Lou Barlow!
Over at Fuzztone, I muse about Lou Barlow for a bit. Go check it out, or read an interview with him here.
Glaze rocks Stella Blue!
So I broke my vow of steady updates until September. I put an honest effort out there to do it, and I’m going to keep putting forth the effort to update the blog everyday.
Last night I played with my old band Glaze (notice the link) at Stella Blue. The show, from what I have been told, was pretty good. My bass sounded about as good as I’ve ever heard it last night. It had this nice deep thumb with just enough Mike Watt-like growl to it.
Now that the show is over, I honestly feel like crap. I think I over extended myself yesterday with stress, adrenaline and a pretty overwhelming and uncompromising amount of heat and my body still hasn’t recovered. I feel nauseous, tired, and my knee and ankle are swollen up. I don’t know what is wrong with me, but it is seriously ruining my weekend.
I have a mountain of photographs and video to pour through so to post here, so check back later on and hopefully it’ll all be up.
Until then, be good.
Dream Boogieing with Sam Cooke
Music biographies (and to an extent, biographies in general) are kind of masturbatory if you know a bit about the subject. I know about Sam Cooke- gospel singer, switched to pop, huge star, “Bring It On Home to Me”, shot in a hotel room, the dominant force in soul music, and hero to Bobby Womack, Lou Rawls and Rod Stewart. But then I read Peter Guralnick’s excellent Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke and was completely blown away by the man.
I’ve loved Sam Cooke for a long time (specifically since I found out that he was the singer of “Wonderful World” and “Cupid”), but recently with the help of this book I was able to really get a grasp of what made him so special.
Musically the guy was gifted. He simultaneously took the black Gospel experience, melded it with a little Harry Belafonte-like calypso and some light rock and roll and created out of thin air a form of black music that was in an attractive enough package for white America to digest. To read about this happening and also to hear it in his music is grounds enough to count him as an all-time great, but to read about what Cooke did away from the spotlight is pretty damn Herculean.
Segregation was a horrible thing. But one of the things that happened as a result of segregation (to an extent) was a simultaneous black culture in America that existed independently of white America. Dream Boogie showcases this. There was a Afro-centric news wire (the ANP- Associated Negro Press), black operated newspapers in every major city, and the much vaunted black club scene across America and Sam was in the middle of all of these.
In fact, Sam seemed in the middle of most of black culture in America in the 1950s until his death in 1964. He bubbles up with Little Richard, meets the Beatles, tours with Aretha Franklin and a very young Gladys Knight, and even cuts a single with Cassius Clay (he wasn’t Muhammed Ali just yet). The guy was, as Reggie Jackson said about himself a decade later, the straw that stirred the drink.
So today I decided to share with everyone a Sam Cooke song. It’s not “Bring It On Home to Me”, or one of his bubblegum smashes. Instead, it’s “Nothing Can Ever Change This Love”, which might be as good a song as “Bring It On Home to Me”. Listen to Sam’s voice as he sings it- it’s barely tethered to Earth, and yet there is still a little dirt and grit around the edges. He belts out huge whoa-oh-ah-ohs that take your breath away and holds other words and phrases inside of his mouth, almost chewing on them until the right timbre is hit. I’ve never seen a Picasso, I’m not able to watch land being formed as lava reaches the sea, and I’ve never seen life created in front of me, but I have heard Sam Cooke’s voice, which is as close to the creator as an atheist like myself will ever get.
Sam Cooke- Nothing Can Ever Change This Love
Until tomorrow, be good.
I go Gaga over Black Jesus
I live a quiet life that is made easier by turning the radio off. Occasionally something of merit will bubble up from the mainstream and force me to listen to it, and more often than not I find it interesting. The latest thing I’ve heard is Lady Gaga.
From what I gathered before I actually heard Lady Gaga was that she was a wacky singer who hung out with wonderfully gay men, dressed in outfits that made for silly looking pictures and did it all in the name of “art” or “shocking people” or something. I heard the Madonna comparisons, and read the interviews in Rolling Stone. But nothing prepared me for the veritable shit sandwich that I ingested once I finally heard the Lady who is Gaga.
Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not a Madonna fan. In fact, I think she has always fucking sucked and came across as less a singer and more of a slightly more talented proto-Kim Kardashian minus the looks. Madonna exists to shock and titillate those around us who don’t have to courage to find actual shocking and titillating things. So if Lady Gaga is deliberately lifting from this no-talent hack, imagine how untalented she seems to me.
