What would a live concert album sound like with all the songs taken out?
Gavin Edwards’ “Having Fun On Stage With Everybody.”
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I’ve known Gavin Edwards for decades, and watched him produce a string of weird and imaginative and wholly successful projects, from his books of “mondegreens” (misheard lyrics) to his definitive biography of Mr Rogers:
Back in 1995, Gavin was seized by a weird (and very nineties) impulse: he created a mixtape called “Having Fun On Stage With Everybody,” consisting of all the stuff from canonical concert albums except the music.
Tuning, jokes, banter, emcees exhorting audiences to welcome this band or that to the stage. Gavin figured the natural audience for this odd project was two people — specifically two friends who got off on the same weird audio adventures as he did.
But a quarter-century later, Gavin is prepared to believe that the vast and variegated internet might have an audience of still more people for this audio adventure, so he’s digitized it and posted it to the internet:
https://rulefortytwo.com/2021/07/23/having-fun-on-stage-with-everybody/
It’s mirrored to Bandcamp, Soundcloud and the, Internet Archive, licensed under a CC license. This is kinda confusing — he’s chosen a ND license, but says “you’re free to slice it up or use it for your own purposes.”
More importantly, all this stuff is not his copyright to CC — instead (as he points out), it’s a glorious exercise in fair use and transformative works.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include The Shakedown (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering; and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias.
