Adventures Of A Loose Wreck

Meritage Residency Wraps

2012-02-29T17:13:00.007-08:00

This Friday I will be ending an 8-month residency at the Meritage Restaurant in Glendale. I have played there once a week since last July and it has been one of the most enjoyable and challenging gig experiences of my life. Every week is different: the crowds both large and small, the songs they respond to, the songs they DON’T respond to, etc. Some weeks the diners and drinkers respond to the old Honky Tonk tunes and Hank Williams stuff. Other weeks they prefer Classic Rock. I’ve even had some nights when my own original material went over big. It is quite a lot of fun trying to “read the room” each week to gauge what sounds will be suitable. There’s been some rockin’ nights in there. Other times when I see mainly couples in the bar I will stick to ballads and love songs in an effort to set the proper mood.

As a musician I have found this whole thing to be a tremendous learning experience. I want to express my undying gratitude to my cousin Kristie and my aunt Alice who gave me the opportunity to play at the restaurant. Each week I have had the pleasure of seeing one or both of them there, in addition to numerous other family members, and this experience has made me feel closer than ever to my extended family. That is a fringe benefit of the gig that I had not foreseen and I am extremely grateful for the experience.

Lastly I want to thank all the servers and bar staff at the restaurant. From the minute I walked in there they have all made me feel like I am among friends. The food and wine selection at the restaurant are amazing. But I have no doubt that many repeat customers come back at least in some small part due to their affinity for the people that work there. All you guys and girls are awesome. Thank you and I hope to see you again soon & often.

This Friday March 2, 2012 will be my last show at Meritage for a while. I’ll be playing from 7:30 – 10:30pm.

Meritage Restaurant
1140 Congress Ave.
Cincinnati, OH 45246

(513).376.8134

http://www.meritagecincy.com/

Record Store Day - 2008 Essay

2012-02-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

I'm a record store veteran from both sides of the counter, you might say.

I grew up out in West Chester when that area was all farmland, if you can imagine that. Before I could even drive my mom used to drop me off at Tri-County Mall and I started hanging around the Record Bar there. After a few years of my constant presence they finally said, "Why don't you just clock in?" That was late summer/early fall of 1984. I was still in high school. Ever since then I have almost always had some kinda job at a record store.

Record Bar in Tri-County was the last of the cool mall music stores in this area. When Musicland and Sam Goody and Camelot and a few other big chains all went bright white neon with futuristic fixtures, Record Bar still had a string of 60-watt bulbs suspended from the ceiling, dirty brown and frayed carpet underfoot, and cruddy wooden LP bins and cassette racks that were a guaranteed source of splinters. This was years before I had a drink or my first puff, but I was probably the only one on that staff that didn't party. Co-workers regularly returned from lunch breaks red-eyed and giggling. Our illustrious leader took long liquid lunches at a restaurant pub down the mall called The Public Landing. I was young and naïve, so it wasn't 'til years later that I figured out my mates had shit going up their noses pretty regular back then, too. (It was the 80s.) We had some crazy good times there, the highlight of which was undoubtedly an in-store we did with The Damned on March 14, 1986. The whole mall was packed with Punk Rock freaks thanks to our little party, and you gotta remember that in 1986 that was extremely unusual for Cincinnati, Ohio. During my tenure at Record Bar an older co-worker and good friend Paul Horton turned me on to Iggy & The Stooges, The Replacements, and The Jockey Club. There was a Punk Rock goddess who was a regular customer there that snared me with her wild charms and soon deflowered me. I knew then I never wanted to work anywhere but a record store for the rest of my life.

Still in my late teens, early 20s, I started venturing down to Clifton to check out Wizard's and Mole's on Short Vine. My first forays into the world of the independent record store were like re-conn missions to mecca. There were also quarterly record conventions in area hotels where you'd sometimes find bootleg vinyl LPs and similarly unauthorized concert films on VHS. Whenever I heard of a cool store in another town I would take a road trip to check it out the very next weekend. Dingleberry's in Dayton was pretty cool. There was a place in Oxford too that was alright. Along High Street in Columbus there were several indie record stores, my favorite always being Magnolia Thunderpussy.

When I was still young enough to tag along on family vacations I would often try to sneak away to find a cool record store. I was pretty pleased with myself after walking miles from our hotel in Laguna Beach one summer to find Licorice Pizza. (Prob'ly still my all-time favorite name for a record store.)

After 4 years of working at Record Bar I was pretty fried on the mall scene. Already a regular customer at Wizard Records in Corryville, John James brought me on there in 1988. We enjoyed some bizarre in-store appearances there too, including a surreal episode with The Great Kat. A classically trained violinist who took up speed metal in the 80s, Kat was a diminutive blond dervish who arrived 3 hours late and only after we had to send someone to pick her up at the Greyhound bus station. She burst through the doors in a delirious rage only to find the store almost completely empty except for a few random shoppers who had no idea who she was. She ranted and raved in a raspy Brooklyn accent and finally calmed down after we told her that if she been on time she would have seen there was a huge crowd waiting for her earlier in the day. Which was a lie, of course. The afternoon before a Soundgarden show next door at Bogart's Chris Cornell wandered into the store. He was a pompous ass. I told him, "It must be cool to walk into a record store and hear your record playing". And he said, real smug with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his bare chest, "Meh… I'm gettin' used to it". John managed to get a bunch of us backstage to meet Jane's Addiction when they opened for Iggy in 1988. When the sound of Iggy and his band taking the stage began to shake the whole building we all just looked at each other bug-eyed and bolted back out into the club like, "See ya! It's showtime!" In spite of personal differences and unnecessary drama that eventually lead to my departure, John and I got along pretty well there for a couple years. I was always grateful to him for offering me the job in the first place as it got me out of the 'burbs and into a more urbane and urban existence in Clifton, where I still live.

After leaving Wizard's I eked out a living doing odd jobs for Bogart's, running errands, and working part-time on the production crew until I got hired on at Everybody's Records in Pleasant Ridge. I was only there for about a year but it was during this time that I began to realize that some of the best friendships I have are with people I met in record stores, be they regular customers or co-workers.

In the Spring of '92, after months of begging for a job, I finally convinced Dean Newman, owner/proprietor of Mole's Record Exchange on Short Vine, that he desperately needed my services because the back room there was a complete mess. There were LPs, 45s, posters, album flats, boxes, books, magazines and more, all covered with dust, stacked and piled all over the floor, tumbling out of closets, blocking doorways. It looked like a fucking bomb had gone off back there. "Come on, Dean… Dude - Seriously. You need somebody to get that shit in order!" When I started there it was like being handed the keys to the kingdom.

Truth is, all the aforementioned stores had their niche markets and specialties. If you wanted one of those giant, British-import subway-size posters of The Cramps for that cute little redhead you were courting, it was worth the drive to Magnolia's in Columbus. Curious about that new import-only Robyn Hitchcock LP? Hit Wizard's on your way home from work. Need to replace your roommate's Ice-T CD that you destroyed at a party? Everybody's stocked the whole Ice-T whole catalog. Even the cut-out bins of the farthest strip mall outposts often yielded a Frank Zappa LP or two.

But Mole's was always my favorite. Just 2 doors down from Bogart's in its original location, it was a mandatory stop before any show at the club or night of drinking and gigging at Sudsy's across the street. My memory of Short Vine's glory days invariably revolves around that funky little record store. Back in the day, their vinyl selection was tops. I always managed to expand my collection of Dylan or Stones or old Blues LPs when I shopped at Mole's. Dean and the other guys who worked there treated me like a baby brother from the first time I passed thru their doors. Even the gruff and grim Michael Riley turned out to be a Teddy Bear underneath an exterior that seemed more like a grizzly! Michael… Now there's a guy with some record store experience. He worked at Mole's over 20 years for 3 different owners! Michael has been a pillar of the musical community in this town since the early 60s. This cat is far and away the most interesting person I have ever met in all my years of hanging around record stores. The guy was at Woodstock and saw The Sex Pistols. Michael flew to London to see The Clash in 1977, he's been spotted in the back of limousines with Bette Midler, he's seen The Rolling Stones over a hundred times since 1963, and he sipped champagne with Muddy Waters in the office at Bogart's while the late show crowd filed in. Think you're cool? Think again.

Mole's back room became my domain and my mission in 1992 and shortly thereafter I went full-time. Off on Saturdays, I would still show up at Mole's for the weekly grill-out in the side alley by the store. Visited by friends and musicians from the neighborhood on a daily basis, I always made sure there was beer or something stronger in the fridge. Frustrated employees from the other record store in the neighborhood would often stop by on their lunch break to vent their spleens and wet their whistle. Our after-hours and Christmas parties at Mole's are the stuff of legend. Many late nights of smoke and guitars, friends and freaks, whiskey and women. Occasionally a regular customer would stop by with a joint during business hours so I would lock the door and put up the "Back In 5 Minutes" sign. More than once I was visited by a frisky girlfriend and up went the "Back In 5" sign again.

Things have changed. One-time Mole's employee Darren Blase went on to great success with Shake It Records, truly a world class record store right here in our midst. LPs gave way to CDs and now CD sales are in steady decline because mp3 downloads seem to be the preferred medium. You can't blame all popular trends on the record companies. If the kids wanna download just that one song they really like for 99 cents, well that's not really worlds apart from the 45s that I used to collect when I was younger. Whatever tiny vestige of artful packaging and the tactile sensation of handling a record cover that CDs clung to for a few years will soon be gone for good. But nothing will ever replace the record shopping experience. Some of us still chase that feeling of flipping thru a record bin and finding some long-lost gem. Different mediums come and go - VHS, Beta, cassettes, 8-tracks - remember reel-to-reel tapes? Ha! CDs may soon be put to pasture, but LPs still maintain an air of mystery and collectibility. Ain't nothing like that eureka moment when you find an album or 45 that you've been looking for for years. And no - finding it on eBay doesn't count.

In '96 Mole's moved across the street next to Subway and then in 2000 moved again up to Calhoun Street. Over the years my boss Dean Newman became one of the best friends I've ever had and later my landlord. After 10 years behind the counter there I put in my notice in 2002. Just ready for a change. Spent that Spring traveling, that Summer roofing. That Fall I landed a job at a great bookstore where my years of record store retail experience were called upon and utilized every day. In 2003 I started working part-time for Dean at Mole's again and I tried to quit last fall but you can still find me behind the counter there every once in a while. I still make sure there's beer in the fridge and I've still got that "Back In 5" sign at the ready.

- April 2008

Van Halen 2012: MUCH Better Than Expected

2012-02-05T07:44:00.000-08:00

Okay that’s more like it. I was underwhelmed by “Tattoo”, the first single from the new Van Halen album A Different Kind Of Truth. But now some additional tracks have leaked out and the shit sounds pretty good. The record comes out Tuesday and now I’m wondering: How in the hell did event organizers miss out on the obvious coup of having Van Halen play tonight’s Super Bowl halftime show???

There’ve been rumors circulating that VH has dusted off and re-worked some old tunes that predate their first album for the new CD. The band performed at the 250-capacity Café Wha? in NYC a few weeks ago and sure enough their 60-minute set included a track called “She’s The Woman” that dates back to VH’s early days on the LA club scene. Hardcore fans recognize tunes and titles like these from bootleg tapes that have circulated for years. I for one am pretty freekin’ stoked that they finally gave “Bullethead” a full studio treatment.

Optimistic observers who shared my doubts about “Tattoo” were quick to point out that the first single released from many records turns out to be the most middle-of-the-road track from the album. This rose-colored speculation is turning out to be largely true, as many of the other tracks from the new record are simply better representations of the charm, chops, energy and humor of VH at their best.

Personally, I just wanna hear them make another record like 1981’s Fair Warning. In my heart I know they will never be able to repeat that recipe. Fair Warning was a very dark record for the band, containing few of their trademark party anthems and no real hit singles of any kind. But ask any fan what their favorite VH album is and 4 out of every 5 will say Fair Warning. I know this is pie-in-the-sky daydreaming for me to think that even one tune on the new record could approach Fair Warning’s dark weirdness. Or so I thought until I heard some of the new tunes. “Beats Workin’” ain’t high art of any kind, and it’s not necessarily even one of my favorites among this new batch of tunes. Still, this one song dives into the depths of de-tuned distortion and noise considerably more than I expected to hear on the whole album. As much as I recognize that this band who I was so fond of back in my high school days is not likely to ever soar to the heights of their heyday ever again, I’m thinking they might just have a few more surprises up their sleeve than even an unabashed dreamer like me expected.

The Felice Brothers' Road Crusade For Authenticity

2011-12-31T08:11:00.000-08:00

I had the extremely good fortune to write an article about the Felice Brothers for Crawdaddy.com in late 2010 that was published online in January of 2011. One of my favorite contemporary acts, I went way overboard in researching the article. Though I was paid handsomely for my work, I went considerably over budget in my research, running up gasoline, food, and hotel bills as I traveled to see the band in Louisville and Nashville in the weeks running up to their appearance at Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House, where I interviewed James Felice for the article. Covering one of my favorite bands for the legendary Crawdaddy was a great honor for me. I will forever look upon this assignment as being akin to “winning the freelance Super Bowl”. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman and to James Felice for being so gracious with his time. Months after this piece first appeared I ran into James Felice at Cincinnati’s MidPoint festival and he spoke glowingly about the article, saying that it was one of his favorite things he’d ever seen written about the band. Remembering my face and our conversation, he asked, “Did you write the review of our new CD for Crawdaddy too?” I assured him that indeed I had and again he complimented my work. As good as it gets for a freelancer who remains an unabashed fanboy as well. Crawdaddy more or less folded in 2011, as they were gobbled up by Paste Magazine who has a much bigger readership but apparently no intention of honoring Crawdaddy with more than an untended, rarely-updated blog page on their site. Try going to Crawdaddy.com and you’ll see links to maybe a dozen articles or so, a shameful and inexcusable under-representation of the magazine that launched “Rock Journalism” before there even was such a thing and yes, even before Rolling Stone magazine. Shame on you, Paste. Anyway – here’s the piece I wrote about the Felice Brothers. Like the other stuff I wrote for Crawdaddy, I am real proud of it. Since even the band seemed to appreciate the article, I thought it would be a shame for it to just disappear forever from the interwebs. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year. –rh

***

If Keith Richards recorded an acoustic album in a loose, back porch hootenanny setting with Tom Waits producing, he’d be lucky if it came out sounding as raw and authentic as the Felice Brothers’ self-titled release from 2008. Though they have enjoyed an increasing amount of success in the Alt-Rock and Americana scene over the past few years, the Felice Brothers remain relatively unknown. With a sound often described as a bittersweet whiskey binge of Dylan-esque ballads and folksy anthems, the Felice Brothers also have an arsenal of infectious acoustic honky tonk numbers. Performing with sweaty, blood-in-their-eyes passion, the Felice Brothers’ live performances are a ramshackle hillbilly soul catharsis exorcism. They look like they’ve been on the road for five straight years, which they have. Trudging ever onward, they spend months at a time on the road, schlepping coast to coast in a beat-up old RV that they have driven all over the US and Canada. Even a cursory glance at their tour dates is enough to give you road fever. The band seems to be constantly touring, taking very few days off and frequently traveling several hundred miles in between shows.

Brothers Ian, James and Simone Felice were raised in a musical family in the Catskill Mountains. Drawing inspiration from their father and many generations of musicians that came before them, the three formed an ad hoc group and eventually moved to New York City. Busking on street corners, in subway stations and city parks, the band soon came to the attention of a small European label called Loose Records. Already veterans of the road at a very young age, the band cobbled together Tonight At The Arizona from a cluster of early demos and hit the highway once again.

Night after night in one city after another, the band performed a seemingly endless string of live shows unmatched in visceral intensity and emotional power. The ragged band of troubadours pressed on as their reputation grew. Their material originating mostly from brother Ian’s pen, it resonates with echoes of the past. Folk legends, murder ballads, strange tales of the rural poor. Some literal and linear in nature, others more abstract. Every last one of the slow tunes is heart wrenching and the rave ups are all unfailingly gut-bucket gritty.

The band’s self-titled CD surfaced in early 2008 and soon “Frankie’s Gun” and “Whiskey In My Whiskey” blossomed into college radio staples. A published novelist and renaissance man whose creativity knows no boundaries, brother Simone left the band to pursue other avenues. With fiddler Greg Farley and drummer Dave Turbeville now full-fledged members of the Felice Brothers entourage, the road was not kept waiting.

The band shares vocal duties. Ian and the similarly tight-lipped bassist Christmas Clapton keen and bleat like rusty saxophones. (Their vocal stylings are frequently compared to Dylan.) Wherefrom these stick figure scarecrows straight outta Steinbeck conjure the full spectrum of human emotion I don’t know. Burly, bearded, cherub-faced James has a huskier tone suiting his larger frame. A raspy raconteur with a voice of considerable depth, he howls “Goddamn You, Jim” and “Let Me Come Home” through tears of rage and desperation. Even Farley is strapping on a guitar and stepping up the microphone to belt out the occasional Cajun hillbilly rock and roux number nowadays.

Already accustomed to busking in the streets and subway tunnels of New York City, when their frozen fingers couldn’t feel the frets, teeth chattering between verses and subway trains drowning out every other chorus, the Felice Brothers’ dream to one day play the Newport Folk Festival was not going to be thwarted by a mere power outage. After the rain cleared, they just played barefoot and acoustic in the mud in front of the stage. By instinctively braving the elements and rising above less than ideal circumstances, they turned adverse conditions into a damn good story and overnight it became part of the legend. Just another tale from the road. Throw another log on the fire.

In support of 2009’s Yonder Is The Clock, the family Felice expanded for that summer’s Big Surprise Tour with Justin Townes Earle, Dave Rawlings Machine, and Old Crow Medicine Show. Though spanning barely a dozen stops on outdoor stages around the Midwest and down south, the tour was seen by many as a natural heir to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. A totally unique program was improvised by loose and spontaneous aggregations that included members of all four bands as they meandered on and off the stage throughout two lengthy sets on each stop of the tour.

Our bedraggled and baying band of road dogs was busier than ever this past summer, touring with few breaks straight on into the fall. Squeezing several European dates in between two extensive US tours, the band’s material began to evolve and change in unexpected ways. In Louisville, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee, this writer was witness to two performances that were wildly divergent in color and content, though the shows were a mere eight weeks apart. In the interim the band had ventured to the far corners of the earth and back again, their travels reflected in the evolution of their new material. With just a few dates left on of one of the longest treks of the band’s brief but already storied history, the gracious and loquacious James Felice took a few moments to chat with me before the band’s performance at the historic Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky. Finding the band finally in the home stretch of a lengthy fall tour, with the comforts of home almost within their grasp and the Cincinnati skyline looming on the horizon as darkness fell on the Ohio River, I asked James Felice about the band’s relationship with the road.

*

RH: You guys seem to be out there on the road almost all the time with very few days off.

James Felice: Yeah. I guess most bands at our level do a lot of touring because these days it’s the only way you can make money, really. We don’t have too many things tying us back at home and we’re always excited to get out on the road and play. It’s fun and we know that it helps us to live. We’re gonna be able to live this winter and not freeze to death because we toured all fall. When you’re a touring musician your work is sort of all lumped into a few months at time. Then there’s other times when you have nothing to do because it’s not like a nine-to-five job. It’s more like a September 1st to December 1st kinda job. It’s almost like going up to Alaska and being a fisherman or something like that.

RH: At some point does the road begin to feel like home and when you’re back home with nothing to do that feels strange?

JF: Yeah, absolutely. We call it Post-Tour Depression. For at least a week after a tour, especially a long tour like this one, you don’t know what to do. It’s seven o’clock and you feel like you should be loading into a club. It’s actually really weird how lonely and lost you feel. At home it’s really quiet. It gets really quiet really quick and kind of boring and scary. You almost feel like you’re suffocating sometimes, but you’re not of course. You’ve just been to forty-five, fifty cities in the last two months so it can be weird to come back home. Especially because we live in a little town where there’s nothing going on. I just have a little house I live in. I don’t have a real job. There’s no schedule. Like tonight, I’m doing this interview in a bar. I don’t usually do that. At home I’d be stacking wood or building a fire or something. So yeah, you fall into that depression but then two weeks later you’re thinking, “I can’t fucking believe that I was on tour! How did I live like that?”

RH: I’m sure you try to make the routing of the tour as easy as possible, but sometimes I guess it’s unavoidable that there’s going to be long drives between shows?

JF: Yeah. The first part of this tour was on the west coast and in the southwest so the drives were always very long because the cities are so far apart. We had something like eleven shows in a row from San Diego up to Vancouver. Then the next day we had a day off, but we had to drive eighteen hours to Salt Lake City. Then ten hours to get to Denver. Then seventeen hours to Omaha. So there’s an incredible amount of driving. We’ve put 12,000 miles on the bus in the last couple months. Maybe more, actually. It’s a lot of traveling. It’s a big ol’ country, man. It’s really, really big.

RH: Eighteen hour drive – that’s no kinda day off at all, is it?

JF: (Laughs) No, no! But I know I could be a truck driver now, you know? If this falls through, I could be a truck driver or a bus driver. Just get my CDL and be ready to go.

RH: You guys have been trekkin’ around in that same RV for a while now, is that right?

JF: Yeah it’s the only one we’ve ever had. Well, the only thing we’ve driven cross country. When we were just getting started we had like a “short bus” - like they have for special needs kids? - which we were! But that didn’t really last too long. We were gonna drive the short bus cross country on our first tour that we booked ourselves. And I remember we were like two miles from home just driving around and we hit a pothole and we all almost died. We almost careened off the road and we were like, “You know what? We can’t do this. We gotta be safe. We can’t take this thing across the country”. Driving that thing was so fucking dangerous.

RH: How much of the new material does the band write while you’re on tour and road test from night to night?

JF: We road test a lot. But we don’t write very much on tour. We’ve been working on our new record. We’re almost done now. We’ve been playing a lot of songs from the new record that’s coming out in March, I think. And it’s a different kind of sound. It’s a different record. The next tour we do, when we tour for the new record, it’s gonna be a different sounding band.

RH: Tell me about the new song, I think it’s called “Royal Hawaiian Hotel”?

JF: Yeah, actually I think it’s gonna be called “Ponzi”.

RH: When I heard it at the Nashville show that one struck me as really different. Ian puts down the guitar. He’s doing more of a frontman kinda thing, swinging his arms around a bit, a little more animated than usual…

JF: Yeah, we’re trying to have fun, man. We’ve been playing this folk kinda rock thing I guess, whatever you wanna call it, for a while. And it’s fun to do but we gotta keep movin’ on. Can’t play the same music your whole life. And, you know, we haven’t really cashed in on it as hard as some. It’s kinda funny ‘cause now you see a lotta bands doing really well with the kinda stuff we were doing. There’s like a whole scene now, bigger than I had noticed before. There seems to be a growing scene that plays this kind of music. But I think it’s time for us to move on and try out some new shit.

RH: The Felice Brothers are already an established act and quite prolific, obviously. But right now I have sense of you guys being on the brink of huge step forward. With the amount of new and very different material that I’ve heard over the course of just a handful of shows, I am reminded of Exile-era Stones or Wilco’s Being There. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me like single disc wouldn’t even scratch the surface of where you guys are at right now and maybe a double album might called for.

JF: Yeah, we have dozens and dozens and dozens of songs. Ian, my brother, writes most of the songs. He’s so prolific that we still pull up songs that he wrote years ago sometimes. Even things that didn’t make the first record. He’s got so many great songs. This new record is actually not going to be a double record. It’s a short, concise, straight to the point kind of thing. Which is important because I feel like our last record was a little sprawled, a little bit too much? This one’s concise and it’s different because we’re moving forward. Ian and the rest of us in the band, we’re never satisfied with what we’re doing and we don’t want to be pigeonholed. You know, this whole rootsy, folky, Bob Dylan, The Band, good time shit is cool. But it’s not us, really. It was. We started playing this kind of music because it was the only goddamn thing we knew how to play, you know? Acoustic guitar, a drum, an accordion. But it’s not who we are, you know? We’re certainly dirt bags. And we’re certainly broke still. But we are musicians and we like to challenge ourselves. So we just have to keep going.

RH: I’m often struck by the dichotomy between stage right and stage left. You and Farley do a fair bit of jumping around, but Ian and Christmas sometimes seem almost reluctant to be onstage at all.

JF: Well yeah, they’re more reserved. They’re more introverted I guess, than Farley and I. It depends on the show. It depends on the crowd and the energy and how things are going. Every show with us is not the same because we’re not acting up there. We’re not playing to a script. It seems like a lot of these big acts out there, there’s like a script that you play: You smile here, you make this joke there, you do this flourish at the end of this song. We don’t do that. We are completely loose and the feeling is always new and different. So some shows are not gonna be as wild and animated. They might be more intense and dark. Ian is sort of like the forefront. He’s our leader, he’s the guy. He’s in charge. And so he sets the tone. And naturally I guess Farley and I are a little more animated, and Christmas a little less so, and Dave does his thing behind the drums. So it depends on the show. The last show we played was crazy. Ian was crazy. He’s all standing up on the drums and fuckin’ around and it was great, you know? But the show before that he was dark and more subdued. That’s just the way it is. That makes it exciting for us because we can’t be sitting there doing the same thing every night. Sometimes the audience gets pissed because it’s maybe not what they expected. But that’s okay.

RH: Well I guess if your challenge was to be as animated as Farley on stage every night you’d have your work cut out for you!

JF: Right! I’d fuckin’ break my hip or somethin’!

RH: You’ve indicated that you’d rather not say at this time what label will be releasing the next record. What else can you tell me about the new record and where you guys are at right now?

JF: Well, when we first got started we had all these labels knocking on our door after Tonight At The Arizona came out. Major. Huge. The biggest labels in the world. Some of the biggest producers in the world. And they flew us out to L.A. and here and there. We played for them and they said they wanted to produce our record. But at the end of the day we decided we didn’t want do that because they all wanted to tell us what to do. They wanted to have a hand in it. The A&R guys told us, “Yeah, yeah. We’ll let you do what you want but I’ll come in and check in like every couple days and make sure everything’s going well and I’ll have ideas.” And we said, “Fuck that”. We don’t want any A&R guy, or anybody telling us what to do. We turned down a lot of big time opportunities and went with Conor Oberst’s label Team Love and they’re great. It’s a little tiny label run by really awesome people. They don’t have a lot of money but they did their best with the record. But you know, we’re still struggling, man. You know, it’s hard to maintain a high level of artistic integrity when you also think “I’d also like to be able to pay my rent”, you know? The way the record industry is these days, for a lot of bands, it’s a struggle. It’s something that we have always struggled with as a band since we first started playing. Ian didn’t want to release Iantown (the band’s earliest demos). He’s like, “That’s a piece of shit. I don’t wanna put that out.” But we said, “Ian, come on. You know… You live in a tent. Let’s get a place to live.” So we did. But you know, Ian is very serious about artistic integrity. He lives and dies by that shit. So I think we’re doing okay. We’re real proud of the new record.

This time we’re gonna step it up a little bit to a slightly larger label. Nothing huge because we don’t want to go with a major that’s going to tell us what to do. And hopefully we’ll get on the right track. These people [at the new label] respect us for who we are and they like the music. They care about it, beyond making money. Because we’re never gonna be huge, I don’t think. You know? We’re gonna do our job and we do it very well. And we’re gonna get bigger than we are now. But we’re not gonna be doing like Lady Gaga numbers. You know we’re not gonna be doing nothing like that big. But these people, at Team Love and at the new label, they care about the music and that’s awesome. That’s what we need: we need financial support and freedom at the same time. Which is very hard to get, in any artistic endeavor. When you try to do anything. And that is the artist’s dilemma: Do I wanna eat? Or do I wanna do what I wanna do? And where do those two things meet? There’s always a compromise. Always. No matter what. But where do they meet, money versus freedom? Comfort versus freedom? Which of course is the great debate in the whole world.

Ace Frehley: No More Cold Gin

2011-12-16T15:21:00.000-08:00

After reading Ace Frehley’s new book I was reminded of this piece I wrote for CityBeat back in April of 2008:

When KISS was interviewed on NBC's Tomorrow show in 1979 in full make-up and regalia, it was clear from Ace Frehley's crazy cackle that he was unglued, untethered, off the leash and most certainly not controlled by Gene Simmons' angry dagger glares. Simmons' demonic powers apparently did not include the ability to rein in Space Ace Frehley, who stole the show with his speed-freak stream-of-altered-consciousness rants that had host Tom Snyder in stitches.

On record and on stage, Ace kept pace with all the Hard Rock guitar heroes of his day. KISS' reputation as a Heavy Metal circus act did not disguise the fact that those were high-voltage Chuck Berry riffs spitting out of Ace's Les Paul like a flame-thrower. In those days before the Internet, rumors were sketchy and unreliable -- reports of any kind were few and far between. But when Ace first left KISS in 1983 due to "health problems," it was soon widely known that the real reason for his sacking was alcohol abuse. The band became an even worse hackfest without the one original member who actually had some chops, but Ace's post-KISS solo stuff was spotty at best. He made a record every few years and toured very little, but even keeping this relatively low profile Ace always maintained a reputation as a guitar god and a raging party animal.

