Tag: music_history

The Year Punk Broke Finally Coming to DVD

Seth Anderson0 comment

I did not own The Year Punk Broke on VHS, but I did see it, and would like to see the film again.

If you were one of those kids who grew up on alternative rock in the 1990s, there’s a very good chance you owned a VHS copy of 1991: The Year Punk Broke, a documentary about Sonic Youth touring Europe back in the days right before alternative rock became the sort of thing your parents asked you about at the dinner table. Nirvana, Sonic Youth’s openers on that tour, were all over the movie, and it also featured footage of Dinosaur Jr., the Ramones, Babes in Toyland, and Gumball. Now, Slicing Up Eyeballs reoprts that the film is finally coming to DVD.

According to director Dave Markey, Universal Music is planning an extended 20th anniversary edition of the movie later this year. It will include a 42-minute film called “(This Is Known As) The Blues Scale”, which contains bonus performances from Sonic Youth (“Inhuman”, “White Kross”, “Orange Rolls/Angel’s Spit”, and “Eric’s Trip”) and Nirvana (“In Bloom”). Watch clips from “(This Is Known As) The Blues Scale” here. The DVD will also contain footage of a 2003 panel discussion with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley, Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, and Markey, as well as more performance material and commentary from Markey and Moore.

(click here to continue reading Pitchfork: Sonic Youth/Nirvana Tour Documentary Film 1991: The Year Punk Broke Finally Coming to DVD.)

 

Robert Wilkins | That’s No Way To Get Along

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Patience please

Heard this song today and thought, gee, these lyrics sound quite familiar. I was right, but had never heard why. I have listened to Beggar’s Banquet thousands of times, and never realized they lifted the song, its style, its lyrics, its mood, from Robert Wilkins. I hope they sent him flowers or something…

Eugene Chadbourne reports:

It is quite obvious to anyone with functioning ears that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had heard the late-’20s song entitled “That’s No Way to Get Along” by the Reverend Robert Wilkins, because the Rolling Stones album track “Prodigal Son” is a direct copy, at least to the point in the road where the imitation of Wilkins’ guitar style hits a technical roadblock. Yet the early pressings of the Stones’ cover listed the writers as Jagger and Richards, a deception that was only corrected following legal action. According to the Stones, the mistake was inadvertent and happened because the original artwork for the Beggars Banquet album had to be redone. Because a publisher connected with the original Vocalion label had nabbed the actual collecting rights to the song, this unfortunately did not result in a financial windfall for Wilkins. And although he took great advantage of the ’60s roots music revival and performed both concerts and new recordings in the absolute prime of his musical power, there is no way that every pimply high school kid who sat around listening to the Stones’ “Prodigal Son” actually was lucky enough to get a taste of the real thing.

A mix of Afro-American and Cherokee Indian, Wilkins hailed from De Soto County, MS, famous stomping grounds for Delta blues.

(click here to continue reading Robert Wilkins | AllMusic.)

Here’s the audio that someone uploaded to YouTube:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki_Jcxv2nRg

 

links for 2011-03-29

swanksalot0 comment

Group Doueh – Treeg Salaam

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Feeding My Addiction

Desert blues news from all over…

Western Sahara’s story is a sad but typical one for a post-colonial land with bigger, stronger neighbors. In the ’70s, a nearly century-long episode of Spanish occupation gave way to bruising jockeying for possession between Morocco (which currently holds sway), Mauritania, and the homegrown Polisario movement of nationalist liberation. Episodes of war have generated a civilian diaspora that’s spread from refugee camps in neighboring countries to Cuba, but life for the people who have stayed behind carries on like it does anywhere. Folks still like to marry and party, and if they do so in the coastal city of Dakhla, they’re likely to hire Group Doueh to bring the tunes.

The group is part of a family entertainment business run by Doueh, a Dakhla native whose birth name was Salmou Baamar. As a youth, he took a shine to the sounds of James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, which he heard on cassettes imported from Spain. His first experiences as a professional musician playing at local parties coincided with Mauritania’s occupation of Dakhla, and you can hear both Western rock sounds and Mauritanian rhythms in his music, which he’s been performing throughout the region and marketing on cassette for over a quarter century. Doueh plays the tinidit (a.k.a. tidinit), a Moorish four-stringed lute, and electric guitar; according to a recent Wire article, he favors a Fender run through a few pedals. The rest of the group includes vocalists Bashiri Touballi and Halima Jakani (his wife) and keyboardist Jamaal Baamar (his son). Rhythm duties are shared between collective handclaps, Halima’s tbal (a hand drum), and the keyboard’s drum programs.

