This week's news on Steve Jobs' FBI files.
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Updated: iPhone 5 release date, news and rumours
17 MayTechRadar
iPhone 5 news and rumours
Although widely expected, there was no iPhone 5 in 2011 after all, though the company did announce the iPhone 4S.
So we'll surely see a total revision of the iPhone during 2012. We've gathered together all the latest iPhone 5 rumours to give us a reasonable picture of what Apple's latest handset might be like.
brightcove : 1212352584001iPhone 5 release date
Given the pattern of Apple's iPhone launches, we're expecting the next-gen iPhone 5 release date to be mid to late 2012.
It could possibly be shown off at Apple's Worldwide Developer Event (WWDC 2012), which usually takes place in early June - even if the focus of the 2011 event was software. We are expecting iOS 6 and more on OS X Mountain Lion this time around so it could be that hardware is further down the list again.
We reported in February that the new iPhone would be launched in October, falling into line with the same release schedule from last year, and Macotakara 'sources' confirmed the Cupertino brand would be honouring the same upgrade cycle from now on.
According to analyst Shaw Wu, the Cupertino firm has reduced the number of iPhone orders by 20%-25% for the next quarter ahead of the release.
But rumours have persisted that the iPhone 5 release date is June 2012. It seems Foxconn was even gearing up for that date. Production was reported to be very close in late March 2012.
iPhone 5 form factor
Unlike the iPhone 4S, the new iPhone will be a completely new design from what has gone before, so that means an entirely new casing as we saw with the iPhone 3G and, later, the iPhone 4.
Interestingly, someone who claimed to have seen a larger iPhone 5 prototype said in November 2011 that Steve Jobs canned the new size and opted for the iPhone 4S. According to Business Insider, it was feared that a new size would create a two-tier iPhone ecosystem.
Beatweek also claimed in November 2011 that the 5-inch was scrapped "because Apple wouldn't be able to do it properly" this year. However, the Daily Mail (make of that what you will) then suggested that a four-inch version was likely and that Sony has already shipped top secret demo screens to Apple.
iPhone 5 specs
Based on the roadmap of mobile chip design specialist ARM (of which Apple is a licensee), we'll see a quad-core processor debut in the new iPhone 5 - probably called the Apple A6. We've seen other quad core handsets debut in 2012, so it's not too much of a stretch to say that the iPhone 5 will be the same.
We had expected some kind of help in terms of predicting the iPhone 5 CPU from the launch of the new iPad, but the announcement of a slightly tweaked A5X processor really didn't help things there.
In terms of other specs aside from the screen (more on that below), rumours are persisting that the iPhone 5 may have a new dock connector. Well, it had to happen sometime didn't it?
iPhone 5 will have 4G/LTE support
After the new iPad's launch brought 4G to an Apple device, it's widely expected that 4G will come to iPhone 5. And with many 4G handsets already announced in the US, it can't be long before the iPhone supports 4G technologies - even if we won't even have a UK spectrum auction until late this year or maybe early next.
Because of the 4G fuss over the new iPad in the UK, we'd expect this to be played down in any UK handset - or the UK might get a different version entirely of course.
Steve Jobs' iPhone 5 legacy
Many sites have reported that Steve Jobs was working hard on the iPhone 5 project, which will apparently be a "radical redesign". We shall see... but the fact the iPhone 4S was so similar to the iPhone 4 suggests that Steve was working on something pretty special before
brightcove : 1161523880001The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that: "Apple is also developing a new iPhone model, said people briefed on the phone. One person familiar said the fifth-generation iPhone would be a different form factor than those that are currently available… it was unclear how soon that version would be available to Verizon or other carriers."
This has since been backed up by reports from Engadget, which state the design will be a 'total rethink'.
iPhone 5 screen
Various sources claim the iPhone 5 will feature a larger, 4-inch screen. Digitimes quotes the source as saying that Apple is expanding the screen size "to support the tablet PC market as the vendor only has a 9.7-inch iPad in the market."
On 23 May 2011, we reported on rumours that the iPhone 5 could feature a curved glass screen. These rumours also came from Digitimes, which said that Apple has purchased between 200 and 300 special glass cutting machines because they're too costly for the manufacturers to invest in.
In March 2012, new reports suggested that the new iPhone 5 would come sporting a larger 4.6-inch retina display, while April rumours even suggested the next iPhone will use new touch technology and will be encased in something called "liquidmetal."
During May, The Wall Street Journal cited sources as saying the device will definitely sport a 4-inch display.
iPhone 5 digital wallet - NFC
There's been some speculation that Apple might include Near Field Communication (NFC) technology in the iPhone 5, turning it into a kind of credit/debit card.
However, with the tech being inside the Google Nexus S and Samsung Galaxy Nexus, as well as a host of other top smartphones, the time for NFC may finally be here.
On 24 June 2011 it was reported that the Google Wallet mobile payment platform could feature on the new iPhone. Eric Schmidt admitted that Google is looking to port the software to other manufacturers.
However, on 31 January 2012 9to5Mac claimed to have spoken with a well-connected developer who disclosed information received from Apple iOS engineers saying they are "heavily into NFC".
The developer in question has not been named, but is working on a dedicated iOS app which includes NFC reading for mobile transactions. When questioned how confident he was on the information he had received his reply was "Enough to bet the app development on".