KISS' self-imposed unmasking, financial de-pantsing, frequent lineup changes and steady decline through the '80s and '90s is well-documented. For a band that was more about flash and fire than the music from the outset, they sucked and struggled more than ever until the inevitable reunion tour in 1995. In the early days the bands' profits went back into their stage show and a series of bad investments. Hard to believe, but it's been said that the reunion tour was the first time in their career that KISS made any real money. Think of that: Who the fuck was banking on all those KISS lunchboxes and shit? By 2002, Ace was sick of the circus again and left with a laugh, saying, "This fucking 'farewell tour' has been going on for seven years!"

I don't listen to my KISS records very much anymore. But I will always owe a debt of gratitude to Ace for being the guy who first inspired me to pick up a guitar. Over the years my tastes have changed, but my guitar is my constant companion. When I was a kid I wanted to be Ace Frehley when I grew up. Ironically, this very same childhood obsession with learning to play guitar also lead me to the conclusion that "growing up" was for assholes. Then the unthinkable happened: Ace grew up. Word is that for the first time in his adult life, Ace Frehley is sober.

Even under the make-up, Ace's complexion always made him look like a man of wax who stood too close to a fire. His hairline is creeping skyward now, but his brown hair still falls about his shoulders. Long gone is the silver symmetry of his face-paint design from the old days. In its place we find a scraggly goatee and ever-present pair of dark sunglasses resting atop a nose that must have snorted a hundred miles of white lines in its day.

A lot of guys who lived that Rock Star lifestyle didn't survive. It's against all odds that Ace is still standing, even about to release his first new album in many years.

Once a notorious drunk slacker cokehead and improbable role model for any kid, Ace is now doing what I would have once thought impossible for him: He's kicked the bottle at age 57. I'll drink to that.

[Special thanks to my friend & CityBeat editor Mike Breen. –rh]

BOOK REVIEW: I'm Chevy Chase... And You're Not by Rena Fruchter [Virgin Books]

2011-12-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to reading the 2007 biography I’m Chevy Chase… And You’re Not and I’m sorry to say I’m dubious about the book. Chase is one of Saturday Night Live‘s original cast members and indeed one of the main architects who created the show alongside Lorne Michaels and Michael O’Donoghue. I can be obsessive about SNL, picking up almost every book about the show and its rotating cast that I can get my hands on. Chevy’s work on SNL and his Hollywood career are well known and need no re-hash here. The man is certainly worthy of biographical treatment but my personal feeling is that perhaps this third rate biography is about all he deserves.

First of all, the writing is unimaginative and fails to rise to any level of investigative journalism. A third grader could do a better job than this. Okay. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Make that a sixth grader. It seems a little odd to me that after years of reading stuff about what a jerk Chevy can be, this biography comes along and paints the first glowing account of his life that I have ever seen or heard. It’s only natural that the subject should be a key source for an official biography, but author Rena Fruchter comes off as a total sycophant on Chevy’s pay roll.

To his credit, Chase is open and honest about the abuse he suffered as a child. Issues and challenges that those youthful experiences brought about in his adult life are addressed in a brutally honest and admirably forthcoming manner here. That alone constitutes a bravery sadly lacking in most people, be they celebrity or not. The book also provides new perspective on Chevy’s departure from SNL after only one season which I found illuminating.

I want to believe that maybe Chevy is not the asshole that dozens of writers and former co-workers have described over the years. And perhaps a better writer could have painted this portrait a little more convincingly. On the other hand, if he really is a jerk, I can’t imagine there would be much demand for a tell-all, “Citizen Chase”, Hollywood Babylon-type treatment. Ultimately, perhaps the chosen approach was a marketing decision. The largest prospective audience for a book like this is the man’s fan base. He’s a funny guy and a major figure in American comedy no matter how you look at it. So it’s two steps forward with his personal revelations but one step back with a poor choice for biographer and I remain ambivalent about whether he deserves better. It’s just been too many years for me reading about what a jerk Chevy can be for this book to come along and just completely change my thinking about him. Having said all that, I still love the guy. In the final analysis, the courage he displays in his willingness to speak about the horrors of child abuse and his own admission that drug use drove him into rehab in the 80s will likely win out and make me love him even more. Those are things that surely would have been glossed over or skipped altogether if this bio were a total hack job.

CHRISTMAS LOVE FOR NEW ORLEANS

2011-12-03T16:40:00.001-08:00

Asking all who read this to keep in mind that New Orleans is STILL recovering from Katrina. Each of us in our own way can contribute to New Orleans’ economic recovery if we consider these NOLA products for gifts and cuisine for our Christmas celebrations with family and friends.

1. MUSIC!
Perhaps the city’s greatest export, New Orleans music is the foundation upon which almost everything in the American Music Vernacular was built. Home of Kermit Ruffins, Dr. Michael White, Rebirth Brass Band and dozens more, Basin Street Records is one of the city’s premiere record labels. Here’s a direct link to their webstore: https://www.basinstreetrecords.com/shop/

2. COFFEE!
Café Du Monde is NOLA’s original French Market coffee stand, world famous for its café au lait and beignets. Their coffee is available in many grocery stores. Other items from the menu, treats, apparel, coffee mugs, etc. available online here: http://shop.cafedumonde.com/coffee.html

3. BEER!
Though beer may not be the first local delicacy to come to mind when considering NOLA products, the Abita Brewing Company is one of the finest microbreweries in the country. Currently they have one of their seasonal brews on store shelves, a dark, flavorful Christmas Ale that is out of this world. Like the Café Du Monde coffee, Abita can be found at many discerning grocery stores and independent beer sellers. Even luckier would be the discovery of a local pub with Abita on tap. While we daydream about that prospect, you can get more mouth-watering info from Abita’s website: http://www.abita.com/

4. SoCo!
Another less obvious gift choice, Southern Comfort has been brewed in New Orleans since 1874. Simply put, this suggestion might be particularly helpful to those who have yet to get a Christmas gift for me.

In all likelihood I will be amending and expanding this post to include more NOLA products. In the meantime, here’s a couple catch-all links to additional gift ideas and food items:

Pure Cajun Products - http://www.purecajun.com/

New Orleans Products.com - http://www.neworleansproducts.com/store/cart.php

Voodoo dolls, candles and other magic trinkets - http://www.neworleansvoodoocrossroads.com/products.html

And lastly, a favorite stop of mine, Marie LaVeau’s House Of Voodoo - http://voodooneworleans.com/

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

ROBYN HITCHCOCK SAVES THE DAY - Nov. 7, 1999

2011-12-03T12:44:00.001-08:00

In the fall of 1999, my band the Loose Wrecks was booked to be the opening act for Robyn Hitchcock at a club called Top Cat’s in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a big fan of Robyn’s work, I was ecstatic about this opportunity and quickly set about making a poster for the show. I took the silliest picture of Robyn’s face that I could find and I had it enlarged. Using four sheets of 11”x17” paper crudely taped together to make a poster, the result was kinda rough looking but effective. On the night of the gig I was in the club when I overheard a very loud screaming argument between Robyn’s tour manager and someone at the bar. Apparently Robyn was touring with an opening act and the tour manager was shouting, “Who is this third fucking band?! They will NOT be playing tonight!” To their never ending credit, the bar staff at the club tried to come to my defense, explaining that I had promoted the show for weeks, hanging flyers and posters all over town, notifying local radio stations, etc. The angry tour manager was drooling and spitting and shaking with rage and refused to back down. Someone pointed me out to him and the man turned his angry sneer upon me and began to approach me from across the empty barroom. At that precise moment, as God is my witness, Robyn Hitchcock himself walked through the front door of the club, uncharacteristically ebullient and beaming from ear to ear, loudly asking the room at large, “Who made this fan-TAS-tic poster for tonight’s show?!” I told him it was me and he thanked me profusely, complimented my work, and after introductions were made he seemed thrilled that my band was also on the bill for the evening. Across the room, the tour manager’s gait and demeanor shifted dramatically. Sneer turned to smile as he thrust his hand out for me to shake, “Nice work, mate. Robyn’s happy with it. Glad you’re on the bill tonight.” Fortuitous timing to say the least, and Robyn himself was never aware of the potentially volatile situation that he unknowingly defused. I have been fortunate to cross paths with Robyn Hitchcock several times over the years. He is highly intelligent, gracious, chivalrous and polite. The music world would be a lot better off if there were more guys like him. A true original, copious Syd Barrett comparisons notwithstanding, and a total gentleman.

"Yesspeak" Decidedly NOT Yes's Peak

2011-11-30T15:39:00.000-08:00

Even through numerous line-up changes, the level of musicianship in Yes has always represented the best in the business and they are considered by many to be the kings of Progressive Rock. Without ever sacrificing the Prog roots seemingly embedded in their DNA, they have crafted numerous songs and several LPs that are staples of classic rock radio. Since their inception, they have always been the kind of band that other musicians look up to.

Music DVDs are naturally designed for an artist’s existing fan base. So it’s reasonable to postulate that very few casual observers will invest in the 2-disc DVD from Yes called “Yesspeak”. This is a band with a tremendous worldwide following, of course. So it is no small niche market that an item like this aims for. There are certainly some excellent concert performances included here but thanks to some ill-advised and overlong interview segments, the overall presentation comes across as pompous and self-important. Allowing for the fact that sometimes a British accent can convey an unintentional air of superiority, the interviews with individual band members contained here are nearly insufferable. Obviously there is a world of difference between a concert film and a documentary. One suspects that the strengths of Yes might be better exhibited in the former as opposed to the latter. As a bonus feature on the DVD, there’s 2 hours of audio from concert performances that speaks much better of this band’s true worth than interview segments featuring grown men cavorting in colorful capes and wispy flowing shirts of shiny silk.

The worst offender is singer Jon Anderson, who comes across as a delusional little man that fancies himself a spry elfin creature with magical powers and a sprawling countryside estate replete with mansion and vineyard. He openly admits that life on the road is spent fantasizing about going home. Humble drummer Alan White and bookish guitarist Steve Howe both seem to have kept one foot in the real world, while Rick Wakeman is enigmatic, deftly holding down the disparate roles of screwy philosopher and the voice of reason. It is primarily Anderson and bassist Chris Squire who carry themselves with odious pride, their swelled heads vainly held aloft in the clouds. The abiding mood created by their interview segments lands just this side of pathetic. Even Roger Daltrey’s narration is overzealous and hyperbolic, as if describing the mystical machinations of a mysterious cabal. A fleeting glimpse of the band members’ personal lives would have made for a much more intriguing presentation of their offstage activities. Perhaps the best approach to this DVD is to keep the remote control in hand and skip over the interview segments. Limit your viewing to the live performances, which are nothing short of astonishing, and you’ll find few flaws with this DVD.

Revelatory Romp: Tommy James' Life Story

2011-11-30T15:17:00.000-08:00

Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells

By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick

When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.

Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.

Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.

James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.

Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.

[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]

FEERSUM ENNJIN: Paul D’Amour’s Doomy Illumination

2011-11-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

Perhaps only Satan truly knows what it takes for a grizzled veteran to stay vital and relevant in the predominantly youth-generated genre of Heavy Metal, but Paul D’Amour seems to have cracked the code. As a founding member of Tool, the bassist D’Amour was one of the architects of an insurgent and progressive sound that expanded and re-defined the boundaries of Metal in the early 90s. Twenty years later and D’Amour is still at the vanguard of heavy rock with his latest project Feersum Ennjin. A bursting black stormcloud of Heavy Metal enlightenment, their darkly atmospheric debut album is heavy but hypnotic, spooky and cinematic. Most of the tracks are ominous, down-tempo grinders with layers of crunchy guitars and thunderous drums (including Tool drummer Danny Carey on one track). The arrangements are mostly unorthodox, with many tunes winding unexpectedly through a number of tempo changes, mood shifts and waves of noise. This “Mobius strip” approach to songwriting is a brilliant tactic to employ, completely removing as it does any air of redundancy that is rampant in almost every single type of popular music including Heavy Metal (perhaps the most predictable music genre). Never rising above the level of a low grumble is a thin haze of growling synth-bass parts gurgling up here and there throughout the record, and this too indicates a fierce determination to pursue further forays outside any pre-conceived definition of Heavy Metal. Balancing a seemingly-impossible blend of head-banging and soul-searching, Feersum Ennjin’s heavy and haunting debut is a smart and angry revelation.

(Feersum Ennjin, release date: November 22, 2011)

Joan Jett by Todd Oldham (Ammo Books)

2011-11-05T08:47:00.001-07:00

As female Rock icons go, there are fewer more pleasing to the eye than Joan Jett. Any serious study of Jett’s groundbreaking career would have to include a ton of photos in order to fully illustrate the sheer force of her image and attitude, and this gorgeous book does just that. Indeed Todd Oldham’s new biography of Jett may be the clear front runner for definitive study status because it contains as much color photography as it does text. Certainly Jett’s work and career are worthy of serious analysis. She has been a balls-out, unapologetic, kick ass rocker since day one. Peruse page after page of glossy photos of Joan Jett and treat your eyes to an enticing visual document of a true underdog original and a classic American girl that created a look all her own. Her sense of style has been copied by countless disenfranchised vixens the world over. Before Joan Jett and the Runaways, the Plain Janes of the world had almost no prototypical recourse to re-envision themselves. The punk rock fashions partly inspired by Joan Jett and the Runaways gave ugly ducklings more eye-catching options than they’d previously ever dreamed of. Joan Jett proved, and continues to prove to this day, with not just her look but her straightforward rock and roll music, that a woman can be a fireball force to be reckoned with in a male-dominated industry.

In a subtle twist to the traditional role of biographer, Oldham has compiled and transcribed hours of Joan Jett interviews from across a thirty year span and arranged them chronologically so that it reads like Jett telling her own story from the very beginning. The result of Oldham’s efforts is an authoritative study that reads like a definitive history as it comes straight from the source. In transcribing Jett’s words for this book’s text, Oldham has crafted Jett’s autobiography for her.

While still a teenager, Joan set out to blow people’s minds by assembling an all-girl band. Though the press treated The Runaways with disrespect and outright hostility because they were women playing rock and roll, Jett seems to recognize that this was also the reason why they were getting any attention at all. The shameful irony is that the Runaways were then cast in a role where they had to defend and explain themselves to the doubters and haters in the rock press that refused to take the band seriously.

I’ve always had the feeling that Joan never liked to talk to the press about her days with the Runaways. But here she speaks very frankly about the group and the divisions within that led them to disband. Some of the girls were more into metal where Joan and Sandy West believed they were just playing good old rock and roll. Speaking of her kinship with punk rock, Joan reflects on the music’s simplicity and the friends she made in the fledgling British punk scene that embraced and admired the Runaways from the days of their first UK tour in ‘76. Much like the punk rock that was to follow them, the Runaways, though trend setters and trail blazers, were misunderstood and unappreciated in their time. It’s easy for us to see that now. But at the time the girls were in a situation where they could draw no comfort from such a thought. None of them yet twenty years old, they were ill-equipped to deal with the continuous slagging in the press. It was all but over for the Runaways as soon as there were divisions beginning to form within the ranks.

Though they presaged punk’s DIY ethic that would spark so much controversy and commerce in the years to come, The Runaways have been slighted by history. They have never truly received proper credit for being one of the first all-girl bands and inspiring riot grrls around the world to pick up guitars and start bands of their own. In the aftermath of their break up, the punk rock scene the Runaways had helped to inspire would soon explode into a worldwide phenomenon.

Even when she was still a child, Joan always was the Runaway with the toughest and most compelling look. With her thick rings of eyeliner, black hair, tight jeans, sneakers, t-shirt, and a sly snarl that oozed sexy boredom, the other girls in the band always looked like frail cheerleaders standing next to her. As a way of protecting herself, she initially adopted the tough chick exterior as a teenage defense mechanism. In one of the most revealing quotes in the book, Jett confides, “The tough image was put upon me. I don’t think I’ll ever shake it. But personally, I don’t really care. I just wanna play rock and roll.”

After a tough time re-grouping, Jett finally got a new band together and took to the road with unflagging determination to make the big time. The Blackhearts’ sound revised and refined the Runaways blueprint only slightly, but the new tougher, tighter sound caught on almost immediately. Playing shows that sold out on word of mouth alone, Jett sold her independently produced first LP out of the trunk of her car. Though she sold every last copy of multiple pressings of her debut album, Joan was turned down by no less than twenty-three record labels before getting signed. Finally, Joan hears her song on a Miami radio station while the band is on tour and it is heart-warming to read her telling of the triumphant tale. By this point in the story you’ll be rooting for our little girl and the first wave of well-deserved success is cause for celebration.

Jett retains her humility and undying resilience through the ups and downs of her career. Her unwavering belief in the power of straight up rock and roll carries her through the tough times, up the charts, and on into the ages as an undying icon of rock history.

This book stands not just as testament to a fiercely determined woman who won out in the face of adversity and the sexism ingrained in our male-dominated culture, but ironically also a photo album of Jett’s strikingly beautiful face. This is no sex symbol peep show. It’s a mixed collection of professional photos of Jett onstage and from various photo shoots throughout the years in addition to a slew of cozy candid snapshots of Joan with family and friends.

In spite of her reputation as a bad ass rock and roller, some of the candid shots here are most endearing. In the best of them you can see past all the make-up and rock and roll clothing and Jett’s inner child shines through. Truly a window to the soul, it’s her eyes. She can spit that rock and roll scowl at you from onstage and rattle you to your core. But when she lets that little girl smile through it’ll melt your heart. Regardless of her expression, it’s those eyes that’ll hook you. Check the sly grin slowly dawning on her sweet face on the book’s cover for the first glimpse of that smile ‘bout to break.

Joan telling her own story is a fascinating read indeed. But the enduring memory that I will take away from my experience with reading this book is that while flipping through this collection of great photos my face began to mirror Joan’s, smiling back at page after page.

*

For more information, contact: http://www.ammobooks.com/books/joanjett/

*

[A slightly edited version of this article originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in October 2010. –rh]

Lucinda Williams - Blessed (Lost Highway Records)

2011-11-02T17:24:00.001-07:00

No one knows the dark nooks of the heart like Lucinda Williams. Throughout Blessed, her newest CD on Lost Highway Records, she travels across rugged emotional terrain. Williams’ songwriting displays an instinctive understanding that if you don’t put yourself way out there emotionally then you ain’t likely to come back with anything interesting to say.

The new record includes a pair of almost-formulaic portraits of the kind of shady characters Williams has always been drawn to. And her song-sketches of rough and tumble characters remain reliably spot-on and not without a strong element of introspection, as if maybe she’s singing to the mirror. Reflecting on the selfish habits of one particular bad apple on the blazing opener “Buttercup”, Williams snarls through a crooked grin and taunts him with the snarky overture, “Good luck finding your Buttercup”. But Miss Lu also takes frequent detours through new territory here, commenting on the ravages of war with “Soldier’s Song”, lamenting the loss of a beloved associate on “Copenhagen”, and, as ever, pouring her heart out in bittersweet love songs like “Sweet Love”, “Convince Me”, and more.

“Born To Be Loved” is a laconic and torchy recital of the awful things not intended for you: rejection, suffering, sadness. Juxtaposing this loving and positive message over a quiet and slow burning minor key vamp, Lucinda’s voice gets first into your ears and then your head and your heart like the warm rush of heroin permeating and percolating through your bloodstream and the effect is hypnotic.

As a songwriter, Williams possesses the rare ability to use stark, simple language that cuts to the core of human emotion. As a singer, her deep South mush mouth pronunciation subliminally suggests that to articulate the words any more clearly might be more than the heart could bear. She has a southern gothic’s strict economy with language, holding back all but the most essential syllables. Her voice frequently cracks with emotion when she sings, making the listener’s heart strings ripple and resonate like a livewire.

With vocal assistance from Matthew Sweet and some fiery guitar contributions courtesy of Elvis Costello, Lucinda and her band deliver twelve really strong tracks this time out. Arguably her best effort since 1998’s watershed Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.

*

[A slightly edited version of this review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in March 2011. –rh]

Jack Bruce: Composing Himself (Jawbone Press)

2011-11-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

The specter of Cream’s mercurial and complicated drummer Ginger Baker hovers like a menacing thundercloud over the entire musical career of bassist Jack Bruce. The surly and smirking dark cloud presents a real threat while simultaneously promising the necessary H2O for growth and change. Great friends since their youthful days on the London club scene, Jack & Ginger have sparred off and on (mostly on) for their entire career in the music business. In the first few pages of Harry Shapiro’s incisive and illuminating Jack Bruce biography, our protagonist clarifies once and for all the question of whether or not the decades of feuding with Ginger have been exaggerated with a single, terse syllable: “No.”

Born in Scotland in 1943, Jack Bruce moved to Canada with his family for a brief time when he was still a young child. The family was forced to return home to Scotland when his father’s employment opportunities dried up but the experience gave young Jack his first inkling of other cultures and an emboldening taste of international travel at a very early age. From a decidedly political family, the boy was never short on independence and a steely strength of character. The Bruce clan was also a very musical family and Jack was something of a prodigy, even singing for Paul Robeson at a political rally when he was still a child. He wanted to play bass but because his hands were too small he started on cello. Even as a child his piano improvisations caught the attention of his instructors. Jack discovered jazz as a teenager, just as he was tiring of classical music’s strict rules that forbade improvisation. Finding regular work as a musician when he was still in school, Jack drove his own car to school at a time when many of his teachers could not afford an automobile. An accomplished bassist by the age of 18, Jack went to London in 1961.

One of the busiest working musicians on the London club scene in the early 60s, it was inevitable that Jack would eventually cross paths with Ginger Baker. Both players passed repeatedly through the ranks of Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the Graham Bond Organization among numerous other groups. Though the mutual respect was instant, sparks were flying between the two men before Jack had turned 20 years old. On one occasion Ginger kicked Jack out of a band at knifepoint.

Ironically the headstrong Scotsman struggled with insecurities. These were all but dispelled after an afternoon session backing Marvin Gaye for some British TV appearances. Hanging out after the taping, Gaye asked Jack to come to the States to join his band. Though the offer was a tremendous confidence boost, Jack turned it down and stayed on in London where he soon found himself playing bass with Manfred Mann just as that band’s fortunes were rapidly ascending.

In the early chapters of this fascinating biography I began to realize that, like many people, I knew almost nothing about Jack Bruce’s illustrious career. Even before the formation of Bruce’s most famous affiliation, he’d already had more experience in the music business than most musicians three times his age.

In 1966, Bruce, Baker and Clapton were getting bored with their respective bands. Where these three men saw the blues as a loose language, a beginning point, all their previous groups saw it as a rigid form, as an end. All this in spite of the obvious charm and immense talent encapsulated in bands like the Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds. In perhaps one of the most fortuitous coincidences in the history of rock music, the stars aligned and Cream was born.

Though the timing was perfect, the birth of Cream was fraught with tension and difficulty from the beginning. For one thing, Ginger was already a full-blown junkie before the band was formed and it was a stipulation to starting the band that he quit using. He didn’t and he nearly overdosed backstage at one of Cream’s earliest TV appearances.

Much of the aforementioned is common knowledge. But the diversity and sheer volume of Jack Bruce’s relatively unknown post-Cream musical activities is almost shocking. Indeed, it is the chapters of this book that relate Bruce’s post-Cream output that this writer found most illuminating. Readers may find it hard to believe how much stuff he’s done since Cream’s break up in 1968 and the list of players he has worked with is a mile long. As the trio’s most accomplished singer and songwriter, many believed it was Jack who would go on to greater fame as a solo artist after Cream disbanded. While Ginger disappeared into obscurity, only occasionally resurfacing for a gig here and there, it was Clapton of course who ascended to superstardom after a long battle with heroin and alcohol.

In the late 60s and early 70s very few musicians other than Miles Davis were blending jazz improv with the fire and fury of rock. Alongside Miles’s seminal Bitches Brew, the music Jack Bruce was making at that time with John McLaughlin and Tony Williams is considered one of the progenitors of fusion. This after Jack turned down an offer from John Paul Jones to join Led Zeppelin. Stephen Stills invited to Jack to join CSNY, but only as a bass player and not as a contributing songwriter. Another polite pass from Jack.

One of the most driven and fiercely independent musicians of the rock era, Jack Bruce followed his muse at every turn. This frequently meant starting over from scratch with a whole new band and playing small clubs for little or no money. In spite of these personal frustrations and financial limitations, Bruce shows no sign of regret for the path he chose was uniquely his. Over the years Jack was called upon to write and sing and play with an incredibly diverse array of players, including Carla Bley, Bernie Worrell, Gary Moore, Larry Coryell, Ringo Starr, and the Golden Palominos to name but a few.

There were huge successes along the way. Jack’s first two solo records were greeted with a rapturous reception and the announcement of his plans to launch a new group with Leslie West sparked one of the greatest bidding wars the industry has ever seen. Though that band would collapse in haze of drugs and corruption, Jack would rise again just a few years later with a new Jack Bruce Band featuring Mick Taylor on guitar. After the completion of a sold-out six week tour, Taylor’s recurring and career-paralyzing fear of success on someone else’s terms led him to quit the band on the eve of a recording session for the band’s first record. Not for the first or last time, Jack was forced to start all over again. In spite of disheartening episodes like this one, Jack never failed to rise again like a phoenix.

With his natural born skills, compositional prowess paired with uncanny improvisational instincts, and unparalleled standard of quality woven into and throughout the entirety of his massive output, Jack Bruce is like a great secret ghost whose legacy haunts and courses throughout the classic rock era. To a man, every individual who played with Jack over the years will say that the experience of working with him expanded their knowledge and understanding of music. This incredible testament is repeated numerous times throughout Jack’s bio, the end result being a sense of his overarching influence holding sway over the development of rock music over the past four decades. Co-written with long-time songwriting partner Pete Brown, Cream’s most famous number “Sunshine Of Your Love” seems now almost like a metaphor for the man himself. The rays of his loving sunshine have warmed and nurtured the music and memories of many of his contemporaries, all of whom consider him an unrecognized giant in his field.

Although I was largely ignorant of Bruce’s post-Cream activities and his tremendous influence before reading this great book, I have to agree with what Ginger Baker said in the wake of Cream’s very successful reunion concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in 2005: “I rather like wee Jack now!”

*

[A slightly edited version of this article originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September of 2010. –rh]

Honda's Crazy Lame Commercial

2011-10-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

I know this shouldn’t bother me as much as it does, but the new Honda commercial really pisses me off. The spot portrays a happy family outing with a carful of kids singing an acapella version of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” with mom and dad singing along in the front seat.

I promise I’m not gonna get over-the-top bent out of shape over this. Taking the time to blog about it may already be a disproportionate response. But when I was 14 years old I was a huge Ozzy fan and at that time - in my hometown anyway - he was not “cool” at all. Early in the 80s before heavy metal became big business corporate hair metal bullshit, Ozzy was considered dangerous. Kids like me had to sneak his records into the house. Many parents equated Ozzy with Satan. Now of course we all know that back then he was just off his rocker, drunk and fucked up all the time. (His deranged exploits included the now-infamous gross-out contest with Motley Crue that culminated with Ozzy snorting a line of ants off the sidewalk.)

But in 21st Century Bizarro World, celebrities seem to clamor to be the next to fuck up royally in public because everything this side of child-molestation guarantees a cash-grab comeback. America loves its fallen heros. You watch: Charlie Sheen will be back on top in no time. And Lindsay Lohan will be looking over his shoulder, jockeying for position to be next in line. Mark my words.

But I digress. That’s not really the point I set out to make here.

Honda’s latest ad campaign is so aggressive that I get sucker punched by this damn commercial about ten times on any given Sunday. And each time it just seems to rattle my cage. Now I’m not saying I was ahead of my time. Even in 1982 Ozzy already had millions of followers. But the thing is: I recall being looked upon with shock, horror and disgust by the other kids in my school and many adults as well because I liked Ozzy’s music. Now Honda has a cutesy little family chirping his song in a car commercial like it was “Frere Jacques” and it kinda makes me sick.

Stranger still, Ozzy’s lyrics stripped to the bone in this acapella version makes it clearer than ever that most people never stop to think about their true message. Ozzy actually makes some astute sociological observations in the song, but most people’s unshakeable mental image of the man is a mad beast biting the heads off of bats and/or doves, or perhaps more commonly as the drug casualty daddy from the TV show The Osbournes. I can recall being absolutely dumbfounded the first time I realized that the lyrics to “After Forever” from Sabbath’s Master Of Reality LP were damn near a commercial for Christ, and I’d been listening to it for years already by that point. If I’m a fan and I never noticed it, what are the chances of non-fans ever having the slightest clue?

Corporate America is a soulless shark. It will exploit anything for a buck, destroying the pure essence of whatever it chooses to feed on. Ozzy’s music was never “sacred” to me. His music, indeed most heavy metal of the time, resonated with a certain contingent of the teenage audience of the early 80s because it fairly screamed rebellion in the face of all authority figures. But now it is a commodity to be shredded and “re-purposed” to make us all feel warm and fuzzy inside when we think of the 2012 Honda Pilot and that’s just weird.

This is a resentment that I do not wish to feel. It makes me think that maybe the parent-scaring music of my youth was sacred in a way. It was an ever-reliable place of refuge where I could always go to be alone and to get away from the adult world and all its ridiculous rules and false judgments. I still run to the music I loved as a kid as a means to escape the harsh realities of life. I take it so serious that some have even accused me of having a Peter Pan complex. I’m still wearing the same uniform of faded jeans and black t-shirt and Converse tennis shoes and I’m still listening to Black Sabbath at an unconscionably loud volume. As ever, this remains and shall forever be my secret hiding place. Honda’s stupid-ass commercial might get under my skin, but in the long run, in the grand scheme of things, it’ll barely register a blip on my radar. You know where to find me.