When they aren’t playing at local festivals and weddings, Doueh runs a cassette dubbing shop, and that’s where Sublime Frequencies’ Hisham Mayet located him after a search up and down Morocco to find the musician responsible for “Eid For Dakhla,” the raucous, backbeat-heavy ruckus that opens Doueh’s first LP Guitar Music From the Western Sahara. That record also kicked off Sublime Frequencies’ series of vinyl-first releases of contemporary guitar music heard around the Maghreb. Although Group Doueh’s music enjoys the same no-budget recording quality as the rest of the series, it differs significantly from the Touareg-rooted approaches of Group Inerane and Group Bombino. The music of the desert interior sounds like the blues, sometimes jacked up to rock distortion and intensity; Doueh’s has a more complex rhythmic underpinning, closer to the Master Musicians of Jajouka or flamenco, and adheres to traditional Mauritanian modes that spin the melodies down different paths than those of their deep Saharan brethren, more elaborate but less open-ended.

(click here to continue reading Dusted Reviews: Group Doueh – Treeg Salaam.)

Interview:

It’s hard to imagine what the four Muslim members of Group Doueh thought about their first gig outside Western Sahara, playing inside an Anglican church that served cold lager within the gay neighborhood of one of the most flamboyantly gay cities in Europe, Brighton, England. A couple of hours beforehand, Terminal Boredom got a few moments to sit down with the band in the church basement after sound check as the musicians ate takeout chicken and tabouli. Sublime Frequencies Co-founder Hisham Mayet translated from English to Arabic and back: vocalist Bashiri Touballi provided answers on the band’s behalf while guitarist Salmou “Doueh” Baamar stood squarely in front of and pointed a video camera directly at their English-language-only interviewer. Outside, a peculiar mix of middle-aged, upper-middle-class world music fans and scruffy weirdos on drugs lined up — an audience peculiar for most bands, sure, but not a Sublime Frequencies one.

 

(click here to continue reading Terminal Boredom – DOUEH.)

I’d usually link to Amazon’s copy of this album, but since they ended my affiliate program in a tax-dispute snit with the State of Illinois, I’ll let you discover the album on your own, from wherever.

Hal Blaine the Wrecking Crew

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The secret behind many hit songs of the 1960s and 1970s – Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew:

Hal Blaine put his hand on my shoulder. “This is going to break your heart, but much of the music you heard in the ’60s and early ’70s wasn’t recorded by the people you saw on the album covers,” he said. “It was done by me and the musicians you see on these walls.”

Talk about a “Wizard of Oz” moment. Last week I traveled to Mr. Blaine’s home here to talk about his prolific career as the Buddy Rich of rock and pop recordings. I also wanted to know more about his role as the ringleader of the Wrecking Crew—an ad hoc group of about 30 highly skilled Hollywood studio musicians who played the instruments on thousands of hit records released between 1961 and 1976.

Many baby boomers still remember the outrage that followed a magazine’s revelation in 1967 that the Monkees didn’t play on all of their recordings. It turns out that neither did the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, the Byrds, the Association, Jan & Dean and dozens of other rock groups of the era. That honor belongs to Mr. Blaine and the Wrecking Crew, whose members included Glen Campbell and Leon Russell.

If rock is about a beat, and a beat is about the drums, then the 82-year-old Mr. Blaine is arguably one of America’s greatest living rock musicians. Wednesday marks 50 years since he recorded his first No. 1 hit—Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Mr. Blaine went on to appear on 38 additional chart-toppers, including the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Mamas & the Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the Carpenters’ “(They Long to Be) Close to You.”

Those represent just a fraction of his output. Mr. Blaine’s beats set hips twisting on upward of 5,000 songs—many of them also hits. He even was the drummer on the Grammys’ “Song of the Year” for six years in a row from 1966 to 1971. In this regard, Mr. Blaine has no living peer. On Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, Mr. Blaine’s nearest rival is the Beatles with a measly 20 No. 1 hits.

(click here to continue reading Hal Blaine, the Wrecking Crew | Who Else Made More Hit Songs? | Cultural Conversation with Marc Myers – WSJ.com.)

From WIkipedia a list of #1 hits that Hal Blaine played on:

#1 hits

plus a list of songs that he played on (damn, he was busy!)

Artists and Payoffs

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Romans Discussing Motor Scooters 1993

Justin Moyer tries to point the finger at artists who play for “undesirables”

Paul Robeson penned a tribute to Stalin. Bob Marley played for Robert Mugabe. And Paul Simon and Queen performed in apartheid-era South Africa. Chart-topping musicians don’t just win Grammys and score endorsement deals – they get paid mega-bucks to perform in unsavory places for unsavory people. Usually no one pays attention.

But not last week. When the big paydays that R&B stars got from the Gaddafi family became public, critics lashed out faster than Naomi Campbell denying taking blood diamonds.

(click here to continue reading Beyonce and Mariah Carey sang for the Gaddafis. Now they’re changing their tune..)