On April 30 2012 an Apple patent filing reinforced the idea NFC in iPhone 5.
iPhone 5 camera
Sony makes the camera for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. Speaking at a live Wall Street Journal event, Sony's Sir Howard Stringer was talking about the company's camera image sensor facility in Sendai, a town that was recently ravaged by the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
According to 9to5Mac, he said something along the lines of, "Our best sensor technology is built in one of the [tsunami] affected factories. Those go to Apple for their iPhones… or iPads. Isn't that something? They buy our best sensors from us."
Sources have also suggested the new iPhone could have an 8MP camera. Indeed, Sony announced in January 2012 that it had developed new back-illuminated stacked CMOS image sensors which are smaller in size.
iPhone 5 price
If the iPhone 5 is an evolutionary step like the move from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S then we'd expect the price to stay more or less the same, although in the UK higher VAT rates may well mean a higher price tag.
It's pretty much nailed on that the new iPhone will cost around £500 for a 16GB / 32GB model (depending on the capacity Apple whacks in there) and unless the iPhone 5 comes with some truly next generation technology that pricing model should hold firm.
iPhone 5 review
TechRadar is renowned for its detailed phone reviews where we look at every aspect of a handset, and we'll be bringing you a full, in-depth iPhone 5 review when we get our hands on one.
As for the name, well it looks like it will be called iPhone 5. Apple has certainly been trying to protect the name iPhone 5 - and has even launched a claim over the iPhone5.com domain name.
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Samsung's Market Cap Takes $10 Billion Hit Amid Rumors of Apple DRAM Deal with Elpida
16 MayMacRumors - Mac News and Rumors
Digitimes' poor track record has been thrust into the spotlight in recent days, but that hasn't stopped one of the Taiwanese news site's reports from having a major effect on stock prices for Samsung and Hynix. The report from earlier this week claims that Apple has placed "huge" orders for DRAM chips with Elpida, soaking up half of the capacity at the firm's main plant in Hiroshima, Japan.
1 GB of Elpida DRAM in third-generation iPad (Source: iFixit)
As noted by Reuters, the rumor has had a significant effect on fellow DRAM manufacturers Samsung and Hynix, with Samsung losing $10 billion in market value today in a 6% stock decline. The smaller Hynix was down nearly 9%"It looks like Apple doesn't want to see Samsung and hynix dominate the chip market. Apple wants to maintain its bargaining power by keeping Elpida running," said Choi Do-yeon, an analyst at LIG Investment & Securities.
Elpida filed for bankruptcy in late February, and Micron has emerged as a likely acquirer for the company. The combined Micron-Elpida would be a strong competitor in the DRAM market, sparking concerns for others in the competitive industry.
DRAM, the volatile memory used to hold active applications and other data for use while a device is in operation, is a commodity in the consumer electronics market, with Apple routinely sourcing from multiple suppliers and shifting orders to achieve the best pricing.
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Jobs-to-be-done’s place in a customer-centric organization
16 MayCloudAve
On Twitter, I asked this question:
When firms talk about being customer-centric today, what are they actually *doing*? FB page? Reacting to tweets? Sentiment analysis? #scrm
—
Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3) May 15, 2012I asked it, as I had a conversation in recent days with a fellow from a large corporate. Customer-centricity was recently adopted as an internal mantra, but the manifestation of that was…wait for it…sentiment analysis.
It’s a start, right? But is it really a difference-maker?
I’ve written recently about jobs-to-be-done. As in, what customers hire your product to do. Those jobs have a tendency to (i) be hidden from you; and (ii) change over time. Knowing, and acting on, jobs-to-be-done (JTBD acronymized) is probably one of the most customer-centric things a company can do. You’re getting deep into what someone is buying your product for.
While I don’t work for a large corporate, I am integrating jobs-to-be-done in some work on next generation gamification elements for the Spigit platform. Why? Because there are many different types of game mechanics that can be applied to a platform. But why would you add any of them? To better deliver on what your customers hire you to do. To accomplish this, I’m using the Listhings site – online post-it notes – to collect and socialize these. I follow my own format for JTBD: context, job, success metric. An actual (blurred-out) example is below:
You know what? Customers love talking about their jobs-to-be-done. Seriously. I usually schedule an inital hour to talk about them, and every single company has wanted to continue to the conversation for another hour. The conversations are not just good customer relations, which they are. They are leading to areas where the Spigit platform can apply game mechanics to improve their outcomes.
But apparently, this approach is sort of radical. As only 7% of firms are deemed to be customer-centric.
Where would JTBD fit?
Which got me thinking. What exactly are companies doing today, at least in the product and service development arena? Where would customer jobs-to-be-done fit with existing approaches? The graphic below is my take on what’s happening out there:
The center blue area represents the work of ideating, designing and producing products and services. The top grey boxes floating around up there? Those are the current factors influencing the product/service development process.
Market Analysis: Classic input for product development here. What are the trends? What are competitors doing? What’s going on in adjacent markets? You’re got to do this. It’s a source of ideas, and evidence of what customers are gravitating toward.
Executive Fiat: Does this really happen??? Heh, just joking of course. This will be a reality forever, and it’s actually appropriate in mild doses. The thing to watch is the bull-in-the-china-shop approach, where that product is gonna get done, I’m not listening to anyone! Perhaps too many executives subscribe to the Steve Jobs-attributed notion that customers don’t know what they want (“So I’m going to give it to them!”).