Urge Overkill - Rock & Roll Submarine

2011-10-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

A lot has changed in the music industry in the sixteen years since Urge Overkill put out a new record. All those changing trends and technological advances of the last few years shrivel and blow away like irrelevant dead leaves on the roadside with the arrival of Rock & Roll Submarine, a blazing, bloody-knuckled monolith of monster riffs executed with utmost precision. Right from the start, the band comes bounding out of their corner, still in fighting shape and virtually exploding with more energy than most bands half their age.

It’s a perilous dichotomy faced by bands who continue playing Hard Rock well into their 40s and 50s and beyond. Balancing years of hard-won knowledge and experience with whatever shred of youthful energy you might have left or might be reduced to faking in order to pull it off convincingly is no easy feat. A lot of dudes embarrass themselves in the process. Not to worry. These guys nail it and make it sound easy. It must be in their blood. Not many artists can return from a decade and a half hiatus and hit the ground running, firing on all pistons like they never went away and never aged a day. Urge Overkill sounds as good as ever on the new record, at times even pushing their wicked, growling vocal harmonies and distorted guitar tones past the brink of anything they’ve done before.

With menacing bass and guitar lines linked and lashing in unison like a chain of fire accompanying the raspy gravel harmonies of Nash Kato and Eddie Roeser, the opening track “Mason/Dixon” is hooky, heavy, and haunting. Call it Sinister Pop. The title track poses the question, “Do I have to spell it out again? This time with attitude?” Upon further thought, our protagonist answers his own question when he claims “I know a better way” and drops in a Stooges riff with a wink and a nod. This band always had a gift for blending the best in pop sensibilities with ten-feet-tall power chords and punk energy. That winning combination is stronger than ever on Rock & Roll Submarine, with just a dash of grey-streaked humor thrown in for good measure.

“Effigy” rages with fierce guitar tones that are thick as hot lava yet punch with snapping, brutal force. You can practically see the speaker cones throbbing, the cabinets shaking, the pant legs flapping from the punishing volume. The lyrics to “Effigy” include one of the better hate song couplets in recent memory: “I don’t want an apology. I want an effigy”. Conversely, the award for Best New Valentine goes to “Thought Balloon”, featuring the irresistible invitation “Would you be my thought balloon?” set to a persistent pop jangle and layers of acoustic and electric guitars.

The record clocks in at a lean 40 minutes, but Urge Overkill unleashes more of Hell’s howling wolves and ferocious power chords here than most bands can dish out in their whole career. These songs are hopped up dragsters racing around in your heart with voices and guitars roaring like a manic beast and the racket is glorious.

* * *

[This review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in May 2011. –rh]

Curt Kirkwood’s Tinker Toy Still Life with the Meat Puppets

2011-10-22T13:38:00.000-07:00

Although their first record was released nearly three decades ago, the Meat Puppets still bring the Psych-Folk storm like a youthful gang of delirious sun-dazed bandits. The veteran group has weathered more than its share of adversity in its storied past, including but not limited to drug problems and jail time. It was just a few years ago when band leader Curt Kirkwood welcomed the return of his brother and Puppets’ original bass player Cris back into the fold. And now son of the late great Doug Sahm of the Sir Douglas Quartet, drummer Shannon Sahm is a full-fledged member of the band. With that the brothers Kirkwood can now count the Sahm family bloodline as part of the Meat Puppets’ Rock n Roll DNA. The band’s new CD Lollipop, their thirteenth, is turbo-charged by Sahm’s confident drum pummeling. His exuberant drum work propels the hypnotic, pounding “Orange” while his clever timing shifts animate the album-opening “Incomplete”.

Despite the band’s long history, the new record fairly bounces with youthful vigor. When told this sounds like a band that’s just getting started, Curt Kirkwood shrugs, “We always were energetic. And Shannon is just hopelessly enthusiastic. Always. That’s part of his deal. I don’t know where he gets it but his dad had the same thing. It’s some kind of sickness! That enthusiasm for making something cool, be it a gig or whatever. And Cris is glad to be playing again. This is the third album we’ve done since he got out of rehab, so we’ve kind of got our sea legs back. And that’s also kind of the reason why I called the record Lollipop too, because it’s such a toe-tapper. Even the slower stuff has a kind of inertia to it. It’s kind of a jolly record.”

The curtain rises on the simmering “Incomplete” with its layers of vocal harmonies, jangling guitars and eerie strings implying ghostly counter melodies. Leading the charge is an undulating Cris Kirkwood bass line that dances an unpredictable zig-zag course through the song’s verses. Like lazy waves of heat rising off Arizona asphalt, Curt’s laconic vocals set the tone here for the rest of this great collection of pop song abstractions and rock & roll fever dreams. Curt and company took a slightly different approach to recording Lollipop.

“We didn’t rehearse the material or anything”, he says. “The stuff was really only about half done when we went in the studio, so we were able to just build it from the ground up like tinker toys. That’s what it reminded me of right away: It was like a tinker toy still life.”

“Generally,” Curt concedes, “We like to go and learn the songs and cut some live tracks and then augment them. Or at least try to do it as realistically as possible. But this time Shannon and I cut everything on guitar and drums first so that we didn’t get away from the framework of the tunes. We started with the vocals because me and Cris are not very strong singers and we need to have the space there. If you dive right in with a band arrangement you’re gonna have guitars in the mix and they tend to fuck with our vocals.” In spite of employing this previously untested recording method, Curt happily reports, “The paradox is that it actually ended up sounding pretty natural and ‘vibe-y’. Although it was completely put together in a way that I think a lot of people really wouldn’t like to do it. We had fun with it.”

A new approach to the recording process does not, however, signal a change in Kirkwood’s songwriting techniques. His methods are, in his words, “About the same as they’ve always been, really.”

In his patented deadpan tone of perma-shrug Buddha-slacker confidence, the lanky singer-guitarist known the world over for his highly influential and irreverent Rock and Roll Deconstructionism and psychedelic Cow-Punk elaborates on an unexpectedly mathematical songwriting formula. About his approach to songwriting, Kirkwood says, “I’ve always done these things as a kind of geometry. Musically and lyrically too there’s a lot of geometry involved, but it’s sort of an oblique geometry. Because you can do what you want but still there’s movement and there’s lines. It’s in the way that I see them. It’s more that geometry than colors. Color comes in later. But first there’s gotta be that geometry and I’m still into that.”

“Of course that’s just the formulaic part of it,” he concedes to illuminate an afterthought. “The other side of it is that there’s some cool chord change or something that you just stumble across. And if you’ve got cool chords you’re probably gonna get a cool melody, if you take a little time. Or if I have just the same old chords that everybody has always used, then it’s all about finding a melody that’s just a little bit different. But once again, for me, that seems kind of like geometry.”

Ironically, for a band whose material always abounds with energy and subversive charm, Kirkwood claims, “I don’t approach the stuff that emotionally. I like it to have an impact that’s a little beyond that. That kind of far-fetched feeling that’s a little beyond any of the emotions we pre-figure. It’s like that feeling when you go to a good concert or something like that makes you happy, but it’s a little beyond that. There’s an exuberance that you can’t put your finger on. I’m always looking for something that will do that. And I’ve been doing it that way a long time, you know? It’s a weird little dragon chase!”

Whether juxtaposing abstract phrases over an otherwise straightforward hoe-down like “Baby Don’t” or copping to blissful ignorance with unexpectedly clever language in the catchy “Damn Thing”, Kirkwood’s Mastery of Psych-Folk song craft is in strong evidence on every track on the new record. One of the down-tempo numbers on the record that nonetheless has a great hook to it is an acoustic guitar and vibes-laden tune called “Amazing”. Again here, Sahm’s innate sense of restraint creates a drum track that alternately punches and suspends the tension. The song’s chorus is a melodic murmur that gets stuck in your head like a viral tape loop.

Asked about the tune, Kirkwood laughs and says, “That was originally called ‘I Hate The Human Race’! It’s a funny one. Instead of saying ‘Amazing’ in the chorus, it used to say ‘I hate the human race’. But, you know, I just couldn’t sing it live. Funny enough, we were going to open for Willie Nelson for a Christmas show about ten years ago. So I wrote it as like a Christmas song!” Laughing about the tune’s unlikely origin and previous incarnation, he goes on to say, “Some of my closest friends were like, ‘God, that song’s awful man!’ And you know, as much as I like it and as perfect as I thought it was, it is hard to sing. Like, to look somebody in the eye and sing that? And I guess I just didn’t want to be that committed to it in its original form. So I took that little phrase ‘amazing’ that was at the end of the chorus and shoved it at the beginning and it works. This was kind of at the last minute and I just thought, ‘Oh shit! Good!’ Because I love the song and I love the chorus. I’d had the song around for a while but I just couldn’t figure out why I would do that. But we recorded it anyway and when the lyric change came it seemed that the content to me was still the same. You can take it however you want.”

Kirkwood pauses to think before answering questions. With each inquiry he seems to be turning the question over and over in his hands before finally shrugging and muttering remarks that sound offhand, maybe even offering the same answers that he’s trotted out for stock questions over the years. But once into the rhythm of the conversation he hits his stride and it wasn’t long before I realized that his were not tired and rehearsed responses. It’s just that the guy has been doing this a long time. While there will surely forever be an impossible-to-name magic to the process involved, the man’s methods are tried and true and clearly he’s sticking to his guns. In “Town” from the new record, Kirkwood laments his role as “one sick clown in a one trick town”. There is considerably more than that to the man who coined it, but it is maybe a better metaphor for his place in Rock history than even he is aware of.

The calmly measured, almost drowsy-sounding tone of his voice is rendered transparent by the obvious enthusiasm that Kirkwood still feels for his lot in life. When pressed for his favorite part of the work cycle involved with recording a record and then going out on tour with the band, he says, “The whole process is a blast.” Elaborating, he goes on, “There’s a lot of it that I really like. I really like hearing the album done. I love that rendition, that final shove off. When you think, ‘Okay it’s done’. Because then you just say: There it is. That’s what it is. And it’s kinda hard to aim that stuff. Then the mystery finally comes to light and all of a sudden you see what your work yielded. And it’s kind of a crap shoot really. But I love that part of it.”

Eager to hit the road and play the new material, Kirkwood says, “I guess I also like seeing the difference between how the stuff sounds on the album and how it sounds live. I like to see if it comes off live like it does on the album or if it takes on a life of its own.” About the recording-and-touring cycle that many find tedious and redundant, Kirkwood admits, “It’s fun to stay focused on something for that long, for me, because I generally don’t do it. My attention span is usually good for about half an hour of watching cartoons and that’s about it, ya know?”

The confident but self-deprecating tone gives way to well-deserved pride when Kirkwood reflects on the Meat Puppets’ trajectory and track record. Like someone who somehow managed to dodge every bullet in a shower of machine-gun spray, Kirkwood sounds grateful for the fact that he never had to do much of the bullshit dance with major labels. Unlike the overwhelming majority of his peers, he says, “I’ve never really had to yield too much to that major label stuff. I mean I’ve always just had what material I have, you know? So in my case it’s always been more about talking the label into what I have. It’s real hard for me to write or to compete with stuff that I don’t agree with, like, to write something specifically for someone else’s aim. Whether it’s for a movie soundtrack or whatever, I’ve never had a whole lot of luck at that. So I just have what I have. And with that I held my own with the majors.”

About the band’s earliest recording endeavors, Kirkwood happily admits, “SST spoiled us. Back then we could just do whatever we wanted and they would gladly put out whatever we gave them. They didn’t blink an eye.” Nowadays the band is signed to Megaforce and Kirkwood gratefully relates that their new label is “definitely like that too. They’re concerned that it’s a good record of course, and we see eye to eye with that. And they let me produce the record myself. Which I think says a lot. I don’t have a big track record except for our indie stuff from the 80s. We produced all that stuff ourselves. But they kind of just let me keep going in the direction that I was going in with our record Rise To Your Knees (Anodyne Records, 2007). It’s been amazing for me, because in the past I have had to take all that cool stuff I learned in the 80s and completely put it away and do a whole producer/arranger trip. I work real hard on my craft and it’s hard to work as much as you do on it and then have other people come in and do more to it when you think you’re done. And I’ve conceded to that plenty of times, because I love Paul Leary and I love Pete Anderson (producers of 1994’s Too High To Die and 1991’s Forbidden Places, respectively). And I’m not the one to say ‘the art is done’, you know? I’m no artist. I’m just a fucking peon with a paintbrush. And it’s hard to just say ‘Oh, I know more than you do’. That’s a really bad stance in art. Fortunately I’ve never had to work with a total douche bag producer, but there have been situations where I would still have to listen to the ones I have worked with. And who knows? They could be right! But nonetheless I work really hard on this stuff. I’ve been doing it for a long time.” Shaking off the seriousness and breaking into a chuckle mid-thought, Kirkwood is quick to close with the quip, “I’ve been in my own corner for so long, whether I wanted to be or not, that it’s pretty gratifying to be given the opportunity to produce these records myself. You know - outside of just being a guitar monkey!”

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[This article originally appeared in a slightly edited form on Crawdaddy.com in June 2011. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman. –rh]

Dr. Michael White - Adventures In New Orleans Jazz Part 1

2011-10-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

A galloping thumb piano ushers in a thumping bass while tribal drums roll and tumble behind a moaning clarinet, creating the ominous intro to “West African Strut”. Centuries of Africa’s influence on Jazz are brilliantly encapsulated thusly by Dr. Michael White and his ensemble in less than 45 seconds. Before you know it, the song’s intro has morphed into a joyous Dixieland romp. In many ways this opening salvo is all it takes to make clear that this isn’t just another Dixieland record. Indeed, the first word of the album title indicates quite clearly that this is to be an adventure.

To be sure, there are a handful of traditional New Orleans Jazz tunes here. But even the old war horses are re-animated and invigorated by the sparkling performances of Cynthia Girtley (“Careless Love”) and Gregory Stafford (“Basin Street Blues”). Their contributions crackle with life and a soul-deep passion that cannot be taught or learned, only born into and cultivated down through generations of New Orleans’ musical families that are driven by their love and respect for tradition. The obligatory standards aside, the real sparks fly from White’s clever remakes of non-Jazz material. Though the traditional rhythms of Reggae and Jazz are quite different, White and his band make Bob Marley’s “One Love” sound like it’s been waiting for years to be played by a Dixieland band. Drummer Herman Lebeaux deserves special mention here, as he lays down the smooth groove that holds together Marley’s tune as it segues almost unnoticeably into a happy medley with Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”.

Dr. White leads the charge throughout without ever hogging the spotlight. His sly clarinet weaves in and out of the sweet melodies like a needle and thread stitching the crucial seams that hold it all together. From somber funeral march to raucous roadhouse stomp, Dr. Michael White’s re-delivery of the happy magic that is New Orleans Jazz resonates with the full spectrum of human emotion. As all good New Orleans Jazz should, the album-closing rendition of Paul Simon’s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” feels like a tipsy stroll down Bourbon Street with all the sights, sounds and smells of celebration tingling your senses, twisting your body and moving your feet to the festive rhythms.

[This review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in June 2011. –rh]

Iggy Pop's Lyrical Instinct

2011-10-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

I played tag in the auto graveyard
I looked up at the radio tower
Rag tent by the railroad tracks
Concrete poured over steel grid
Pondered my fate while they built the interstate

This opening stanza from “Cold Metal”, the lead-off track on Iggy Pop’s Instinct LP from 1988, succinctly sets the scene for the brutally honest autobiography to follow. In a few lines of naked simplicity, Iggy sketches the background of his humble beginnings like a true Punk Mystic. Picture the boy Iggy here, observing the radio tower and the birth of the interstate highway system, eager to see just where these things will take him. It’s a remarkable example of understatement that evokes a very specific mood of wonderment and conviction. It’s also the opening salvo on an Iggy Pop LP that has never really been given its due.

Largely ignored at the time of its release, Instinct has wallowed in relative obscurity in the Iggy canon. Following more or less right on the heels of the Bowie-produced Blah Blah Blah album from 1986, Iggy was enjoying something of a renaissance and a modest comeback around this time. Bowie’s involvement had garnered some attention and managed to squeak out at least one minor hit for Iggy with “Real Wild Child (Wild One)”, but for the most part the Blah Blah Blah record was considered by many fans to be an over-produced disappointment. In what was perhaps a deliberate display of Iggy’s own personal revulsion at having conceded to make such a commercial-sounding record with Blah Blah Blah, Instinct would have none of its predecessor’s gloss and sheen. Well before the record’s release, the rumor mill was a-buzz with talk of Iggy enlisting producer Bill Laswell and former Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones for the project. Hopes and expectations ran high. A true return to form, Instinct hit the ground like a rabid beast and fans were much pleased with its rough and rugged sound. Gone were Bowie’s synthesizers and cheesy electronic drums. Iggy himself sounded much more at ease and confident, growling over the din of distorted guitars and heavy drum beats. Home again in the muck and chaos.

Obviously there has been quite a lot written about Iggy over the years. He is forever being lauded as the Godfather of Punk, and rightfully so, but very little has been written about him as a lyricist. For all of his onstage antics and barking beast vocal stylings, it is safe to say that Iggy’s simplistic lyrics were just as much of an influence on Punk as the Stooges’ brutal, brain-pummeling sound. Even King Cantankerous John Lydon would have to cop to that. Iggy’s Instinct stands as testament to guy who always keeps things simple and to the point, often managing to say more with less. Throughout the record, he sounds like a man standing strong and confident against all odds. At the time of this recording, Iggy was already twenty years into a very unlikely career that many thought would have ended in a blaze of drugs and foolishness many years before. Today, another twenty years further down the road, we can look back and see he was justified in his convictions.

“Cold Metal” is an apt metaphor for modern life’s continual barrage of contradictions. It may be “the father of beat, the mother of the street”, but it’s also the dubious “skeleton of the free”. In one couplet alone, Iggy simultaneously celebrates and denigrates “Cold Metal”. Marveling one moment how “it’ll even fly”, seconds later he spits out a reference to the same as “rust buckets in the sky”. The song sounds almost like a metaphor for the glowing pros and unforgivable cons of America itself. In what was surely an unintentional premonition of the environmental movement, Iggy warns us that we “better save a tree”, citing Hendrix and Buddha as inspiration along the way. Chosen as the first single from the record, the song’s title may have been responsible for giving A&M Records the stupid idea to market Iggy as a Heavy Metal artist. This was 1988, after all. By crimping his bleached blond hair and sporting a chain mail vest in many publicity photos and live performances of the time, Iggy himself may have inadvertently sent false signals of his own willingness to play along.

It was around this time that Iggy’s pre-occupation with all things false and phony began its rapid swell into full-blown obsession. His later solo records in the 90s and an eventual reunion with the Stooges would provide him with the platform to call bullshit on everyone and everything within shouting distance, but it was the Instinct record where this foundation was laid. The album’s title track is an incisive scalpel, cutting straight through the bullshit to reveal the ugly truth of the world where Iggy resides.

Already a wise veteran of the industry, Iggy sums up his station with strategic patience…

Standing on the borderline between joy and reason
Tending carefully my fire, waiting for my season

Only three lines in and he’s unable to resist the impulse to snap a quick peripheral nip at the hand that feeds him…

I know who these people are
I know what they stand for
Corruption’s built into their plan
Nothing’s on the other hand
Tricks and trials
Await the child

With full faith and absolute trust in instinct over other impulses and influences, with no other choice or desire but to embrace his fate, our hero bravely dives into the fray…

Instinct keeps me running, running like a deer…
Running through the grinning shadows

Elsewhere on the record we find the unexpectedly shy boy who penned “China Girl” still crooning about how his heart yearns for a simple girl with strong convictions. No one puts a woman on a pedestal quite like Iggy, who invariably likens the object of his desire to some kind of goddess. The Instinct record includes two numbers in this vein. Not content with a single ode to a “Strong Girl”, Iggy also serenades his “Tuff Baby”. In this way, Iggy continues his pattern of pining for things that are simple only on the surface, like the way the most mundane conversation with a woman can carry within in it the weight, wonder and promise of an epic romance.

Always a lively interview subject on Late Night With David Letterman, Dave gleefully invited Iggy back on the program time and time again during the 1980s. Often buoyant and childlike when he found himself in an interview situation to his liking, Iggy’s numerous appearances on the program always showed him barely able to contain his enthusiasm. Bouncing up and down in the chair next to Dave’s desk, Iggy reminisced about his memories of watching Soupy Sales on television as a child growing up in Detroit. Sales always instructed his young viewers to keep their cards and letters to “25 words or less”. Much to Dave’s delight, Iggy claimed that this lesson stuck with him all his life and greatly influenced his spartan songwriting technique.

(Ironically, Soupy’s sons Tony and Hunt Sales would play in Iggy’s backing band in the late 70s and later went on to form Tin Machine with David Bowie.)

Bootlegs from the Instinct tour find Iggy facing typically boisterous and belligerent crowds. Yet his between-song banter would frequently veer into introspective and confessional rants that were often lost on audiences that came to stage dive and slam dance, hoping to see Iggy roll around on broken glass. “This is a song I wrote when I got really pissed off,” he confided to a packed house at Boston’s Channel. “I couldn’t take drugs anymore because my mind got blown. So I thought I’ll just have to get high on you.” He’s losing them but he doesn’t care. They writhe and scream as if the mosh-pit melee were their sole reason for being there. “Everybody wants to feel high,” he continues with uncharacteristic onstage calm. Maybe it’s a soliloquy for his own benefit at this point. “That ain’t no damn crime. Everybody just wants to feel alright whenever they can get away with it. And I’m the same way.” He pauses, mulling it over while the crowd-beast undulates with barely-contained rage. Finally, unapologetically, he declares, “I would never take back all those times I got stoned and every time I stripped off my clothes.” This, it is clear from the recording, the audience can relate to. Finally he leads the band into the song “High On You” from the Instinct album. “But now I’m getting real high… on YOU.”

The U.K. Subs’ former bassist Alvin Gibbs was in Iggy’s band for the 1988 tour, and he later wrote a book about the experience. If we can believe what we read in Neighborhood Threat: On Tour With Iggy Pop, Iggy was still struggling to stay clean at the time. More than once during the tour he succumbed to temptation, though by all accounts he set aside the hard stuff for good around this time. The lyrics on his Instinct record may in fact be a true indication that the man was taking stock of his station at the time, perhaps knowing even then that if he was going to be in it for the long haul that he’d better ditch some bad habits and develop some good new ones and make it stick. Say what you want about his freakish physique and undying insistence to go shirtless 99% of the time, it is no accident that Iggy is in such good shape for a man who will be 65 next year.

All of us bleed the same when we’re cut. Throughout history there have been many producers of pop music that would have you believe that certain artists will bleed pretty pink unicorns and rainbows of healing light and never-ending bliss when you cut them open. Speaking truth to power and railing against the mainstream for over 40 years, Iggy Pop bleeds out the good, the bad and the ugly every time you put him in a studio and press record. Here on Instinct, in a handful of couplets buried long ago and far away on an album released during an era considered by some to be a low point in his career, Iggy Pop conveyed more intensity and more palpable human emotion than most artists do in their whole life. His wild man persona and storied history with the legendary Stooges are well-documented in the annals of rock history. But throughout a career that spans over four decades, Iggy Pop has rarely if ever been taken seriously as a lyricist. Discussions about his work never credit his lyrics for their emotional depth. Perhaps that’s the price you pay when your most famous song is called “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. The final track on the Instinct record (“Squarehead”) makes it all too clear that the very same man who wants to be your dog definitely “ain’t gonna be no squarehead”. And while the truth is that Iggy probably won’t change anybody’s mind with that frank statement alone, slang and street language have always the parlance of his trade and the defiant sentiment of the song is much greater than the sum of its parts. Iggy weaves grime, filth, and iron-clad conviction with hard-won insight and spits out acidic poetry. If you’re looking for a suck-ass brain-dead toady to tow the company line with a big, fake smile on his face, I believe you must have dialed the wrong number.

* * *

[This article originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in a slightly edited form in July 2011. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman. –rh]

Nicole Atkins' Jam-Packed Life

2011-10-13T16:57:00.001-07:00

[This article originally appeared on crawdaddy.com in July 2011 in a slightly edited form. –rh]

The intro tape plays as the band members take their places on the stage. Stone-faced behind black sunglasses, bassist Jeremy Kay and drummer Ezra Oaklan seem unaffected by the summer heat, their dark shades lending the bearded rhythm section a cool aloofness. This statuesque calm is best exemplified by tiny guitar goddess Irina Yalkowsky, who is preparing to unleash a barrage of growling blues guitar riffs. With the possible exceptions of Neil Young and the occasional helicopter howling overhead, the unsuspecting crowd will not hear anything like Yalkowsky’s six-string sorcery anywhere else around the festival grounds all weekend long.

The sun beats down on a vast green expanse of Tennessee farmland that has been converted to accommodate 80,000 people at what is now considered the big daddy of all summer music festivals. The sunburned and music-crazed crowd is dispersed in random, undulating, ever-changing contingents that swarm from stage to stage. Stage right behind a towering column of speakers on Bonnaroo’s Other Tent stage, Jersey girl Nicole Atkins hangs her head for one last moment of concentration as her long brown hair with rebel yellow streaks falls over her face. Her brow is momentarily furrowed in concentration then it lifts and her face relaxes into a wide grin. The Morricone intro tape gives way to the band pummeling their instruments to conjure a smashing crescendo that is Atkins’ cue to come bounding out on the stage.

Located on a far corner of the festival grounds, the Other Tent does not garner many curious passers-by. Because of their more central locations in the midst of constant foot traffic, almost all of the other Bonnaroo stages lure in casual listeners. But the Other Tent is a destination stage. So when a crowd gathers around this stage for an afternoon performance by Nicole Atkins & the Black Sea, it is no accident. Atkins appears from the wings and approaches the microphone at center stage and the crowd erupts in a spontaneous roar of recognition at the sight of her. Her face brightens with a bit of bashful red in reaction as she begins the rugged whisper of “Heavy Boots”.

Somber verse builds to rumbling chorus, while Atkins’ voice rises and falls with the music. The lyrics are an invitation to lay down your weary tune and let Miss Nicole take the weight for a while. She pleads her case like an impassioned friend who will not take no for an answer. When Atkins’ calm and assuring tone referring to “all the battles deep inside you” leaps alarmingly into the full-throated upper register threat-promise repetition of “they are no match for me”, it is the stuff of everlasting goosebumps. She may look like the girl next door but when she belts it out like this her voice could level a mountain.

A relaxed and natural performer onstage, Atkins has been tirelessly working on the road since February. The sultry ballad “The Way It Is” is a nightly feature in her set and Atkins invariably eases right into the song’s acapella intro with no cue from the band as to what key the song is in. This type of brain-muscle memory is akin to perfect pitch and it is rare. The song builds to a torchy chorus that spills over into a stunning guitar solo from Yalkowsky that rages like a five-alarm fire. At Bonnaroo, Nicole Atkins & the Black Sea full-tilt sprinted through three sets on three different stages in less than six hours before piling back into the van and heading down the road to the next gig.

Atkins, who now calls Brooklyn home, has been through a lot over the past few years. In spite of the relative success of her Neptune City album from 2007, her label dropped her. She subsequently parted ways with both band and boyfriend and moved back to Jersey for a brief period before starting work with a whole new crew on what would become the Mondo Amore record. The gate keepers do not issue disclaimers or helmets to shield you from the indignities of the music business. But Atkins seems to have rebounded from hard times with thicker skin, greater resolve, and fierce convictions about finally making the record that she wanted to make.

I recently spoke with Atkins, just a few days before her recent Bonnaroo performance. She graciously set aside a few minutes of her day to chat with me while she was en route to a show at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom.

* * *

RH: What’s happening? Where are you today?

Nicole Atkins: We’re almost in Cleveland. We’re playing a show at Beachland Ballroom tonight.

RH: You said “Almost”. You must be in transit then?

NA: Yep. I’m in the van.

RH: How is the tour going?

NA: Today’s the first day! Well, the record came out in February and we’ve been on the road pretty steady since then. We did a month and a half of touring and then we were home for a little while. We’ve been out of town a lot, but this is like the first day of our next month out on the road again.

RH: Assuming it’s a fairly wide spectrum, what kind of venues have you been playing?

NA: Yeah, it’s small clubs on up to some bigger places. We just did some shows with the Avett Brothers and they were in like mini-amphitheaters. In a few days we get to play with the Black Keys in Indianapolis in a hall built for like 8,000 people. That’s gonna be nuts. So yeah, it’s anywhere from like a basement shithole (laughs) to big amphitheaters. It all depends if it’s one of our shows or if we are opening for someone. But, you know, we’re getting there.

RH: And you’re scheduled to play a couple sets at Bonnaroo?

NA: Yeah, we have three sets. The first one is our big, like… actual full set. And the second one is a more stripped down, shorter set. And then the third one is another full set, but on a smaller stage. It should be awesome.

RH: Have you ever been to Bonnaroo?

NA: Yeah, I played there in 2008. It’s one of my favorite festivals.

RH: What’s your take on playing festivals?

NA: I actually prefer the smaller, “tent” stages to the bigger stages at any festival. I like anything that’s a little bit more personal and up close.

RH: Do you find you’ll make adjustments to the setlist or the pacing of the show depending on the size of the venue?

