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In 1964, Lyndon Johnson needed pants, so he called the Haggar clothing company and asked for some. The call was recorded (like all White House calls at the time), and has since become the stuff of legend. Johnson’s anatomically specific directions to Mr. Haggar are some of the most intimate words we’ve ever heard from the mouth of a President.
We at Put This On took the historic original audio and gave it to animator Tawd Dorenfeld, who created this majestic fantasia of bungholiana.
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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.
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Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr tweeted on Thursday that he is planning to write an autobiography. According to Marr, no deal has been made but he has been approached with a serious offer to pen a tell-all about his time in the Smiths.
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How’s this for true grit? Famously combative, alcoholic, and drug-addled filmmaker Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs) is, as Chevy Chase might joke, “still dead” (he passed away in 1984 at the age of 59) — but that doesn’t mean Bloody Sam can’t make a comeback. Vulture has learned exclusively that producer Al Ruddy (The Godfather, Million Dollar Baby) recently unearthed a script for a Western called The Texans that Peckinpah wrote in 1980 but never got around to making.
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Antonio McDyess is the chillest chill bro in the Association. He’s Serge Gainsbourg, stubbled, disheveled, and in love. McDyess is the serpentine rise of smoke from Tom Waits’ cigarette. He’s Chet Baker’s My Funny Valentine—the especially long version that forgets you’re listening. Antonio McDyess is all these things and a Quitman smile.
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Orson Welles and I were talking one time about the relative merits of John Ford and Howard Hawks at their best, and finally Welles summed it up: “Hawks is great prose; Ford is poetry.” There haven’t really been very many poets in pictures, but the one pretty much everybody agrees about now is the Frenchman Jean Renoir. He was also Orson’s favorite director—as he is mine—and Ford was so impressed by Renoir’s Grand Illusion (l937) that he wanted to remake it in English. Luckily, studio-head Darryl Zanuck told him to forget it; he would “just fuck it up.”
Tag: music_history
Bukka White – Aberdeen Mississippi Blues
Amazing tune, really, from an amazing guitarist. Sounds simple, but yet it isn’t.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsMpHHSLSlc
I’ve studied this song for a long time, and cannot get this phenomenal right hand rhythm string-slapping pattern down. Probably why Bukka White is a guitar god, and I am not.
Bonus: Poor Boy Long Way From Home, lap style.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0jRX69mxcE
And since I looked it up, since it is Booker T. Washington White’s hometown:
Aberdeen is a city in Monroe County in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The population was 6,415 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Monroe County.Located on the banks of the Tombigbee River, Aberdeen was one of the busiest Mississippi ports of the nineteenth century. Cotton was heavily traded in town, and for a time Aberdeen was Mississippi’s second largest city. Today Aberdeen retains many historic structures from this period, with over 200 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. In the spring of each year, Aberdeen hosts pilgrimages to its historic antebellum homes. The most prominent of these antebellum homes is The Magnolias, which was built in 1850.
(click to continue reading Aberdeen, Mississippi – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
One version of the lyrics goes something like this (but not the song above, some is the same, not all):
I was over in Aberdeen
On my way to New Orlean
I was over in Aberdeen
On my way to New Orlean
Them Aberdeen women told me
Will buy my gasoline
Hey, two little women
That I ain’t ever seen
They has two little women
That I ain’t never seen
These two little women
Just from New Orlean
Ooh, sittin’ down in Aberdeen
With New Orlean on my mind
I’m sittin’ down in Aberdeen
With New Orlean on my mind
Well, I believe them Aberdeen women
Gonna make me lose my mind, yeah
(Slide guitar & washboard)
Aber-deen is my home
But the mens don’t want me around
Aberdeen is my home But the men don’t want me around
They know I will take these women
An take them outta town
Listen, you Aberdeen women
You know I ain’t got no dime
Oh-oh listen you women
You know’d I ain’t got no dime
They been had the po’ boy
All up and down.
The Pope Finished Reading Keith Richards Life
The Pope finished reading Keith Richards autobio, Life.
I did too.