Well, except all of the examples Justin Moyers cites were big deals. I had heard of all of them, and so did you too in all probability. Not to mention that these incidents took place in the quaint era before internet gossip rags, and before the 24 hour cable news networks set the agenda.

Let’s peek at how big of a deal, via the magic of Google.

  1. Paul Robeson and Stalin yields: about 149,000 hits
  2. Bob Marley and Robert Mugabe: about 47,000 hits
  3. Paul Simon in apartheid-era South Africa: about 382,000 hits
  4. Queen Plays in South Africa: about 15,600,000 hits, some1 of which are about the performing artists who performed as Queen.

So, on to the bigger point: should we criticize the artists who took money from dictators, and bankers, and other undesirables? Or the Medicis, or Bill Gates? Even if the artists are already wealthy, like Beyonce, Usher, Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Lionel Richie, 50 Cent? I don’t like the music of any of these pop stars who took Libyan blood-for-oil dollars, but that isn’t relevant. Unless the National Endowment of the Arts suddenly becomes a pet project of the G.O.P.2, artists should be able to get paid without sniping from the chattering classes.

Footnotes:
  1. most? [↩]
  2. ha ha, I know, bad joke [↩]

Natural Mystics: Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer

Seth Anderson0 comment

On my reading list:

 

Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers – one of the most influential groups in popular music. From youth to early adulthood, they had been inseparable; united in their ambition, through musical harmony and financial reward, to escape Jamaica’s Trench Town ghetto. On the cusp of success however, they’d been pulled apart by the elevation of Marley as first among equals and by the razor sharp instincts of Chris Blackwell, the shrewd and charming boss of Island Records. “I & I: The Natural Mystics” examines for the first time the story of the Wailers, arguing that these musicians offered a model for black men in the second half of the twentieth century: accommodate and succeed (Marley), fight and die (Tosh) or retreat and live (Wailer). It charts their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split. Following their trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, Colin Grant travels in search of the last surviving Wailer. He unravels the roots of their charisma, their adoption of the cult of Rastafari, their suspicion of race pimps and Obeah men (witch doctors), and illuminates why the Wailers were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. “I & I” is a remarkable story of creativity, squandered talent and fierce ambitious rivalry – a mix of reportage and revelatory history by one of our best and brightest non-fiction writers.

And from the Guardian U.K.

Fans of the The King’s Speech could gain a different perspective on its pale-hued study of the British monarchy in the 1930s by reading this vivid biography of the Rastafarian reggae artists the Wailers. Colin Grant includes the story of Leonard Howell, imprisoned for two years for sedition in Jamaica in 1933. His crime? As a believer in the divinity of the recently crowned Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, “Ras Tafari”, he had been urging mass meetings to think of Ras Tafari rather than George V when they sang “God Save the King”. Black Jamaicans were already impressed by reports of white European royals such as the Duke of Gloucester kneeling at the feet of the diminutive black emperor. Were they at last, after centuries of oppression, seeing the beginning of “black man time”?

In fact, the society that produced Bunny Livingston (later “Bunny Wailer”), Bob Marley and Peter Tosh took three steps back for every four forwards in its restless search for an indigenous sense of self-worth. Rastafarians risked alienating other black Jamaicans who believed in more orthodox forms of improvement such as paid work, as well as the white settlers who lived in balmy luxury far from the filthy, overcrowded slums where the Wailers grew up. In Grant’s hands, life in Trench Town in the 1960s is energetic and theatrical, rich in comedy and tragic irony.

When Haile Selassie made an official visit to Jamaica in 1966, the airport was so thronged with would-be adherents that the emperor took one look and went back to his plane. The call went out for the charismatic local Rastafarian leader Mortimer Planno, the Wailers’ spiritual mentor, who climbed the plane’s steps and recited the second psalm to the multitudes. Then he stretched out his arms and said: “His Majesty want to come off the plane now.” The crowd miraculously parted, and Haile Selassie began his visit; but later the same day, Planno was turned away from the official reception at Government House.

(click here to continue reading I & I: The Natural Mystics, Marley, Tosh and Wailer by Colin Grant – review | Books | The Guardian.)

Never Heard Of It Grammys

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Kaulana O Hilo Hanakahi by The Kalima Brothers

I was amused that so many folks twittered complaining about their lack of knowledge about Arcade Fire that some wag created a tumblr blog devoted to the phenomenon. For the record, if you pay attention to a certain kind of music critic, you had heard of Arcade Fire. I mean, they’ve appeared on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report fer christsakes. But not everyone pays attention to these sorts of cultural signifiers.

Arcade Fire hasn’t sold enough units to be a household name apparently.

Nitsuh Abebe of the New York Magazine’s Vulture blog ruminates why, and what does it mean to be proud of one’s ignorance?

