Former Washington City Paper music critic Rickey Wright is dead.  Wright passed away at 4:31 p.m. on February 19 in Seattle after suffering from a series of small strokes. At the time of his death, he was working on a book about John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Wright was probably one of the most prolific talents the Washington City Paper has ever had perhaps on par with Jenkins, and the great, beloved Joel S. I never met Wright but I was around when he was around in the mid-to-late ’90s. I marveled at the fact that he could write on just about any band or genre and not appear to sweat it. (Most of us sweat it).

Wright’s prose was effortless and to the point. He didn’t mess around with silly metaphors. Nor did he make you feel stupid (he never loaded his pieces with arcane references to deep cuts, alternate Replacements b-sides, etc.). He just wrote and wrote.

“He was a save-your-ass kind of writer,” recalls former Washington City Paper Arts Editor Glenn Dixon. “If someone didn’t come through, and there were constantly people who didn’t come through, Rickey would do the job. He’d write it well. He’d get it in on time—always. He was never without ideas and he could cover any kind of music. I can’t tell you how rare that is. I’m really sorry.”

Wright penned pieces on everything from Travolta to Ben Lee to all of pop music in 1997 to Metallica and Soundgarden to R.E.M. to Charles Mingus to Johnny Cash to Led Zep to Curtis Mayfield and Millie Jackson to Luna and Teenage Fanclub to Wesley Willis to British ska to all of ’90s rock to G. Love to Boston to the Shangri-Las to the Replacements. Wright’s final posting on his Facebook page was a list of his 12 favorite Beatles covers; he included two remakes of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

Idolator had this to say about Wright’s passing:

“Wright was an editor for Amazon for some time (that job brought him to Seattle), and his work appeared in publications like USA Today, the Village Voice, Blender, Harp, and the Seattle Weekly. He also won the 1999 Rhino Music Aptitude Test, a fact that seems somewhat trivial at first glance, but if you’ve actually seen the test or some of the people who have failed it miserably, you realize what a testament to his musical knowledge that accolade really is.”

Ned Raggett wrote up a nice obit. Fred Mills has a tribute to Wright in Blurt. Matos has a deeply personal post on Wright as well. Here’s a portion of what Matos had to say:

“Rickey passed away this afternoon at 4:31. Last week he’d had a stroke–apparently more than one, all small, over a period of time–and went to the hospital for treatment. He had surgery and underwent another stroke on the table; he spent most of his final week in a coma. Our friend Rachel and I visited him yesterday. It was not as awful as I’d feared it might be: he still looked like himself, which was encouraging even if everyone knew he wasn’t going to make it. It’s hard not to second-guess how much of this I should be saying, mainly because Rickey was the kind of person who deserves whatever honor you can give him, especially in passing. I’ve seldom known a kinder person, or a better listener, or anyone more enthusiastic about music or film or whatever–and even better, his enthusiasm was catching. When I’m excited about something I yell without meaning to, or just become obnoxious about it. Rickey never did that. He didn’t have to.”

If you’d like to read more of Wright in his own words, you can check out his blog.

Wright’s last blog post had been a hopeful one. It is dated Feb. 4. It was about Obama. He titled it “I love my president.” This is what he had to say He uses the post to print a quote from Obama:

“In the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place . . . I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”

There is an obit from his former employer the Virginian-Pilot:

“‘He had quite a following when he was here and was influential in the local music scene,’ said former Pilot writer Earl Swift. ‘I’ve never known anyone with a more encyclopedic knowledge of music.’”

There is still lots more from his friends and fellow critics. Here’s a really personal recollection of Wright (I’m just quoting a small portion; you should really read the entire entry):

“Rickey used to literally rock and roll. He never stopped moving. Either his leg was always tapping or he’d rock back and forth in his chair like a baby trying to comfort himself. He had a repertoire of postures. Always leaning forward with his hand on his thigh, fingers pointed in and elbow pointed out. He used his hands when he talked, flipping his palms upward in a gesture of offering.

Rickey always looked cool. He was a rock critic and looked the part. He always had a good haircut. He always wore the cool black ankle boots with the pointed toes. He knew how to wear a suit. He walked on his toes a bit which sort of accentuated his little belly. He always had just the right rock ‘n’ roll button on his bag or his jacket.

Rickey loved his cats, Chet and Kettle. When Chet was sick, he went through tremendous lengths and expense to try to keep him alive. When Kettle ran away, he consulted a pet psychic to find her, and found her. He used to talk about what a good soul Chet had and how you could see it in the little cat’s big eyes….

Rickey and I only ever talked about two things: music and love. Our last conversation was about the latter. It occurred around the beginning of January….”