Usage Vectors: Once you have product out there, you learn what people are using, what they value in the existing product features. And you continue to develop along those vectors. It’d be irresponsible to do otherwise. Just watch getting stuck on those vectors and missing the market shifts.
Customer Service Tickets: As people use your product, they’re going to file requests and report issues. These items are some clues to what people are trying to get done. They suffer from being narrow, focused on a specific interaction point and grounded in what they know of the current product. But you can divine some of what people want to get done from these.
Customer Surveys: Surveys get you closer to customers. Polling people’s preferences for difference attributes and behaviors. Good input as you consider a product or venture. Problem with surveys is that the questions are set ahead of time. Whoever puts them together has to decide what the key factors are. But that leaves a huge hole in understanding what customers themselves value.
Focus Groups: A favorite activity of large companies is to get some random people in a room for a couple hours and ask them about some concept being tested. In that these sessions have actual people talking, they are nominally useful. But common critiques of these are that
- Participants tell researchers what they want to hear
- The format is unnatural - forced face-to-face interactions with strangers for two hours in a closed room
- Alpha personalities sway things
- What’s discussed are already-decided concepts, not insight on what customers are looking to get done
As was stated in this 2003 Slate article, “The primary function of focus groups is often to validate the sellers’ own beliefs about their product.”
Jobs-to-be-done fills a gap
In all of the popular bases for developing products and services, one can see a gap. Most are a triangulation to understanding what customers want. Now some are quite useful in a customer-centric sense: usage vectors, customer service tickets, surveys. But they’re also piecemeal.
They represent the hope that you’ve got a bead on customer needs and wants.
Why the reluctance to actually talk directly with customers? Seems plain talk in a (not overly) structured way will give you a better sense of where opportunities lie. Aside from the product/service tools listed above, there are the social media engagement practices of today (react to tweets, have a Facebook page, sentiment analysis). All have their place, but they fall short.
Want to be customer-centric? Try talking to your customers.
(Cross-posted @ I'm Not Actually a Geek)
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Apple E-Book Lawsuit: Steve Jobs Swayed Publisher, Complaint Alleges
16 MayMacworld UK - News
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs got directly involved in an alleged conspiracy to fix e-book prices after a publisher balked at participating in the scheme, according to a court document filed by 31 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
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Judge: Ample evidence that Apple "knowingly joined" e-book conspiracy
16 MayArs Technica
Aurich LawsonApple is not officially on the hook yet for allegedly colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices, but US District Judge Denise Cote had some harsh words about the company's actions. Cote denied Apple and five publishers their request to have a class-action suit over the alleged price fixing thrown out on Tuesday, writing (PDF) that it certainly appears as if Apple and the publishers did not act as innocently as they claim when it came time to sell e-books on the iBookstore.
The class-action suit in question is the one brought by a number of US states, filed on the same day as the Department of Justice's own action against the companies. (The number of states involved in the class has since ballooned from 16 to 31.) An amended version of the complaint released last week revealed new details in the case, such as an e-mail from former Apple CEO Steve Jobs that implies that he was personally involved in the decision to push the "agency model" on e-book publishers. The e-mail doesn't explicitly show illegal actions, but does show that Jobs was thinking about many of the details that are now being argued in various lawsuits.
Cote apparently took note of it. In her opinion, she points out that Jobs' comment at the 2010 iPad launch—that e-book prices would all "be the same"—implies that publishers had indeed colluded to "raise eBooks' prices and that Apple intentionally and knowingly joined that conspiracy." She noted elsewhere that although Apple may not have had the same motivations to join the alleged conspiracy as the publishers, that doesn't mean Apple wasn't a participant.
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Psystar Case Comes to a Close as U.S. Supreme Court Declines Review
15 MayMacRumors - Mac News and Rumors
More than four years after Psystar challenged Apple by first selling $399 unauthorized Mac clones and later shifting tactics to offer software supporting installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard on PCs, the dispute between the two companies has finally reached its conclusion. As noted by CNET, Psystar's persistent legal appeals have now been exhausted as the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review an appellate court ruling from last September upholding a ban on Psystar's sales of Mac clones.Following a rejection of Psystar's appeal to that decision in September, the company's lawyers vowed to take it up to the Supreme Court. "This is far from over," K.A.D. Camara of Houston law firm Camara & Sibley LLP told Computerworld in an interview. The company kept to its word, and filed for a review from the Supreme Court on December 27, 2011.
Psystar's persistence that saw the company press the issue with Apple as far as the courts would allow led Apple to suggest a potential conspiracy, questioning why a small company would be so bold in the face of Apple's legal action and how it could have financed the expensive court battles. No such conspiracy was ever revealed, however, with Psystar's financial backing remaining something of a mystery.
"We are sad," Camara told CNET by e-mail this evening. "I'm sure that the Supreme Court will take a case on this important issue eventually."
Psystar's original "OpenMac" Mac clone, quickly rebranded "Open Computer" to skirt Apple's trademarks
While Apple was quick to file suit against Psystar in July 2008 and an initial injunction against Psystar effectively shut down the company in December 2009, the court cases continued to play out over an additional period of nearly two and half years. Psystar attempted to fund its legal defense during some of that time by soliciting donations and selling T-shirts, and did somehow manage to secure enough funding to support filing several more appeals taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
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Booker T & the MGs: 'It was just a lucky marriage of us four' – a classic interview from the vaults
15 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Following the death of Donald 'Duck' Dunn, read an interview with Booker T and the MGs by Barney Hoskyns from Mojo in August 2001, now available courtesy of Rock's Backpages – the world's leading archive of vintage music journalism
If ever there was a piece of music that deserved the epithet "timeless", it's Booker T & the MGs' Green Onions.