There are some obvious jokes to be made about people with Internet access using Twitter to complain about not knowing something, as opposed to using Google to look it up. But for the most part, this reaction — all these examples cherry-picked from teenage pop fans and bemused adults — is just plain normal. “Never heard of it”: This has been the natural and traditional response of all sorts of ordinary American humans to all sorts of phenomena. It’s not really about knowledge or information. It’s an argument, for the most part, and a faintly aggressive one — a way of insisting that what you pay attention to really does define the world. What you’ve heard of is real, and everything else is marginal. The center holds, and you are that center. You are normal and aware, and not just some tiny atomized entity that can only hope to know one tiny corner of the universe.

It used to be a little easier to get away with that. You could presume that you were an informed person and anything truly notable would have been brought to your attention at some point — and enough people would share your vantage point that you wouldn’t often be challenged on it. (The truer this was, the more attractive it was to pull the reverse move: that of the music aficionado who’s proud to have never even heard of the most popular artists in the country.) I feel like I can remember people acting baffled, twenty years ago, when some “weird” band called R.E.M. won a few Grammys — and this was an act that had multiple top ten singles, videos on MTV, and all the other monocultural perks that are no longer available to any but the most successful musicians. (They would have also had some underground haters looking at them as over-popular, middlebrow college-rock sellouts who’d stopped being good sometime in the mid-eighties; it always goes both ways.)

But that “never heard of it” chauvinism is harder to pull off these days, and it’s a real problem with talking about music. The funny part is that while the Internet tends to make people feel like they’re more aware of what’s happening in music, and what “everyone” else is talking about, it’s just as effective at doing the opposite — sustaining all different kinds of huge and vibrant music worlds, to the point where whichever one you’re aware of is surely just a single weird corner among many, many more. Look at any forum or comments box where random strangers find themselves talking about music, and you wind up peering into some kind of chauvinistic Tower of Babel: so many people fiercely sure that their vantage point is normal, despite being surrounded by so many staggeringly, radically different backgrounds, perspectives, and frames of reference.

(click here to continue reading Arcade Fire, and the ‘Never Heard of It’ Grammys — Vulture.)

For the record, Arcade Fire isn’t my favorite band, but I like them enough to own three of their records, including the one that won them a Grammy.

Black Eyed Peas Are Horrible

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The Super Bowl’s half time show is always lame, but of all the spectacles I’ve seen1 the Black Eyed Peas was by far the worst. They weren’t even good lip syncers, much less musicians, or anything resembling entertainment. My focus group were laughing hysterically at the Black Eyed Peas antics, and not with them, at them. So bland, so mediocre.

And there was not even a chance at a wardrobe malfunction since Fergie seemed to be wearing some sort of breastplate to protect her nipples from destroying the nation.

Fergie Breast Plate Black Eyed Peas Super Bowl 45.jpg

(Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

The Black Eyed Peas began life a decade and a half ago as a socially conscious, dance-friendly underground hip-hop group and are now the ambassadors for hip-hop to the rest of the world. Their fundamental tenets remain — good cheer, movement, gauche taste — even as they churn out supersize, occasionless songs, at breakneck tempos, designed for maximum impact.

Theirs is music that works harder than the performers, which was a liability during the early part of the set, especially on “Boom Boom Pow,” one of the most limber pop songs in recent years, which the group delivered largely standing still, letting phalanxes of dancers around them do most of the work.

Those clusters of bodies were key. Unlike in previous years, in which fans were allowed on the field to suffocate the stage, this year, there were hundreds of dancers in illuminated unitards helping round out the Black Eyed Peas’ space show. They formed arrows to direct the eye to the stage, and during “Where Is the Love?” formed hearts, lit up red and scattered across the field.

After two songs, Slash was inserted into the setup for a jolt of arena rock, playing a crisp version of “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” dodging Fergie’s vocal and physical histrionics. That was for hip-hop novices, even though the Black Eyed Peas know how to service that audience on their own. They played “The Time (Dirty Bit),” which borrows from “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” (the theme from “Dirty Dancing”), and “Pump It,” which samples Dick Dale’s “Misirlou,” popularized in “Pulp Fiction.”

These are the group’s dimmest songs, the ones on which they pander the most. Stiffness aside, “Boom Boom Pow” was better, as was the relentless “I Gotta Feeling,” which opened and closed the set. The show peaked when Usher joined in, performing his hit “OMG,” which will.i.am produced and is featured on. But Usher’s spectacular choreography, including a high leap over a kneeling will.i.am, landing in a split, only highlighted the headliners’ weaknesses.

(click here to continue reading Hip-Hop Comes to the Super Bowl – NYTimes.com.)

At least they didn’t get paid:

In 2010 the group grossed a whopping $81.6 million from touring alone…So it may come as a surprise to learn what The Black Eyed Peas are earning for their halftime show at Super Bowl XLV: Nothing.