And now a review: We Have a Meth Lab
This is my life in a nutshell: the out-of-work music writer, the hardened critic, the aging hipster, the asshole, and even the balding, self-loathing, pseudo-Jew asked by former Ashevillian/head BFO-er/Decline conspirator Bob Rest to give a CD by his latest band, We Have a Meth Lab, a listen and a review.
“Give it a good review” he says, adding later on for me to compliment his band’s musicianship. I download the un-mastered version of his album and prepare myself for it.
These days I hardly listen to a lot of rock and roll. My life (and musical habits) seem to dwell upon old-school soul testimonials by long dead black dudes and newfangled noodlings by white men nerdier than I am in all sorts of jangly, though sometimes distorted and vaguely jazzy post-punk outfits. Rock and roll- and especially punk rock is something best left to the masses. Sure it gets your heart racing and your head bobbing, but its so fucking populist, and populism (as we all know) is for everyone else. Musical douche bags such as myself like stuff arty or less white, and we love using cuntastic phrases like limitations of the genre when talking about rock and roll.
With that long-winded and highly pretentious qualifier out the way, I can honestly say that despite my self-righteous leanings I loved We Have a Meth Lab’s The Meth Lab for Cuties LP. It’s good shit.
The Great Outdoors and a Little Country Music
Like most people (I hope), I’m pretty influenced by the things I choose to read, listen to and watch on television or DVD. Recently, Jessie and I have been on a Ken Burns kick, watching all of his films via our Netflix subscription (we’re married; those things come with the license now). As of right now we are headlong into watching The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and I’m utterly inspired to experience the great outdoors as a result.
Wait, what was that?
That’s right, I’m starting to get into the idea of being outside (something I have hated my entire life). I want to go on hikes, long walks, camping trips and even to a few of the National Parks that I’ve seen in the first two discs of the documentary.
I don’t know if this is a passing interest or something that will sustain itself inside of me, but for the last two nights Jessie and I have taken our dogs on the three mile Occanalufte River Trail at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and I’ve loved every minute of it. I’ve watched the river cut thought the mountains and seen trees form a canopy over our heads. I’ve seen giant mountains that create their own weather, and stood for just a moment with my mouth agape, as if I were some flatlander who has never seen these things that actually were around me for all of these times. There’s something about all of this wonderfulness around me that is startling and makes me regret never noticing it before.
Tonight was a normal walk on the trail. Jessie and I were walking a bit fast because we were losing daylight, but just off the trail in the river a solitary old man stood fly fishing. He was new at the sport, according to Jessie who pointed out his neon orange fishing line skimming the water, but it looked so tranquil. I can’t imagine ever doing something that seemed so calming. I decided then and there that I needed to attempt this one day. I could imagine the water surrounding me, alone out there in the midst of the river, flicking my wrist and flinging the line. Just me and the water, first the line goes to the bank of the river and then rides the current down to the front of me. I hold the fly in the water, and then I repeat. It’s freaking zen watching it, and I am dying to attempt it.
But the real highlight of the walk was just as we came off the trail- there was a giant elk standing a little over 15 feet away from us. Our older dog Chili stood in front of Jessie, the new puppy and I and watched the elk quietly eating grass. He posed no threat, but my dog wasn’t taking chances because he’s a good boy. I couldn’t believe that it was standing that close to me. The closest I’ve been to an elk previously was watching Chevy Chase punch the Wally World mascot in National Lampoon’s Vacation. Needless to say, it was amazing.
I think (and hope) the great outdoors and I are like country music for me. When I was a kid, my grandpa always listened to WWNC (long before it was a bastion for right wing morons like Matt Mittan) and sang along with the country music that was played on the station. I remember making fun of him about how hokey the songs were. I vowed to never listen to country music. But now I play the stuff every day (along with a lot of other things). I have a soft spot for most country music that happened between 1950 and 1987. It’s never amazing music, but it is always fun.
Maybe mountaintops, waterfalls and vistas could be Randy Travis for me. I certainly hope so.
Until tomorrow,
Be good.