The most basic of blues instrumentals, set to a walking 2/4 beat, the track doesn't amount to a whole hill of beans. And yet after almost 40 years it remains astoundingly funky, a vehicle for the most sinuous of Hammond organ grooves and for the vicious Fender Telecaster licks of Steve Cropper, in the fine words of Gerri Hirshey "cutting across the top like a sugarcane machete".
What makes Green Onions even more remarkable is that a) it was a pure accident of fate and b) it gave birth to the lifelong career of The Greatest Backing Band in the History of Soul, bar none.
On a hot summer afternoon, four Memphis musicians were farting about in a studio at 926 East McLemore Avenue, either winding down after a session by rockabilly singer Billy Lee Riley or waiting for the self-same gentleman to show up – after four decades, no one seems too certain. Three takes later they had a track in the can that put Stax Records on the pop map and led to a decade-plus of unparalleled southern soul success.
"We were all real excited about this thing," remembers Steve Cropper of Green Onions. "The next morning I called Scotty Moore over at Sun and I said: 'We got a hot one, can you make me a dub on it?' So I ran over and he says, 'Man, that's funky!' Then I took the dub over to Reuben Washington at WLOK and he just threw it on live, played it four times in a row. And I'm tellin' you, the phones lit up."
If it seems amazing today that an instrumental like Green Onions could climb all the way to No 3 on the US pop chart (in September 1962), bear in mind instrumentals were all the rage at the time. Indeed, Memphis itself was a hub of vocal-free R&B, spawning hits both local and national by the likes of Willie Mitchell, Ace Cannon and the "Combo" led by ex-Elvis bassist Bill Black.
But where most purveyors of instrumentals quickly faded away, Booker T & the MGs – named after the fact once Green Onions had taken off – sustained a long career based on the incredible feel they brought to everything they recorded. Nearly two decades after the collapse of Stax, their services were still in demand from evergreen superstars like Bob Dylan and Neil Young.
Booker T & the MGs are the alpha and omega of the Session Band, the Rhythm Section, the ideal of a group of backroom pickers whose interplay is almost telepathic. At Stax, the four men cooked up some of the most mouth-watering grooves in soul's recipe book, imprinting their gritty style on a raft of smash hits by the likes of Carla Thomas, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett – above all by Otis Redding, the original and still the ultimate King o' Soul.
Respect, I've Been Loving You Too Long, Knock on Wood, In the Midnight Hour, Hold on I'm Coming, (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay … you name 'em, Booker T & the MGs played on 'em.
"I like to pat ourselves on the back," says Donald "Duck" Dunn, one of the great bass guitarists. "When you hear Booker T & the MGs, you can pick one instrument and there's a separation there. It's not cluttered. It's just like it was written, but it was all done off the top of the head. It was just a lucky marriage of us four, I think."
Duck Dunn himself was not an original MG, but he was in a seminal pre-MGs band called the Mar-Keys. And in that group was Steve Cropper, a lean young Missourian doing his best to maintain control amid the flaring egos of bandmates like Packy Axton, Charlie Freeman and Don Nix. Control might not have been an issue had Last Night, yet another Memphis instrumental, not taken off and become another national pop hit (No. 3 again!) almost exactly a year before Green Onions.
Formerly known as the Royal Spades – an unfortunate choice of moniker for a mob of young honkies obsessed with black rhythm and blues, but there we go – the Mar-Keys were wild white boys whose solitary and implicitly rather salacious hit took them across America, chitlin' circuit and all.
"We were kind of outcasts 'cause we played R&B," Don Nix told me. "We never did like rock'n'roll. We got with a black booking agent in New York and toured with a lot of black packages, like Ike & Tina Turner and James Brown. We even backed Chuck Berry, though we hated his music."
When Cropper came to blows with Axton, a boozer destined to die of alcoholism at the pitifully young age of 30, he quit the Mar-Keys and returned to Memphis. Ironically it was Axton's mother, Estelle, who came to Steve's rescue, offering him a job in her Satellite record store. The store sat bang next door to Stax, of which she (the "ax" part of it) was co-owner with her country-fiddle-playing brother Jim Stewart (the "St").
From day one, Cropper had his sights set on the Stax studio, a disused movie theatre in a very black part of town. Quickly he made himself indispensable, and moved fast when original Stax engineer Chips Moman fell out with Jim Stewart. "Steve," Stewart would come to say, "was my right-hand man."
"The studio wasn't designed like studios are today," Cropper recalls. "I mean, we took this old theatre and pulled the seats out of it. We had to go and hammer all of the screws down into the concrete before we could put carpet down. And we were all there helping to do that, making burlap baffles and so on, without any knowledge at all of what we were doing."
Also making himself indispensable to Stewart was a multi-talented black kid called Booker T Jones. Booker had played sax and bass with Memphis bandleaders like Willie Mitchell and Gene "Bowlegs" Miller – and even blown baritone sax on early Stax sides like Rufus & Carla Thomas' 'Cause I Love You and William Bell's country-soul classic You Don't Miss Your Water.