That’s right. Fergie, will.i.am, and those other two guys whose names you can never remember (for the record, they’re called Taboo and apl.de.ap) will not be receiving a performance fee for their efforts in Dallas. So why the charity? Because the acts that play Super Bowl halftime shows traditionally don’t get paid. A better question: Why have dozens of other high-profile acts agreed to play the Super Bowl for free?

The simple answer is exposure. At first glance, that sounds preposterous. Turn on any pop radio station and you’ll be hard-pressed to go more than seven minutes without getting the echoey, bass-laden, auto-tuned strains of The Black Eyed Peas firmly implanted in your brain. A remarkable 1.3 million people paid to see the Peas in concert last year alone

(click here to continue reading Why The Black Eyed Peas Aren’t Getting Paid For Their Super Bowl Gig – Zack O’Malley Greenburg – The Beat Report – Forbes.)

Greg Kot writes of the BEP:

The Peas didn’t exactly perform so much as cheerlead, their “Boom Boom Pow” just a centimeter or two removed from “sis-boom-bah.” With lyrics like Madison Avenue slogans plastered over relentless beats, the quartet’s big, proudly superficial music advertised and celebrated itself. It’s not meant to be scrutinized, but blasted over big speakers at Cowboys Stadium or in saloons worldwide hosting Super Bowl parties.

…

Coming in short minute-long bursts, the Peas’ songs actually benefited from the nervous, jump-cut energy of the medley, exiting long before their repetitiveness and trivality could become apparent. Even the second-tier Peas, Taboo and apl.de.ap, inexplicably got some screen time.

and of the National Anthem, as warbled by Christina Aguilera…

The National Anthem, as pole-axed by Xtina: At least Christina Aguilera looked dignified in a black outfit, in contrast to the dressed-down pole-dancer look she favors in concert and video. But after that things went downhill quickly. She bungled some words, leaving out the line, “O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming,” and instead repeating a line from earlier in the song. She stretched the approximately minute-long song to twice its length by making sure to punctuate just about every phrase with an inappropriate growl or melisma. On the first line, she transformed the word “night” into about seven syllables. On the final “brave,” she lingered on for more than 10 seconds before being drowned out, barely, by jet fighters zooming the stadium. As usual, Xtina managed to make even this most revered of songs sound like it was all about her.

(click here to continue reading Turn It Up: Super Bowl halftime review: Black Eyed Peas, plus pre-game music.)

eww.

Footnotes:
  1. I’ve watched most since 1982 or so, even in the hipster years when I didn’t own a television [↩]

Robert Plant – Ethnomusicologist

Seth Anderson0 comment

Long, if somewhat laudatory, interview with Robert Plant in Toronto by Ed Vulliamy1

 

Robert Plant’s music-making is like an hourglass. At the source of the process is a wider, more rapacious range of influences than those of any other singer, which converge through the bottleneck of Plant’s remarkable voice and muse, only to widen again into a delta of sound, incorporating and interweaving all of them. Plant once talked about “subliminal flutters passing Beefheart, Son House, Terry Reid and the call to prayer from the minaret of the Koutoubia in Marrakech, all waiting to contribute to the next sound”. “Every 16 bars, we visit another country,” Plant had told me while rehearsing in a barn in Wiltshire with his excellent band Strange Sensation in 2006, and he still does.

It starts with Delta blues, then follows them north with the migrations to southside Chicago, where Elmore James plugged the black man’s blues into the white man’s amplifier. Into that mix add “Jimmy Powell, Chris Farlowe, Steve Marriott and John Lennon” – the latter of whom haunts the Band of Joy’s track “Falling in Love Again”. The trails of Victorian explorer Richard Burton (whom Plant read as a boy) took him to north Africa and the discovery of those Indo-Arabic sound tapestries, and then there’s that often forgotten ingredient, on which Plant draws for his encore in Toronto: the lovely “I Bid You Goodnight”, an a cappella gospel song resurrected in the 1960s by the Incredible String Band. People often forget that Led Zeppelin were a folk band, too, drawing in no small part on the mystical history and song of the Welsh borderlands where Plant grew up and lives (at least nominally) — Celts, Saxons and Britons overlaying one another’s pagan and early mystical Christian roots. But, as Plant says, the String Band got the song from Joseph Spence and the Pindar family, who were Bahamanian.So a conversation with Plant in Toronto about the tributaries feeding the Band of Joy is a wild musicological crisscrossing of the Atlantic.We talk about young Plant in England, the son of civil engineer, with a passion for Wolverhampton Wanderers; but “with receptors wide open to everything”, too, transfixed by visits of Son House and the Delta bluesmen, “though it if it hadn’t been for people like Mike Bloomfield in America, Son House would never have been found driving a school bus, as he was”.