I’ve consistently done a horrible job memorializing the books I read and films I watch1 because I’m a damn lazy blogger. Before I started working for myself, which coincidentally was also before the omnipresent distraction of the internet and Netflix, I easily consumed five or ten books a week, every week, for years and years without fail. Those days are gone, but still, I do manage to read a few dozen books a year, too bad I haven’t been more diligent about recording which ones.
Films aren’t so hard – I don’t have a moral objection to posting the blurb about movie with a sentence or two of my own reaction, and in fact, expect to see more of those sorts of blog posts in 2011, but book posts are more difficult.
I assume part of the problem is that I always am juggling ten or fifteen books at any given moment: I keep a stash of books in most places I might snatch a moment or two of leisure time – office(s), bedroom, living room, camera bag, iPad, wherever. Unfortunately, this often translates into me *not* finishing books nearly as often as I finish.
Also, since I have fond memories of being a history student at UT, I catch myself wanting to delve a little too deeply into my reviews, instead of tossing out a few thoughts. I’ve had a blog since 20032, so know myself well enough to be cognizant that long posts are rarely completed. Nobody is issuing me a grade based on the profundity of my thoughts, I need to stop pretending .
Long winded intro aside, new year, new rules. Well, attempted new rules. Check back in a few months, and see.
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Keith Richards and James Fox wrote Life, an enjoyable romp through the 1960’s, 1970’s, and beyond through the eyes of the most interesting member of the Rolling Stones. Richards frequently claims the reason he survived his decade of being a junky was because he was never greedy about trying to “get more high”, but a few pages later, Richards is so out of it, he’s nodding off while driving a carload of people. Internal contradictions, and unreliable narrator, in other words. Some of Life is a bit self-serving, especially when Richards boasts of his drug-induced stamina, and some is cringe-worthy such as when describing his relations with women met on tour, but fun nonetheless. By the mid-1980’s, Richards runs out of interesting things to say, and the last chapter is even worse – less recollection directly from Keef and more from various compatriots in his circle, or his son, Marlon.
No matter, the Rolling Stones made three great, desert island records,3 another near great album,4 and a bunch of great songs on various other albums, or as singles, and Keith Richards would be a fun dude to be buddies with, if you could handle it. If they would have broken up as they released Tattoo You, I’d respect them a lot more, since nothing released since then5 has been much good. I cannot really criticize musicians for continuing to do what they love, we’ll just say I’m not interested in the current incarnation of the Stones.
Liz Phair:
He’s been a global avatar of wish fulfillment for over four decades and managed to eke more waking hours out of a 24-hour day than perhaps any other creature alive (thanks, Merck cocaine and amphetamines!). As Keith puts it: “For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes.”
You better believe it. This cat put the joie in joie de vivre. As the legendary guitarist for the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards has done more, been more and seen more than you or I will ever dream of, and reading his autobiography, “Life,” should awaken (if you have a pulse and an I.Q. north of 100) a little bit of the rock star in you.
“If you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom,” he says, “same with anything.” Born in 1943 to parents who met as factory workers, Keith was raised in Dartford, an industrial suburb of London. Through the marshes behind the many “lunatic asylums” that seemed to populate Dartford in disproportionate numbers, Keith learned what it felt like to be helpless and afraid, serving as a daily punching bag for bullies on his way home from school. By the time he fought back and won, he’d discovered a fury in himself for which he would later become infamous. The plight of the underdog was his passionate crusade, and anyone or anything that represented injustice in his eyes was fair game. Kate Moss recounts a hilarious anecdote from 1998 in which Keith, sidestepping the festivities of his daughter Angela’s wedding at his manor house, Redlands, finds he’s short some spring onions he laid on a chopping block while fixing himself a light nosh of bangers and mash. When the thieving guest totters into the kitchen with the greens playfully tucked behind his ears, Keith grabs two sabers from the mantelpiece and goes chasing after the poor guy in a homicidal rage. I won’t even touch on the incident involving shepherd’s pie.
(click to continue reading Book Review – Life – By Keith Richards – NYTimes.com.)
Janet Maslin:
It is 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in the New York office of Keith Richards’s manager, a place that might look ordinary if every wall and shelf were not crammed with some of the world’s most glorious rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. Mr. Richards has a 3 o’clock appointment. “Come on in, he’ll be here in a minute,” an assistant says — and here he comes in a minute, at 3:01. This from a man who once prided himself for operating on Keith Time, as in: the security staff ate the shepherd’s pie that Keith wanted in his dressing room? Then everyone in this packed stadium can bloody well wait. The Rolling Stones don’t play until another shepherd’s pie shows up.