NA: I think it’s always a matter of giving back to the crowd what they give you. So, when you’re playing a club with maybe like thirty people there and it’s kinda empty, sometimes it can be kinda hard to really give it everything. But you figure it out. You figure out how to do it. But when you’re playing in front of a couple thousand people you feel like it’s just so easy to pull off anything you want. Like, the first time I played Bonnaroo I kinda felt like a superhero! It was crazy. We’re just trying to take what we put down on the album and really stretch it out and expand it a little more, and kind of jam in certain spots a little more and interact with the crowd more.

RH: I hear something in your new record that strikes me as much more organic and earthy-sounding than a lot of stuff out there these days…

NA: Well, you know, I wanted it to be a mix of grittiness and grandness. So I definitely tried to mix earthy, raw guitar-based songs with moments of orchestral strings like a thick layer of fog.

RH: I’m picking up on a vintage 70s Rock kind of sound to some of the stuff.

NA: Yeah.

RH: “My Baby Don’t Lie” sounds like a song that would be right at home on Led Zeppelin III.

NA: Oh, hell yeah. Thank you! That’s awesome. That’s our new single.

RH: Do I hear echoes of some early blues singers in what you’re doing, like a little Memphis Minnie and maybe even a little bit of Dinah Washington in there? Would you count blues singers like that among your influences?

NA: Well, for this record I guess I was really influenced a lot by Howling Wolf and Mark Lanegan, Nick Cave, Echo & The Bunnymen… The Doors, and a lot of darker stuff. Leadbelly… I was listening to a lot of blues singers at the time and using that as a reference for a lot of the vocal melodies. And then I brought around my guitar player Irina (Yalkowsky), and that’s her specialty, blues slide and psychedelic guitar… Uh, hold on… (Atkins turns to address Irina, who’s also riding in the van) Hey Irina, who are your guitar influences? (garbled muttering in the background) …Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Magic Sam… Freddie King’s a big one. So, the goal was to try to make this record kind of a mix of beautiful, dark Echo & The Bunnymen kind of stuff in contrast with a very southern, Americana rootsy blues sound.

RH: It sounds like you went through a lot in order to get to a place where this record became a reality. You must feel doubly blessed to get a second chance in an industry where a lot of people don’t.

NA: Yeah. I feel very, very relieved that it’s finally out. I can’t even tell you… I just started making this record on my own in my friend Phil Palazzolo’s studio, without a label or any money. We spent many days working on a song like “War Is Hell” trying to get the string arrangement just right, and then hearing it just made me so happy. And then to get a phone call saying we still don’t know who’s gonna put this record out… It was a mix of triumph and trying all the time, and wondering if this record was ever gonna come out. But it finally did.

RH: When you are out on tour do you have a chance to write new material and begin preparing songs for the next record?

NA: Yeah, in fact we were just working on that right before this round of phone interviews. We’re trying to plan the next record now. We might as well, so that when we get off the road we can get in there and get going, and not let that much time pass. I’ve already got so many ideas. I really want to structure the sound of the next one to be a little bit more cohesive on every song. So that we’ll have something where the songs won’t necessarily be more ‘happy’ but it’ll be more beat-driven and upbeat. Because when we play a song like “Baby Don’t Lie” live, to see what that does to the crowd can be so inspiring. So it feels like, “Alright! Let’s do a few more of those!”

RH: How much if any collaborating do you do with your band mates when you’re writing?

NA: You know, there’s a lot of songs that I do on my own. And my guitar player Irina and I have been working on a few ideas together. The band as a whole actually got in the studio - I guess it was a couple weeks ago – and just started jamming to see what we could come up with. This is the first time I’ve ever done that with a band. So we’re just gonna keep playing together and see what comes.

RH: What about your plans for the rest of the year? I guess this leg of the tour just started. Any idea what’s beyond that?

NA: Yeah. Well, we do this tour that takes us down south then back up the east coast. Then we’re home for a few days before we go back out. In August we’re doing a few one-off festivals and then I’m doing a few dates solo, opening for Fountains Of Wayne. Then we’ll probably do another tour in the fall, opening for somebody cool, I hope. And then we’ll get to work on the new record.

RH: Sounds like your dance card is filling up.

NA: Yeah, my dance card is always full. I like keeping busy.

A Wizard, A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio by Paul Myers

2011-09-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

To commemorate the announcement of Utopia’s 2011 fall tour of the U.S., here is a re-post of my review of Paul Myers’ excellent book about Todd Rundgren. This article originally appeared in December of 2010 on Crawdaddy.com. –rh

***

Paul Myers has penned the definitive Todd Rundgren biography. Dispensing with the typically invasive biographical method of delving into a subject’s personal life, Myers here instead sticks to the real meat of the matter: the artist’s work. Dedicated solely to Rundgren’s music and production, the book is a much more intriguing and respectful biography than one could ever pen in the more traditional vein. Salacious anecdotes and personal memories spewed, deciphered and interpreted with a vengeance by all and sundry often adds up to a disrespectful treatment of the subject and ultimately a violation of their privacy. Let’s leave that shit to Kitty Kelley, shall we? Myers’ respectful approach is best exemplified by his decision to dedicate no more than a single paragraph to Todd’s tumultuous break-up with Bebe Buell.

Though Todd’s tongue had already taken up permanent residence in his cheek by the time the young man named his 1973 magnum opus A Wizard, A True Star, time has proven this title to be apt, accurate, and certainly suitable for this book’s title as well. A willing participant in the interview process for this book, Todd’s every contribution is insightful, revealing, acerbic, and often funny as hell. From the first few pages his quotes are brutally honest, including very frank discussions about experimenting with drugs.

Myers has a keen eye for the crucial and heretofore unseen pieces in the puzzle. Todd may have had a tumultuous relationship with his father when he was a boy, but imagine the impression it must have made on the young lad when dad built his own hi-fi system by hand.

Young Todd’s high school band experience morphed into Nazz and a subsequent recording contract as a solo artist. First establishing himself as a hit-maker as early as 1972, Todd was soon tapped to produce other artists, as well. With “Hello It’s Me” topping the charts, Todd was busily constructing his first studio in a friend’s loft apartment on 13th street in New York City. Making it up and learning the ropes as he went along, Todd mastered the rules of performance and production as he simultaneously went about breaking them to suit the needs of his impeccable ear. In retrospect, it is amazing how the first fruits of Todd’s improvised construction of a recording studio from the ground up resulted in the psychedelic masterpiece A Wizard, A True Star. This was just one of what would be a string of wildly diverse and endlessly inventive self-produced solo LPs from Todd.

In the early 70s, Rundgren settled comfortably into the producer’s chair and helped birth two hard rock classics of the era: The New York Dolls’ debut album and what would turn out to be Grand Funk’s biggest selling LP, We’re An American Band. I found it interesting to learn how the title track from the Grand Funk LP was quite contrived and meticulously crafted to give the band its first number one single.

Todd’s production resume’ reads like a who’s who from almost every imaginable subgenre of rock music from prog to punk. The list of enthusiastic contributors to this book includes Patti Smith, David Sanborn, Hall & Oates, Steve Hillage, Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf, Flo & Eddie, as well as members of the Psychedelic Furs, Badfinger, The Tubes, Cheap Trick, The New York Dolls, XTC, and Utopia.

Though its members seemed to grasp that Utopia was not a top priority to Todd or his label, he did keep them busy as hired hands whenever possible. Sidemen on countless projects, Kasim Sulton and Prairie Prince were employed by Todd numerous times including the sessions for the first LP by 70s teen pop idol Shaun Cassidy.

No one in the music business was busier or in higher demand in the 1970s than Todd Rundgren. A staggering number of hit records were produced by him at this time including Meat Loaf’s seminal Bat Out Of Hell LP. Though the torrid and complicated back history of that legendary album is well known by now, it is curious to contemplate how the backing band assembled by Todd for those sessions was one half Utopia and the other half from Bruce’s E Street Band.

In the 80s, Todd’s already busy production schedule kicked into high gear with a steady stream of artists passing through his studio. At this time Todd kept himself busier than perhaps he cared to be, in order to keep his ill-fated video production studio afloat. In addition to his reputation as an audio production genius, Todd was an early proponent of video and computer technology. He often found himself way ahead of the curve with these emerging technologies and many of Todd’s experiments failed to generate much notice or sales. The advent of the personal computer marked a major turning point for Rundgren. Ushering in the modern era of digital recording, it made the producer’s role obsolete. Now any kid can record a whole album on a laptop in his bedroom. On the other hand, it also opened up a world of possibilities for King Tinkerer Todd and he continues to explore new technology.

Over the course of literally hundreds of sessions with dozens of artists displaying varying temperaments, there were bound to be clashes in the studio between hard headed artists and their sarcastic, self-assured and sometimes condescending producer. In the long run and in spite of their strong differences at the time, many found that Todd was almost always right in his convictions. In addition to his role as producer, Todd is also a multi-instrumentalist who contributed mightily to hundreds of these sessions. It seems like every single artist he worked with over the years has nothing but good things to say about him. Many credit Todd with making them better musicians and songwriters. Others say he broadened their horizons and in numerous cases his efforts propelled them to greater fame. He looms like a mischievous guardian angel over the careers of countless recording artists.

Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, A True Star

2011-09-15T17:58:00.000-07:00

(This article originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in January 2010. -rh)

At the time of its release in 1973, Todd Rundgren’s sprawling art-pop masterpiece A Wizard, A True Star ascended no higher than number 86 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. But in the intervening years, the record has enjoyed a cult-favorite status like few other albums of the classic rock era. Though it garnered no hit singles, the album does boast a handful of Rundgren fan favorites, like “Zen Archer” and “Just One Victory”, songs that have been staples of Todd’s ever-evolving live show for over three decades.

Unlike any other record of its time, A Wizard, A True Star blended the Beatles’ Abbey Road medley mentality with the ambition of Zappa, the unbridled energy of fusion, and of course Rundgren’s own explosive imagination. The result was a sparkling pop record that, though it enjoyed success among Rundgren’s small fanbase at the time of its release, would languish in relative obscurity for several years before it began to get the recognition it deserved. A Wizard, A True Star: Was the title alone perhaps an indication of an advanced sense of self-deprecating humor that would forever be lost on the general public and well beyond the comprehension of the masses? Even in an era when Zappa’s oddities and the prog-rock freak-outs of many others were quite common, it seemed both critics and the record-buying public needed time to soak up the subtleties of A Wizard, A True Star before its greatness began to become apparent. Almost as if it took a few years to properly digest.

For sure, many variants of rock music became simpler, less demanding to the listener, and almost watered-down sounding as the ’70s wore on. Whether it was the soft rock “California sound” that first blossomed in the early ’70s or the angry punk of just a few short years later, it all aimed for a gut-level target. To his never-ending credit, Rundgren never stooped to that level. He has, throughout his career, made brainy rock music for brainy people, and his reward is a devoted cult following of hardcore fanatics that trail his every move and support his every musical whim even as he has pursued his muse down some unexpected avenues.

The album opens with an ominous synthesizer line, as “International Feel” eerily unfolds like a sonic snake turning itself inside out, only to reveal a shimmering sheath of diamond melodies. Originally from the Broadway production of Peter Pan, the placement of “Never Never Land” in the number two slot always struck me as a brilliantly far-reaching gesture. So early in the proceedings! To croon with aching sincerity this long-lost Broadway ballad full of flowery chords and sappy sentiment, as a launching pad for the maze of maniacal self-examination to follow?

This is the listener’s first clue of the rapidly dawning revelation that this album is comprised of many short little ditties that segue seamlessly and continuously throughout. Side one in particular has long since been considered both the prototype and the Gold Standard of Pop Collage, blending sparkling segments into the blindingly brilliant sum of its perfect parts. Among the stream of gems that follow is “Flamingo”, one of this writer’s favorite tunes on the record. A clever and playful instrumental, a tiny symphony for synthesizers, “Flamingo” is reminiscent of some of Zappa’s Hot Rats era stuff.

Later, we hear Rundgren’s elastic and electric voice stretch and soar in an unlikely medley of ’60s cover tunes, beginning with the soft and sentimental trilogy of “I’m So Proud”, “Ooh, Baby Baby”, and “La La Means I Love You.” (For such a goofball, apparently he can really nail a ballad when he wants to.) Rundgren shifts gears for the medley’s final segment, a crazed remake of the frenetic ’60s dance pop track “Cool Jerk.” Employing some unexpected rhythm shifts to dizzying effect, Rundgren’s frantic performance seems to skip and jump and fold over on its perky, patchwork self. Other highlights of the album include “Is It My Name?”, a climactic outburst of guitar histrionics, and the album’s anthemic closer “Just One Victory.”

Though the album was released 36 years ago, A Wizard, A True Star could well be seen as something of a career retrospective. Considered by many to be his magnum opus, it’s got all the hallmarks of Rundgren’s music: Humor of both the cerebral and cornball varieties, advanced musicianship, beautifully crafted pop songs and ballads, a couple of ironic rockers, a handful of covers, and perhaps most poignantly, some surprisingly insightful lyrics that reveal a vulnerability and yearning for truth and love and understanding. The meditative “Zen Archer”, the melancholy lamentations of “I Don’t Want to Tie You Down”, and the bittersweet “Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel” are all perfect examples of Todd Rundgren’s soul-searching lyrics, echoing introspection, and self-administered “rock therapy” as prayer.

Rebirth Brass Band - Rebirth Of New Orleans

2011-09-15T08:18:00.000-07:00

This is a CD review that I wrote for Crawdaddy earlier this year. I recommend this disc for anyone who is a fan of New Orleans music, as I would just about any record by the Rebirth Brass Band. Mood elevating, uplifting stuff that’s bound to raise your spirits and get you bouncing. -rh

***

A natural extension and continuation of one of the longest-running musical traditions in America, the Rebirth Brass Band’s infectious brand of New Orleans second line Jazz blazes ever onward into the 21st century with boundless energy, gutbucket funk and raucous humor. The group has been a French Quarter fixture since the early 80s and their non-stop party rages on with the release of a brand-new disc on Basin Street Records called Rebirth Of New Orleans.

A new slew of shout-along party chants join the Rebirth canon here including the loopy and lascivious “I Like It Like That”, a rousing romp that builds to such a frenzied cadenza that the tune eventually collapses in a riotous tumble of laughter. Rebirth toasts the New Orleans Saints with “Do It Again”, updating and re-working the teams’ ‘Who Dat’ boast as a Jazz party chant. And even old-fashioned romance gets the jubilant brass band treatment with the album opener “Exactly Like You”. Selecting just the right track to put at the end of a record that will make the listener want to start the whole thing over again from the beginning is an elusive art form. The trick is perfectly executed on Rebirth Of New Orleans, a playful and mischievous record that’s brilliantly capped off by the Rebirth krewe’s closing battle cry “Let’s Go Get ‘Em”.

There is a buoyant, roaring solidarity to Rebirth in full flight. No one player or personality ever takes center stage. Tuba and drums form a foundation that is both solid and bouncy, while the horns largely stick to the melody and howling harmonies. Yet they all unfailingly serve the almighty groove. No one came to hog the spotlight. All involved are steadfastly dedicated to their mission to keep the party rockin’. If this music doesn’t sound and feel like springtime then I don’t know what does.

Fans and historians alike know that New Orleans Jazz can trace its origins back to Congo Square. An expansive French Quarter greenspace re-christened not long ago as Armstrong Park in honor of the Crescent City’s most famous son, it’s where slaves once gathered to sing and socialize every Sunday. Jazz was borne of tremendous suffering, unimaginable poverty, and decades of soul-crushing injustice. How it has evolved over the years yet still maintains that Storyville red light district street corner brass band vibe and came to rise like a dancing Phoenix and manifest itself among the ranks of the most joyous musical expressions ever known to man is nothing short of a living miracle. Of course every Rebirth song is like a party. What’s not to celebrate about that?

Joe Satriani Interview - November 2010

2011-09-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

I conducted a lengthy telephone interview with Joe Satriani in November 2010. He called me from Madrid. Joe was very gracious with his time and I was able to spin two separate articles out of our conversation. The shorter of the two pieces can still be found online at http://www.guitar.com/articles/future-joe-satriani. The original assignment was for Crawdaddy so I gave them a much longer piece that contained what I thought was probably the more interesting stuff that Joe and I had discussed, with the more guitar-centric content going to guitar.com. The following article appeared on Crawdaddy.com in January 2011. -rh

***

Twenty years ago you couldn’t swing a dead cat without knocking down a dozen guitarists who were high on flash and long on speed. Sailing smoothly above the fray as he did even way back then, it’s no surprise to find Joe Satriani still going strong and making some of the most adventurous music of his career. With Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards, Satriani spotlights an unusual variety of tonal textures from the middle eastern vibe of “The Golden Room” to the ethereal, spacey soundscapes of “Wind In The Trees”. The virtuoso guitarist makes confident strides into previously uncharted territory with his fourteenth record, including among this sparkling set of new mood pieces a gospel-tinged ballad of striking beauty called “Littleworth Lane”.

Satriani says “organic” is the key word when it comes to describing his creative process. “When I’m in my home studio working by myself all I’m doing is really trying to connect with the inspiration behind the song. I can turn around and plug into a variety of amplifiers that seem to sync up and support this feeling that I have, the story that I want to tell.”

In the studio with the band, Joe tries to keep the organic vibe alive with the assistance of Mike Fraser. “We move into the second phase when the band starts to hear the music,” he goes on to say, “and we start to add their tracks to previously recorded guitar stuff that was done at my house. That’s where the engineer and co-producer Mike Fraser really has a great, positive influence over us as a band. He helps us to achieve our goal of keeping that organic feel and making sure that all the tones evolve in the best possible way for each of the players.” With drummer Jeff Campitelli, bassist Allan Whitman, and the multi-instrumental mastery of former Zappa band member Mike Keneally on keyboards, Satriani has recruited the most phenomenal sidemen imaginable for his current band.

No Chicken Little when it comes to the unpredictable ups and downs of the music industry, Satriani speaks calmly of the unending upheaval therein. “Ever since I started in the music business when I was 14 years old it’s been chaos, you know? I started to educate myself about the music business. I found that ever since 1900 there’s been a series of upheavals where new people become franchised and another group of people become disenfranchised at the same time. Currently, the trend with the internet in full swing is doing just what publishing did at the turn of the century and the advent of recording did a few decades later.” Laughing, he concedes, “We never have a shortage of this feeling like ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ in our business!”

Satriani’s virtuosity and unique vision have guided him through much more recent changes in the public’s passing fancy, leaving him and few other guitar instrumentalists standing after the 80s metal craze came to a close. “I remember back when I was working on the idea of a solo guitar career,” he reminisces, “I refused to be a ‘shredder’”. He was turned down many times before getting signed by Relativity Records. Even then, Satch laughs, “The president of the label turned to me and said ‘Your record: I don’t get it. Where’s all the shredding?’ And I had to tell him that’s not what I am. I’m a rock artist, not a ‘shred’ artist. I’m not heavy metal. I celebrate all forms of music and, admittedly, it’s sort of a broad approach, you know?”

Having already released his first record on his own label in 1986, Relativity put out Joe’s breakthrough LP Surfing With The Alien the following year. All these years later, Satriani still marvels at the record’s unlikely success against long odds. “Somehow, while Michael Jackson and Motley Crue were battling for number one, out came this record of mine and it sort of caught the imagination of a lot of people. And it was my sophomore effort, which I thought was really interesting because usually that’s where a lot of new artists fall apart. But people picked up on my second album and it was just the right record for people to like because I really liked it too. Because nothing’s worse than getting popular for something you hate, you know?”

Enjoying some unexpected laughs on this leisurely stroll down memory lane, Satch feels for those artists who reluctantly do a pop song and all of a sudden it becomes a big hit. “They’re kinda stuck with it for the rest of their career. But Surfing With The Alien was the right record for me to hit a home run with because I still love playing those songs to this day.”

Though he’s already begun to collaborate with Sammy Hagar for the next Chickenfoot album (the band reconvenes to begin recording in January), Joe doesn’t like to divide his attention by thinking about other projects when he’s on the road. “When I’m on tour”, he says, “it really is difficult to clear the set that you’re going to play that very evening from your head and work on an entirely different set of music. I find it actually not a pleasant mental experience. I like to devote my life on tour to just the live show. That’s all I like to think about: How to improve it every night. And then once I get time off I can easily switch off the tour and say ‘Now I’m home. Now I can write for the next gig’.”

When pressed, Satch did admit to being interested in maybe someday doing an acoustic record or perhaps something with chamber musicians. “That’s kind of been done a million times by every guitarist,” he notes. “But I’d like to do something where the guitar is more properly integrated into what we would consider to be a symphonic arrangement. I would want to write all original music for it and that would take quite a lot of time. In between my solo stuff and Chickenfoot right now I don’t think it’s gonna be coming in the next year or so.”

Having just wrapped up several weeks of touring in Europe, Satriani and his band are on tour in the US through December and on into the new year.

King Crimson - Three Of A Perfect Pair

2011-09-08T11:03:00.000-07:00

Here’s another Crate Digger flashback from last year. This originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in August 2010. -rh

***

After seeing his brainchild endure several line-up changes since their inception in the late 60s, 1984 found Robert Fripp enjoying some well-earned stability in the King Crimson ranks. From the seeds of that stability had grown a newfound collective persona and brotherly camaraderie heretofore unknown in the court of the Crimson King. The trusty and crafty Bill Bruford remained well-entrenched behind the drum-kit while glowing eyes and fiendish mustache obscured the true nature of bassist Tony Levin’s Papa Bear warmth. Another relative newcomer to the crew, singer/guitarist Adrian Belew had already established himself as integral to the new Crimson chemistry. Having originally assembled this quartet as a foundation for a new project, Fripp surreptitiously resurrected King Crimson.

Following on the heels of the early 80s releases Discipline and Beat, Crimson’s caustic chemistry had been supercharged by extensive touring. With their iconic, uncluttered cover art rooted in the primary colors, Crimson closed out a sly and mighty triumvirate with 1984’s Three Of A Perfect Pair.

From its opening measures the title track seamlessly blends Crimson’s machine-like accuracy and tricky time signatures with the emotional vulnerability of Adrian Belew’s lyrics and soaring vocals. With its peculiar meter and overlapping polyrhythms, the tune is an odd, angular beauty, like a musical conversation between several of Picasso’s deliriously fractured cubist creations or a Blues from another planet. Focus your ear on Bill Bruford’s hypnotic drum patterns, alternating sixes and sevens from verse to chorus. The drum pattern alone is enough to put you in a trance.

After only a few short years in the fold, Belew sounds confident and expansive here. Already a journeyman guitarist, his lyrics, vocals, and singular guitar style defined this era in Crimson’s long career. No mean feat when you share guitar duties with a force as formidable as Mr. Fripp. But then again no one has ever accused Adrian Belew of being an unremarkable guitarist.

Perhaps the Fripp & Belew dynamic is the most obvious oil-and-water corollary in support of this bizarre musical dichotomy of robotic precision and playful abandon. Where Fripp is calculating, seated at his guitar station like a scientist in the laboratory or a patent clerk at his desk, Belew’s unbridled emotion abounds as he emphatically croons about human frailties and makes outrageous animal sounds with his guitar.

At the time of this album’s release in 1984, it was no stretch to think that Crimson was capable of earning some long overdue chart success. That same year their Prog mates in Yes were riding high on the unlikely and unprecedented success of 90125. John Wetton and Greg Lake, both former members of the Fripp fold, had also scored big with Asia’s debut in 1982. So why not the Crims? On this record in particular it was a tune called “Sleepless” that many thought had crossover potential. Levin’s insistent bass groove propelled “Sleepless”, a tune that was admittedly accessible by Crimson standards. Alas, the music industry’s preconceived notions and a small label’s non-existent publicity budget conspired to extend Crimson’s obscurity. The bulk of this long player is far from radio-friendly. One doubts it was Fripp’s insomniac ruminations over that elusive hit single that inspired “Sleepless”. The gurgling sonic lava of “Nuages” and the spooky obstinance of “Industry” are hardly Top Forty fodder. While Belew crooned “Sleepless”, Dick Clark slept soundly with dreams of Debbie Gibson dancing in his head.

There has long been a popular misconception of Fripp as the stoic and humorless ringleader of Crimson. With Three Of A Perfect Pair perhaps the puppet master Fripp consciously allowed for the impression that maybe Adrian Belew was running the show. Indeed, Belew’s lyrics and vocals take center stage here. Often dominating the record, Adrian’s plaintive pleas just might be its most recognizable trait. Fripp is undeniably the Crimson king, but he knows in order to make it work he has to let his all-star players off the leash. Certainly it is this loose discipline that allows Tony Levin to run amok on the bass guitar. Fripp instinctively trusts Levin, who reciprocates that trust by always keeping a firm footing in the groove. No simple task when wrangling the 12-string Chapman stick and playing a song in a 21/7 time signature!

(Special attention must be given to Tony Levin who brought the Chapman Stick to its widest exposure. The Stick is essentially a giant fretboard with up to 12 strings. It has a wide frequency range including bass and guitar strings and a very percussive tone. It is played by tapping or fretting the strings as opposed to the more conventional picking method. To this day, Levin is considered the pre-eminent master of the Stick.)

Unlike the simplistic cover art that adorned them, King Crimson’s early 80s releases were a three-pronged showcase for music that was anything but basic, simple or safe. Improved production techniques made the Crimson sound a little more palatable to the uninitiated. But the truth remained undeniable as ever – even in its new incarnation, King Crimson was still capable of crafting masterful and unpredictable Art Rock weirdness of the highest order.

This line-up later expanded into a “double-trio” including Trey Gunn and Pat Mastelotto and went on to create some of the most dense and challenging music of Crimson’s long and illustrious career. Perhaps it’s a good thing that hit single eluded them in the 80s, as such a success would have surely sidetracked Fripp & Co. from their life’s mission to continually craft ever more strange and complex music.

Cheap Trick - 1977

2011-09-07T14:17:00.000-07:00

* This article first appeared May 25, 2010 on Crawdaddy.com. *

Cheap Trick - Cheap Trick (Epic, 1977)

Before cutting their first record, reputedly armed with a repertoire well north of 200 songs, Cheap Trick was the kind of hardcore road dogs that could work the bar band circuit from Rockford to Rochester with their eyes closed. It is rumored that many roads were not even yet paved before Cheap Trick blazed their trail through the Midwest.

From the opening strains of “Hot Love”, the first song on their first album, Cheap Trick fearlessly and ferociously matched the fire and intensity of the burgeoning brats of the punk scene. Already a globe-trotting, guitar-collecting veteran when he and Tom Petersson assembled Cheap Trick from the ashes of their previous band (Sick Man of Europe), Rick Nielsen launched into the band’s 1977 rip-roaring raw debut album with a frenetic guitar riff that sounds like a yelping coyote leaping through fire. From there, the record does not let up, bringing the heat and the hooks for 40 unrelenting minutes of pure pop fire.

As evidenced by other cover tunes in their live repertoire, Cheap Trick takes possession of Terry Reid’s “Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace”, and there has never been any doubt as to its ownership since their rendition first appeared. A tentative groove pulses from Petersson’s eight-string bass to introduce the song. Soon, all hell breaks loose when subtle pounder Bun E. Carlos lays down a primitive beat to introduce Nielsen’s howling guitar. When describing Cheap Trick though, one must reserve that word—”howling”—for vocalist extraordinaire Robin Zander. Possibly one of the most criminally underrated vocalists of the rock era, Zander hits the ground running, immediately establishing himself as the new gold standard of cocksure crooning. By the song’s end, Zander’s voice is irrefutably without peer, springing forth fully-formed from the starting line.

The album’s go-for-the-throat sequence continues with “He’s A Whore”, a hook-laden rocker that contains the earliest clues of chief songwriter Rick Nielsen’s twisted sense of humor and remains a highlight of many of the band’s live performances. The high energy relents only briefly for the tender “Mandocello.” The only ballad on the record, it reveals an unexpected gentle side to Nielsen’s songwriting and Zander’s vocal skills.

You better catch your breath during that beautiful ballad because the intensity returns with homicidal vengeance for the next tune, the switchblade insanity of “The Ballad Of TV Violence (I’m Not The Only Boy).” Nielsen’s menacing guitar tone threatens to maul and shatter everything in its path (and in its past). By the song’s blazing and frenzied conclusion, you’ll be convinced that Robin Zander’s guttural howls are the sound of a man in primal scream therapy coming unglued and slashing to shreds everything, everybody, and every thought within reach. Listening to Zander’s performance is a breathtaking and exhausting exercise.

Side two scales back the gas-fire intensity only enough to spotlight the band’s incredible arsenal of pop hooks and melodic mastery. As “Elo Kiddies” and “Daddy Should Have Stayed In High School” introduce the second half of the LP with razor sharp distortion and nightmarish invitations to lechery, one realizes that this is not quite the usual pop song fare. “Taxman, Mr. Thief” eerily picks up the sentiment where George Harrison left off, but musically Cheap Trick paints a much more dire picture of the Taxman’s iron-fisted rule with a minor key jam that smells like it’s been singed by the flames of hell.

Closing out the record with “Cry, Cry” and “Oh, Candy”, Cheap Trick showed, perhaps for the first time in the rock era, that fire and fury, “strum und drang,” pathos and pain, can all inform a rockin’ pop song about lost love. And such is the case of “Candy”, one who took his own life and left not one but many to lament the heartbreaking loss.