Read More “Rickey Wright R.I.P.” »

Although the pay is rumored to be low, authoring a 33 1/3 book is one of the surefire ways that a music writer can transcend day-to-day geekdom and elevate themselves to a sort of record nerd immortality. If you haven’t heard of this, 33 1/3 is an on going series of books, each of which is dedicated to a single important/interesting/influential album. The writing can involve anything from straight biography to Meat is Murder-inspired fan-fic and the authors range from professional critics, to super-fans, to John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats (who penned the book on Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality).

Several months ago the series’ blog posted an open call for book proposals and on Sunday they finally ran a list of of the submissions, all 597 of them. It was only out of sheer sloth that I neglected to turn in my own proposal for ZZ Top’s Eliminator and I’m really regretting it now (although maybe there’s still a chance for my Billy Gibbons-in-West Berlin screenplay?).

The list varies pretty wildly, but it’s interesting to see which records were pitched by multiple times. Four pitches for Duran Duran’s Rio and four pitches for Dinosaur Jr’s You’re Living All Over Me. More surprisingly, seven people pitched Slint’s Spiderland! Really? Is a deep reading of “Nosferatu Man” really that necessary? I suppose that at least one of those proposals must have a pretty good argument for it.

It’s nice to see that DC (or at least DC 1984-93) is very well represented–Unrest, Half Japanese, Nation of Ulysses, Pussy Galore, four pitches for various Fugazi records. I’m very pleased that somebody wanted to do a book on Lungfish’s Sound in Time, which is among my all-time favorites, but in order to turn a profit the book would probably have to move more copies than the album ever did.

But sales figures aside, that’s not nearly as weird a bizarre and idea as flash-in-the-pan boogie-rock band Black Oak Arkansas’ The Definitive Rock Collection. I remember that when I was a kid I tried to pick up a copy of that during a road trip and my parents, who rarely made any attempt to censor my music tastes, flatly prohibited me from buying it. Maybe they had seen this video and just decided that if there was any chance that their son would grow up to chicken-strut around on stage in white spandex and fringe, that they would play no part in it.

Richie Unterberger, who penned the books Turn! Turn! Turn!: The ’60s Folk-Rock Revolution, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, and Unknown Legends of Rock’n'Roll, among others, will be chatting Monday night about his latest effort, a 400 page, detail-filled work called The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, and showing rare films and playing rare recordings featured in the book. Unterberger’s book covers studio outtakes, BBC radio recordings from 1962-65, live concert performances, home demos, private tapes, and fan club Christmas recordings, and makes the case for why these recordings matter and which ones he would like to see get official releases.

I first came into contact with Unterberger when he was my editor at the now defunct indie rock, jazz, reggae and more music magazine Option. The California-based writer does extensive research for his published volumes, and writes in a straightforward, easy-to-read manner. Based on my conversations with him from way back when, along with his writing, I’d guess that tonight’s presentation will be detailed enough to please Fab Four fanatics and down-to-earth and honest enough for those who may only be familiar with the Liverpool lads greatest hits.

From 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Library of Congress Mary Pickford Theater, Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. SE. 202-707-5677. The event is free.

I have a hard time imagining that anybody who enjoyed Alex Ross‘ excellent history of 20th Century classical music, The Rest Is Noise, wouldn’t also get something out of Hallelujah Junction, the entertaining, occasionally punchy, memoirs of composer John Adams. The two books complement each other well—Ross forcefully argues that music history was a chaotic mix of ideas, not a straightforward march from Stravinsky to Serialism to Minimalism, and throughout his book Adams offers a similar defense of the same notion. (Ross is credited in the acknowledgments, too.)

Plenty of listeners tend to think of Adams primarily as a Minimalist—he matured as a composer in San Francisco in the 70s, studying the same experimentalists that Terry Riley and Steve Reich did—but he knows his Wagner and Webern, and he’s not afraid to take a few whacks at some of his contemporaries. Philip Glass, for instance, gets a mild spanking: “[I]n general I have had the feeling that he rarely troubles himself much with delving into new possibilities or combinations for the many different instruments that he writes for.” His harshest critiques, though, are reserved for the many critics who came out during the performances of his 1991 opera about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, The Death of Klinghoffer. Adams has little patience for folks who appreciated how “evenhanded” he was in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (”I did not keep a running account of how much ‘noble’ or ‘beautiful’ music was accorded to the hijackers as opposed to how much was given to the hostages or to the Jews”), and he fires both barrels at Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin, who wrote an article in the New York Times after 9/11 that Klinghoffer should never be performed again. Adams’ neat trick is to let Taruskin’s own words undercut his argument, befitting a composer with a fine understanding of subtlety and counterpoint. That’s not to say that Hallelujah Junction was written to settle scores, just that it’s a spirited work from an artist who obviously bears a few scars from being called upon to defend every new idea he has.