Chalk up the promptness to the man’s new incarnation: he is now Keith Richards, distinguished author. True, he is far from the only rock star to turn memoirist, and far from the only Rolling Stone to write a book about himself — very much about himself. The raven-haired Ron Wood wrote “Ronnie,” in which he described Brian Jones as “me in a blond wig.” Bill Wyman, the band’s retired bass player and bean counter, wrote “Stone Alone,” in which not a 15-shilling demo disc went unmentioned. Now Mr. Richards has written the keeper: “Life,” a big, fierce, game-changing account of the Stones’ nearly half-century-long adventure.
“It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” he says about the book. “I’d rather make 10 records.”
(click to continue reading As Keith Richards Remembers It, and He Says He Remembers It All – NYTimes.com.)
Michiko Kakutani:
For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war.
Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade.
“I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”
(click to continue reading ‘Life,’ Keith Richards’s Memoir – NYTimes.com.)
You get the idea…
For me, the gossip about Mick Jagger’s “tiny todger”, and Brian Jones beating Anita Pallenberg and that Chuck Berry was kind of a dick, and so on, was less interesting than discussion about the music. Keith Richards figuring out open string tuning, for instance, or that multi-track recording is less interesting than pointing microphones at the wall and collecting what bounced off it.
Footnotes:Complete Fela
Just received my holiday present to myself, a 27 CD box set comprising of 46 Fela Kuti albums, and a bonus copy of the film, A Slice of Fela. Whoo hoo! I previously owned a few of these of course, but only from CDs issued long ago, or vinyl moldering in storage. Supposedly, the newer reissues have better sound. No matter, I’m excited and ready to dance.
Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing
Probably the best obituary of Captain Beefheart I’ve yet read is not even an obituary, but something written by Don Van Vliet himself:
1. Listen to the birds
That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.
2. Your guitar is not really a guitar
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.
3. Practice in front of a bush
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
5. If you’re guilty of thinking, you’re out
If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.
6. Never point your guitar at anyone
Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.
7. Always carry a church key
That’s your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He’s one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song “I Need a Hundred Dollars” is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he’s doing it.
8. Don’t wipe the sweat off your instrument
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.
9. Keep your guitar in a dark place
When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.
10. You gotta have a hood for your engine
Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.
Quoted from Rolling Stone’s Alt-Rock-A-Rama, as published by Beefheart.com
Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb
This looks rather interesting
Roscoe Holcomb is one of the giant iconic figures in American traditional music. He personified the “high lonesome sound” so celebrated and admired today for its powerful and haunting effect. His style of singing and his brilliant banjo and guitar playing transport the listener straight back to the earliest roots of American music, a style that remained vital in his native eastern Kentucky long after disappearing everywhere else. Although Roscoe died in 1981, his masterful performances have only gained in recognition and respect since then. This DVD gathers together 2 documentaries about Roscoe made by filmmaker John Cohen and classic performances captured in the 1960s. It presents a comprehensive overview of Roscoe’s great and varied artistry as well as offering an incisive and intimate portrait of the man himself and his background and environment.
(click to continue reading Amazon.com: Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb: Roscoe Holcomb: Movies & TV.)
ABC published this:
Odds are you haven’t heard of Roscoe Holcomb. If you’re a fan of American music, though, his is most certainly a voice worth hearing.
Holcomb was the “high lonesome” singer of eastern Kentucky, a man whom performers from John Cohen to Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton revered as a source of spare, original mountain music and the hardship behind it. His voice, which reached almost into falsetto at times, told of work and pain and wondering — stoicism and emotion delivered by a man on a porch with his banjo and the traditions within him.
In the early 1960s, Cohen, a musician and historian, traveled to Kentucky to film a stark, black-and-white movie about Holcomb called “The High Lonesome Sound.” It helped propel the aging Holcomb into a career that took him away from manual labor and, for a time, into a world of performance where people appreciated him for his music.