Making up the quartet at the Billy Lee Riley session that hot summer afternoon were a pair of more seasoned Memphis musos, bassist Lewie Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson, Jr. Several years older than Steve and Booker, both men had impressive pedigrees: Jackson had played onstage as a mere kid with his bandleader father, and Steinberg was all over instrumental hits like Ace Cannon's Tuff. Al Jackson had to be lured away from the employ of Willie Mitchell, for whom – a decade later – he would lay down the classic grooves on Al Green's run of Hi hits.
"Al Jackson was the greatest single stroke player I ever heard in my life," Cropper told Jim Payne in the latter's excellent book Give The Drummers Some! "He'd just throw something in there every now and then and you'd go, Wow! Or he'd do some little tom thing that would come out of nowhere."
"Al was just the cleanest drummer in the world," adds Dunn. "The pocket where Al put everything was the real secret of Stax. Every time we recorded, he was 98% correct on just about everything we did. And even today, every drummer I play with asks me, 'What was it like to play with Al Jackson? '"
The success of Green Onions (and the album of the same name) did more than put Stax on the map. It made Booker T & the MGs the hottest studio combo in the south. Which was why regional Atlantic promo man Joe Galkin dragged the Macon-based Johnny Jenkins & the Pinetoppers up to McLemore Avenue in October 1962. And why a strapping 21-year-old singer named Otis Redding – half Little Richard, half Sam Cooke – was begrudgingly given half an hour to cut his impassioned ballad These Arms of Mine at the tail-end of a disastrous session.
"The cat sang about two lines," Steve Cropper told Peter Guralnick in the latter's Sweet Soul Music, "and everybody's eyes just went like this – Jesus Christ, this guy's incredible!"
"Otis made a better musician out of you," says Dunn. "He just brought out things you didn't know you had in you. You got happier, you felt better, and your hands and fingers moved better. He was a star. He wore the halo. Elvis, Sinatra, the Beatles … Otis was one of 'em."
Six months later, thanks to the airplay it received from legendary Nashville DJ John "R" Richbourg – who happened to have half the publishing on the tune – These Arms Of Mine cracked the R&B Top 20 and the Big O's career was off to the races.
The MGs' own career took something of a backseat then and thereafter. "We never had much time for MGs recordings," says Cropper. "We were always using the last 30 minutes of a session, or somebody else had called for a demo and didn't show. It was never like, 'OK, we're booking a week to do Booker T and the MGs.'"
Green Onions carbons like Jellybread and Home Grown failed to replicate the original's success, though 1963's Chinese Crackers at least substituted a Wurlitzer electric piano for the trademark Hammond organ – and featured a punchy, Booker T-led horn section into the bargain. In November 1964, Lewie Steinberg stepped aside to make way for Duck Dunn and the Stax sound truly hit its stride.
"Lewie was just perfect for that walkin' bass thing," says Dunn, "but when it got more aggressive and syncopated with the Otis stuff, my style was more appropriate."
"We wanted a fat sound," remembered David Porter. "Jim Stewart did a lot of work on getting that sound. He had no rhythm, but he had great feel. Sometimes Jim and Al would go in the studio for half the day trying to find the perfect sound. And when Tom Dowd came down from Atlantic to upgrade the board, he further helped to develop that sound."
"I can't really define it as a secret formula, but we did make a concerted effort to keep things simple through the years," says Booker T. Jones. "That was the one kind of unspoken and sometimes spoken agreement among the Stax producers. It just happened to be the chemistry of the time and the players."
Duck Dunn's arrival had the additional effect of making Booker T & the MGs a half-black, half-white group at a pivotal moment in the south's racial history. And while the group's three remaining members are quick to downplay the pioneering and/or courageous aspects of their partnership, there's no doubt that the band became a symbol of racial unity.
"I didn't have apprehensions, other than the normal daily apprehensions about associating with whites," says Jones. "By the time we made it to the stage, we'd already passed through all the taboos – the hotel, the restaurant, the gas station. And the stage was where our power was, and that's why we were able to go through the south the way we did."
"Musicians never even think about it," adds Dunn. "Al and I got confronted on an airplane once by a bunch of morticians that had been to a convention. This guy asked me what I was doing sittin' beside … the old 'N' word, y'know … and I got a little upset. But the shows themselves weren't a problem."
More stressful even than racial confrontation was the sheer workload heaped on the shoulders of the four men – especially given that Jones had decided to complete his musical education at Indiana University. In addition to the Stax-Volt roster there were non-Stax clients like Wilson Pickett, whom Atlantic's Jerry Wexler brought in for a Memphis makeover in May 1965. It's bracing to reflect that the whole of Otis Blue – one of the absolute pinnacles of American 60s soul – was cut in a space of 36 hours.
"We would literally spend 15 hours a day in the studio," says Cropper. "I think we had 17 or 18 artists on the roster, so we had a pretty busy schedule. The other problem came in trying to keep people current, because whenever they did have a successful record, obviously their managers and all wanted to put them on the road … and then we couldn't get 'em in for recording! Especially Otis: we almost could never get him off the road to get him in and cut."
By the same token, Otis could rarely get the MGs to come out on the road with him: to Stax they were far more valuable in the studio than out of it. Only when a major European revue tour was lined up in the spring of 1967 was it deemed vital for the Stax session elite to hit the road.
