Cross your robot fingers if you hope to get a vinyl copy of Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memories, which was released today: Many local stores are sold out, and the ones that aren't had only a handful of copies as of this afternoon.
"They're just selling really quickly," said a clerk at Rasputin Music on Powell Street in San Francisco, explaining why he wouldn't put a copy on hold for us. The store only had two vinyl editions left as of 3:45 this afternoon.
It was a similar story at the giant Amoeba Music on Haight, which had only four copies left at the same time. A clerk there offered to hold one for us if we could run over to get it, though.
Ray Manzarek, the keyboard player for the Doors, was the first rock star I ever interviewed. I'd just started writing about music, and one morning my editor called me up and asked if I'd like to interview Manzarek. I don't know if he knew I was a Doors fanatic, but I jumped at the chance. I went out and bought a cassette recorder and a contact mic with a black suction cup that stuck to the mouthpiece of my landline. Manzarek called me late one afternoon and, after I did a sound check to make sure the recorder was working properly, we started talking.
He spoke at length about music, art, poetry, and the possibility that Jim Morrison had faked his own death to get out of the glare of the spotlight. Manzarek said it would be just the kind of stunt he'd pull. Morrison had only been gone for a few years at the time of the interview, so it seemed possible that, unlike Elvis, he might still be around.
Pop-Up Magazine: The Song Reader Issue
Monday, May 20, 2013
Davies Symphony Hall
Better than: The vast majority of print glossies.
In the four years since its inception, Pop-Up Magazine has become the go-to literary event in San Francisco -- the one that draws so many glitterati to Davies Symphony Hall that it's hard to fathom how every one of them could be drinking the same $5 beer or wearing the same pair of affordable designer glasses (a joke not lost on the producers of Pop-Up, who used it in their homemade advertisement for an eyewear sponsor). Getting in is unnecessarily challenging; snagging a good seat is as much a status symbol as landing a second tier box at the opera. Tweeting about it afterward could raise your public profile, though it's also considered outré.