Now, Cohen has taken unused footage from that session and several others to create a compelling new movie, “Roscoe Holcomb From Daisy, Kentucky.” It is the anchor of a definitive new DVD called “The Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb” that also features other rare video of performances and a copy of the original 1962 movie.
Quiet, introspective and moody, the new film reveals a man trying to make sense of his life and his music — a kind of music that Dylan referred to as “an untamed sense of control.” In long, lingering clips around Holcomb’s house, interspersed with performances, he comes across as a man lost in time, figuring himself out. In short: authenticity, the kind that any Nashville wannabe today would hand over his pickup and his hound to acquire.
(click to continue reading Review: DVD Revisits a ‘High Lonesome’ Musician – ABC News.)
With Sound Investments, Lyon & Healy Harps Endures
Lyon & Healy, located at Ogden and Randolph, a few blocks from me.
We’ve written about Lyon & Healy previously, but the Chicago Collective1 has a slightly different slant:
In a recession that shuttered longtime manufacturers, reshaped whole industries and sent millions of people looking for work, one might expect a company that makes $100,000 harps to be wobbling at the knees, if not toppled over by now.
But Lyon & Healy, the Chicago company that produces one of the music world’s most esoteric instruments, knows something about weathering disasters, having survived the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 and the Great Depression.
Even as domestic sales fell by 25 percent since 2008, the company, which opened in 1864 and made its first harp in 1889, kept all 135 employees on the payroll and continued to build its instruments using carefully selected hardwoods and master carvers.
“I think people are still looking for things that are sound investments,” said Stephen Fritzmann, a master harpmaker and Lyon & Healy’s national sales manager.
(click to continue reading With Sound Investments, Harp Company Endures – NYTimes.com.)
though every article written about the harp seemingly has to mention Joanna Newsom:
Footnotes:Lyon & Healy’s harps “just speak beautifully,” Joanna Newsom, an innovative American harpist, wrote in an e-mail. “They have such dynamic breadth and coloration. And I think they each have a sort of ‘spirit.’ ”
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The company may owe part of its economic durability to the fact that harps are having a bit of a moment. They have appeared on the hit television show “Glee” and have gotten a boost from Ms. Newsom, a Lyon & Healy devotee whose style has taken the instrument out of its classical mold and brought its sound to a general audience.
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The aroma of drying wood and the din of harp music fill the company’s five-floor, 64,000-square-foot factory in the West Loop. The instruments pass through several stages of production — building the mechanism and body, carving the column and base, and gilding and stringing the instrument. “I still love just walking through those doors and being surrounded by all those harps,” Ms. Bullen said.
Ms. Newsom plays a rented style No. 23, which stands just over 6 feet, weighs 81 pounds and is intricately carved along the base and crown with flowers. She said she was awe-struck during her first visit to the factory, which she described as the equivalent of “stumbling on El Dorado.”
- New York Times division [↩]
Barbara Dane
I’ve been a near obsessive collector of music since I was 13, and often I accumulate more than I can consume. Case in point, I stumbled upon this album in my collection by Barbara Dane. Wow, what a smoky, husky, sexy voice, accompanied only by herself on guitar. I have no memory of why I own this CD, apparently I bought it in August, 2007, but didn’t really listen to it until tonight1. No matter, I’ve heard her now, and am in love.
Barbara Dane’s parents arrived in Detroit from Arkansas in the 1920s. Out of high school, Dane began to sing regularly at demonstrations for racial equality and economic justice. While still in her teens, she sat in with bands around town and won the interest of local music promoters. She got an offer to tour with Alvino Rey’s band, but she turned it down in favor of singing at factory gates and in union halls.
Moving to San Francisco in 1949, Dane began raising her own family and singing her folk and topical songs around town as well as on radio and television. A jazz revival was then shaking the town, and by the 1950s she became a familiar figure at clubs along the city’s Embarcadero with her own versions of women’s blues and jazz tunes. New Orleans jazz musicians like George Lewis and Kid Ory and locals like Turk Murphy, Burt Bales, Bob Mielke and others invited her onto the bandstand regularly. Her first professional jazz job was with Turk Murphy at the Tin Angel in l956. “Bessie Smith in stereo,” wrote jazz critic Leonard Feather in the late 1950s. Time said of Dane: “The voice is pure, rich … rare as a 20 karat diamond.”