Ironically, due to a mix-up in the mastering process, sides one and two were reversed at the time of the record’s original release in February 1977 (perhaps due to the band’s insistence that it be labeled with a “Side 1″ and a “Side A”, making the first Cheap Trick album the first “cheap trick?”). As a result, this incredible album was never heard as the band originally intended until the re-mastered, re-sequenced CD was released in 1998. Take this writer’s advice and listen to it as it was originally, albeit erroneously, sequenced. That is, after all, how it was heard for many years and subsequently how it earned its reputation.

Though it is considered an underrated cult classic and even the definitive hard rock record by many, Cheap Trick’s studio efforts would not return to the raw in-your-face sound of their debut until many years later. Amazingly, Cheap Trick continues to set stages ablaze with their incendiary live performances some 30-plus years after the band’s inception.

***

[Afterthoughts: One of the regular features on Crawdaddy’s website that I found particularly suited to my writing style was their Crate Digger column. Basically, it was a forum for revisiting old records, hence the “crate digger” moniker. My normal routine for getting stuff on Crawdaddy.com involved pitching four or five story ideas at a time and praying that my editor would give me the green light on at least one of my pitches. Cheap Trick’s debut LP from 1977 is one of my all-time favorite albums so I was beyond ecstatic when I got the opportunity to write this review. It’s the perfect example of how fortunate I was to write for Crawdaddy, even though it would last for just a few short years. Time again my wonderful editor Angie Z. gave me the opportunity to write about something I loved and then see it run on the legendary Crawdaddy. An ocean-size Thank You goes out to thee, Miss Angie! –rh]

Keeping Up With Keneally

2011-09-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

Mike Keneally is a freakishly talented guitarist and multi-instrumentalist whose creativity knows no bounds. First unleashed on the international music scene as the featured Stunt Guitarist on Frank Zappa’s 1988 tour, Keneally has since released a number of CDs under his own name that are indescribably expansive and bursting with energy, a continuous barrage of wondrous musical ideas that tumble and flow and crash against one another like an avalanche of joyous noise.

Keneally frequently blends elements of razor sharp Pop Rock a la XTC with explosive Prog Rock flourishes, and extended free form guitar solos of Zappanese proportions. Cleverly weaving it all together with humor and grace, the result is never short of dazzling. The sound of Keneally’s boundless imagination is beyond comparison, beyond category, and often beyond belief. His old boss would no doubt be proud.

October of last year saw the release of Evidence Of Humanity, a collaboration between Keneally and drummer Marco Minneman. The project was born when Minneman recorded a 52-minute improvisation on the drum kit and passed the tape off to Keneally to see what he could do with it. Keneally dug it and dug in, overdubbing dozens of guitar parts, keyboards, bass and more. The result is an epic piece of Prog Rock mastery, with Mike expertly accompanying Minneman’s rhythmic foundation as it continually morphs through dozens of changes and little suites within the greater opus. It’s a singular piece of music that winds wildly through uncharted territory, alternating passages of delicate interplay with raging guitar freak outs. Amazingly, it has hallmarks of both spontaneous improvisation and intricate composition. It has to be heard to be believed.

In June of this year Keneally released a live album called “Bakin’ At The Potato” featuring his 5-piece Mike Keneally Band. Recorded in a small club in September 2010, the performance is a blazing showcase for the whole band. Live onstage is a completely different setting than any recording scenario, much less the tedious, comprehensive technique employed on his collaboration with Minneman. But Keneally shines and rages regardless of the setting, and the live album also doles out ample evidence of his full-throated soaring vocals and clever lyrics. Doubling on keyboards, Mike is accompanied on the live record by two additional guitarists Rick Musallam and Griff Peters. The six-string threesome spins some wildly inventive harmonies and each is a virtuoso capable of some truly stunning guitar work. Keneally’s rhythm section features drummer Joe Travers and bass man Bryan Beller. Travers is a veteran of Dweezil’s Zappa Plays Zappa project and holds the reigning title of Zappa Vaultmeister, the overseer and organizer of all the posthumous releases from the legendary Frank Zappa tape vault. Travers is a monster drummer and the connection he shares with bassist Beller is simply telepathic. Beller has been playing with Keneally for many years, invariably Mike’s right hand man in nearly every solo project that Keneally has been involved in for many years.

Both of the aforementioned CDs come with a bonus DVD of their respective ensembles in performance and in conversation. The bonus DVD with Evidence Of Humanity includes a live duo improv that clocks in close to an hour, in addition to a lengthy conversation with Keneally and Minneman. “Bakin’ At The Potato” comes with a bonus DVD that features the band’s entire performance, including 5 tracks that did not fit on the CD.

And, as if that weren’t enough, bassist Bryan Beller also just released a live disc featuring the same band as heard on “Bakin’ At The Potato”. The main difference here of course is Beller as band leader and writer of all the songs. Keneally plays mostly keys for this set, but he is equally/freakishly adept on them as he is on guitar. That fact alone is astounding, as is the sight of him playing both at the same time. In addition to his prodigious output as a solo artist, Mike is also an accomplished sideman who has played with everyone from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Ambrosia, in addition to his work with Zappa and, much more recently, an ongoing collaboration with Andy Partridge from XTC. But, I digress!

From the regretfully short-lived “They’re Both The Same Band Tour”, the Beller set was recorded the same night as the live Keneally disc. Beller’s material differs from Keneally’s in that it seems slightly less expansive and schizophrenic, and more rooted in heavy grooves. (Perhaps not totally unexpected from a set of tunes composed by a bass player.) If anything, these smokin’ vamps give the soloists a little more room to stretch out and the disc is a hell of a nice companion piece to “Bakin’ At The Potato”. In truth, after hearing them both back to back, I can only see them now as two halves of a greater whole, bursting with boundless energy and bizarre humor, all seamlessly embedded in intricate yet engaging compositions. Far from a self-important, humorless wank-fest, these 2 live records represent some of the most impressive musicianship and explosive fun that I have heard captured on tape in a long time.

Restless Farewell to Crawdaddy

2011-09-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

Paste Magazine recently gobbled up Crawdaddy and absorbed it into their music journalism empire with little or no fanfare. I understand that this is just how things work in the topsy-turvy, fucked up world of 21st century journalism, but this unceremonious burial is without question far less than the legendary Crawdaddy deserves. In their infinite wisdom, Paste has buried all but the barest evidence of Crawdaddy’s vast archive, including, as far as I can tell, everything that I wrote for Crawdaddy over the past few years. Ditto the excellent contributions of my cohorts Jeff Wilson and Greg Gaston. In the coming weeks I plan to re-post everything that I wrote for Crawdaddy on my blog, including pieces on Todd Rundgren, Iggy Pop, Nicole Atkins, the Felice Brothers and lots more. It was a great honor to contribute to such a legendary publication and I must admit it breaks my heart to see some articles that I was really proud of simply vanish from the interwebs. I realize there may be legal issues with me re-printing stuff on my blog that now technically belongs to Paste. But if they do not see enough value in it to post it themselves, I’m gonna proceed with my plans to re-post until I hear from them, and I doubt if they’ll be contacting me to complain. I guess we’ll see. Anyway – it’s an excuse to beef up my bloggery and a much easier way for me to keep an online inventory of the stuff all in one place anyway. So, therefore it is, another bittersweet life lesson with the same moral/punchline/silver lining: Sadness and smiles.

Shiny and the Spoon - Ferris Wheel

2011-08-13T10:13:00.001-07:00

Shiny And The Spoon’s debut CD Ferris Wheel is a light and lilting, feather-sensitive acoustic affair, but don’t be fooled by the smooth veneer of the band’s soft sound. This is far from the stuff of unicorns and rainbows. A deep current of romantic skepticism that runs just beneath the calm surface of these still waters is perfectly encapsulated in the metaphorical implications of the album-opening “Snowflake”. Over a lightly strummed acoustic guitar, vocalist Amber Nash displays a presence of mind that is rarely in our grasp during the first warm blush of a new love, gently reminding us - or herself, perhaps - that this blessed and unique thing will melt away all too soon.

Throughout the disc, Nash and guitarist Jordan Neff display an amazing gift for vocal harmonies that are sweet as pie and soft as a cotton ball. Liberally sprinkled with Southern gothic imagery and late summer malaise, their deceptively simple lyrics convey a great depth of emotion. With a singular blend of cynicism and grace, Ferris Wheel carries itself with quiet humility like a silent spinster aunt in a Steinbeck novel.

The perfect accompaniment for the duo’s clever lyrics and infectious melodies is Neff’s subtle string-work, coolly weaving through each tune like a smiling serpent through tall grass. Late in the proceedings, “13 Crates” hints at a completely different direction. Neff turns up the grit just a little bit here, revealing a strain of dark Blues unheard on the rest of the record. The juxtaposition of this ominous minor key lament among a crop of largely lighter fare creates an unexpected mood twist and perhaps points towards uncharted territory to be explored in the future.

The duo’s excellent songcraft and natural harmonies are a winning combination that casually propels Ferris Wheel with a confidence refreshingly free of ego. This is perhaps best exemplified by their cover of Malvina Reynolds’ “No Hole In My Head”, wherein the duo’s clever command of acoustic instrumentation and self-assured irreverence creates a lighthearted new spin on the blues.

Shiny And The Spoon’s CD release show is tonight in the Southgate House Ballroom. This evening’s impressive itinerary also features Lisa Walker, The Rubber Knife Gang, and The Hiders. The show starts at 9pm.

Delusional Professor Monkey suit exchanged for Humbled Accepting Monkey model

2011-08-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

I’m realizing lately, over the past few years, that I am not nearly as cerebral or intelligent as I always thought I was. Though I always considered myself an intellectual outsider, circumstances of the past few years have relieved me of this delusion. At least of the intellectual part. Still an outsider by almost every method of measuring such things. But the truth is, “I ain’t so smart”. After a period of denial I think I am finally kind of okay with this. And why fight it? There’s little a dumb ass like me can do to ward off the inevitable encroachment of cold hard common sense. “Boy, you just ain’t nowhere near the genius you always thought you was.” Sounds funny. Sounds simple, too. But it’s a years-long, gradual and sometimes painful process for some of us coming to terms with this harsh reality. And believe me this ain’t no pity party. It has more of a sad, celebratory feel to it for me. Like a memorial service for the self-involved turd I used to be. Like shedding a skin that served me well for a time but now it simply does not fit. Physically, emotionally , philosophically, that monkey suit has been outgrown. I shed now the Delusional Professor Monkey suit only to reveal beneath it the Humbled Accepting Monkey suit, that comes replete with fresh wounds for licking, an expanded waistline for morose introspection, and a new mind frame that is both shiny and dull. You’ll figure that out. Shedding delusions of intellectual grandiosity is actually a very comforting process. Maybe this too is one of those Zen moments that I’ve been reading about and chasing for years. It has been said that the moment when we accept that we know nothing is the beginning of wisdom. Now as my 44-year old body struggles to stay trim, to lose even just a couple pounds takes great effort, my eating habits are just as awful as they have always been, to say nothing of my alcohol intake, at least I can feel good about this stage of my development (decline?) from svelte self-absorbed egotist to doughy dufus. It’s not so bad.

More recently I have had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of legitimately intelligent people. Medical professionals, artists, health workers, authors, scientists, etc. I feel fortunate that the path I have chosen has certainly given me opportunities to expand and grow and develop as a musician and an artist. But still, more often than not, I equate a large percentage of my artistic endeavors with that of a monkey with a paintbrush. I mean to belabor the point that I am not fishing for pity here. I consider it a rare and precious series of events that has brought me to the acquaintance of truly intellectual people. I feel like a whiffle ball champion meeting Ty Cobb. It’s a little intimidating but I am already finding that I derive a great deal more pleasure and real insight from looking UP to people, instead of looking DOWN on them which I know I have been guilty of doing in the past. Time and circumstances have put me in my place and I am more than a little grateful for it. Makes me think that maybe we all oughta do a little more looking up to people and not down on them. Can’t hurt to try.

I want to try to learn how to cultivate ways to trust my primal urges and rely less on cerebral conclusions. Trust my gut. How’s that for psychobabble contradiction? I want to employ my COGNITIVE SKILLS to cultivate a more PRIMAL approach to life!

For the sake of a real life analogy, I offer this: the one time in my life that I was never more certain that I was doing the right thing, ended with a divorce less than 24 months later. Granted, that is another story. And, long story short, I am happy to report that my ex-wife and I parted on good terms and remain good friends. My point is that if I can manage to make such a colossal and cataclysmic fuck-up out of the one time in my life that I had never been more sure of myself, how can I place any faith in myself to make even the simplest of decisions? I don’t have an answer for you. Consider it a riddle, food for thought. I’ve been kicking it around for a while and coming up with no real concrete answers or conclusions. But it has been a humbling experience, and ultimately, perhaps that’s what this little emotional exercise is all about. Anything we can do to humble ourselves? That too, can’t hurt to try. Seems like only good could come from that.

Some of these confounded quandaries we’ll spend our whole lives circling, scanning them for new clues, some chink in the armor we hadn’t noticed before, some new point of entry that will reveal the secrets, the inner workings, and the elusive answers we’ve sought in vain. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the circling itself that’s the point. It’s the search, the seeking that hones the mind, sharpens the spirit, hardens our resolve, not the finding out of any damn thing. Because we all know that every answer only reveals ten more questions. So keep circling, brothers & sisters. It shows you to be in possession of an inquisitive mind and a searching spirit. Be wary of so-called answers. In truth, they’re not really the goal.

What good is your destination, if you can’t enjoy the ride?

The Faucet Is ON.

2011-07-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

The great American philosopher Chris Robinson once said, “When you smile up at the stars, just know that the motherfuckin’ stars are smiling right back at you.” In the context of a live show with his band the Black Crowes performing the song “Cosmic Friend”, I took this to mean that when you send positive energy out into the universe that the universe will send positive energy back to you. Do good things in this world, and in turn this world will find a way to send good things back to you.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I wrestle with my insecurities and personal problems just like everybody else. But I have been trying to make a conscious effort to set those things aside as much as I am able and just get on with what I believe God or Fate or the Great Whatever put me here to do.

I’ve got money problems and hang-ups like everybody else. But what kind of fool am I if I let those things interfere with my creative impulses? So I’ve just been getting down to the business of playing music, composing, rehearsing and recording with my band, playing an awesome new weekly gig and adding tons of new material to my solo acoustic repertoire, and writing.

It’s a faucet. I can leave it be, bone dry, useless and producing nothing. Or I can turn that shit on.

I’m here to tell you that these past couple of weeks that I have had that faucet cranked open and flowing, I am getting more positive feedback from the universe that I can even inventory for you at this time. Amazing concert experiences, meeting legendary musicians who I have admired for DECADES, incredibly bountiful and productive recording sessions with my band, and a whole new perspective and deeper appreciation of my own endeavors as a solo acoustic guitarist. The shit keeps coming on like an avalanche. I am so grateful for having finally discovered this approach. I know it can’t last forever. Every artist who’s in it for the long haul goes through peaks and valleys in their output. Like everyone, I’m sure to experience highs and lows, rough phases and difficult stages when I might struggle to keep this new approach in mind. But right now I’m at peak flow and smiling up at the stars. Humbled, grateful.

- - - - - Josh Eagle and the Harvest City - - - - - - - - - - "A Good One Is Hard To Find" - - - - - -

2011-07-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

The CD release show for Josh Eagle and the Harvest City is tonight at the Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky. A Good One Is Hard To Find is a solid and cohesive alt-country affair that steadily churns along like a waterfall of human emotion spilling over at sunset after a long day in the woods.

Eagle’s gravelly vocals crackle and croon with raspy hard-won insight, travel memories, homesickness, and a humbly self-assured confidence about turning this last crucial corner en route to righteousness after a bumpy ride through rough territory. Eagle’s vocal delivery is a masterful balance of strong emotions measured and carefully spun in humble tones conveying the weight of experience, the burden of hard lessons learned, and always the longing to return to simple things, that special girl, home.

The tunes here are particularly strong. There ain’t a weak one in the bunch, aided in no small way by the band’s subtle touches that illuminate the album’s dynamic arrangements. “Feathers In My Name” opens the record with a whisper over acoustic guitar, with the band only gradually rising up from the silence to provide a subtle pulse. There’s a number of mid-tempo rockers throughout, all of which feature Eagle’s unique gift for conveying heavy symbolism through deceptively simple language. “Radio” closes out the affair on a sweet and subtle note. Casting himself as your radio, Eagle sounds all too happy to sing you through the emotional toil and important lessons of recent events, guitar in hand, love and reverence in his voice, gratitude pouring from a humble heart.

This is a beautifully crafted record that oozes with organic warmth and deep emotions and it is far and away one of the most original and consistently rewarding alt-country records to emerge from the Cincy music scene in some time.

In the hands of the right Program Directors, I simply can’t see this record not catching on at college radio and alt-country stations like WNKU. I’d be really surprised if they’re not playing this already.

The cover charge for tonight’s show is $10, with a copy of the new disc included in the price of admission. The show starts at 9pm and also includes performances by The Cliftones, Fair City Lights, and Kelly Fine.

Portions of tonight’s proceeds will go to Play It Forward, a local charity whose goal is health insurance for Cincinnati musicians.

The Southgate House is located at 24 E. 3rd Street in Newport, Kentucky

Random Thought Blast #1

2011-07-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

It has been a banner week for a music lover like me. In the span of just seven days, I have seen Steely Dan, the New York Dolls, and Steve Earle. Along the way I also had the good fortune to meet some of the musicians who play with those bands as well. It’s been a week-long reminder of why I have always been and will always be a moth to music’s flame. This week in particular, but also in a wide-ranging general sense, I just feel so blessed to be around so much great music and to have the opportunity not just to see it and hear it performed by others but to be a creator of the stuff myself. (My own band is in the midst of recording and mixing our next CD as well.) For all of the stress, anxiety and myriad other issues that plague my existence just like they do for every other person I know, music is a healing friend that has ALWAYS been with me and ALWAYS WILL BE. That thought is just so amazing to me and I have made a promise to myself today to try to bear that in mind as much as possible EVERY SINGLE DAY. Every single note that we musicians and singers bring into this world is nothing short of a MIRACLE. Whether you play in the crustiest death core band or the Royal Fucking Philharmonic, this holds true.

Some of you reading this may be familiar with my struggle with anxiety and depression. I’m not ashamed of it. Though I do not go around broadcasting it for obvious reasons, it is also not a secret. Shit, the more friends I confide in about it the more I find that I am far from alone in this struggle. Lately I have been feeling a strange new “Weird Calm” about my station in life. Maybe this is what the Buddhists mean by “willing participation in life’s sorrows”. I struggle with crippling self esteem issues, an almost complete lack of confidence, and social anxieties that you wouldn’t believe. Yet I am a working musician and writer subject to an almost-constant barrage of kind and supportive words from friends and family.

I had a revelation just last night:

Almost every single person works hard all their life. It’s just a fact. Some people work hard all their lives to accumulate money, property, land, houses, stuff, businesses, children, possessions, assets, automobiles, boats, planes, expensive clothing, pure bred pets, etc. I have none of those things. BUT - I have worked hard all my life to accumulate EXPERIENCE and INSIGHT and TRAVELS and all kinds of musical skills and experiences both in live performance and in recordings, the kind of things that most people only dream of. And that's not only "okay" it's actually very cool.

Just like Biggie said, "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems..." I have no money but all the freedom in the world. I’m gonna do my best henceforth to stop worrying about my LACK of money and focus instead on the seemingly endless opportunities that I have.

To all my friends and family who read this: Thank you so much for your love & support. I know that I still have a tendency to sometimes behave like a neurotic shut-in who’s afraid to leave his house or be seen in public anywhere. But I’m working on that too and it is the prospect of crossing paths with any one of you out there that helps me shut the door behind me and step out into the world every time I do.

Love to all.

-rh

The Speed Hickeys live at Stanley's Pub 04.23.11

2011-07-20T21:22:00.001-07:00

the speed hickeys live at stanleys pub (cincinnati, ohio) 4-23-11 from Cincinnati Local Music Scene vid on Vimeo.

HEAVY METAL COOKBOOK Chapter 3: Back In Blackened Chicken

2011-07-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

Step 1 – Mix Cajun seasoning with oil of your choice to make a light paste. You can add salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder to suit your own taste. Soak chicken breasts in this marinade overnight.

Step 2 – Pour Blackened seasoning and a little bit of oregano in a bowl and stir it together until it’s blended. Pre-heat the oven at 425 degrees.

Step 3 - Drag each chicken breast through the spices in the bowl and drop them on a hot skillet on your stove top. Braise the chicken for one minute in the skillet then flip it and braise the other side for one minute.

Step 4 – Put the braised chicken breasts on a lightly greased pan and place them in the oven for 15-20 minutes, or until the middle of the meat is no longer pink.

Other options:
1. Skip steps 2 through 4 and grill the marinated chicken
2. Skip step 4 and grill the braised chicken

HEAVY METAL COOKBOOK Chapter 2: Guacamole All Night And Pate' Every Day

2011-07-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

HEAVY METAL COOKBOOK Chapter 1: Shout At The Devil’s Food Cake

2011-06-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Not bad for a first draft. Next attempt will incorporate a thick layer of black icing on a MUCH bigger cake.

Sparrow Bellows "On The Spot"

2011-06-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

Recorded live by Steve Ferguson at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio on Saturday June 4, 2011.

ON THE SPOT

(music: Sparrow Bellows, lyrics: Ric Hickey)

Got an empty bottle from the alley
Burnt a candle, dug a hole
When the moon went back behind the clouds
You dug it up and found it full

Curse Of The Bottle took your house from you
Then Vegas made you wanna saw your spouse in two
You drag way behind the beat, Maestro said “Hit the street”
Leaving one thing left to do

Back to April and Adair
But you got more than you bargained for down there
Barely got out in one piece, now you’re back on Bourbon Street
A little worse for wear

Heaven’s hiding underground
A treasure hidden wanted just to be found
But you messed about where you ought not mess around
And they ran you out of town

Might have made that up on the spot
Might have changed some names and places so you won’t get caught
You had one too many shots with the Benvies
And you spilled your guts

Good Morning, Murfreesboro

2011-06-10T06:24:00.001-07:00

Waking up in Murfressboro, with the hum of the highway right outside our window. Chuck is awake before me. He's dressed and running out to get us carry out breakfast while I am still wiping the sleep from my eyes. Out of my cooler I grab one of the frozen ice coffees I brought for the weekend. For the first time ever, Bonnaroo organizers have provided a different set of directions for the press. Our first stop this morning is an off-site will call where we pick up our wristbands and press credentials. Then it's on in to the festival grounds. The route they have provided for us is a circuitous zig zag through Tennessee back roads, completely avoiding the expressway. It looks like we are about an hour or so from will call. As many of you know, the Tennessee countryside is beautiful. My father's family is from this part of Tennessee. So before we even get to Bonnaroo itself I have this scenic drive to look forward to as well.

I can't believe I get to see the Decemberists today. Wish you were here, Damian!

Other highlights on the Friday schedule: Wanda Jackson, Kylesa, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Del McCoury Band, Walk The Moon, My Morning Jacket, Primus, and more...!

Made It To Murfreesboro

2011-06-09T20:01:00.001-07:00

Pulled into Murfreesboro around 7pm. Checked into cheap hotel then found a great Chicago style pizza joint right down the street. They have 110 different beers on the menu. We immediately struck up a conversation with the hostess who is also going to Bonnaroo. She spent several minutes talking with us before we even placed our order and then she returned to our table a few more times to talk about Bonnaroo. This bodes well for tomorrow as we were hoping to make some local friends who might help us with travel tips regarding traffic and alternate festival entrances. Our hotel parking lot is full of shady characters, reminiscent of the Lot Lizards Of Louisiana. We're doing whiskey shots now, winding down for the night. It's our last cozy night indoors with plumbing, privacy, air conditioning and beds, before we submerge ourselves into the funky Bonnaroo parking lot for four nights of car camping.

On The Road To Bonnaroo

2011-06-09T13:06:00.001-07:00

We're on 71 south, almost to Louisville. The I N C R E D I B L E new Bootsy CD is playing while Chuck reminisces about leaving home when he was 16 years old to go on the road running sound for Steppenwolf.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Bootsy Collins & the Funk University

2011-06-08T14:04:00.000-07:00

The people of Cincinnati, Ohio have a unique perspective on Bootsy Collins. Though he is originally from the area and makes frequent public appearances in and around the Queen City, few there really grasp the enormity of the man’s fame and far-reaching influence. Bootsy of course is a world-renowned bass player who got his start playing with James Brown when he was still a teenager. From there he went on to stardom with Funkadelic, Parliament, and his own Rubber Band. Over the years Bootsy has remained active and prolific and his bass guitar style is considered one of the most influential in the history of all popular music.

Photographer and raconteur Chuck Madden says Bootsy is “stayin’ on the one… and doing it for real on his new CD Funk Capital Of The World!” Madden goes on to describe the new disc as “positive and uplifting”, with its great song tributes to Jimi Hendrix, Bootsy’s brother Catfish, and his “funk father James Brown”. Madden, who has known Bootsy for years, went on to say in all seriousness that this was probably the best solo record that Bootsy has ever done.

Looks like we’ll have another slew of towering funk memories to thank Bootsy for after this weekend.

Here’s a clip of him talking about his new record:

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Del McCoury Band

2011-06-08T07:42:00.000-07:00

The best in bluegrass meets the best in Dixieland jazz this weekend with the Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band performing together onstage at Bonnaroo. A living example of “the best of both worlds”, their collaborative efforts in the recording studio resulted in the rollicking American Legacies CD that was released earlier this year. Both groups maintain hectic performance schedules, with the two crews colliding for only a handful of shows in 2011.

Here’s a re-post of my recent review of their excellent CD:

“This week marks the release of what is surely soon to be considered one of the finest roots music CDs of the decade. In the Del McCoury Band you have some of the best players in the bluegrass field. And with the legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band you get traditional Dixieland jazz at its finest. Though the blend of bluegrass and jazz might sound unusual to some, the truth is there is a lot of common ground between the two. At any rate, the marriage of these two bands in a recording studio has resulted in one of the most enjoyable Americana records in recent history.

Ol’ Del takes many of the lead vocals here, but the microphone is passed around the entire troupe throughout the record. The whole gang declares their readiness to rip and roll on the album opening track “The Band’s In Town”. Hank Sr.’s “Jambalaya” is reborn here as a rousing Mardi Gras stomp, while the traditional “I’ll Fly Away” is a celebratory flight to the heavens propelled by piano and angelic vocal harmonies. The tune fairly sparkles as the entire ensemble weaves and warbles with ragged glory.

If the mix of jazz and bluegrass sounds incongruous to you, just cue up the song “Banjo Frisco” and dig the clever juxtaposition of banjo with a full horn section. Rob McCoury‘s banjo sets the bouncing melody atop a lightly jumping rhythm provided by the drums and mandolin while the horns and fiddle trade solos. The happy vibe immediately pulls you into the joyful spirit of the tune. Under the dancing spell of this record you might not realize right away that you are listening to something that has no discernible precedent in American music. Not many parties this good also offer a hidden history lesson.

The Del/Pres collaborative is playing some tour dates together this spring and summer, including a number of outdoor shows and festivals. Without a doubt, they are one of the most highly-anticipated of the 80-plus acts scheduled to perform at this summer’s giant Bonnaroo Music And Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.”

Frankly, there are very few acts on the bill at this year’s Bonnaroo that I am looking forward to seeing more than these guys. Popular trends and shallow subgenres come and go. This stuff will be around forever. One need only go one or two layers deeper into this music’s history to find that it is the foundation for everything worth a damn that followed. If this promo clip that I’ve attached below fails to get your juices flowing, you better check to see if you still have a pulse.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Buffalo Springfield

2011-06-07T15:24:00.001-07:00

This installment of my top picks for Bonnaroo 2011 was written by a special guest contributor, my old friend and mentor Paul Horton. I hate to think how lousy my taste in music would be if I hadn’t met Paul in 1984, when I was still a teenager. He is one of the most intelligent and insightful people I have ever known and out of the top ten funniest people I have ever met, Paul is not just number one but he’s also funnier than numbers two thru ten combined. I asked him to share his thoughts on the reunited Buffalo Springfield performing at Bonnaroo this year and this is what he had to say:

“Kinda like the Beatles, the Springfield had almost TOO much talent. Even drummer Dewey Martin had been a teen heartthrob in the pacific northwest with a hit record he’d made under the name Sir Raliegh & The Coupons. His version of "White Cliffs Of Dover" was a spot-on British Invasion knock-off. Unlike the Beatles’ soft/hard Paul/John thing, there was a much stranger dynamic in Buffalo Springfield, where those lines were not so clearly drawn. Stephen Stills was a real gunslinger. He could sing and play his ass off and his sound had a confidence bordering on arrogance. Neil Young was a mysterious weirdo with a barely-controlled guitar style. Their guitar styles had that cool difference that Television later exploited. Richie Furay was your all around likable/versatile/talented musician who was probably class president in high school. His contribution was huge and his later music in Poco with latter day Springfield member Jim Messina retained more of the Springfield flavor than CSNY or the later Stills-Young Band. He was the release to the Stills/Young tension. Each guy solo was just more of the same. Stills a hot-playing egomaniac, Young a flaky genius, Furay always a great entertainer. I hope I get a chance to see them. I about wore out their 8-track when I was a kid.” – Paul Horton, June 7, 2011

To Paul’s insight I’ll add only a couple things. One is to follow up on Paul’s point that this was a group that was more than the sum of its parts. Which says a lot, considering the tremendous success that Stephen Stills and Neil Young went on to achieve post-Springfield. Also, I think it can’t be overstated how much of an impact this group had, though they were together just barely over two years. When post-Dylan rock n roll was in its infancy, Buffalo Springfield epitomized its potential. They were a jolt to the status quo from the minute they hit the ground and two short years later shocked the rock world again with their sudden disbanding. Sadly they have been largely neglected over the years by most people, many of whom know them only for the song “For What It’s Worth”. Original bass player Bruce Palmer died in 2004 and Dewey Martin passed in 2009. Last fall, Furay, Stills and Young played their first shows together as Buffalo Springfield since 1968. Joining them on bass and drums respectively are Rick Rosas and Joe Vitale. A few days ago the band launched a mini-tour of California including dates in Oakland, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara. Their Saturday night headlining performance at Bonnaroo is the only other show the band has confirmed as of this writing. After a week of shows on the west coast, they should be tearing it up pretty good when they roll into Tennessee this weekend.