Particular concerts are recalled: Bukka White, Son House, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at Birmingham town hall between 1963 and 1966. “When I met Sonny Terry,” says Plant, “he was blind, and I had to help him guide the rubber stamp he used to autograph albums”. But American bands of the 60s were meanwhile “doing things with songs like ‘The Bells of Rhymney’, and music that had come to America from the UK and Europe catalogued and collected by Cecil Sharp to Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress”. This is the music that, essentially, became Americana, that rich, mercurial gathering of folk, country, gospel, bluegrass and r’n’b.

In his introduction to Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” in Toronto, Plant gives the headbangers in his audience a brief lesson in its trajectory as “an English folk song” which came across the ocean “with the Pilgrim Fathers to Virginia, and down into Louisiana, where it was taken and made into a black song. We heard this song by a guy called Lead Belly back in the 60s”. Following three Atlantic crossings, from Plymouth to the deep south via Virginia, back to the Black

(click here to continue reading Robert Plant: the showman must go on | Music | Music | The Observer.)

I am a bit of a fledgling ethnomusicologist myself, and perhaps this is why Robert Plant is still interesting to my ears in a way that others from his era are not. I like his current Band of Joy album, you should give it a spin…

Footnotes:
  1. who admits:

    it was my great honor to be writing liner notes for Plant’s collected solo albums.

    [↩]

Singing the Perfectionist-Folkie Blues

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I don’t know much about Alan Lomax, other than he was the son of John Lomax, another famous ethnomusicologist, and that he collected musical artifacts, and hung out with Bob Dylan. This biography sounds interesting…

Years later, when they had gotten to know each other, Mr. Szwed accompanied Mr. Lomax to the Village Gate to hear Professor Longhair. The set began with “Jambalaya.” Lomax vanished. And then, as Mr. Szwed writes in his keenly appreciative, enormously detailed new Lomax biography, “I felt something brush by my leg, and when I looked down there was Alan crawling on the floor toward the bandstand so as to stay out of people’s vision.” Lomax reached the edge of the stage, knelt worshipfully until the set was over and then pronounced Longhair the greatest folk musician in the Western world.

Alan Lomax had astounding energy and enthusiasm. He was both an exhaustive and exhausting force in American music for almost 70 years. When he died in 2002, he left behind at least the following, which Mr. Szwed has dauntlessly tackled as source material: 5,000 hours of sound recordings; 400,000 feet of film; 2,450 videotapes; 2,000 books and journals; numerous prints, documents and databases; and more than 120 linear feet of paperwork. It’s not hard to see why detractors called Lomax “The People’s Republic of Me.”

On the evidence of “Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World” his enemies and admirers were equally well armed. Lomax may not have courted controversy, but his work and methods made argument inevitable.

(click here to continue reading John Szwed’s Biography of Alan Lomax – Review – NYTimes.com.)

 

Netflixed: The Soul of a Man

Seth Anderson0 comment

Took me a moment to get used to Wim Wenders utilizing Chris Thomas King as a stand-in for Blind Willie Johnson, but eventually warmed to the idea of reenactment filmed in black and white stock. The film covers three of my favorite blues musicians: Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir, and there is some actual historically significant footage later in the movie which is worth renting just to watch this, especially if you are a J.B. Lenoir fan1.

This disc includes the film “Soul of a Man,” in which director Wim Wenders delves into his personal music collection and takes a look at the histories of some of his favorite artists — including Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson and J.B. Lenoir — as told through music (what else?). Footage of James, Lenoir, John Mayall and inspired covers by contemporary artists such as Eagle-Eye Cherry, Los Lobos, Bonnie Raitt and Lou Reed are featured.

 

(click Netflix Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues: A Musical Journey: Disc 2: The Soul of a Man.)

There is apparently a audio CD containing 20 songs from the movie

The DVD would have been better if the full performances were also available as an extra feature: with so many interpretations of these seminal blues songs by well-known artists, it is a shame that most clips only last a verse or less. I would have enjoyed watching the student film recording of J.B. Lenoir in their entirety as well.

Cassandra Wilson’s Vietnam Blues, Lucinda Williams’ Hard Times Killing Floor Blues, and Bonnie Raitt’s Devil Got My Woman were2 quite good, as was a trio consisting of Eagle-Eye Cherry, Vernon Reid, James “Blood” Ulmer performing a version of Down in Mississippi.

On the other hand, a few performances were cringe-worthy, including Beck’s version of I’m So Glad, and Lou Reed’s Look Down the Road. Beck released a pretty good album, One Foot in the Grave, recorded before he got famous that included a good cover of “He’s A Mighty Good Leader”, unfortunately Beck phoned in his performance on The Soul of  A Man, I couldn’t listen to even the portion excerpted.