Nothing prepared Booker T & the MGs – or Otis, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, the Mar-Keys, Sam & Dave, and Otis' new protege Arthur Conley for that matter – for their reception when they flew into London that March. To this day, Duck Dunn remembers the tour as "probably the most impressive thing I've ever done in my life".
Yet with the acclaim came the first hints of unrest within Stax's supposedly happy family. Not only did fame seem to be going to Otis's head, it even caused jealousy within the MGs, with Cropper perceived as milking the major share of the glory. "They seemed to take it like I was in it for myself," Steve told Guralnick, adding that when the Stax party returned to Memphis he was demoted from his role as A&R director.
To a degree this reflected deeper dissatisfaction with the group's rewards for its contribution to the label's success. Prompted by his new black lieutenant Al Bell, Jim Stewart tried to address the issue by creating a production pool known as The Big Six (Cropper, Jones, Jackson and Dunn, plus the emerging, red-hot team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter), but he found it increasingly hard to keep the company's employees happy.
"The theory behind the production pool was that nobody is ever hot all the time," remembers Cropper. "So we kind of used that theory by saying: 'We'll all contribute and we'll all get paid out of this production pool rather than getting paid as an individual producer.'" The theory would bring big problems.
The MGs continued to pump out their soulful instro-covers of current pop hits, along with originals like the verging-on-funk Hip Hug-Her, a top 40 hit backed with a shimmering rendition of Gershwin's Summertime. They also produced a slew of thrilling sides – Cold Feet, Crosscut Saw, the mighty Born Under a Bad Sign – for notoriously truculent bluesman Albert King. But just how out of step the group was with 60s America was evident in the matching lime-green suits they wore behind Otis when he wowed "the love crowd" at the 1967 Monterey Pop festival. "I still remember us up there in those … chartreuse suits," winces Duck Dunn.
Redding's untimely death at the end of that year left Stax in a state of shock from which it never truly recovered. The crossover success of the posthumous Dock of the Bay – patched together by a grieving Steve Cropper – was scant consolation for the loss of a man who seemed destined to become the pre-eminent ambassador for soul music. Moreover, barely five months later, Memphis itself was the scene of an even more shocking and traumatic death: the assassination of Martin Luther King on a second-floor balcony at the Hotel Lorraine. Relations between black and white musicians in Memphis would never be quite the same again.
"It was a horrible time," confirms Duck. "The day after it happened, I was standing out in front of Stax with Isaac and David and the police come by and jump out to ask if I was OK. It was just an awful situation."
"A lot of things changed dramatically in Memphis," adds Cropper. "And musically there came this real uprising. That's why the Wattstax thing happened, and why Isaac was so successful with the Black Moses thing."
Additionally, the out-of-left-field success of Hayes' 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul became a bone of contention when – due to its release on the new subsidiary label Enterprise – the other members of the "Big Six" pool didn't get to share in its royalties.
"It wasn't Isaac and it wasn't David, it was business," maintains Dunn. "It's the executives that get greedy. Rarely does it ever have anything to do with the musicians."
By 1970, Stax was a very different company from the place it had been eight years before. Not only had it parted ways with Atlantic and entered into an ill-advised distribution deal with Gulf & Western, but Estelle Axton had been edged out of her own company and Al Bell was aggressively attempting to build Stax into something bigger than it could ever have been.
"I worshipped Al Bell, and everybody there did," says Duck Dunn. "I mean, he was the one who put me and Al Jackson on salary, so he was my hero. But there were some bad decisions made, and I know there was an offer to take Aretha Franklin and we turned that down. And who did we get instead? Lena Zavaroni!" (Sadly, Dunn is not joking: Scots lass Zavaroni's Ma! He's Making Eyes at Me was, unbelievably, a Stax LP in May 1974.)
Worse came when the singularly nasty Johnny Baylor – and his infamous bodyguard "Boom Boom" – muscled his way into the Stax fold after clinching a distribution deal for his Koko label. Openly-brandished handguns became a common sight at 926 East McLemore.
It didn't help matters that Al Bell was bringing in outsiders like Detroit producer Don Davis and giving them preferential treatment. Nor did it help the MGs' morale that Booker T himself – the Top 10 success of 1969's Time Is Tight notwithstanding – was wearying of the band's formulae and wanting to stretch out. The signs had been there on moodier sides like 1968's Over Easy and reached their logical conclusion with 1970's McLemore Avenue, an album devoted entirely to the group's interpretation of Abbey Road.
"After I started to get more music education and got older, I started to want to explore musically as an individual," Jones says. "And so, yeah, I did push the band. The ultimate of that was McLemore Avenue … I mean, was that a Stax record?! I guess that was the beginning of my sort of maverick experiences as a musician. But any time you stretch out, any time you push the envelope, there's gonna be discomfort."
Following the release of 1971's Melting Pot – recorded in New York, significantly – Jones quit the band and split for Los Angeles. There he would marry Priscilla Coolidge, sister of Rita, and embark on a producing career encompassing such unlikely highlights as Willie Nelson's standards album Stardust.
"It had to with the money side of things," says Cropper. "I think he demanded that he wanted to make more money, and it just wasn't gonna happen. And so Booker said he was outta there and going to California. Booker was not mad at the band; we were all still brothers and loved each other. I don't think we ever even got into an argument over a song. We just weren't those kind of guys."