Here is a clip of the band performing at Neil Young's Bridge School benefit concert last October:

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Loretta Lynn and Wanda Jackson

2011-06-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to believe that Loretta Lynn could have ever been a figure of controversy. But she was, and more than once. Oddly enough, in the early 70s it was still considered shocking to have a song called “Rated X”, particularly in the field of Country & Western music with its devoted fan base of church-going southerners. The lyrics may be about a rascally former spouse but the song’s title still managed to stir up enough controversy to put Loretta on the defensive. This is to say nothing of the uproar brought about by her song called “The Pill”. Though she is rarely given credit for it, Loretta Lynn paved the way for much of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s by writing many of these songs herself, their lyrics inspired by her feelings about the world outside her window. The great lady would probably shrug off any such suggestion with her natural humility, more likely to be interested in swapping recipes than in basking in false glories. From her younger days apprenticing in the shadow of friend and mentor Patsy Cline to her recent work with Jack White, by all accounts The Coal Miner’s Daughter remains as down to earth and gracious as ever. This humble queen of Country music might laugh at being labeled a “living legend”. But the words have been used to describe her for quite some time now, and for good reason.

There was a time when the American public’s perception of the Rockabilly lifestyle was abject fear and loathing. Buncha greasers couldn’t possibly be anything more than common criminals and degenerates. A rare female hit-maker in the male-dominated Rockabilly field, Wanda Jackson was another good girl from the south who wasn’t looking to stir up any controversy. (Darn that Presley boy from Tupelo who steered her career towards Rockabilly in the first place!) Walking away from her rock n roll career, she turned to singing gospel music exclusively for many years. No doubt it was the fire and the fury of her early output that caught the ear of Jack White. The guitarist reached out a hand to produce a record for Wanda Jackson at a time in her life when she seemed to have made peace with the records she’d made as a young woman.

Both of these unlikely feminist icons and music legends will be playing at Bonnaroo this weekend. Their producer Jack White keeps a home and headquarters not far from Nashville. One wonders if Jack will make an appearance at the festival.

Here’s a clip of Jack and Wanda on Letterman:

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Atmosphere

2011-06-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

As always, hip hop is well-represented at this year’s Bonnaroo. Eminem is one of the festival’s headliners and elsewhere on the schedule you’ll find Lil Wayne, Big Boi, and quite a few others. In my opinion, hip hop has a much higher success ratio as a recorded medium than it does as a performance medium. With few exceptions, it seems like hip hop in a live setting often turns into a vocal melee, a blur of multiple voices shouting over the beat. In a recording studio there are countless ways to enhance a performance, to accent the beat here, the vocals there, with variations in dynamics, mood, and meter among a myriad of tools at your fingertips. Tediously crafted subtleties are often the most important ingredient in constructing hip hop tracks in a recording studio. Conversely, live hip hop performances are frequently devoid of subtlety.

I became a fan of Atmosphere several years ago when I was channel surfing and stumbled upon a music video for “National Disgrace” from their 2003 CD Seven’s Travels. With lyrics elucidating a litany of American hypocrisies over an ominous a funky groove, the track neatly encapsulates Atmosphere’s greatest strengths. Though to be fair, I would be remiss if I failed to herald MC Slug’s slash and burn sense of humor and razor sharp insight that he never shrinks from directing at himself. Much of Atmosphere’s work also contains a measure of 60s and 70s rock sensibilities. They’re not afraid to craft a track with a catchy melody or an obvious chorus that’s easy to sing along with like an old pop song. At Bonnaroo 2006, Atmosphere drew an impressive crowd around This Tent for a well-paced and well-received performance. At the time, Atmosphere was starting to rise above relative obscurity in the hip hop underground, the beginning of a steady ascent that has brought the band a modicum of success and well-earned stature in the hip hop community. They strike me, an admitted hip hop novice, as the 21st century version of the popular college rock bands of the 80s and 90s. Their name is not quite a household word, but the illuminaughty are hip to them. Slug himself seemed genuinely humbled and pleasantly surprised by the crowd’s overwhelmingly positive response at Bonnaroo 2006. You could see the gratitude on his face when he told the admiring crowd, “This rock festivals can be weird for a hip hop crew. Thanks for not making me feel like a fish out of water!”

Atmosphere returns to Bonnaroo this year for a Friday afternoon performance in This Tent.

Here’s the video for “National Disgrace”:

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: The Smaller Stages

2011-06-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

(Imelda May on the Sonic Stage at Bonnaroo 2010. Photo by Ric Hickey.)

Live music of every kind imaginable is presented from noon ‘til dawn for four days straight at the annual Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. There are five large stages throughout the festival grounds where the big name acts can be seen, while the smaller stages at Bonnaroo play host to the newer bands. Occasionally Bonnaroo performers will “double up” by playing a brief second set on a smaller stage after completing their performance on one of the main stages. In rare cases, a particularly ambitious act might even perform three times over the course of the weekend. Many bands must adhere to tightly scheduled tour itineraries that leave them with little or no time to hang around at Bonnaroo for more than their allotted set time. Others who have a little free time to play with will perform as much as possible at the festival and even hang around the press compound for spontaneous interviews and photo shoots.

The bandstand on the Sonic Stage at Bonnaroo is approximately the size of that which you would find in a small club. While it is an open-air stage, it is small enough to provide an experience somewhat akin to seeing a band in a bar or small venue. Every year at Bonnaroo it is the Sonic Stage where I get turned on to a new artist that I had not previously heard of. After a 2-hour performance heavy on dark weirdness and feverish jams at last year’s Bonnaroo, Umphrey’s McGee re-surfaced just an hour later and did a second, 30-minute mini-set on the Sonic Stage. The soon-to-be-setting sun faced the bandstand head on for their second performance and I could see the heat taking its toll on the band members. (Half of whom it turned out were fighting bad summer colds that day.) In a display of instinctive performance therapy, Umphrey’s calmly cruised through a brief set that included a cover of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” that seemed to bring a brief respite from the punishing heat. The familiar and soothing groove actually seemed to cool everyone down for a few minutes. At a festival where shade is in short supply, you can’t put a price on moments like these.

The heat factor pendulum swung to the opposite end of the spectrum when Rockabilly siren Imelda May performed on the Sonic Stage last year. Her excellent band, good humor, and feral feline howl brought the Sonic Stage to an absolute boil. I was walking from a now-forgotten point A to a soon-abandoned point B when I passed by the Sonic Stage during her performance and immediately fell under her spell. Ambling up for a closer look, I didn’t stop until I was at the edge of the stage. I remained there for the remainder of a stellar performance by an artist that just 20 minutes earlier I had never even heard of.

One of the many things I have learned about Bonnaroo is this: You may go to Bonnaroo eager to see acts that you already know and love. But when you come BACK from Bonnaroo, you invariably will be talking about all the amazing NEW acts that you discovered there over the weekend.

Other than the aforementioned Sonic Stage, the other small stages at Bonnaroo include Café Where? located in the way back of the lawn in front of the What Stage, the On Tap Lounge, and a Solar Stage that is powered by an angled platform of solar panels right next to the stage. The Solar Stage is one of numerous “green initiatives” at Bonnaroo, including an aggressive recycling campaign and a number of environmental groups stationed at booths scattered among the other merch and food peddlers.

There is never a shortage of fireworks coming from the big stages at Bonnaroo. But a lot of ‘Roo veterans will tell you that the smaller stages are where the real action is. This year the small stages at Bonnaroo will give attendees the opportunity to witness up close and personal performances by Bruce Hornsby, G. Love, Nicole Atkins, !!!, Bela Fleck, The New Orleans All Stars, Futurebirds, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Gary Clark Jr., and Amos Lee, to name just a few. Cincinnati’s Walk The Moon is scheduled for a pair of small stage performances this year and the band is riding high on a goodwill wave of music industry buzz paralleled by very few other acts on the Bonnaroo 2011 line-up.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Reggae Frisbee

2011-06-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

Continuing where my last post left off, I have to admit that I am looking forward to Bonnaroo also because it always provides me with the opportunity to throw a Frisbee around.

Other than running a little track when I was younger, I’ve never been much of an athlete. And even though I am not a master of tricky catches or anything flashy, I kick some serious ASS at throwing Frisbee. (There’s no point in false modesty about something as silly as Frisbee skills.) One of my stronger points is accuracy. I can thread a needle with a Frisbee from a hundred yards away. This is a very good skill to have when insinuating one’s self into a Frisbee toss with strangers. The back half of the lawn in front of the What Stage is very sparsely populated during the daytime hours at Bonnaroo. Each year I troll through the area and always find a couple dudes half my age throwing Frisbee and I’ll ask if I can join them. They have every right to be suspect of a total stranger’s skills or lack thereof. But young Frisbee dudes at Bonnaroo are generally pretty easy-going. Within seconds, after I have executed a number of long distance tosses with surgical accuracy, they realize “Okay, this guy’s pretty good”.

Invariably, the Bonnaroo schedule will include a big name Reggae artist during the afternoon hours of Friday or Saturday. This is Prime Frisbee Time. My Bonnaroo Frisbee Tradition began in 2007 when Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers were performing. Wandering around the festival I happened upon a couple of guys throwing Frisbee and they were kind enough to let me join them. We had staked out an area in front of the Which Stage during a time in the afternoon when the area wasn’t too crowded. We had a good triangulated session going on when a golf cart broke down in our midst. To our surprise, the passengers on the golf cart were Matisyahu and a couple guys from his entourage, dressed head to toe of course in traditional Hasidic garb. The golf cart just needed a push to get it kick-started, but Matisyahu and crew insisted on throwing Frisbee with us for a few brief moments before we gave ‘em a happy shove off. The golf cart disappeared into the crowd, kicking up a cloud of dust in its wake. The two kids I’d been throwing Frisbee with were totally stunned by what had just happened. You should have seen the looks of delighted disbelief on their faces. A classic Bonnaroo Moment.

Last year at Bonnaroo it was Reggae legend Jimmy Cliff who provided the soundtrack for a particularly spectacular Frisbee session involving myself and two teenagers I befriended. Several times that afternoon the people around us actually applauded our acrobatic prowess. It was hot as Hell that afternoon and three of us soon wore ourselves out and huddled to smoke a joint. This, I will confess, is one of the perks of throwing Frisbee at Bonnaroo. Not only will you make new friends, but many times your contribution to the Frisbee session will earn you a few minutes of additional bonding while passing a joint. Earlier in the day on this particular occasion I had consumed a suspicious brownie that was handed to me another kind stranger as we passed one another in the crowd. Our entire conversation transpired in a matter of seconds and consisted only of the Kind Stranger’s instructions, “Here. Eat this.”

When in Rome…

After the conclusion of the Jimmy Cliff Frisbee session smoke down the mysterious ingredients of That Fateful Brownie began to take hold. At this point some of you may be questioning the relative wisdom of my decision to eat the brownie in question. I’m not sure what to say in my defense here. All I know is things like that sometimes happen at Bonnaroo. My vague recollection about the moment of decision was simply thinking, “You buy the ticket. You take the ride.” The effects of my post-frisbee smoke down mingled with the brownie’s contents. I’d exerted myself strenuously for an extended period in the afternoon sun and soon physical exhaustion bloomed into a low-grade dehydration. I was fucked up. I can’t say that what transpired was entirely pleasurable. I wobbled unsteadily back to the press compound and glued my ass to a big plastic lawn chair for the next hour or so. From my left came a booming sound echoing through the treetops, the raucous magic of the Dead Weather performing on the What Stage. To my right, over the horizon, just beyond the not-so-distant perimeter fence between the press compound and the teeming masses in from of the Which Stage, came the sound of the Avett Brothers. These performances did not overlap by much, if memory serves. All I know is that both bands sounded great, but at the time I did not trust my legs to transport me the short distance I would have had to walk in either direction in order to get closer to the action. I sat in that lawn chair blissfully unaware of a brief rain shower that sent people all around me scrambling for cover. When I thought I had finally regained my senses and felt confident to walk once again, I sauntered over to the press tent for a bottle of water. All I can say about what happened next is that when you have finally pulled yourself together after a brief trip down the rabbit hole, the last thing you want to stumble upon is a GWAR press conference in progress.

The great Bonnaroo tradition of including at least one major Reggae act on the bill continues this year with Black Uhuru. Giants of the Jamaican music scene with deep roots dating back to the early 70s, they play the What Stage at 3:30pm on Saturday. You know where to find me.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: The Decemberists

2011-06-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt, The Decemberists are the number one band I am looking forward to seeing at Bonnaroo this year. Their performance at Bonnaroo in 2007 is one of the greatest concert memories of my lifetime. For the 2007 fest, I had the good fortune to bring along with me a dear friend of mine named Damian. As he was barely 18 at the time, he and I had some pretty serious disparities in our must-see lists for that year’s performers. Me and D go way back, to when he was a small child. Long story short, this young man is like a son to me. So I was very gratified with his overwhelmingly positive response to some of the older performers that I wanted him to check out, such as John Fogerty and Wilco.

Damian made me promise to join him for the Decemberists’ performance and what we witnessed that day converted me instantly into a big fan. With the midday sun beating down on the Which Stage, the Decemberists’ performance was energetic, passionate, humorous, and rife with drama and choreography. Their songs captivated me, even as some of them stretched out into 15-20 minute epics. In particular I was struck by their performance of “The Tain”, an 18-minute opus that ebbs and flows through numerous changes in mood and tempo. There’s a lot of things that I love about the Decemberists, not the least of which is the sense of humor and bravery that guides their willingness to take as long as they need to tell a story. Not many bands could pull off a twenty-minute mini-opera in front of a festival crowd and have them eating out of their hands for the entire tune. I overheard some idiotic sorority girl rumblings during their set that still crack me up to this day. Complaints that the Decemberists were “weird” and “all their songs are too long”!

For me, it was this experience more than any other that has come to symbolize how Bonnaroo bridges generational gaps with its diverse line-up. In this case it was a young friend who drew my attention to an intriguing and relatively new contemporary band. And I’d like to think that Damian too went home with a deeper appreciation for a number of artists whose heyday was way before his time. Every year at Bonnaroo I am exposed to new artists that I was not previously familiar with. Conversely, I see tons of young kids at the festival each year getting turned on to the music of artists like Allen Toussaint and Ornette Coleman, which I can only assume that many of them had never heard before.

The band has caught some flack for some of their records. Even their loyal fan base is divided over some of their recent releases. I’m rather fond of The Crane Wife, for example, but I’ve met a number of Decemberists fans who do not care for it at all. Ditto 2009’s The Hazards Of Love. That is hands down my favorite record by them. But apparently it was too expansive and “prog” for a lot of listeners. Shit. That’s what I LIKED about it! At any rate, the band’s courage and band leader Colin Meloy’s singular vision have steered the Decemberists unscathed through the choppy waters of mixed reviews. Late last year the band released The King Is Dead, a much more acoustic and rootsy-sounding record than their previous effort. The album has been embraced by fans and heavy rotation on college radio has undoubtedly garnered some new fans for the band as well. Meloy’s songwriting is stronger than ever and the barnyard hootenanny mode seems to suit the band really well for the time being. God only knows what they’ll sound like next year. But for now they are riding high on the success of The King Is Dead.

The band plays the huge What Stage on Friday afternoon at 5:30, and I’m a little chagrined that they are playing the big stage this year. On the one hand it makes me happy for them because it is a sign of their growing popularity. However the What Stage is so big that it gives listeners absolutely no sense of up-close intimacy with the band. It’s ironic, given the down-homey acoustic nature of their new record that the crowd is kept at considerable remove from the performers high up on a giant stage behind layers of barricades and security guards. The Decemberists’ performance will be a definite highlight of my weekend, no doubt. But after I inch my way up close for a few numbers I will probably bail to the way back for more elbow room. The sound is always great on the What Stage. So after a glimpse of the band from up close, I’ll be content to fall back to a comfortable spot on the grass where I can sit for the remainder of their set. The vast field in front of the What Stage is often pretty empty in the way back during the daylight hours before the big headliners take the stage at night. If I’m lucky, I’ll find some people throwing Frisbee back there during the Decemberists’ set and ask if I can join them.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Robert Plant & Band Of Joy

2011-06-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the time is right for a serious biography of Robert Plant. As a founding member of one of the most influential bands in the history of rock n roll, there certainly has been quite a lot written about the man already. Narrow your focus for a moment on the last ten years of his career and you’ll see an elder statesman of Rock who continues to make interesting music. Tapping into the world of contemporary roots music, with a core of musicians and collaborators including Alison Krauss and Buddy Miller among others, Plant has released a string of records that solidify his ongoing artistic relevance against some pretty strong odds.

Other than a tribute concert staged in honor of Ahmet Ertegun a few years ago, the surviving members of Led Zeppelin have resisted any kind of reunion since drummer John Bonham’s passing in 1980. Page and Plant made a couple records, with John Paul Jones joining them for a handful of projects along the way. But for the most part the band has never reunited in spite of the piles of cash they stand to make from it. After the Ertegun tribute, there were strong rumors of a reunion with many reports stating that Page, Jones, and Bonham’s son Jason were all on board for the project. It’s interesting to note that Plant is the youngest of the original band members, yet even as the baby brother in the band he is not keen on getting Zeppelin back together. Of course that ‘baby brother’ is now in his 60s.

Plant’s recent work with the Band Of Joy finds him in the midst of an ongoing journey to explore American roots music. It could said that this journey began when he was still a teenager, singing Willie Dixon songs in the early days of Zep’s career. Plant may be the lone hold-out on the prospect of a Zeppelin reunion, but his new album has a few tunes that bear more than a passing similarity to Led Zeppelin III. It makes me wonder what Jimmy Page thinks about that.

Any way you look at it, it’s pretty impressive for Plant to still be going strong and making some of the most engaging music of his post-Zep career. I am more impressed with Robert Plant today than I have ever been. It’s easy to think of him as the tall, blond geezer in the skin tight jeans with his shirt unbuttoned, squealing like a banshee center stage with the full bombast of Zep exploding all around him. But the truth of the matter is that he was in his twenties then and no doubt the early 70s were a different time for music and fashion. Put it this way: Would you want the general public’s image of you to be when you were 23 years old, proudly displaying the fashions of the time? Granted, Plant being saddled with this iconic image probably doesn’t bother him too much as the music he was making back then has surely made him a very rich man. But Plant’s recent work is powerful stuff and it’s gaining him a whole new audience. That is a much more impressive feat than ANYthing a reunited Zep could ever do. And it’s admirable that he would pass on the big bucks to pursue something he personally considers more valid and meaningful. Certainly more admirable than anything Mick Jagger has done in the last thirty years.

Plant’s recent performances have included a number of Zeppelin tunes, interspersed with more recent material from his solo records. As a founding member of Led Zeppelin who also continues to make great records, not to mention one of the most recognizable faces in all of Rock history, it is inexplicable that Plant is not receiving top billing at this year’s Bonnaroo Festival. When he and his band take the What Stage on Sunday at 6pm, they’ll dispel any and all doubts that he is one of the biggest stars not just on this year’s line-up but in the world.

I’ve never seen Plant before and I’m not even gonna bother trying to hide my excitement about seeing one of the founders of Led Zeppelin. My buddy Nate told me Plant’s been opening his shows with “Black Dog” and dropping in some Zep gems later in the set too including “Tangerine” and “That’s The Way”. Unlike many of his peers, Plant is aging gracefully and he continues to be a vital and relevant recording artist. There is a lot to be said of his recent solo records, in particular the fantastic album he made with Alison Krauss just a few years ago. That said, I’ll be patiently waiting throughout his set to see if it’s really true that he often closes the show with “Gallow’s Pole”.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Nicole Atkins

2011-05-31T12:37:00.001-07:00

Nicole Atkins’ Mondo Amore CD is a churning, caustic tempest in a teacup. Atkins’ songs rarely stray from the mid-tempo rock setting, but there are two very strong traits that elevate this record far north of mediocrity. One is Atkins’ voice. Working within the relatively thin constraints of her vocal timbre, Atkins nonetheless has tremendous range. The other thing that sets this record apart is the unusually engaging arrangements of the songs. These two strengths are intertwined throughout the record as it is Atkins’ compelling and personable voice that frequently leads the charge when a song makes an unexpected turn. There is nothing operatic or show-bizzy at all about Atkins’ vocals. Sly humor and punch drunk convictions illuminate her lyrics and she puts it all across with a gritty, down to earth style. Musically, this is reminiscent of 70s hard rock, with guitars and drums heavy in a mix that also features piano and an array of swirly strings and vintage keyboard sounds.

The disc opens with “Vultures” where we find Atkins alternating between ominous panther purring the creepy quiet verses and the measured caterwauling of the song’s catchy chorus. “You Come To Me” is another track that illustrates the full spectrum of Atkins and her band in full flight. Early in the record resides the lone ballad on the disc, the ghostly “Motel Plaster”. I suggest you catch your breath there while you can because the rest of the record is a lusty and shamelessly enjoyable bruiser. Enter at your own risk: Press ‘play’ and almost immediately you’re like a rag doll in a clothes dryer. You will get roughed up a little along the way and you might even emerge a little more ragged than you were at the outset. But good rock n roll should be a physical experience and oddly cleansing at the same time. One of the stronger cuts on the album, “My Baby Don’t Lie” features Atkins’ bluesy wail and homicidal lyrics that place her squarely in the Blues tradition of woman-done-wrong-now-seeking-revenge. With its foundation of acoustic guitars, harmonica, a pulsating drum beat that’ll make you stomp your feet, and Atkins’ blue note howl, the song is a direct descendant of Led Zeppelin III. They haven’t made rock records this good for over three decades. With its brilliant blend of soaring vocals and theatrical rock, this record could almost pass for a lost Heart album from the 70s. But even that is selling it short as the soul and heft of Atkins’ craft are far better than even that comparison could ever insinuate.

Nicole Atkins and the Black Sea will perform two sets at this year’s Bonnaroo Festival. Both shows take place on Sunday afternoon with the first of the two scheduled for 1:30pm on the Other Tent stage. A short time later they will appear on the much smaller Sonic Stage for a half-hour set to commence at 4:30pm. The larger stage will be the perfect setting for Atkins and crew to give full voice to their most bombastic tendencies. But the Sonic Stage is a much more intimate setting. Despite the mid-afternoon in mid-June setting of an open-air stage set up under the blazing hot Tennessee sun, the Sonic Stage is quite small and it is here that fans have the opportunity to get much closer to the stage. In that regard, it provides the closest thing to small club setting as you are likely to find at Bonnaroo.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: G. Love & Special Sauce - and - Black Joe Lewis & The Honey Bears

2011-05-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

I promise that sooner or later I will get around to enumerating at least a few of the dozens of stellar contemporary artists scheduled to perform at Bonnaroo 2011. But my heart and soul and spirit are all deeply indebted to and embedded in the Blues, so I’m gonna ride this Roots Music strain ‘til the inspiration dries up altogether, which, come to think of it, I pray never happens. So I guess I shouldn’t make any promises about my ‘Roo Previews taking a leap into the 21st century just yet.

No doubt showing my age here, but I ain’t ashamed to admit that I am roughly twice the age of the average Bonnaroo attendee. For all of my borderline-misanthropic misgivings and dubious feelings about the bulk of contemporary music, there is a hell of a lot of it that I truly enjoy. My personal taste leans heavily towards the music of the past because I believe there is infinitely more of substance and intrigue in music’s past than I can foresee in the near future. That said, as I’ve oft-referred to in my recent posts, the roots and retro patterns of the recent past are not only still going strong but appear to be still building up steam. And that’s a good thing, in my opinion. Guilty as usual for taking the long way around to making my point, here and now what I mean to say is that in spite of the desperately sad state of contemporary mainstream music it is Bonnaroo that year after year draws a huge crowd of very young people who already have diverse taste in music and whose appetite for MORE-MORE-MORE is insatiable. Say what you want about the drugs that many of them are ingesting at Bonnaroo. At least these kids are there to gorge themselves on a wildly diverse array of music and performance styles. The sight of the swirling, sweaty, sunburned and red-eyed masses at Bonnaroo that I see every summer gives me more hope for future generations than any of the flat out embarrassing displays of modern youth culture I am subjected to on the radio, television, the internet, or anywhere else. So you can imagine it does my heart good when I see HUGE crowds of teenagers and twenty-somethings at Bonnaroo, dancing and grooving to the likes of Buddy Guy, John Fogerty, Jimmy Cliff, Jeff Beck, John Prine and Kris Kristofferson.

I am similarly pleased whenever a new artist comes along and stokes the coals of a dying style. I first heard G. Love & Special Sauce seventeen years ago with the release of the band’s 1994 debut. Their Blues-infused Garage Rap put a whole new spin on gritty R&B and the band enjoyed some success including a couple minor hit singles in their early days. Not to say they have fizzled out in any way at all. But seventeen years is a small eternity in the music biz and, perhaps somewhat ironically, they appear at Bonnaroo this summer almost as elder statesmen in the alt-rock world. G. Love’s infectious grooves and gratuitous charm will have no problem grabbing the Bonnaroo audience. An overwhelming contingent of the Bonnaroo audience craves dancing barefoot in the grass like a fish craves water. Opening the Which Stage at 12:30 Sunday afternoon, G. Love will have the early crowd wiping the sleep from their eyes and shaking their tail feathers in the first song.

I guess if I’m gonna use an expression like “stoking the coals of a dying style”, I better be able to back that up with more than one example. In fact, a much better and far more extreme instance would be Black Joe Lewis & The Honey Bears. Now touring in support of their second album, this band’s over-the-top, off-the-hook, high energy Funky Soul Blues Revue is one the few things I have ever encountered that deserves even a passing comparison to the legendary James Brown. If you know ANYTHING about music, then you know there ain’t nothing like James Brown in his prime. Until I heard Black Joe Lewis & The Honey Bears, I didn’t think anything even came close. Now this is no slavish copy of the JB formula. But rather an inspired troupe of descendants and disciples of the Godfather of Soul. The band’s Scandalous CD features a number of stylistic variations on the classic Funky Soul sound with echoes of Memphis and Detroit surfacing here and there along the way, and no small measure of humor as well. With a sly smirk theme running through every song, as well as an abundance of energy and chops that strains credulity, Black Joe Lewis & The Honey Bears are guaranteed to be one the most memorable performers at this year’s Bonnaroo Festival. (This Tent stage, Saturday 12:30pm)

Here is a video for the first song on their new record, a track called “Livin’ In The Jungle”:

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Dr. John

2011-05-29T08:51:00.001-07:00

As long as I’m riffing on the Black Keys and the Blues, I would be remiss if I failed to mention this year’s Bonnaroo Superjam featuring Black Keys’ singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and the legendary Dr. John.

Every year Bonnaroo has a featured “Superjam” segment, often keeping the jam session participants a secret up until the last minute. Most years the rumors begin to surface as showtime draws near, the info perhaps leaked by Bonnaroo officials in order to feed anticipation for the event. This time around the Superjam participants have been announced well in advance and the news is fraught with explosive chemistry. Dr. John of course is a New Orleans legend who’s been around since the late 60s and has been a tremendous influence on countless artists across the spectrum of Pop, Rock, Jazz and Blues music. The prospect of a jam-fest lead by Dr. John and Auerbach has already earned this year’s Superjam a well-deserved spot near the top of many attendees’ must-see lists. In addition to Auerbach and Dr. John and others, this year’s Superjam will also feature Cincinnati’s own Brian Olive. Formerly of the Greenhornes and the Soledad Brothers, Olive played sax on some recent Dr. John sessions and his new solo disc is due later this year.