From the Wim Wenders website:

In “The Soul of A Man,” director Wim Wenders looks at the dramatic tension in the blues between the sacred and the profane by exploring the music and lives of three of his favorite blues artists: Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson and J. B. Lenoir. Part history, part personal pilgrimage, the film tells the story of these lives in music through an extended fictional film sequence (recreations of ’20s and ’30s events – shot in silent-film, hand-crank style), rare archival footage, present-day documentary scenes and covers of their songs by contemporary musicians such as Shemekia Copeland, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Garland Jeffreys, Chris Thomas King, Cassandra Wilson, Nick Cave, Los Lobos, Eagle Eye Cherry, Vernon Reid, James “Blood” Ulmer, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Marc Ribot, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Lucinda Williams and T-Bone Burnett.

Says Wenders: “These songs meant the world to me. I felt there was more truth in them than in any book I had read about America, or in any movie I had ever seen. I’ve tried to describe, more like a poem than in a ‘documentary,’ what moved me so much in their songs and voices.”

…

The rasping voice of Blind Willie Johnson, who earned his living on street corners and sang the title song, was sent into space on the Voyager in 1977 as part of the CD recording The Sounds of Earth, which had been placed onboard for posterity and/or examination by extra-terrestrial beings.

With the voice of Laurence Fishburne – Morpheus in the Matrix films – narrating, the film recounts the lives and times of the three using both old recordings and archive footage as well as fictional scenes and covers of their songs by contemporary musicians such as Nick Cave, Lou Reed and Beck.

Because there was no archive footage in existence of either Blind Willie Johnson or Skip James, Wenders used actors to play their roles but shot the scenes with an old 1920s black-and-white camera that lends realism, later using digital technology to fit the music to the pictures.

“I had to use old techniques but new technology,” Wenders said at Cannes. “This would have been impossible in the past.”

In the film, Wenders recounts that he first heard the name JB Lenoir when John Mayall in the late 1960s sang The death of JB Lenoir, a song that impacted a generation at the time.

“I wanted to know who this person was,” Wenders said, who crossed oceans to find information on Lenoir.

Music has long been a mother of cinematic invention in Wenders’ career. The title of his debut 1971 Summer In The City was from a hit by Lovin’ Spoonful and The Million Dollar Hotel was inspired by Bono of U2.”

(click here to continue reading The Soul of a Man/ Wim Wenders – The Official Site.)

Footnotes:
  1. and you should be, if you aren’t [↩]
  2. predictably [↩]

Reggae the sound that revolutionized Britain

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Reminded me once again that Eric Clapton is an asshole:

The summer of 1976 brought another pivotal event, Eric Clapton’s drunken rant on stage at Birmingham, in which he acclaimed Enoch Powell as the politician who would “stop Britain from becoming a black colony… the black wogs and coons and fucking Jamaicans don’t belong here”. From a man which had topped the US charts with a cover of Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff”, this was shocking stuff and inspired the formation of Rock Against Racism (RAR).

British reggae swiftly acquired a new militancy and ubiquity. Steel Pulse sang “Ku Klux Klan” with the Klan’s white hoods on their heads. Linton Kwesi Johnson proclaimed it was “Dread Inna Inglan” and warned “get ready for war”. The growing roster of home-grown acts – Misty in Roots, Reggae Regular, Black Slate – found exposure on RAR stages and, after John Peel’s conversion from prog rock, on his Radio 1 show and its live sessions.

Aside from its social commentary, reggae became chic due to its sonic radicalism, with its dub, rap and special disco mixes picked up by rock and soul. “Reggae taught us about space, leaving gaps. It was such a relief after the strictness and minimalism of punk,” says Viv Albertine, guitarist with the Slits, whose 1979 album, Cut, was produced by Dennis Bovell.

In the post-punk era, the Clash, the Members and the Ruts were other rock bands incorporating reggae into their sound, along with the Police, who deftly integrated reggae on hits ‘Message in a Bottle” and “Walking on the Moon”. “We plundered reggae mercilessly,” acknowledges drummer Stewart Copeland on Reggae Britannia.

(click to continue reading Reggae: the sound that revolutionised Britain | Music | Music | The Observer.)

And always a good excuse to play music by Linton Kwesi Johnson, the political, poetical reggae master.

 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji4hdnCEEUM

or:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fU2yFsW9NI

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4QCYQfov6I

 

Here’s a transcript of what Eric Clapton said, btw.

Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. Wogs I mean, I’m looking at you. Where are you? I’m sorry but some fucking wog…Arab grabbed my wife’s bum, you know? Surely got to be said, yeah this is what all the fucking foreigners and wogs over here are like, just disgusting, that’s just the truth, yeah. So where are you?

Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. You fucking (indecipherable). I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man.

Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking (indecipherable) don’t belong here, we don’t want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don’t want fucking wogs living next to me with their standards.