To Ebony, she seemed “startlingly blonde, especially when that powerful dusky alto voice begins to moan of trouble, two-timing men and freedom … with stubborn determination, enthusiasm and a basic love for the underdog, [she is] making a name for herself … aided and abetted by some of the oldest names in jazz who helped give birth to the blues.”
By 1959, Louis Armstrong had asked Time magazine readers: “Did you get that chick? She’s a gasser!” and invited her to appear with him on national television. She toured the East Coast with Jack Teagarden, appeared in Chicago with Art Hodes, Roosevelt Sykes, Little Brother Montgomery, Memphis Slim, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon and others, played New York with Wilbur De Paris and his band, and appeared on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show as a solo guest artist. Other national TV work included The Steve Allen Show, Bobby Troop’s Stars of Jazz, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
In 1961, the singer opened her own club, Sugar Hill: Home of the Blues, on San Francisco’s Broadway in the North Beach district, with the idea of creating a venue for the blues in a tourist district where a wider audience could hear it. There Dane performed regularly with her two most constant musical companions: Kenny “Good News” Whitson on piano and cornet and Wellman Braud, former Ellington bassist. Among her guest artists were Jimmy Rushing, Mose Allison, Mama Yancey, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Big Mama Thornton, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry.
(click to continue reading Barbara Dane – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
I’ll have to look for more albums by Ms. Dane
Footnotes:- trying to learn a couple of Woody Guthrie songs on guitar, looked for cover versions, and stumbled upon the song, Danville Girl [↩]
Neil Young Album Le Noise and iPad app
Neil Young knew he wanted to make a purely solo album — just himself and a guitar — when he recruited Daniel Lanois to produce the upcoming “Le Noise.” That it finds him primarily playing electric guitar, however, came as a surprise.
“It evolved from being solo acoustic into being solo electric,” Young tells Billboard.com. The singer-songwriter says that after a few acoustic songs were initially recorded, he pulled out “The Hitchhiker,” an autobiographical song Young first wrote around 1975, and began working it up for “Le Noise.” “Then I thought to myself, ‘This is definitely going to be better electric than acoustic,” Young recalls. “So we tried it and it sounded really interesting and really good and strong…So I went home and got my white [Gretsch] Falcon out…and I wrote a sound or two like that and then brought them in and that kind of opened the door for us.” Neil Young Announces New Album, ‘Le Noise’ Lanois adds that the transition to electric “was not a deliberate move or anything. Neil was able to go off and write some additional songs, and I think there was
(click to continue reading Neil Young Goes Electric for ‘Le Noise’ | Billboard.com.)
Plus there is supposedly an iPad app or something
“Le Noise” will also be released as an App that Young says “is based on my ‘Archives’ Blu-ray set” with a variety of interactive extras including original lyric manuscripts, photos, a career timeline and possibly alternate or live takes of the songs, the latter of which come from preview performances while he was on tour earlier this year. “What it does is bring you back to the album cover experience we used to get when the album cover was something tangible and big enough to actually read and see,” Young explains. “(The App) creates a version of it for the iPad or for a computer or a smart phone.”
Amazon blurb Le Noise:
This eight-song album is a collaboration between the acclaimed rock icon and musician, songwriter, and producer Daniel Lanois, known for his work with U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, The Neville Brothers and many others. As producer or co-producer Lanois won Grammy Awards in 1987, 1992, 1997, 2000, and 2001.
Young and Lanois have crossed paths musically over the course of many years, including Lanois’ performances at Young’s Bridge School Benefit Concert and Young’s performance at Farm Aid when Lanois was Willie Nelson’s music director, but this is the first time the two have recorded together. Recorded in Lanois’ home in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, ‘Le Noise’ features Young on acoustic and electric guitars with Lanois adding his trademark sonic textures, creating one of the most sonically arresting albums Young has ever recorded. No band, no overdubs, just ‘a man on a stool and me doing a nice job on the recording,’ as Lanois puts it.