Sharing is Caring: Beard Music 2010
A few years ago, mix CDs were an obsession of mine. I was constantly working on a compilation for someone, scheming of rare tracks and strange cover songs. I guess that this blog is an extension of that same compulsion. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s because I want to feel musically superior to someone else- oh you haven’t heard that? I’ll make you a CD- but I love people hearing songs for the first time. I love when they like it and I really like arguing with them if they hate it. It’s a compulsion that doesn’t go away.
That’s why I’ve assembled Beard Music 2010. It started out as a continuation of a few CDs I made for Bort a while back. It’s a collection of songs featuring acoustic guitars, guys with bears, soul brothers with soul patches, some intermittent goatees and even a few lusty little Van Dykes. It’s all about dudes singing about freedom and taking it easy, and it’s something that I’m hoping will become a yearly tradition. I originally wanted to do this at Christmas, but now the idea of the CD being released during those hot summer months is exciting to me. A beard in the summer is a pretty amazing thing.
While I can’t tell you everything that is on the CD in this blog entry, I can tell you that there are songs resembling the works of Broken Social Scene, Elvis Presley, My Morning Jacket, The Isley Brothers and even a little ditty by a group of acoustic guitar strumming dudes known as America thrown in for good measure. But I’m not entirely sure what is on the CD. I guess you’ll just have to download it for yourself.
The Ones We Love the Best
Holy shit, The Hold Steady, you sure know how to work a guy over. Last Wednesday night Jessie and I made the drive from Sylva to Athens to catch your show at the 40 Watt Club and I was completely blown away by the show.
I knew what to expect walking into the concert- I own all of the band’s albums and had seen the band two times previously. But this show might have been better than the first time I saw them in 2006 at the Grey Eagle. Guitars played big open chords and bluesy leads, the bass and drums locked into a solid AC/DC-meets-Springsteen groove and lead singer Craig Finn ran about the stage doing his twitchy weirdo thing.
The highlights of the show for me personally were the songs from the band’s latest album Heaven is Whenever. I think it shows that the band has moved into a classic rock-ready machine that constantly turns out solid tunes. The songs from the band’s first two albums have always been decent to me, but have always felt like long rants instead of songs. Once the band figured out how to right great choruses, it was on.
Another big moment was talking to a couple of older guys at the front of the stage. They were in their late forties and in a band- but they weren’t all about recapturing their glory years. Instead they were playing music for the same reasons that I am- it makes them feel vital, and it helps them tap back into what rock and roll meant to them, and what it meant was on display at the show last week: sweat pouring, beer drinking, arms and legs flailing and still hitting the power chords on cue rock.
This is rock and roll, people.
Elvis has left the building (and my current reading list)
I just finished Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick and I am utterly and completely heartbroken and destroyed by the life, the death, the spirit, the soul and the utter and complete hopelessness that was Elvis Aron Presley. I can’t put into words how heartbreaking the final years of this man’s life were. He was troubled by addiction, grief over the passing of his mother nearly 20 years earlier, and his self confidence and swagger destroyed by his divorce. I really just want to sit here and write a detailed synopsis of the book, but I don’t know if doing that really illustrates why this book and the last few years of the man’s life has really destroyed me in such a spectacular fashion.
I guess Elvis’ decent into addiction, his trouble with his weight and the shooting of television sets are enough for everyone else, but those things (in their own rather peculiar way) are so mundane by now. What struck me instead was how Elvis fucking Presley had no self confidence at the end. All of the accounts of the man’s life just recall him being utterly defeated by the world and himself. It seemed like for the last five years of his life, Elvis was aware of the inevitability of his death, and worried that people wouldn’t remember him as the devastatingly talented (and important) person that he was.
From Guralnick’s book (the conversation was said to have taken place around this time in 1977:
Over the next few nights he brought up things they had talked about often in the past, but now they took on a different tinge. He spoke to her about his mother, he talked about his pain, he spoke of his place in history. “How will they remember me?” he asked over and over again. “They’re not going to remember me. I’ve never done anything lasting. I’ve never done a classic film” But then his mood would change. His mission in life, he said was “to make people happy with music. And I’ll never stop until the day I die.
Those mood swings- often in the same conversation seemed to be the norm for Elvis in his final years. It seemed like to me- granted I wasn’t there and I only know Elvis from his music and from the 1,200 pages of Guralnick’s books- that Elvis had no sense of who he exactly was in those final years.