It wasn't long, indeed, before Cropper had followed Jones to LA, setting up his own Trans-Maximus (TMI) studio in – to quote from a 1976 interview by NME's Steve Clarke – "a seedy building at the mugger's end of Santa Monica Boulevard". His own post-Stax career would lead him from collaborations with the likes of Rod Stewart (on Atlantic Crossing) to the massively successful John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd blues-soul homage that was The Blues Brothers.
In September 1975, with Al Bell about to be indicted after a series of shady dealings only properly uncovered in Rob Bowman's meticulous history Soulsville USA (1997), the four men who'd made up Booker T & the MGs decided they were missing each other's company (and chops) enough to warrant getting the old gang back together.
"Al was missing it and I was missing it," says Duck Dunn, who'd remained on the Stax payroll with Jackson (and even cut an album with him called The MGs). "We went out to California and had a meeting with Booker and Steve. We said, we all wanna do this again, but we wanna make sure everybody's thinking alike. And everybody said, Yeah, we miss it, we need to do it. And so we decided to give everybody three months to get all of their deals wrapped up and finished."
Barely a week later – and in singularly suspicious circumstances – Al Jackson Jr., the greatest soul drummer of all time, was shot dead in the house on Memphis' Central Avenue where he'd lived with his estranged wife Barbara. To this day the case remains unsolved. To this day, too, the fact that two months earlier Barbara Jackson had shot her husband in the chest with a .22-caliber pistol hangs over the October 1 murder – as do persistent rumours that singer Denise LaSalle and fugitive Nate Doyle were sighted that day at the Central Avenue house. (Doyle was shot dead by the FBI the following year in Seattle.) Bizarrely, Barbara Jackson still resides in the house where Al was killed.
"I got my ideas about Al's death, but it'd just be speculation," says Duck Dunn, who was a good deal more aware of Jackson's marital problems than either Jones or Cropper. "I think the guy who actually did it was the guy killed in Seattle. I've heard the rumours about Denise LaSalle and all that, but … heck, I just miss Al."
Otis Redding, Martin Luther King, Al Jackson, Jr: the latter's murder is another of the tragedies entwined with the stories of both Stax and the MGs. Just a few years later, the name of John Belushi would be added to the list.
Notwithstanding the losses they've experienced, the surviving trio has continued to thrive through the many evolving stages of black American music. While Cropper and Dunn have helped to keep the Blues Brothers Band on the road, the ultimate non-soul acclaim came when they were asked to serve as "house band" for Columbia's "Bobfest" Dylan tribute at Madison Square Garden on October 16, 1992. A year later, Neil Young asked them to back him on both the American and European legs of a tour that concluded every night with a haunting version of (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay.
"As I stood where Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave and so many great singers stood, and felt that groove surrounding me, I knew that I had found a place," Young would write of the experience. "A musical place where history surrounds you without getting in the way."
"It's obviously gratifying, you know, but somewhat surprising," says Booker T of endorsements like Young's. "We thought we were appealing to blues fans, but it highlights the fact that blues and rock are related. We found it very easy to play with Neil: we didn't change anything much, and neither did he."
Yet nothing makes the three Memphis heroes happier than simply getting back together. "We go out and play with other people because we have to make a living," says Dunn. "But when we get together again, it's just like old home week every time. There's never any tension."
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Boot up: Google on news, Torvalds on Github, Amnesty hacked, installing CS6 and more
14 MayGuardian.co.uk - Media News
Plus Google's maps on iOS, Dell's ultrabook for open source, details from the Oracle-Google trial and more
A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
FOSS Patents: Judge holds Google to infringe 8 more Java files >> FOSS Patents was first to publish 6 of them
Florian Müller:
On Friday afternoon by local time, Judge William Alsup, the federal judge presiding over the Oracle v. Google lawsuit in the Northern District of California, entered a judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) overruling the jury (as well as Google's opposition to an Oracle motion for JMOL) with respect to eight decompiled Java files.
Müller had originally said - in January 2011, 15 months ago - that 6 of those files were copied from Java into Android, and hence must be infringing. Turns out he was right (at least if you think the judge is right. And the judge is, well, a judge.)
Groklaw - Google Files for SJ on Copyright Damages; Oracle: Could We Wait and Get a New Jury Instead? ~pj
So Oracle has now filed a motion asking for a postponement of phase three of the trial, the damages phase. It would like a new jury, too. It wants to wait to calculate damages until after the judge decides whether APIs are copyrightable, so it can add the 37 API files into the mix for damages, if they are. Maybe then it would have a prayer of getting some money.
In short, Oracle woke up and realized it's in a pickle of its own making. It was too clever by half, and now reality has struck. It clearly is worried that if they go to the damages phase now, it will gain a big fat zero in damages. It should have thought of that before it asked for infringer's profits, but there you are.
The problem with Groklaw's analyses is that it imputes motives that just don't exist, and acts as though Google's lawyers are geniuses, and Oracle's are idiots. Given that Oracle's lead attorney is David Boies, who prosecuted the Microsoft antitrust trial in 1998, you'd think its writers would be more conflicted. Apparently not.
The head of Google News on the future of news >> MIT Center for Civic Media
Richard [Gringras, head of news at Google] doesn't believe the vertical model of a newspaper makes sense going forward. He compares the metropolitan newspapers' all-things to all-people product to content portals for specific communities. This strategy doesn't make sense given the possibilities. Yahoo!'s initial success was as a portal. But portals have disappeared online as consumers have learned to navigate the web on their own and found the niche sites they love.
