have an active account, it can be tough to get in because they cap the site at 100,000 members, but do keep trying. I got my account a few months ago after a day or two of trying. (If all of this is sounding like a lot of mumbo jumbo to you, check out the DimeWiki for more info on BitTorrent in general and Dime in particular).

If you aren't able to get the show via BitTorrent, visit the Message Board, where some of us will be weeding out copies of the show the old-fashioned way: on CD.