‘Neil was so appreciative of the sonics that we presented to him,’ Lanois says. ‘He walked in the door and I put an acoustic guitar into his hands – one that I had been working on to build a new sound. That’s the multi-layered acoustic sound that you hear on the songs ‘Love and War’ and ‘Peaceful Valley Boulevard.’ I wanted him to understand that I’ve spent years dedicated to the sonics in my home and that I wanted to give him something he’d never heard before. He picked up that instrument, which had everything – an acoustic sound, electronica, bass sounds – and he knew as soon as he played it that we had taken the acoustic guitar to a new level. It’s hard to come up with a new sound at the back end of 50 years of rock and roll, but I think we did it.’
African music the actual African diaspora likes
Interesting observation really. When I travel, I try to find neighborhoods and restaurants the locals like, should do the same with music. Worth a listen at least.
"Tres Tres Fort (Dig)" (Staff Benda Bilili)
The Troxy in east London, and 2,500 pairs of hands are in the air. It’s been four years since the R&B duo P-Square played Britain. They’re household names back home in Lagos, were named artist of the year at this year’s Kora African music awards in Burkina Faso, and the brothers’ hook-driven blend of western and African rhythms has brought London’s Nigerian community out in force. “They’re just so wicked, man,” says a teary-eyed twentysomething over screams. “Where’ve you been?” she adds, incredulous, when I tell her I’ve only just discovered them.
Lately, I’ve been looking for African artists other than those beloved of the world music scene, which has had the west African colossi Salif Keita, Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour on heavy rotation for years. When they – and the likes of the Gibson-toting Malian chanteuse Rokia Traoré, the funky Congolese veterans Staff Benda Bilili and the red clay-smeared Ivorian diva Dobet Gnahore – come to Britain, they play to crowds that are largely white and middle-class, with little sign of the African diaspora. So there must be a whole other bunch of African artists whom Britain’s African communities are listening to.
(click to continue reading African music the actual African diaspora likes | Music | The Guardian.)
Hail, Hail Professor Longhair
Loves me some Professor Longhair, and for that matter, vintage Atlantic Records R&B. Such good sides. Highly recommended.
“Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1: 1947-52” (Various Artists)
Walk around the streets near my home in east London and the area’s past will soon rise up to meet you – carved above door-frames, etched into glass and painted on awnings and the sides of buildings are the ghost-signs of former industries: shop-fronts and faded adverts for Blooms Pianos and Gillette Razors; fountain pens, glass, stoves and whisky; Strongs Meat and Donovan Brothers’ Paper Bags.
This was once an area famed for furniture and shoemakers, matches and model-makers, but as the industry moved elsewhere many of the names drifted into obscurity, too: Lesney, Bailey & Sloper, Bespoke Shoes, Berger, Jenson & Nicholson, Batey & Co, F Puckeridge & Nephew. As the area reinvents itself with luxury flats and new train lines, galleries and delicatessens, the few names that remain serve as faded, barely noticed reminders of the vibrant history of this part of the city.
I was thinking about these ghost signs and all those lost names this last week as I listened to Atlantic Rhythm and Blues, Volume One. This is a collection of 25 songs released between 1947 and 1952 in the first five years of the label’s existence. It ranges from relatively well-known artists – including Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown – to obscure acts such as Stick McGhee, who pops up playing his only hit, Drinkin’ Wine (Spo-Dee-O-Dee).
(click to continue reading Hail, Hail, Rock’n’Roll | Laura Barton | Music | The Guardian.)
And ‘Fess…
“Fess: Anthology” (Professor Longhair)
Likewise Professor Longhair, who appears here playing two of his biggest songs, Hey Little Girl and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Born Ray Byrd in Louisiana, Professor Longhair was a blues pianist and singer who settled in New Orleans and whose music has proved something of a linchpin of the city: a rolling, rumbling thing, with a rumba lilt, a certain Caribbeanness, and a croaky, lurching gait. You’d recognise it, surely – the dishevelled, tanked-up plea of Hey Little Girl is played often enough. Mardi Gras in New Orleans, meanwhile, has one of the most persuasive whistled intros in musical history.
This was a man who tap-danced for money along Bourbon Street, who was a card-shark and a gambler and a hustler, a one-time wannabe-boxer; a man who tried to scratch a living as a cook and a dancer and a seller of a miracle cure-all named Hadacol. You can hear it all in his music of course – a need and a desperation and a desire for more. But also a charm and a seduction and something winningly ramshackle.