I remember reading an interview with George Harrison about his time on tour with The Beatles and he said that it felt like he was just part of the circus when The Beatles rolled into town. I’m sure that Harrison was referring to the spectacle of Beatlemania, but I think Elvis probably felt this also, only he was some sort of grotesque version of our collective past- the rebel as a cartoon character. It’s heartbreaking to think that Mr. White Jumpsuit was the same person who introduced the concept of having hips and shaking them to white people, but they are one and the same.
But that’s not what destroyed me about the book. I guess my own neurosis at times is seeing the neurosis of other people and worrying that I have the same problem. But I do wonder- do I have a true sense of myself? If Elvis fucking Presley wasn’t aware of his own self and what the world around him thought, then how am I, a foul mouthed wannabe writer in Jackson County, North Carolina ever going to have a true sense of who I am and what I’m here for?
I guess I define myself by my friends and family. I define who I am by the smiles on their faces and the warmth in their hearts. I may never do anything 1/1,000,000th as cool as “Hound Dog”, but sitting with my friend Miguel and making fun of Little League Baseball players does compare in some way.
But enough of my neurosis- it’s on to other things. Tonight I downloaded a bootleg of Elvis playing the Asheville Civic Center in 1975. By the sound of the music, he’s not the zombie playing to blue hairs that all written reports like to make him out to be in this time. Instead, he’s playing his hits for a crowd of people 35 years and a million times different from the quaint shithole that is today’s Asheville. The crowd is eating it up, and Elvis sounds like he’s having fun. Jerry Schiff (one of my new bass heroes) is playing his ass off. It sounds like a rocking affair that I wish I could have been alive to see- even if the crowd never really gave Elvis a standing ovation (according to every account that I’ve read).
I hope Elvis, a person that I wasn’t alive to have known, found his peace- either in his final moments or floating through the ether as he is now. I hope that the Elvis from the first half of that quote is long gone and the Elvis from the second half of the quote is looking down at people like me- who wasn’t there for the glory years, the comeback or the decline- is still finding awesomeness in his music.
I don’t usually do this, but I figured some people around here would appreciate it- here’s a download of Elvis’s Asheville show from July 23rd, 1975. It’s a great bootleg entitled “Gyrating Asheville”. Check out the track listing and information here.
Elvis Presley- Gyrating Asheville
Until later, be good.
Why Tron sucks and Justin Bieber doesn’t.
The summer movie season has burst up us like buttons in a fat girl’s changing room, and I’m just as guilty as everyone in America of getting excited about big budgeted, trite Hollywood garbage. I like explosions, I have been known to enjoy remakes, and I enjoy sitting down to a movie and having to make myself not think for a few hours. I like to be entertained, I guess.
This compelling and rather American need to be entertained by utter shit stands tall in my life like a New York City skyscraper, and tonight in preparation for this summer’s onslaught of shit, I let an al Queda-driven airplane called Tron come crashing through my feces skyscraper, and I don’t know if I’ll ever recover. Now that that long and rather unsatisfying metaphor is out of the way, I’d like to explain why.
I remember Tron’s release in the theater. Just judging from the previews and the few posters that I’d seen of the movie, I knew that it just had to be the most awesome thing ever. For one reason or another, I never saw it in the theater. It probably came out on home video soon after that, and I still never got around to seeing it. The movie always popped in and out of my sphere of geekdom, and I never really sought out the film until a few weeks ago. Until Netflix burst through my better judgment and I placed it in my queue. Today Tron arrived, and after dinner I decided to sit down and watch this movie that had garnered such a cult following that it has spawned a sequel nearly three decades later.
I’m here to say (or type, or whatever) that Tron is a huge steaming pile of black light covered shit. It was so bad that I laughed throughout the entire movie and wondered what was so awesome about this movie that people raved about it for years to me. I wondered what prompted people to dress up like the characters at comic book conventions and I wondered if Jeff Bridges Oscar could be taken away for doing a movie like this.
Immediately after sitting through the movie, taking the DVD out of the player and placing it into the magic Netflix envelope to send back to Send Us More Movies Land, I fired up my computer and checked my Facebook, and noticed at least three friends of mine’s status as being something about how much they hate Justin Bieber. That’s when like a lightening bolt straight from God, or Usher, or even the Master Control program it hit me:
Justin Bieber and Tron really aren’t that much different.