Other than the Superjam on Sunday evening, Dr. John is also scheduled to perform his 1974 album Desitively Bonnaroo in its entirety during a late night set Saturday at 12:30am. Joining him for this performance will be Allen Toussaint and the original Meters, all of whom performed on the original LP. As you might have guessed, the festival got its name from the Dr. John album and this will be one-time only performance, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I seem to recall that in years past the Bonnaroo Superjam segment was typically a late night set on Friday. Another Bonnaroo switch-a-roo this summer finds the Superjam slated for Sunday evening at 7pm. Many folks are frankly wiped out and contemplating an early escape on Sunday afternoon. Though the music will continue this year as always right up until midnight Sunday, four days of walking around in the hot summer sun with your nights spent passed out in a tent is just beyond the stamina level that some people can sustain. This writer is guilty of leaving on Sunday evening on more than one occasion. At times this is due to the schedule restraints of one’s travel companions. Other instances have been the result of an exhausted concensus dictating an early departure. I have no way of knowing if it was conceived as a deliberate attempt to “stack the deck” with heavy hitters in order to keep people from leaving early, but this year’s Sunday afternoon line-up is crowded with big name acts. So many in fact that Sunday evening’s schedule is one of the most conflict-riddled segments of the entire weekend. Between approximately 4pm and the seven o’clock start of the Superjam, Bonnaroo patrons face the daunting dilemma of either choosing or bouncing back and forth between several stages featuring the likes of Gregg Allman, Galactic, Iron & Wine, The Strokes, Explosions In The Sky, Cold War Kids, legendary filmmaker John Waters appearing in the Comedy Theater, and the great Robert Plant with his Band Of Joy on the festival’s huge What Stage. This year, a Sunday departure robs you of the opportunity to take in that slew of big names, to say nothing of the Superjam scheduled for a sunset launch. For all of the great Bonnaroo memories and amazing experiences I have ever had at the festival, I have never stayed through the final night of the fest and woken up on a bleary-eyed Monday morning. That all changes this time ‘round.

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: The Black Keys

2011-05-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

As long as I’m riffing on the Blues, maybe this is a good time for me to speak of the Black Keys.

The band’s most recent CD Brothers fairly reeks of retro, but I mean that in the best possible way. The band’s early stuff was similar in a lot of ways to the White Stripes. (Indeed, even the band’s name could almost be a nod to Jack and Meg.) Though they started out just guitar and drums, they have expanded to include bass guitar and some gritty vintage electric keyboards as well. The result is pure Blues Rock magic and even with the expanded line-up the Black Keys still specialize in sparse, skeletal arrangements and simple tunes.

And if there are echoes of T. Rex and even The Doors in the Black Keys’ most recent material, so what? To my way of thinking that is perhaps one the most peculiar aspects of the ‘roots music’ phenomenon of the past decade or so. Alt-Country no doubt owes a great debt to folk music indigenous to the American south. And I am happy to report that there seems to be no end in sight to a Bluegrass scene that was revitalized if not completely brought back from the dead by the O, Brother Where Art Thou phenomenon of several years ago. But “retro” is always in. It may sound like an incongruous statement, or like the Duke Ellington quote I referenced before, just a quaint, silly “angle” to sell new music that sounds old. BUT THAT’S WHAT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY HAS DONE SINCE DAY ONE. No matter how square you thought your parents record collection was, in time we all surround ourselves with things remarkably similar to the stuff our parents and even our GRANDparents listened to.

Frankly there ain’t a damn thing wrong with Linda Ronstadt’s version of “Blue Bayou”. The girl had the common sense to at least do a completely different arrangement of the song and in doing so almost made it her own. Almost, but not quite. But believe me – taking a Roy Orbison song and ALMOST making it your own is pretty damn good and probably the best you can hope for when covering a song of his. At the other end of the spectrum is Van Halen, who fell way short of re-animating Roy’s “Pretty Woman” with what was essentially the sound of a bar band playing a summer picnic for a change of scenery. My point is the Black Keys could do a hell of a lot worse than to make a record that contains a number of tunes that sound eerily similar to Marc Bolan and T. Rex. That comparison has probably already been made in any number of reviews of the band’s latest CD. If they inadvertently lead a few contemporary listeners to discover T. Rex, they have done more for the modern world than the next ten bands put together.

The Black Keys were already a first-rate live act when it was just the two of them up there flailing away. This writer stumbled upon them quite by accident when they performed as a duo at Bonnaroo 2007. Those two guys kicked up such a frenzied ruckus I thought they were gonna bash the stage into splinters with their unholy cacophony. Granted their new stuff is wee bit calmer, but the addition of the keys and bass have brought them into a retro realm of rarified air. Hell, even Marc Bolan didn’t make but a few truly great T. Rex albums. The Black Keys already can lay claim to a sort of runner up status by default.

Check out this live clip of the band performing “Everlasting Love” from their latest CD:

Top 20 Picks For Bonnaroo 2011: Gregg Allman

2011-05-28T21:59:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t too long ago when almost every form of popular music was still rooted in the Blues. Nowadays you’d have better luck finding the proverbial needle in a haystack than to find even the slightest thread of a Blues influence in mainstream music. Regardless of whatever the preening pop stars of the day or the latest hip hop poser wants to claim, it ain’t there. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Well. Yeah. Maybe I am. Let us never forget Duke Ellington’s legendary quote: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”. To a cleverer-than-thou modern listening audience with an inexcusably narrow spectrum of musical knowledge thanks to the corporatization, commodification and gentrification of The Devil’s Music, that may sound like just a corny little mission statement. But the Duke was dead serious. It was the great man’s M.O., his heartfelt CREED.

That elusive “swing” factor can be found in a lot of very different musical styles, all of which derive from American roots music like Gospel, Jazz, and the Appalachian string band music that evolved into Bluegrass and Country. And pretty much all of it is rooted in the Blues.

Bonnaroovians looking to get some hearty Blues fiber in their diet at this summer’s festival need look no further than That Tent at 4:30 on Sunday afternoon, when the legendary Gregg Allman will take the stage. Produced by roots-meister T. Bone Burnet, Allman’s excellent new Low Country Blues CD includes covers of songs by Blues giants Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, and B.B. King among others. The Bonnaroo crowd can expect to hear a healthy sampling of tunes from Allman’s new record and no doubt a number of classic Allman Brothers songs as well. One-time Allmans guitarist Warren Haynes is also performing at Bonnaroo this year. Though Haynes is scheduled to perform with his band on Friday, Allman’s Sunday afternoon set could still very possibly be the scene of an impromptu jam session. For now he’s put his band Gov’t Mule on hiatus for 2011 and Haynes is playing a number of dates in support of a new release by the Warren Haynes Band. That outfit will complete its first tour leg this week and hit the road again in July, but that leaves their schedule completely free for mid-June when their only booking is Bonnaroo. Haynes is a Bonnaroo veteran quite familiar with the jammy spirit of the festival. That makes the weekend a fertile setting for Haynes to pop up just about anywhere ready to wail. With or without Haynes joining him and his band onstage, the prospect of Gregg Allman singing “Whipping Post” at Bonnaroo is definitely a must-see moment at this year’s festival. Bonnaroo is always thick with sick jam session fireworks. Gregg Allman’s performance is sure to be a peak.

Countdown To Bonnaroo 2011...

2011-05-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s that time again folks. Bonnaroo 2011 is just two weeks out and I can contain my excitement no longer. Where I live there has been a ridiculous amount of rain for the past two months and I wonder if the glum view out my window has precluded me from thinking very much about the Fabulous Frolic that is about to unfold in Manchester, Tennessee. No matter, as the actual launch of said freak fest is about to commence, rain or shine. And what a ridiculous notion that is anyway – I mean to call bullshit on myself here - because anyone who has ever been to Bonnaroo knows that no amount of rain in the weeks leading up to the event can dim one’s enthusiasm about returning. At any rate, the sun is shining right now and I’ve got my iTunes Bonnaroo Mix on shuffle with the volume cranked loud enough to scare the neighbors, the cats, and the neighbor’s cats.

A couple days ago I ran into a friend of mine who had just received his Bonnaroo wristband in the mail. Seeing me jogging down the sidewalk, he pulled over, double-parked, and ran to catch up with me to share the news. His excitement made me immediately realize that people all over the country are receiving their wristbands in the mail this week and every last one is getting that first big rush of anticipation. Bonnaroo Nation is getting amped.

Where to start with this typically amazing Bonnaroo line-up? Short of making a plain-and-simple list of the DOZENS of acts scheduled to perform, there really is no way to thoroughly enumerate the vast musical smorgasbord that is Bonnaroo. At a glance, the big name headliners include Buffalo Springfield, Eminem, Arcade Fire, The Black Keys, Primus, My Morning Jacket, Lil Wayne, Widespread Panic, Robert Plant, Dr. John, Gregg Allman, the Decemberists, Big Boi, NOFX, Black Uhuru, and many, many more. Bonnaroo’s ten stages also include a comedy theater and a cinema tent that will feature appearances by Lewis Black, Henry Rollins, Aziz Ansari, and Cheech Marin as well as Q&A with filmmakers John Waters, Zach Braff, and more.

With the festival ‘bout to jump off in just two weeks, I don’t have much time left to post my thoughts on what I’m looking forward to the most this year. But in the coming days I will do just that, with my Top Twenty Picks For Bonnaroo 2011. The only thing I know for certain is that once I have completed that list I will be forced to concede that there are at least twenty MORE acts that I am looking forward to seeing.

"The Ballad Of Dean And Myra"

2011-05-14T15:19:00.000-07:00

Found this crumpled up in the back of a desk drawer today,

an unfinished poem from many years ago…

THE BALLAD OF DEAN AND MYRA

Dean loved Little Myra
Like he never love no one else
A young man, he had some plans
But when he met Myra he put ‘em on the shelf

Myra lived way ‘cross town
And they both was just kids
Had to ask his folks, take him to see her
So that’s just what he did

Papa said “Alright, come Christmas mornin’
I’ll take you over there -
If your chores are all done. How’s that deal sound to you?”
Dean said, “That sounds fair.”

But come Christmas mornin’
A blizzard blanket the town
When Papa said, “I ain’t takin’ you nowhere.”
Him and Dean went fifteen rounds

“You said you’d take me to see Miss Myra.
Didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout no snow.
Just ‘cause you ain’t taking me there
Don’t mean I ain’t gonna go.”

So Dean pulled on his boots and hat
And Papa went back to playing cards
Dean went right out the front door
And cut through a few neighbors’ yards

Took a short cut through frozen forest
Spider skeleton trees
Climbed a few hills, fell a few times
Tore a hole in one of his knees

Emerged by the roadside
Dean didn’t raise no thumb
Didn’t care if he caught a ride
Didn’t care if his face was numb

A thousand cars went past
Each one splash and slush
Now he was drenched and hungry too
Because he didn’t have no lunch

Soon a car pulled over
Stop with a screechin’ skid
Out the doors came the smell of booze and smoke
And three-four rough lookin’ kids

Didn’t say a word, just came at Dean
Swingin’ pipes and knives and sticks
Dean could do nothing but fall to the ground
Takin’ the punches and kicks

Seemed to go on forever
The stabbin’ and kickin’ and beatin’
Then the care sped away just as quick as it stopped
Leavin’ Dean a-lyin’ there bleedin’

Dean came to, flashlight in his face
Police officer shakin’ his cage
Sayin’, “Boy, I can smell the booze on you
And you appear to be underage.”

Dean knew better than to breathe one word
He wasn’t gonna go there again
Dean thought he was being prudent
The cop thought he was arrogant

Took his shoes and his belt and his wallet
Bound his feet and his hands
Lying on the cold hard concrete floor
Dean spent Christmas night in the can

Wasn’t ‘til the next morning
They let him use the phone
Rang a few times and when someone picked up
Dean said “Hello. Is Myra home?”

...

Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Del McCoury Band - American Legacies

2011-04-14T06:39:00.000-07:00

This week marks the release of what is surely soon to be considered one of the finest roots music CDs of the decade. In the Del McCoury Band you have some of the best players in the bluegrass field. And with the legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band you get traditional Dixieland jazz at its finest. Though the blend of bluegrass and jazz might sound unusual to some, the truth is there is a lot of common ground between the two. At any rate, the marriage of these two bands in a recording studio has resulted in one of the most enjoyable Americana records in recent history.

Ol’ Del takes many of the lead vocals here, but the microphone is passed around the entire troupe throughout the record. The whole gang declares their readiness to rip and roll on the album opening track “The Band’s In Town”. Hank Sr.’s “Jambalaya” is reborn here as a rousing Mardi Gras stomp, while the traditional “I’ll Fly Away” is a celebratory flight to the heavens propelled by piano and angelic vocal harmonies. The tune fairly sparkles as the entire ensemble weaves and warbles with ragged glory.

If the mix of jazz and bluegrass sounds incongruous to you, just cue up the song “Banjo Frisco” and dig the clever juxtaposition of banjo with a full horn section. Rob McCoury‘s banjo sets the bouncing melody atop a lightly jumping rhythm provided by the drums and mandolin while the horns and fiddle trade solos. The happy vibe immediately pulls you into the joyful spirit of the tune. Under the dancing spell of this record you might not realize right away that you are listening to something that has no discernible precedent in American music. Not many parties this good also offer a hidden history lesson.

The Del/Pres collaborative is playing some tour dates together this spring and summer, including a number of outdoor shows and festivals. Without a doubt, they are one of the most highly-anticipated of the 80-plus acts scheduled to perform at this summer’s giant Bonnaroo Music And Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.

An interview with Pete Townshend biographer Mark Ian Wilkerson

2011-03-31T18:39:00.000-07:00

Mark Ian Wilkerson was born in Birmingham, England in 1969 and moved to the US in 1984. After completing a stint in the military, Wilkerson met his future wife and the two settled in Louisville, Kentucky and began raising a family there. A lifelong obsessive fan of The Who, Wilkerson was unsatisfied with the available literature on the band and he came to the conclusion that he must take it upon himself to pen the definitive Pete Townshend biography. He initially published it himself under the title Amazing Journey: The Life Of Pete Townshend. Soon a major publisher expressed an interest in releasing the book and it was re-issued with additional material including a new foreword penned by Eddie Vedder. It also boasts a new final chapter comprised of a recent interview that Townshend provided exclusively for the book, which now bears the new title Who Are You.

I recently spoke to Wilkerson about how the book came together.

***

RH: Can you tell me about your first discovery of The Who and at what point did you realize this was more than just one of your favorite bands?

Wilkerson: I first got into The Who when I was around 10 yrs old. This was around '79 during the 'mod revival' which was taking place in England at the time - the Quadrophenia movie was out, and the Kids Are Alright movie too. The Jam, who owed a large debt to The Who, were hugely popular, and The Who were enjoying a resurgence of their own with their new drummer Kenney Jones. I wasn't really listening to new Who music at this time - I was discovering their earlier work. So while the Who Are You album was only a year old, my first Who purchase was a cassette of Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy. Within a few years, my family life was thrown into turmoil and I think I dove deeper into music because of that. I was struck by the honesty of Pete's writing, and his work became a personal refuge. Quadrophenia, in particular, rang true with me during this period and it remains my favorite work by any artist.

RH: When did the idea first occur to you to write a Pete Townshend biography?

Wilkerson: I read a Townshend bio back in '96 or '97 and I was disappointed with it. There's a tremendous amount of honesty and depth behind Pete's compositions and I wanted to learn more about that. I began studying his life and career as a hobby, just to satisfy my own interest in my favorite artist. It really just grew from there.

RH: How long did you work on the book? I understand there was a period of several years when you dedicated more or less all of your free time to the research and gathering of resources like articles and interviews?

Wilkerson: I worked on it during my spare time from '97 to '05. Late '05 is when I self-published it. I collected recorded interviews, printed interviews, out of print books - anything I could get my hands on. I put together a timeline and fleshed it out as I collected more & more info. Once I felt that I had a sufficient amount of detail (and that the well was pretty much dry) for a certain period in Pete's life, I would start hacking away at the timeline and putting together a narrative. This was all in between being a dad and a husband and a full-time worker, so I had plenty of time to contemplate Pete's life & music between bouts of writing & researching!

RH: Tell me about how you arrived at the decision to self-publish.

Wilkerson: After several years of research & writing, I wanted to share what I'd written with other Who fans. I posted it on the web, a chapter a week, in early 2005, and received some great feedback (and corrections!) from readers. I even got an email from a friend of Pete's telling me how great - and accurate - it was! It was difficult to read on the web, so some readers suggested that I offer a printed version. That's when I looked into self-publishing. I found an on-demand publisher named Lulu (lulu.com) which was a great option for me.

RH: Tell me about your experience with selling the books at the Who convention in the UK.

Wilkerson: I was invited to attend a Who convention in Shepherd's Bush (West London, the Who's birthplace) in 2006. I brought two suitcases jammed with books, and dragged them around the London underground rail system to Bush Hall. The convention was quite a surreal experience. It was held in a pretty small concert hall. They had scooters from the original Quadrophenia movie. I met 'Irish' Jack Lyons, who was one of the original 'mod' Who fans that Pete had in mind when he wrote Quadrophenia. I saw the band Casbah Club, which included Pete's brother Simon Townshend, former Big County drummer (and one of Pete's favorite session drummers) Mark Brzezicki, and former Jam bassist Bruce Foxton. Really a great experience to see these musicians up-close. Roger Daltrey showed up during the evening and jumped onstage for a few quick renditions of Who songs, accompanied by Simon. I had a table set up and sold all of my books, which was nice, since I didn't want to lug them back home! I signed a bunch of autographs, which is really a strange experience when you've never been asked to do that before. Of course, the highlight was meeting Pete the day before the convention.

RH: Tell me about your chance meeting with Pete in front of his home.

Wilkerson: I arrived in London the day before the Who convention - late March 2006. Pete wasn't expected to take part in the convention (and it turned out that indeed he didn't), but I wanted to see where he lived, so I walked up Richmond Hill to take a look. His house is right next to the street, no big gates or fences or anything like that. There was a nice new Ferrari sitting outside. Just as I walked past, the front door opened and a few people walked out. It turns out it was Pete, along with someone who was selling him the car. As Pete climbed into the car, I walked up and introduced myself. He was very gracious, got out of the car and chatted with me for several minutes about the self-published book. The thing that really stuck with me was, as I shook his hand to leave, he squeezed my hand for an extra second or so while giving me an earnest look and telling me how pleased he was that I'd put the book out. What a strange coincidence that was - it's the only time I've ever been to Pete's house, and I was there for about two minutes before he walked out. If I hadn't met him that day, the Who Are You book probably would never have happened.

RH: How did your book come to Pete's attention?

Wilkerson: I had been communicating with Pete through his webmaster, Matt Kent, from the point where I had begun thinking about publishing. I wanted to make sure he didn't have any problems with it, because there had been reports that Pete was working on his autobiography. When the self-published book came out, I sent Pete the first copy.

RH: How did it come to be released by major publishers in the US and abroad?

Wilkerson: After a brief meeting with Pete, I sent him a letter thanking him for taking the time to talk to me. I also mentioned that I would love to be able to interview him at some point. He accepted and I interviewed him by email while he was in the midst of the Who's U.S. tour that fall, promoting Endless Wire. Once I'd interviewed Pete, I was able to interview several others, including his brother Simon, his brother in law and producer/engineer Jon Astley. I traveled to London in January 2007 to conduct some interviews and while I was there had a meeting with Chris Charlesworth, managing editor of Omnibus Press. Chris has a long Who pedigree - he was a writer for Melody Maker back in the late '60s / early '70s and often covered the Who. He has written some Who-related books, and edited Tony Fletcher's mid-'90s Keith Moon bio. Chris also played a key role in assembling the 1994 boxed set 30 years of Maximum R&B. Within pretty short order we had a book deal done.

RH: What are you working on now and what can you tell me about it?

Wilkerson: I am contractually obligated to not reveal that information at this time, but something many people will find very interesting will be announced very soon so let's hold off on answering this question for now!

On The Spot (Curse Of The Bottle)

2011-03-30T17:29:00.000-07:00

Got an empty bottle from the alley
Burnt a candle, dug a hole
When the moon went back behind the clouds
You dug it up and found it full

Curse Of The Bottle took your house from you
Then Vegas made you wanna saw your spouse in two
You drag way behind the beat,
Maestro said “Hit the street”
Leaving one thing left to do

Back to April and Adair
But you got more than you bargained for down there
Barely got out in one piece,
now you’re back on Bourbon Street
A little worse for wear

Heaven’s hiding underground
A treasure hidden wanted just to be found
But you messed about
where you ought not mess around
And they ran you out of town

Might have made that up on the spot
Might have changed some names
and places so you won’t get caught
You had one too many shots with the Benvies
And you spilled your guts

TRUE WIDOW - As High As The Highest Heavens And From The Center To The Circumference Of The Earth

2011-03-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

I’m always a little cynical when a band’s publicity materials make what appear to be hyperbolic and exaggerated claims about their sound. So you understand if I had serious doubts when the first thing I read about True Widow was a quote from Alternative Press that described them as “equal parts My Bloody Valentine and Black Sabbath”. I mean, how can they live up to that? In actual fact, that comparison is closer to the truth than I’d imagined possible. At the same time, that equation unfairly oversimplifies the band’s own unique qualities. The heavy swirl is there for sure. But there is also a haunted house vibe that permeates the record like a bad break-up fever dream.

The name of the band’s new album might take all afternoon to read, but their sound gets right to the point. Drowsy vocals are half-buried under a squall of detuned guitars. And their Sisyphus of rhythm sections features a menacing bass guitar sludge that creeps like lava while unrelenting drums roll and tumble like a slow motion avalanche at the bottom of a boiling sea. Like the howling haze of junk sickness, True Widow’s hefty, hypnotic sound immediately engulfs the listener like a bleak and stormy trance.

The band’s new record is released today. For a preview, you can check out the track “Skull Eyes” for free here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20381822/Skull%20Eyes.mp3

For tour dates and other info about True Widow, you can follow the band on their blog: http://truewidow.blogspot.com/

LOOSEWRECK’S FLASHBACKS Chapter 742

2011-03-06T16:04:00.000-08:00

AC/DC January 11, 2009
USBank Arena, Cincinnati, Ohio

A friend recently asked me what my worst pet peeves are about going to concerts. It took me all of 2 seconds to spit out, “Everything is outrageously expensive: the tickets, the parking, the t-shirts, and of course the ridiculously overpriced beers…”

I’ve been a huge fan of AC/DC since I first heard them when I was 11 years old. So it’s difficult for me to even acknowledge the fact that I am pissed at them for their high-priced tickets. The Stones priced me out a few years ago when their average ticket price sky-rocketed over two hundred bucks. That’s another band that I love and it pains me to think that I may never see them in concert again. But ticket prices that high equate to a band giving me the middle finger. No matter how much I love ‘em, I feel have no choice but to return the gesture.

I guess I never thought that AC/DC would succumb to this trend, but on their current tour they are charging upwards of a hundred bucks a ticket. (Including ‘service charges’ etc.) As purveyors of the most blue collar music on earth, how can they justify those prices? If a guy wants to take his girlfriend to an AC/DC concert nowadays, it’s gonna cost him his entire paycheck and that makes me sick to my stomach. Shaking off a burst of incredulous laughter, Dean Newman, owner of Mole’s Records in Clifton Heights observed, “With this fucked up economy? Those are the very same blue collar workers facing possible lay-offs in the new year.”

I know how these things work. When a band of great stature plans a tour it is early in the process when the promotion is handed over to a corporate sponsor. The band is paid a huge chunk of their earnings up front, while the sponsors and tour promoters set the ticket prices. I get that. And I’m perfectly willing to risk appearing naïve and idealistic about this when I ask: Does it have to be that way?

How foolish is it of me to think of Angus and the boys as big-hearted old friends who believe they already have plenty of money and they would never do such a thing to their loyal supporters? (Don’t answer that.) The fact is that the band may have little or nothing to do with setting those exorbitant ticket prices. With the modern concert promotions infrastructure well entrenched as it is, they are, like you and I, just cogs in the machine.

Truth is, they are clever devils. Say what you want about their exclusive deal with WalMart. It is a brilliant sales tactic and it has given AC/DC their first #1 album in many years. You can be assured they were paid a huge “signing bonus” just for making the deal in the first place, making a nice profit before a single copy of the disc was sold. Keen-eared listeners have also heard AC/DC as “bumper music” leading in and out of commercial breaks on dozens of big network sports broadcasts in recent weeks. You can bet that somebody in the band’s management cleared the path for this development as well, another tool for raising the band’s profile while they are on tour throughout the fall and winter, in support of the new record.

AC/DC’s Black Ice World Tour finally arrived at Cincy’s USBank Arena on Sunday January 11 and after months of doubts and deliberations I finally decided that I had to go to the show. Sunday afternoon I was tipped off that some good seats right beside the stage had been released through TicketBastard so I went online and paid the cursed piper.

The less said the better about the highly forgettable opening act The Answer. I had both good and bad feelings for them during their set. “Congratulations on snagging the sweet gig” Vs. “Too bad you suck”. To be fair, the rock n roll concert clichés always begin with the opening band receiving a terrible mix, and this night was no exception. A typical 4-piece Metal band whose swaggering front man tossed his blond mane about like a child throwing a tantrum, The Answer might actually have some talent and some tunes but the muddy mix gave no real evidence of this.

After an intermission the houselights dimmed once again and AC/DC took the stage around 8:30pm.

Their over-the-top, larger-than-life, bombastic Spinal Tap stage props included a giant bell for singer Brian Johnson to swing from during the intro to “Hells Bells”, a scantily-clad, heavily made-up and tattooed three-story tall inflatable woman leering and bobbing over the drum kit for “Whole Lotta Rosie”, and the inevitable cannons firing during “For Those About To Rock”. A giant train crashed through the back of the stage to open the show with the night’s first song, “Rock And Roll Train” from the new record. (Ironically, it was this new tune that was stuck in my head for hours after the show.) The pillars of flame that heralded the band’s arrival on stage and later accented the finale to their classic “Let There Be Rock” produced such heat that even several rows away from the stage I felt certain my eyebrows were singed.

The band played only 3 or 4 tunes from the new record, sticking to classics like “Back In Black”, “Shoot To Thrill”, “Highway To Hell”, and an extended blues jam on “The Jack” that included Angus’ by-now familiar strip tease routine. To his credit and my relief, the 53-year-old guitarist shows only his AC/DC boxer shorts when he moons the audience these days.

I gotta tell ya: Angus and the boys can still bring it. His guitar playing and frenetic onstage flailing, kicking, running, spiraling, falling and twitching are just as hilarious and unbelievable as ever. I can’t understand how he can do that for 2 hours every night without inflicting serious harm on himself. And he’s been doing it since 1974!!!

From the moment AC/DC hit the stage, all was forgiven. I make no excuses for them or anyone else who allows their ticket prices to be set in the triple digits. I guess one way of looking at it is that today’s ticket prices prevent me from seeing as many shows as I would like to.

TOP TEN HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2010 - part 3

2011-02-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve been putting this off for a few weeks cuz I’ve just been real busy so I haven’t had a chance to sit down and complete my list of personal highlights from 2010. I’m just gonna bang it out right now and get it finished and off my mind. Seems almost a ridiculous thing to still be reminiscing about 2010, now that we are 6-7 weeks into 2011. Anyway, here’s the rest of the list…

#8:
Weirdest damn thing. My reflexes seemed to get quicker in 2010. I notice now that when I drop something I almost always catch it before it hits the ground. Car keys, guitar picks, coins, whatever. It’s weird. But it’s a welcome surprise in my mid-40s when frankly I should expect my reflexes and other functions to begin declining soon. I don’t know. Is that weird? To consider this a personal highlight of the past year? All I know is it happens all the time. Enough that I would remark on it.

#7:
After many years of living 2 hours away, my Dad recently moved back to the Cincinnati area. Now he’s just 20 minutes up the highway and I have been able to visit him much more frequently in the past few weeks than I have for years. Very cool.

#6:
In November, I got to see and hang out with my old friend Paul Horton for the first time in many years. In fact, 2010 was a great year for re-connecting with many old friends, some of whom I had not seen or heard from in over 20 years.

#5:
Jason And The Scorchers at the Southgate House in September as part of the MidPoint Music Festival. This was one of the best concerts I’d seen in years. OPENING NIGHT of their tour, drummer stranded in Europe with visa problems, the Scorchers had a guest drummer for the night and he totally fucking killed it. A Nashville cat of the highest order, the guy had less than 24 hours to learn their whole set. Jason himself was like “Iggy Twitty” onstage, the original country punk. Still energetic and singing his ass off, prowling the whole stage. Singer Stacy Collins did a three-song guess spot and she raged. She could kick Gretchen Wilson’s ass in her SLEEP. Then, after play 75 minutes of blazing cowpunk, the band took a break and then got back onstage and did another set. They coulda mailed it in. Especially with their drummer situation. Instead they rose to the occasion and played a long and incredible show. Nashville veterans through and through, though once considered rebels and outcasts, they brought it big time. And Warner Hodges is still one of the best rock n roll guitar players on earth. Something tells me he is sober now cuz he looked healthier than ever. And he slung his guitar 360 degrees over his shoulder more times in one song than the human hackfest Yngwie Malmsteen has in his whole career. An amazing show to watch and to hear. Stacy Collins did a guest spot in the 2nd set too. I can’t say enough good things about this show. The Scorchers are BACK. Check out their latest CD Halcyon Times and tell me you don’t agree.

#4:
Keith Richards finally released “Wingless Angels 2”, a follow-up to a record he released back in 1996 that features traditional Jamaican Nyabinghi drumming and chanting. This second record features more of the late great Justin Hinds on vocals, a true Reggae legend. Keith puts his money where his mouth is by taking the effort to bring this traditional Jamaican music to a wider audience. And it’s also a thousand times cooler than the bullshit solo records that Mick Jagger is in the habit of releasing. Keith doesn’t chase that pop star bullshit. He sees an opportunity to expose traditional Jamaican music to the world and it’s a beautiful thing. Basically, Keith records the drumming and chanting in Jamaica then he goes home to the States where he overdubs very sparse guitar and bass tracks, and a few other surprises too like honking harmonica here and wailing violins there. Very cool stuff.