Adams reads tonight, Nov. 12, at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW. Call (202) 364-1919 for more info.

As previously reported here, the latest issue of the Chicago-based cultural magazine Stop Smiling is all about D.C., with Backyard Band’s Anwan Glover featured on the cover. The D.C. release party for the issue on Nov. 13 has a pretty impressive lineup: Glover and George Pelecanos are guests of honor, with DJs Ian Svenonius and Kevin Coombe spinning.

Info: Nov. 13, 7-10 p.m., Civilian Art Projects, 706 7th St. NW. $5 donation requested (included copy of the magazine). RSVP to rsvp@stopsmilingonline.com.

Kay Bozich Owens and Lynn Owens‘ new book, Lost in the Supermarket: An Indie Rock Cookbook, includes recipes from the likes of Black Dice, Belle and Sebastian, Country Teasers (still keepin’ it classy with a drink called “Red Headed Sluts”), the Mountain Goats, Xiu Xiu, Sonic Boom, and more. I know practically nothing about cooking, and I’d be pretty careful about ingesting anything prepared by a former member of Spacemen 3. But Guy Picciotto’s recipe for rhubarb crumble does sound appealing. Reprinted with permission of Soft Skull Press.

Guy’s Rhubarb Crumble

Serves 6 to 8

Filling Ingredients:

4 cups diced rhubarb, cut into smallish chunks

3 Granny Smith apples

3/4 cup of honey

1-1/2 tablespoons of cornstarch

1/8 teaspoon of cardamom

Crumble Topping Ingredients:

1/2 cup unbleached flour

1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into tiny cubes (put butter in freezer briefly till cold and hard)

2 tablespoons of sliced almonds, crushed walnuts, or crushed pecans or all of the above

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Dice the rhubarb into small chunks and peel, core, and cut the apples into thin slices.

3. Combine all the fruit in a big bowl then mix in the honey, cornstarch, and cardamom.

4. Dump the fruit concoction into an 8 x 8 inch baking pan and then smooth out the top with a rubber spatula so it’s nice and even.

5. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, brown sugar, salt, and cinnamon.

6. Take the cold butter and dice it up into little mini butter squares.

7. Toss the butter square tidbits into the dry topping ingredients. Rub the butter bits into the mix with your fingers just till it forms crumblets. Don’t over rub—you want nice crumbs. Add the nuts and then spread the crumble topping over the fruit filling in the pan.

8. Bake for 55 minutes till the top is nicely browned and the fruit filling is bubbling up like a tar pit.

9. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or as is. Refrigerates nicely.

Punk legend, Blowoff DJ, and onetime City Paper columnist Bob Mould is going to publish his autobiography with Little, Brown. Michael Azerrad will assist; pub date’s 2010. Mould has more info on the deal on his blog.

It’s turning into a D.C. summer over at Paper Cuts, the New York Times‘ book blog. George Pelecanos submitted a playlist for its “Living With Music” feature last week. Today’s entry features author, Atlantic blogger and former City Paper staffer Ta-Nehisi Coates, weighing in with a sweet set of hip-hop classics, from Slick Rick’s “A Children’s Story” to the Geto Boys‘ deathless “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.”

D.C.-area crime novelist George Pelecanos has submitted a playlist of some of his favorite songs to Paper Cuts, the New York Times’ books blog. Among the local selections: William DeVaughan’s  “Be Thankful for What You Got,”  Slant 6’s “Time Expired,” and Fugazi’s “Cashout.”

Thurston Moore’s and Byron Coley’s photo history No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976-1980 has a black-and-white-and-puke-green color scheme, which feels appropriate: The movement’s music was designed to be both stark and a little stomach-turning. Playing the role of Lower East Side oral historians, the Sonic Youth guitarist and longtime music journalist interview the scene’s prime movers, including James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Rhys Chatham, and, most provocatively, Brian Eno. Glenn Branca vents about No New York, an Eno-produced compilation that spawned jealousy among those not included (”what [Eno] did destroyed No Wave,” he says). But Eno wasn’t wrong to call it “one of those sort of flames that burns very brightly for a short time and then goes out,” and the dozens of photos included capture evidence of the fire: a chainsaw taken to a guitar, a scrum between Chance and critic Robert Christgau, and lots of empty lofts and rooftops reclaimed for art’s sake. Moore and Coley discuss and sign copies of their work at 4 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Free, (202) 364-1919; at 7 p.m. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW, $22, (202) 639-1770. —Mark Athitakis

(Also, see our interview with Marc Masters, local author of his own No Wave book, which was published earlier this year.)