This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for fuck’s sake? We need to vote for Enoch Powell, he’s a great man, speaking truth. Vote for Enoch, he’s our man, he’s on our side, he’ll look after us. I want all of you here to vote for Enoch, support him, he’s on our side. Enoch for Prime Minister! Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!

Francis Ford Coppola Sees the Future For Artists

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Francis Coppola Claret

Francis Ford Coppola sees the future, and for the artists among us, you better plan on having a day job, or a patron:

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep,  he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

Q: How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

(click to continue reading Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration :: Articles :: The 99 Percent.)

Or as in my case, not care. My art1 is a hobby that gives me pleasure, so I do it. I have no expectations of selling my work to be hung on Steve Jobs’ wall, or used in a Coppola film. I just do it because I want to. Sometimes I sell my work, and this is good too, satisfying even, but I don’t expect to sell enough of my work to quit my day2 job.

Speaking of which, if you want a print of something I’ve done, just ask, and I’ll make arrangements. Eventually.

via

—

p.s., Mick Jagger said something quite similar a few months ago

Footnotes:
  1. such that it is [↩]
  2. well, literally, day and night job [↩]

Wanda Jackson and Jack White

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sounds interesting. I liked Jack White’s collaboration with Loretta Lynn from a few years ago too

In the years since, [Wanda Jackson] has swung from rock to country to gospel, earning a cult following as the Queen of Rockabilly. Now, like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn and Mavis Staples before her, she is the latest veteran artist to work with a devoted younger producer, in the hopes of a third-act career shift.

On Tuesday, Third Man and Nonesuch Records will release “The Party Ain’t Over,” Ms. Jackson’s first studio album in eight years and the first produced by a paragon of contemporary rock: Jack White. The collaboration, with Mr. White playing guitar, is largely retro, a collection of covers recorded live with a 12-piece band. But everyone involved hopes it will introduce Ms. Jackson to a new audience, affording her a level of attention that’s closer to her more famous contemporaries like Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, all of whom she performed with. “She’s influential to every modern female singer, whether they know about her or not,” Mr. White said. “She broke down those walls in the beginning, when it was the hardest to do.”

Since she was discovered at 15 in Oklahoma City, Ms. Jackson’s career has been etched by men: Hank Thompson, the country star who got her signed after hearing her on local radio; Elvis, who encouraged her to wield her singular voice — a graveled purr — in rock instead of country; Wendell Goodman, her husband of 50 years, her tour manager and constant companion; and now Mr. White. But through it all she has become a shimmying emblem of female independence in a male-dominated industry, testing boundaries with her forward style and lyrics about mean men and hard-headed women (and those are the love songs). As she allowed, winkingly, at the Knitting Factory show, “No wonder I have a bad-girl reputation.”

(click to continue reading Wanda Jackson, Rockabilly Queen, Prolongs Her Party – NYTimes.com.)

Jack White and Ms. Jackson seemed to have gotten along:

Initially Ms. Jackson and her husband hoped to make a Sinatra-and-friends-style duet record. “I think those kind of albums should be made illegal, they are such a bad idea,” Mr. White wrote in an e-mail. Instead he preferred to get Ms. Jackson in the studio at his home in Nashville, recording an album of her own.

She was reluctant at first. “I was nervous about it because I didn’t know what he was going to expect,” she said. And she worried that her rockabilly fans would rebel at more contemporary stuff. “Wendell kind of had to drag me into the studio kicking and screaming,” she added.

Mr. White, who first heard “Let’s Have a Party” as a teenager in a cover by the 5678s, an all-girl Japanese garage-rock group, put her at ease quickly, helped by the familiar songs he selected: the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola,” Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain” and the country staple “Dust on the Bible.” Ms. Jackson suggested an Elvis tune, “Like a Baby,” and they both loved “Teach Me Tonight,” recorded by the Cuban-born De Castro Sisters.

One song that Mr. White offered made his singer balk — Amy Winehouse’s “You Know That I’m No Good.” Some of the raunchy lyrics were too much for Ms. Jackson, a born-again Christian since 1971. So Mr. White rewrote them. “He sang in my headphones with me to teach me the melody,” Ms. Jackson said, “and then once I got it I said, ‘Oh yeah, this is a great song.’ ”

But he was a demanding producer. “I’m not really used to that,” she said.

In the studio Ms. Jackson likened his approach to a “velvet brick,” which he said was one of the best compliments he’s ever received. (“It’s got me wondering about coating my tombstone in red velvet flocking,” Mr. White said. “I’m looking into that.”)

They played with the song selection to achieve the right mix of inspiration and believability. “Making an album of rockabilly covers would’ve been too easy and boring,” he said. “The idea was this woman has an attitude in her that can work in calypso, funk and yodeling, just like it can in rockabilly. Wanda and I wanted to get someplace further out there and see what she could pull off at this stage in her career.”