#3:
Keith’s autobiography.

#2:
I had the good fortune to play some really awesome gigs last year. Sparrow Bellows traveled and played some great hometown shows as well like MidPoint and Fountain Square. My old band the Speed Hickeys reunited after a 20-year hiatus and we’re gigging regularly again and probably sounding better than we ever did before. And via band gigs and solo shows I got to meet Tony Levin, and Johnny and Joey Spampinato from NRBQ. All three were among the nicest rock n roll veterans I have ever met. Tony Levin was gracious and patient and talkative. Genuinely friendly. Johnny Spampinato talked to me about guitar amps for 20 minutes. And Joey Spampinato blessed me with copious compliments about my guitar playing. I was over the fucking moon, incredulous.

#1:
Bill Murray sighting on the streets of Austin and again minutes later at Stubb’s, when Sparrow Bellows was in Texas for SXSW. Coolest thing ever. Like an Elvis sighting. The man is a god to me. I walked right by him twice in ten minutes and I was so freaked out that I could not speak for over an hour.

TOP TEN HIGHLIGHTS OF 2010 - part 2

2011-01-11T19:38:00.000-08:00

(The man in the photo is author Cesar Aira.)

#9:

One of the funniest books I've read in a long time came out last year - The Literary Conference by Cesar Aira. Here's what the New Yorker had to say about it:

"Aira, an experimental Argentine writer, has published more than sixty books, though only a few have appeared in English. At a literary conference, César, the protagonist—author and translator by day, mad scientist by night—hatches a plan to rule the world by creating an army cloned from the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. But César accidentally clones a cell that’s not from Fuentes but from Fuentes’s silk tie, thus loosing lumbering, thousand-foot-long electric-blue silkworms upon the city of Mérida. Aira writes, “It seems like the insertion of a different plot line, from an old B-rated science fiction movie.” It sure does. But Aira’s writerly self-reference, while hardly subtle, is disarming, and the result is amusing, self-conscious camp."

Your Leo Horoscope For Today

2011-01-05T18:32:00.000-08:00

Check yourself and your own overrated hackfest band before you start thinking you are qualified to criticize Mick & Keith’s songwriting abilities. Bitch, please.

TOP TEN HIGHLIGHTS OF 2010 - part 1

2011-01-03T07:24:00.000-08:00

#10:

After consuming a mysterious brownie handed to me by a total stranger and toking up some dank with some Frisbee friends at Bonnaroo, there was a period of a few hours on Saturday June 12th when I was so twisted that I could not move and for a while was unsure of who I was. This experience was not entirely pleasurable, but if I came home from Bonnaroo without having had an experience like this I would have been disappointed in myself. I sat on a big plastic lawn chair backstage and listened to the distant sounds of the Avett Brothers’ performance on the Which Stage. I wanted to walk over in that direction to check them out but did not trust my legs to get me there. It started to rain and I didn’t notice until I saw many people running for cover. In truth it was barely drizzling but I did finally get up and go to the Messy Hall food tent for shelter. When I started to feel a little better I walked into the press tent and happened upon a press conference featuring Oderus Urungus, lead singer from GWAR. Believe me, no matter how big of a GWAR fan you are, when you are coming down from a strange trip and are just starting to feel normal again, this is not the scene you want to behold. Just when I was starting to resume my grip on reality too. I sat back down and just observed the chaos from a safe distance. Soon my friend Chuck happened by and we decided to go walk around a bit but as soon as I emerged from the press tent my head began to spin again and I was suddenly very dizzy and disoriented. I stopped and leaned on Chuck’s shoulder for support just as Conan O’Brien walked right past us. Chuck laughed and said, “That’s nothing: Shakira is standing twenty feet behind you.”

TOP TEN NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FOR 2011

2011-01-01T13:22:00.000-08:00

10. I’m gonna get more exercise.

9. I’m gonna drink less alcohol.

8. I’m gonna try to cultivate better coping skills when it comes to dealing with a pet peeve I have about people I know who are severely lacking in self awareness. One aspect of this new “coping mechanism” I plan to develop is to call some people out directly. If you are engaged in any activity that I deem inexcusably thoughtless or mindless or embarrassing or just flat out asinine behavior you just might get an Unsolicited Truth Attack from yours truly. You have been warned.

7. I will do no more freelance writing assignments for no pay. Many editors do not pay for “web content”. It’s become a very common practice and I think it’s ridiculous and offensive. The whole world of journalism is moving away from print and on to the web, so what other kind of content is there? See Pete Hammill’s article on this called ONE DAY, WEB JOURNALISTS WILL GET REAL MONEY: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/22/pete-hamill-one-day-web-j_n_786930.html

6. I wanna get rid of half of my stuff.

5. I’m gonna try to develop more healthy eating habits. Somehow, I have to figure out how to eat less cheese. They say quitting cigarettes is harder than kicking heroin. I think cheese is more addictive than both combined.

4. I will talk less and listen more.

3. I’m gonna release another acoustic record and do lots more recording in the new year.

2. I will write more and I’m gonna bang out – at the very least – a rough draft of the book I’ve been talking about writing for years.

1. I’m gonna call my friends more often and get back into my old habit of letter writing too. E-mail and texting makes it all too easy for a social anxiety-ridden shut-in like me to fall into weak and lazy methods of staying in touch that are a poor substitute for real communication.

Back On The Train

2010-12-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

Apple slices and peanut butter. Croweology. A good night's sleep and a shave first thing in the morning. Hot coffee. Happy cats. Fresh batteries. Black socks and a new intro to an old song. I miss my old friend Michael but I don't miss the person I was before I met him.

Some Thoughts On Liz Phair

2010-10-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what to think of Liz Phair. The way this particular blonde fireball chooses to package and present her public persona doesn’t exactly make it difficult for 40-something dudes like me to ponder her “work” and “significance”. And I do admire her often self-deprecating sense of humor and the fact the she is unapologetically doing whatever the hell she wants. I have often wondered if it is possible to set aside our love of Liz Phair the Old School Indie Queen in order to objectively critique her newer stuff. Her new Funstyle CD is a weird accomplishment. It’s pure fluff. But because it comes from our darling Liz I wonder if we don’t reflexively apply an extra measure of serious scrutiny to it than we might for a new record by Christina Aguilera or Kylie Minogue. Because Phair continues to confound our expectations so brazenly, I wonder if anyone can honestly claim to be a fan of all of her records. Perhaps the unspoken pun of the song “You Should Know Me (Better Than That)” on her new disc means to imply that we will never really know her.

Alternately calm and keening, Phair’s singing voice still feels like a naturally melodic extension of her speaking voice. With songs like “And He Slayed Her”, Phair proves that she’s still capable of coining simple pop tunes that are catchier than most. Stranded like stray geeks at a hipster convention, there’s only a couple of them here, amidst programmed drechno like “Smoke” and “Beat Is Up”. Unremarkable electronica accompanied by Phair’s cutesy, half-clever midlife observations is hardly worthy of unreleased B-side status. Here though it comprises half the disc and it’s sad to think of her needlessly shedding even more fans by passing off tunes like this as an artistic statement.

Phair’s bold swan dive into the realm of overproduced mainstream pop of several years ago now looks like an almost gutsy sell-out. Here now she mocks us all who mocked her then with a slew of self-referential rants. The first unsettling inkling is “Bollywood”, which features an ill-advised rap. That tune and “U Hate It” represent the contingent of cartoon techno nightmares on Funstyle. Together they comprise an uncomfortable tour of Phair’s career, business dealings, industry standards, media rumblings, and personal observations about the many hypocrisies of a reluctant rock star’s public life. This feels like going to your mom’s art show. You kinda have to be there but it’s awkward and you have to keep a respectful half-smile on your face even though her work isn’t really that good anymore.

Not quite enough to salvage the project is the bonus disc of Phair’s 1993 Girlysound demos that predate her classic Exile In Guyville. Perhaps included as counterpoint to the new stuff, more likely it’s just tacked on as incentive to increase sales. These early demos deserve better than to be buried on a bonus disc included with her latest stab in the dark. A limited release of the old demos perhaps could have performed a measure of damage control for her flagging reputation. My guess is that she’s just not interested in looking over her shoulder to shore up some good publicity. I don’t know who’s more lost right now: Phair or her audience. It’s sad because the handful of rockin’ pop tunes here show that she’s still got it. She’s got balls and every right to do what she wants. But in an industry where CD sales are flat-lining, just how long can she afford to play jokes like this on her fans? This unfortunate misstep reminds me of Mick Jagger’s inexplicable and embarrassing attempts to connect with today’s youth market. But at least he’s trying. Two or three good tunes lost in a wash of programmed electronic crap raps and rants? Seriously, Liz. If ya gotta be obstinate and peculiar, just put out a 7” until something closer to true inspiration strikes.

Of course there is a difference between William Shakespeare and Archie comics. Both have every right to exist and both are legitimate art forms. Classic literature and candy confections for the kids can happily co-exist. It goes without saying that Phair’s early work was far from Shakespeare, but it does have an undeniable air of sincerity and inspiration that seems to be borne of real experience. I for one still love her, but her recorded output of the last few years is sketchy at best, and painfully embarrassing at times. It’s like watching a good friend total one new car after another, yet somehow always surviving unscathed and living to crash another one tomorrow. For God’s sake be careful, Liz. Maybe let somebody else drive next time?

Is the joke on us? Is Liz Phair now making deliberately disposable pop music as a statement about how our Britney Culture Run Amok is a corporate monster that feeds on our short attention span? I doubt it. Funstyle is kitschy fun and silly. But like a mediocre comedy record that might make you kinda smile on the first listen, you may never grant it a second spin. Her early stuff holds up to repeated listens all these years later. But was her early success a fluke? Of course it was. Everyone’s is. But now she’s writing songs about her last record’s bad reviews? Worse still, she’s rapping them over programmed drum beats? I would like to believe that sort of thing is beneath her but here it is. I don’t know. Must be nice to be a cute little blonde. She can continually shoot herself in the foot and every year or so there will always be another label that will release her new record. And grey-haired geeks like me will listen to them. What she’s after I’m not sure but the vexing vixen refuses to take the short cut to our hearts.

Weird Uncle Frank

2010-10-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

“The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary” encapsulates almost everything you have ever heard about Frank Zappa music into a single mammoth epic, a surrealistic musical cartoon that in its original form took up the entire first side of Frank’s 1978 album Studio Tan. There is no guitar solo and no potty humor. But other than these two hallmarks of Frank’s music, the listener is challenged to traipse through a crash course collage of Zappa’s Universe of conceptual continuity, a maze of myriad musical riddles and rapid fire references. “Greggery Peccary”’s convoluted storyline may seem random and ridiculous at first but under scrutiny reveals many levels of acerbic wit, finger pointing, social commentary, a deeply cynical and hilarious lampooning of popular trends that goes so far as to ridicule the very notion of popular trends, recurring characters from other Zappa tunes and dozens of “clues” to other songs in his vast catalog.

With some of Frank’s many overdubbed vocals pitched helium-high and harmonizing no less, while others are floor-rumblingly low, a story unfolds about a little pig named Greggery who invented the calendar and the traumatic life events that followed. I’ll say no more than that about the story line, and indeed that sentence barely sums up the first few minutes of the piece. I’ll refer to the song as a “piece” because it is essentially a classical piece played by rock musicians who also sing a wacky story over the top of it. The piece goes through more changes and “movements” than I can count and all I can say to the curious and uninitiated is please do yourself a favor and check out this song but be sure to strap yourself in for the long haul and listen to the entire 20-minute piece. There is no “radio edit” of “Greggery Peccary” for today’s ADD consumer culture. Listen closely and you will hear snippets of numerous catchy little ditties, interspersed and interwoven here like Frank’s every daydream doodle come to life. It really is a brilliant piece of music and I guarantee you that you have never heard anything like it before. How many songs can you say that about?

Using that, my brief and off-the-cuff summary of “Greggery Peccary” as a jumping-off point, let us also deduce that this tune is probably not the easiest entry point into the vast and convoluted catalog of the American composer Frank Zappa. What most people know about him is that some of his songs had “dirty” lyrics. Some might even be able to quote a line or two from “Broken Hearts Are For Assholes” or “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?”. Others know he gave his children unusual names like Moon Unit and Dweezil. Some might remember his senate testimony at the PMRC hearings in 1985. But, since this was broadcast on C-SPAN, most Americans were probably not tuned in. Beginning with the Mothers Of Invention and evolving over the years through an ever-changing stable of musicians in his employ, Frank Zappa released over 80 albums between 1966 and his untimely death in 1993. From the Zappa vaults the family trust continues to unveil posthumous releases of concert performances and previously unreleased studio recordings. Encompassing rock, jazz, doo wop, comedy, classical, improv, r&b, electronica, blues, and more, Frank Zappa’s prodigious output qualifies as the most wildly diverse catalog of music ever created by any one individual.

But how the Hell did I get interested in Zappa music by hearing “The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary” when I was just 12 years old? Of course at the time I hadn’t the slightest clue what Frank was about. I had no concept of classical or avant garde music. I was 12 years old for God’s sake. How did the aforementioned “Greggery Peccary” open the door for what would be the most important musical relationship of my life when I was 12 years old and ill-equipped to even begin to understand it? Maybe cuz it was funny. Maybe cuz it was so unexpected. Maybe because Side 2 of the same LP was completely different. It contained two jazz-rock instrumentals that I did not like nor could I even comprehend at the time, and one short little love song called “Let Me Take You To The Beach” that seemed to be deliberately stupid. I had never encountered such a thing. “This guy”, I remember thinking to myself, “tediously crafted a pop song with lyrics that are defiantly, proudly stupid”. I knew that was funny, conceptually. But I didn’t know why. Even this very short song takes half a dozen unexpected left turns during the instrumental segment, with layers of synthesizers that seem to be programmed to bleat and blurt the most ridiculous keyboard sounds that Frank could come up with. I couldn’t wrap my pre-teen mind around this stuff at all, but for some reason I was intrigued. In the months that followed I began a series of random acquisitions from the Zappa catalog at my local record store, and the first few I bought all sounded completely different. I thought, “What the hell is up with this guy?” I must confess that I was often nonplussed to the point of anger when, after saving up my allowance for six weeks, I would pick up a Zappa cassette like Uncle Meat or Waka/Jawaka, albums that were loaded with titillating and bizarre song titles, only to find myself completely befuddled and confused by complicated jazz rock that sailed way over my head. I myself believe that any 12-year old kid in my position would likely have been put off by Zappa’s music. “This doesn’t sound like Nugent at all.”

How is that even though three out of every four purchases left me disillusioned and confused I kept buying Zappa records? It is the great mystery and the great treasure of my youth. I shall forever believe that it was simply fate. I was meant to be sitting in front of a TV when Zappa was on the Dick Cavett Show. Perhaps I was so intrigued by Frank’s appearance on the Cavett show that I could have started anywhere in his catalog and likely would have followed suit by throwing myself into his music like I did. At age 12 I did not know that Zappa’s music would become one of my life’s great passions. Even though I did not understand much of it as a child, perhaps the confounded, inexplicable diversity of Frank’s music was the very thing that interested me. I don’t know. My parents were in the middle of splitting up at the time. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how Zappa’s music brought an intriguing and positive distraction into my young life at the exact same time that my family was suffering through a great traumatic rift. His music would open my mind and expand my horizons, the confusing clusters of notes like unseen hands giving guidance not unlike a parent.

The Day I Discovered Frank Zappa

2010-10-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

June 12, 1980

I’m 12 years old and I’m on vacation with my family in Long Boat Key, Florida. For some reason everybody’s at the beach except me. I go back to the hotel room to change into my swim trunks and I turn on the TV. The Dick Cavett Show is on and Dick is interviewing this weird guy with a big mustache and goatee. They are talking about the weird guy’s music and how some of his lyrics have offended some people. In particular, a song called “Jewish Princess” that has the whole Anti-Defamation League up in arms. The man is soft spoken but speaks eloquently and unapologetically about his work. He is articulate, acerbic, and funny as hell. How it is that I found Frank Zappa funny though I was only 12 years old when I discovered him, I don’t know. I had received a guitar for my 11th birthday just 22 months prior to stumbling upon Zappa’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show. But heretofore my guitar heroes and musical taste were exactly what you might expect from a kid who grew up in the 70s: Ace Frehley, Angus Young, Ted Nugent. I sat at the foot of the bed in the hotel room and watched the whole interview, thinking, “This guy is fucking cool. When I get home I gotta check out some of his records.”

Back home in Cincinnati, I asked my guitar teacher, “What’s up with this Frank Zappa guy?” My instructor was surprised to hear me ask about Frank and he had only good things to say about him. I think the dude was impressed: Is this little kid really asking me about Frank Zappa? This particular teacher was always quick with a mix tape whenever I asked about any guitar player that I was curious to hear more of. But I noticed he was reticent and evasive when I asked him to make me a tape of some Zappa stuff. At the time I thought nothing of it. Maybe he didn’t have any Zappa stuff in his personal collection or his cassette deck was broken or something. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that maybe my guitar teacher didn’t wanna make me a Zappa tape because of Frank’s risqué lyrics. I mean I was still only 12, 13 years old and this dude probably didn’t want my parents to discover that he’d made me a tape with “Crew Slut” or “Titties And Beer” on it. Fair enough. So I took matters into my own hands.

Down the other end of the strip mall where I was taking guitar lessons was a department store called Rink’s. Back then every department store had a record section and that was where I would spend hours killing time when my mom was buying socks or pillow cases or something. I found a couple Zappa LPs at Rink’s and the one that really caught my eye was Studio Tan, with its jagged, surrealist cover painting depicting some dude’s big weird comic book face exploding with colorful angst. I was 13 years old and this too must have affected my decision to buy it. But even in the cut-out bin it was priced at $3.99 and I didn’t have that kinda money. Elsewhere in the same bargain bin were records priced at a mere 99 cents. So I simply removed the sticker from one of those and placed it over top of the $3.99 sticker on Studio Tan.

Even at age 13 I had a little bit of a record collection. So I have to admit that I was a little disappointed with the sparse packaging of Studio Tan. Just a single sleeve cover with no gatefold, and a plain white inner sleeve with no pictures and no real liner notes to speak of. Just a few song titles scrawled on the back of the jacket. Wait. Can this be? There’s only four songs on this album? When I got home and took the record out of the sleeve I was elated to see that side 1 consisted of ONE LONG SONG. What the hell is up with that? And there in the middle - the yellow Discreet Records label. I’d seen Black Sabbath records with that same label, and I began to imagine what kind of devilish heavy metal epic the weird man with the crazy mustache and the dirty lyrics that offended religious people must have concocted that could possibly take up an entire album side. The song was called “Greggery Peccary”. I dropped the needle on the record…

Paul McCartney - Mexico City, May 27, 2010

2010-06-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first installment of a brand new feature here on Adventures Of A Loose Wreck – the guest contributor segment! Please welcome our first outside contributor, my old friend and baby brother Cris Coey. Cris had the extremely good fortune to see Paul McCartney in Mexico City last week. The following is his review of the show.

-rh

***

Paul McCartney: ‘Up and Coming’ Tour – Mexico City, May 27, 2010

The spacious baseball stadium Foro Sol was the site of Paul McCartney’s first performance in Mexico City since early 2002. It was also the first time I had seen the former Beatle in concert since October of that same year in Cleveland, Ohio. I must say that this was quite a different experience for so many reasons.

Eight years ago, I saw that show with my mother which was very special for me. Being one of the people who got me into the Beatles, there were so many times that night where we would catch each other crying or smiling ear to ear. However, there were also times where it seemed like we were the only ones in the arena feeling the emotions that can come from hearing one of the greatest songwriters in history perform a myriad of his best songs. So while it was enjoyable, the people around us acted more like they were out for a night at the symphony or ballet and not a big, exciting rock show. Just like us these people had paid hundreds of dollars for their tickets, yet they all chose to sit there with legs crossed and hands folded. You would have thought they’d want to move around a bit and get in the groove, you know, just to get their money’s worth. But they didn’t – and as a result I felt like I couldn’t! Maybe I’m just different, I guess. I tend to measure my enjoyment of concerts based on a number of things, including significance, song selection, quality of performance, atmosphere, and energy. And having said all that, the show in Mexico last Thursday night rated five stars across the board! Not only was it far superior to the Cleveland performance, but I can now say (without equivocation) that after attending over 70 concerts in my life by various artists, I just witnessed the best one EVER! Who would have thought I’d have to travel to a different country to experience it?

This time around my companions were also quite different. My girlfriend Lupita and I decided to make the trek back to her native land and join her mother Martha, her Tía Tete, and her 17-year-old sister Ana Laura, all of whom I had just met hours earlier. They (including most everybody we encountered on our journey) are some of the nicest, most humble and down-to-earth people you could ever want to meet. So needless to say, having the pleasure of being with four of Mexico’s finest ladies definitely added to my enjoyment of this extravaganza.

The show wasn’t scheduled to begin until 9 p.m. local time, but the energetic crowd could barely contain its excitement, eagerly anticipating the night’s festivities. Chants of “Paul! Paul! Paul!” and spontaneous rounds of applause whirled around the stadium, even as the ominous Mexican skies misted rain upon its most excited inhabitants. When the lights went down and the last raindrop fell, we were graciously greeted by the band, consisting of keyboardist ‘Wix’ Wickens, drummer Abe, guitarists Brian and Rusty, and of course Sir Paul himself. “¡Hola Chilangos!” he said (which is slang term for natives of Mexico City) as he greeted us with a wave and a smile. With each member dressed in black, we certainly weren’t feeling blue as the opening notes of the whimsical “Venus and Mars” began. Kind of an odd choice considering the subdued nature of the song, but it has a definite beauty and after about a minute transforms into its longtime counterpart, the raucous “Rock Show.” To my delight, this got the Mexican crowd moving and bopping to the beat, and the energy didn’t stop there as they completed the introductory trifecta segueing into the concert favorite “Jet.” Already panting from excitement, I had a chance to catch my breath as Paul took a moment to remove his faux Beatle jacket, exposing a white button-up and red suspenders which elicited a vociferous roar from the audience. We then got the first Beatles song of the night, “All My Loving,” which was accompanied by black and white images of the Fab Four frolicking around and jumping about on the main screen. The nostalgic glimpses of the boys at their goofiest prompted the first tear of joy to fall from this observer’s eye.

After the always great “Got to Get You into My Life,” Paul played a song off his 2008 release The Fireman called “Highway.” This is an enjoyable little number and at times bears a rhythmic resemblance to the Rufus Thomas hit, “Walking the Dog.” And before too long, we got the Wings classic “Let Me Roll It” which concluded with an instrumental jam on Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady.” A real treat for sure! With the concert now in full swing, Paul took the opportunity to slow things down a bit with a splendid rendition of “The Long and Winding Road.” Quite honestly, I’ve never really enjoyed the Let It Be version that Phil Spector butchered so badly with his sappy overproduction. However, McCartney’s live versions never fail to warm my heart as I was compelled to exchange a few hugs and kisses.

We then moved on to what I thought was the most interesting part of the show. Shortly after the doorbell signaling it was time to “Let ‘Em In,” the crowd really showed its aptitude for interaction. I don’t know why or how they were inspired to do this (and soon after I), but we treated the band – and each other – with what could only be referred to as an impromptu “light(er) show.” It was unbelievable, entertaining, and fascinating all at the same time! The rhythmic flicking of the Bics by thousands to the beat accompanied the song perfectly, and even caught the eye of Sir Paul from his piano. And after the always beautiful “My Love,” McCartney took the opportunity to acknowledge the crowd’s synergy and spontaneity by saying “That thing with the lights, that’s just so GREAT!” He added, “You keep so in time – it’s so cool,” and pleaded with us to do it again to an improvised ditty in which he sang again and again over a simple one-two beat “Shine the light, in Mexico … you shine the light, in Mexico.” This was such good fun, and really gave me the feeling that we were all ONE together on what was truly a magnificent night. After about a minute of the magic, Macca strummed his acoustic and started one of my all-time Beatle favorites, the timelessly charming “I’m Looking through You” from Rubber Soul. Equally sweet was the gem “Two of Us,” which even included the whistled bit of “Hello, Goodbye” at the end. Paul then capped off the acoustic portion of the show with a spirited version of “Blackbird” (which gave me chills as I heard the Spanish speaking crowd sing along in English), and “Here Today,” an ode to his lad from Liverpool with whom he helped change the world, John Lennon. As I listened, I’m not ashamed to say that some more tears were streaming down my cheeks ... The world still misses you, John!

Following the acoustic interlude, the bouncy “Mrs. Vanderbilt” restarted the electric festivities as we joyously shouted along “Ho, hey ho!” Then came the melancholic “Eleanor Rigby,” which saw Abe take a break from beating the hell out of his skins to sing backup vocals. Undoubtedly the most impressive member of McCartney’s much younger band mates, Abe hits the drums harder than anyone I’ve ever heard since the late great John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. Once “Eleanor” subsided, Paul got out a ukulele (of all things) for another tribute, this time to George Harrison as he began “Something” from Abbey Road. It was a sweet novelty, brilliantly done wherein the rest of the band didn’t join in until the majestic guitar solo, all while a picture collage of the quiet Beatle adorned the backdrop. “¡Viva Jorge!” I shouted upon its completion, as I’ve always felt George never received enough credit for his contributions to the band or blossoming into the wonderful songwriter that he did.

The always fun “Band on the Run” (perhaps Paul’s greatest solo achievement) came next, and then we were blessed with a couple of White Album classics, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and the first “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” of the tour. While the former is definitely standard for Macca’s repertoire, the latter was an unexpected treat, especially for Ana Laura as she told us before the show it was her favorite Beatles song at the moment. “I’ve got a feeling (in México)!” Paul said afterward, and proceeded to play my favorite song of the same name from the Let It Be album.

As we entered the latter part of the show, we got another Lennon tribute, this time juxtaposing the first half of “A Day in the Life” with the second half of “Give Peace a Chance.” While this was very interesting to hear, I couldn’t help but wonder what John would say about all this reverence. Would he laugh and say that they were still “worlds apart”? Or would he be grateful to his former partner for showing him that kind of love and admiration? Sometimes I even wonder if John would show Paul the same kind of class if the shoe were on the other foot. But I digress.

Finally, the trio of “Let It Be,” “Live and Let Die,” and “Hey Jude” closed the set, and though they were expected they were nothing short of spectacular. The breathtaking fireworks display during “Live and Let Die” seemed almost too close for comfort, and the “Jude” sing along was spine-tingling, especially as the boys and the girls took their turns.

The group came back after a minute or two, and without delay the first notes of “Day Tripper” were heard. Another pleasant surprise! “Lady Madonna” and the children at her feet then followed, and upon its conclusion Paul noticed a woman holding a sign in the first few rows that read “I WANNA DANCE ON STAGE.” So after Paul asked if we wanted to rock some more, he actually read the sign and asked if she wanted to come up. To everybody’s amazement (and envy), security guards actually came down to show the young lady the way. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Paul said, “Twenty minutes later, she arrives,” and without further ado the driving beat of “Get Back” began. You know she had to be so excited, yet so nervous and overwhelmed at the same time. But this vivacious, chesty Chilanga didn’t waste her time in showing us and the boys her moves, and even flirtatiously bounded around Rusty and Paul for a moment. After the song finished they all took a bow, and the anonymous spectator-turned-star took the opportunity to give Sir Paul a smooch. Even though the band had topped itself, we all wanted more and thankfully got it, as they came back for a second encore with the yin and yang pairing of an emotional “Yesterday” and maniacal “Helter Skelter.” After profusely thanking the crowd for being so great again, the band launched a wonderful combination of “Sgt. Pepper’s Reprise” and “The End,” complete with a perfect recreation of Ringo’s rumble and an extended rotating guitar solo segment. Then sadly, after nearly three hours and thirty some songs, it was indeed the end. But I don’t think there was a singular soul in the sellout crowd that could have asked for anything more out of our old English idol.

Paul McCartney, now 67-years-old, has written so many great songs throughout his illustrious career that he can’t possibly play everything while doing it marvelously and make everyone happy, but somehow he did. In some way he managed to captivate an audience of 60,000 plus, and sound as good as I’ve ever heard him sound for one glorious night in Mexico. I didn’t end up sitting down once! And I made sure to hoot and holler every chance I got … you know, just to get my money’s worth.

Incredibly enough, after singing his heart out and playing his ass off, Paul took the time to shake a few hands and autograph his trademark Hofner violin bass, promptly awarding it to some lucky fan amidst a shower of confetti. Finally, as the band left the stage looking completely exhausted, Macca enthusiastically clapped his hands and skipped back into the darkness.

Sir Paul, there’s no maybe about it – I’m amazed.

- Cris Coey
June 7, 2010

***

Ed. note - Here's a link to a youtube clip of Sir Paul in Mexico City, improvising a quick little ditty about the lighter show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Ro_mT28So

Daftitude Test - Question 1

2010-05-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

You are on the clock, getting paid at a rate of $16 an hour for job training. You are seated around a large table with 12 other trainees. In this scenario, it is acceptable to:

A) Take calls on your cell phone any time it rings during class

B) Kick your shoes off, put your bare feet up on the table, and work on your knitting while the instructor reads from her notes

C) sketch an elaborate pencil drawing of a dragon fighting a robot on the back of your training manual while loudly discussing the drawing with the classmate to your immediate right

D) All of the above