There was some commercial success, for a while, but not much. Longhair’s musical offspring have been plentiful, though: you can’t listen to Fats Domino or Dr John, Allen Toussaint or Huey Smith without hearing his influence. Nor Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley or Lennon and McCartney. After a period of obscurity in the 1960s, when he worked as a janitor and fell back into gambling, Longhair enjoyed a burst of success in the last decade or so of his life with tours and a new album deal and dues paid by Robbie Robertson and Robert Plant. After his death, on the eve of the release of a new record, he was awarded a posthumous Grammy and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Charanjit Singh – Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat
Picked up a copy of Charanjit Singh’s 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat recently, and it is quite hypnotically fascinating. I’ve never been a big fan of House music, despite its origin just down the street from me, nor has electronica been a favorite, though I have a few favorites. No matter, this album is good, despite having similarities with both of those genres.
Charanjit Singh found himself in an interesting position back in the early 80s. Working as a session musician in the Bollywood films industry, he was exposed to a wide variety of electronic musical devices. Two of the instruments he used, which would not have been made so readily available otherwise, were the Roland TB-303 and TR-808 synthesizers — the very same synthesizers that later generated all of those drippy sounds you hear on your acid house records. During the time he spent away from his work, Singh sought to re-contextualize the ancient music of his nation — the Indian ragas — using the most technologically up-to-date methods. So no, Ten Ragas To a Disco Beat isn’t some abstractly titled avant-garde record (which is what I initially thought); it’s actually ten ragas played over a disco beat. And no, it’s not one of those corny gift-shop albums marketed to rich tourists — it’s 10 hissing artifacts that represent an aurally flexible ancient culture.
Now, ‘hissing’ isn’t usually the word one uses to describe what happens when folks attempt to re-record old cultural music. Usually you’d call it “world music,” and usually you wouldn’t listen to it. But don’t be averted. Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat was originally released in super-limited quantities in 1982, but it’s recently been re-released by the Bombay Connection label, and it couldn’t be better. The melodies mesmerize, the rhythms pulse relentlessly. And the synthesizer… Oh lord, Singh’s synth makes sound that modern electronic producers should envy. Ten Ragas doesn’t come off gimmicky like one would expect from reading over its history, rather, it’s minimal and potent beyond measure. So get
(click to continue reading Charanjit Singh – Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat | DeLorean | Tiny Mix Tapes.)
Robert Plant Upcoming Band of Joy Album
Sounds worth a spin, liked the Alison Krauss collaboration, and have been really digging into American roots music, Bakersfield, etc., plus always finding time to rock out a bit to Led Zeppelin once in a while.
Last night, Robert Plant dropped in at a dimly lit bar in the East Village near the end of a listening session for his newest album, Band of Joy, and for a few brief moments, admitted he didn’t know what to talk about. “Should I tell you about the Butter Queen and the Plaster Casters in Chicago?” he said, referencing some of the most famous groupies in rock history. “That’s not quite as relevant now as back then — and penicillin is easily available now.”
Holding a microphone in front of a small crowd at New York’s Back Room, the Led Zeppelin frontman quickly changed the subject to the new disc, due September 14th on Rounder Records. Band of Joy follows the intimate, moody vibe of his Grammy-winning collaboration with Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, but the songs are more powerful, like the blazing spiritual classic “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” and a hard-driving take on “Harm’s Swift Way,” a rare Townes Van Zandt track.
“March 16-20 1992” (Uncle Tupelo)Band of Joy was originally Plant’s experimental blues outfit in Birmingham, England, from 1966 to 1968, which helped earn him the nickname “The wild man of the blues from the Black Country.” John Bonham joined in 1967. While Plant’s Zep days were often too demanding to allow him time to appreciate American music, one of his earliest singles was a cover of the Rascals’ “You Better Run” in 1966. Plant was 17, playing with the Tennessee Teens for Columbia Records, and says the track went nowhere. “It disappeared without a trace,” he remembered. “Forty-one years later, I finally decided that it was worth working with American musicians.”