Paywalls are not a panacea. Richard's not against experimentation with paywall models. The New York Times was smart, he says, in designing its paywall with many levers to adjust revenue vs. traffic flow. It's not there yet, but they can experiment and find what works. He appreciates those who are looking at paywalls in a more nuanced way. Some publishers say, "They bought it before, they'll buy it again," or "We need to get people back into the habit of paying for news." But consumers never did pay the true costs.
Gringras essentially goes around giving much the same talk. This doesn't make it wrong.
Can Dell's open source XPS Ultrabook steal Apple's thunder? >> Forbes
By "Trefis contributor":
Dell has announced a six-month, open source pilot program aimed at creating an ultrabook suited specifically for web and mobile developers. The Macbook Air and other OSX based machines have become the development environment of choice for a lot of web and mobile developers recently most likely due to software such as iLife, iMovie and other design tools.
Sure, what developers really want is to be able to organise their photos and cut little films. Dell's efforts here are praiseworthy, but iLife and iMovie really aren't the reason why the Macbook Air has succeeded with developers. Try: lightness and SSD.
Linus Torvalds v Github's Pull Request: >> Github
The king of Linux vents on how rubbish Github is (for writing OS kernels, presumably). Fascinating to see it play out.
Will Apple's maps move bring a real and perhaps better Google Maps to iOS? >> Marketingland
Greg Sterling, making a lot of sense about why Apple's maps product on iOS is so much worse than Google's on Android, despite having the same back-end supplier:
Here's a bit of conspiracy theory: What if Apple wanted to replace Google Maps from a very early point and the company was biding its time until it could acquire and build the core assets and expertise to do so? Maybe that early point was when former CEO Steve Jobs' attitude toward Google changed, when he began to feel that Android was "a stolen product"?
To continue with my conjecture, maybe Apple thought it would be harder to wean iPhone users off a stronger Google-powered mapping product than the comparatively weak one that exists today. I know this seems very contrary to Apple's culture and corporate ethos. Yet replacing a weaker product with a stronger one is a lot easier than taking away a strong product from users who've come to depend on it.
Also, Google could then offer its own Google Maps app. Win-win.
Amnesty International UK website was compromised to serve Gh0st RAT >> Security Labs
Between May 8 and 9, 2012, the Websense® ThreatSeeker® Network detected that the Amnesty International United Kingdom website was compromised. The website was apparently injected with malicious code for these 2 days. During that time, website users risked having sensitive data stolen and perhaps infecting other users in their network. However, the website owners rectified this issue after we advised them about the injection. In early 2009, we discovered this same site was compromised, and in 2010, we reported another injection of an Amnesty International website, this time the Hong Kong site.
Take note.
Adobe CS6 Installer: Continuing a proud tradition of user hostility >> Betalogue
Entertaining, though not as bad as in the past. One point that always resonates:
One day, maybe, an Adobe engineer will understand that, when the user has to go through a length installation process, the best approach is to let him enter all the required information (password, serial number, etc.) right away, and then -- and only then -- go through all the lengthy processes that are of no interest to him without asking for any user input, so that he can switch to something else and, you know, actually make valuable use of his time.
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Steve Jobs Ashton Kutcher
12 MayVentureBeat
TMZ has released photos showing actor Ashton Kutcher wearing a black turtleneck, jeans and New Balance sneakers, as he apparently made his way to the film set of the late Apple CEO’s biopic in L.A. yesterday.
The film is due out in the fourth quarter, and is being filmed now. Its producer Mark Hulme has said Ashton was picked because he carries physical similarities to Jobs. These include the youthfulness of Jobs at the time (the film focuses on the early era, before even the release of the iPod) but also “the psychological complexity.”Judging from the traffic we’ve seen here at VentureBeat on our posts about Kutcher and the film, there’s going to be significant interest in this film even if Kutcher doesn’t completely nail the complexity part (you can see from the image above that he’s trying). It’s a tall order. As TMZ notes: “part hippie, part driven businessman, part brilliant, and part crazy.”
[Image credits: TMZ]
Filed under: VentureBeat
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Steve Blank on small startups, big execution, and Steve Jobs
12 MayGigaOM
When Steve Blank talks about entrepreneurship, people listen. When he writes a book on the subject, like his latest effort with co-author Bob Dorff titled The Startup Owner’s Manual, it’s a good bet it will be on many founders’ bookshelves.
Blank co-founded the CRM software company E.piphany and the video game business Rocket Science. His current gigs as an entrepreneurship professor at Stanford, UC Berkeley and Columbia give him a unique insight that combines a historical perspective with a look at the next generation of entrepreneurs.
I sat down with Blank at his ranch in Pescadero, where we talked about his book and his take on the state of startups and entrepreneurship. Some key takeaways:
- Startups are not smaller versions of big companies, so don’t try to be like them
- Startups are about searching for a business model, not executing a business plan
- Contrary to the myth, Steve Jobs interacted with consumers more than you think
- Amazon has been hugely important to the boom in startups
- Today’s students have a “wonderful entrepreneurial arrogance”
Watch the videos below or listen to the audio only of the entire interview.
PART 1: Startups are not small versions of big companies
PART 2: Forget a “business plan”
PART 3: The myth of Steve Jobs and customer interaction
PART 4: The overlooked importance of Amazon
PART 5: A sneak-peek at the next generation of entrepreneurs
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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- Web startups: How to guard against security breaches
- 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