Resurrecting the Band of Joy, Plant picked out top-notch roots musicians and session players for the group: multi-instrumentalist Darrell Scott, guitarist and co-producer Buddy Miller, drummer Marco Giovino and bassist Byron House. “I’m working with arch-bishops of good taste,” Plant said.
(click to continue reading Robert Plant Previews Upcoming Band of Joy Album | Rolling Stone Music.)
Hmm, don’t know the Townes Van Zandt song called Harm’s Swift Way, have to look into that.
Buddy Guy’s Lament for the Blues in The Backyard
[the old Buddy Guy’s Legends Blues Club]
Buddy Guy said he was worried about the blues.
…
When Mr. Guy arrived here in 1957, it was the heyday of Chess Records, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and there seemed to be a blues venue — like the 1815 Club, Theresa’s, the Blue Flame Lounge — on every other corner. Some were no more than tiny rooms that could fit 35 people if no one took a deep breath.
There were so many clubs, Mr. Guy said, “you couldn’t count them all.”
One reason the clubs thrived, he said, was because “back then, everybody had a job.” People could afford to go out, and everybody wanted to hear the famous Chicago blues.
“When the Beatles started, they came here,” Mr. Guy said. “When the Rolling Stones started, they were on 21st and Michigan, trying to find Chess Records.”
Those days are long gone. The relocated Legends, which opened its doors on May 28 at 700 South Wabash Avenue, is one of the city’s few remaining venues dedicated to live blues. Mr. Guy hopes his club will provide emerging blues musicians with the kind of exposure he got playing at the 708 Club and the Blue Flame.
“If there wasn’t a club when I came here, nobody was going to see me walking down 47th Street and say: ‘There goes Buddy Guy. One day he’s going to be a guitar player,’ ” said Mr. Guy, an energetic 74. “I had to go into those clubs and play.”
Lincoln T. Beauchamp, known as Chicago Beau, is a musician, magazine publisher and author of a book about the city’s blues history. The blues community that once flourished on the South and West Sides, Mr. Beauchamp said, fell victim to changing social and economic conditions.
“Pre-integration, the black community was a lot more vibrant,” he said. “Along 47th Street and Cottage Grove, you had a community that was able to sustain itself, and the blues and jazz clubs were part of it, not just socially but also politically.”
(click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative – A Lament for the Blues in Their Backyard – NYTimes.com.)
Times are changing, but not always for the better
From a Whisper to a Scream
“From a Whisper to a Scream” (Allen Toussaint)
Seriously good – pick up a copy if you don’t already have one
Kent Soul has done an exceptional job in remastering and reissuing Allen Toussaint’s classic sophomore long-player — which was known simply as Allen Toussaint — and the “bonus” selection, a vocal-less blues-meets-funk titled “Number Nine.” When these songs first surfaced circa 1970, Toussaint (piano/vocals) had become a decade-long veteran of the New Orleans’ Crescent City soul movement. Under his own name as well as the pseudonym of Naomi Neville, he was a composer, producer, and even a recording session musician. He left a trail of influential R&B titles that would resound back across the pond in the form of cover versions by the likes of the Rolling Stones (“Pain in My Heart”), the Yardbirds (“A Certain Girl”), and the Who (“Fortune Teller”), along with countless others. Toussaint’s uncanny musical malleability resulted in a diverse yet solid second solo outing.
He is supported by Mac Rebennack (organ/guitar) (aka Dr. John), Terry Kellman (guitar), Eddie Hohner (bass), Freddie Staehle (drums), John Boudreaux (drums), Clyde Kerr (trumpet), Earl Turbinton (alto sax), and none other than Merry Clayton (backing vocals) and Venetta Fields — perhaps the most in demand studio voices of the rock & roll era. The dramatic “From a Whisper to a Scream” perfectly captures the synergy existing between Toussaint’s ultra cool delivery and the understated yet piercing lyrical indictment. Other highlights include the pop-oriented, upbeat, and classy “Sweet Touch of Love,” the author’s interpretation of “Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky” and “Working in the Coalmine.”
(click to continue reading From a Whisper to a Scream > Overview.)
Everyone should have a few Allen Toussaint albums around, worn from repeated playing1
Footnotes:- even though CDs theoretically don’t have this problem the way a vinyl record does, CDs still get worn, scratched and discolored from repeated handling [↩]