![]() Saturday, March 29, 2008 ... 4:14 PM Tent Revue Muxtape Thanks a bunch to Flop Eared Mule for showing us this cool site. Now you can hear just what the Tent Revue sounds like. Click on the tape! ![]() ![]() Friday, February 22, 2008 ... 3:48 PM The white boy and the country blues I'm happy to see that after several months of silence, Yuval Taylor has resurrected his blog Faking It with a response to this Newsweek article by David Gates about white kids' self-satisfying, myth-making fandom of the old country blues, and that fandom's relationship to, or underpinnings of, blackface minstrelsy. Gates concludes that white fandom of Delta blues boils down to: "a voyeuristic vampirism, feeding itself on another's delicious pain." And he says that like it's a bad thing. But doesn't that "vampirism" account for a big part of the allure of experiencing any art?--heightening and intensifying and exploring or even briefly escaping our emotions by sucking like a lozenge on an exaggerated representation of someone else's emotions? I think that fetishising the misery you may hear in the country blues is not so unlike swooning to the exaltation of, say, "Ode to Joy." (Gates's implied argument that the experience of performing a country blues song is more miserable than the experience of creating happier music is awfully presumptive, and Yuval points out that the presumption is its own form of romanticizing the suffering of black Americans.) The already bottomless tangle of black/white American race relations gives this particular instance of vampirism its fangs, but I wonder if the desire to imbibe the pain encoded in art can't be extricated from racism far enough that it can be understood, even in the case of the country blues, as not a bad thing. 'Course, I'm a youngish white guy who grew up more or less middle-class, and I love the country blues. The weirder and more mysterious (though not necessarily more pained) the better. So maybe my reaction is the reflex defensiveness of a vampire shown his reflection. So I'm thinking harder about it. I first came to the blues when I was 14 and my piano teacher taught me the I-IV-V progression and the E-blues scale. That year, a friend from school grew excited about Robert Johnson after an HBO viewing of -- oh yes -- Crossroads (that ultimate self-satisfying myth-making paternalist Orientalization of the blues and general Mississippi blackness), and my friend got hold of the Complete boxed set of cassette tapes. I remember, before having watched the movie myself, sitting with him in his basement, browsing the lyrics booklet for interesting-looking songs, then fast-forwarding the tape to find them. I remember hearing, for the first time, "Come On In My Kitchen." Looking at the lyrics. The hair on my neck raising at the sound of that bottleneck guitar. The keening verses and the crackle of the masters. I'd never heard anything like it. I felt as though I had put my ear to a wall on the other side of which was another fucking world, a shadowy, mysterious, fever dream distortion of my world. The sensation was of black thick crude oil bubbling up from my unconscious. And I remember that very night that my friend and I flipped past the Allman Brothers on MTV Unplugged, playing "Come On In My Kitchen" -- a coincidence that engraved the whole experience with the finality of revelation. We might've watched Crossroads that weekend, or the next weekend, and I guess I liked it, but the truth is I hardly remember it, while I still remember the exact fucking moment I heard the vocal/bottleneck doubled opening of "Come On In My Kitchen." It's still my favorite Robert Johnson song. My friend outgrew the country blues pretty quickly. I never did. I know that to suggest that my introduction to country blues occurred in a vacuum is ridiculous. I was 14, and white, it was the 1980s, I had watched hours of TV every day, including re-rums of Gimme a Break and Good Times, all those Tom & Jerry cartoons with the big-legged Mammy chasing old Tom-cat out of the kitchen with a broom. I was acculturated as hell, I admit it. And as I grew a little older and started looking into the music on my own I certainly flirted with the specious idea of "authenticity" in blues. But I can tell you that my initial fetishising of the mystery in the sound of the country blues, still its most magnetic feature to me, was not racial. Now, pastoral -- OK, yeah. My parents came from the country, central Illinois, a flatland of cornfields and small town streets that grew so still and spooky in limpid moonlight that I was afraid to shut my eyes or to open them. I spent whole summers out there, like Ishmael at sea, and attended funerals there in the winter, and I think that, since I first felt it with "Come On In My Kitchen," I've been looking for more music that returns me to my childhood impression that mystery and magic and weird dangers skulked in the poker-faced cornrows and along the lakeshores at night. This Grimms' Americana is, of course, not a new idea, but that only cements my feeling that it truly exists, even if it never existed -- part of the fabric of American memory, if not my own memory. Now, European romanticizing of the pastoral predates American racism by, what, thousands of years, right? Along with the blues, Native American culture, hillybilly music, and lately in indie "folk" rock Eastern European gypsy music, just extend similar Orientalization of the rural (prelapsarian) "other." The African-American pastoral is uniquely thorny, poisoned and tangled at the very root, because its seed is, of course, slavery. Though that at 14 I recognized Robert Johnson's music as rural suggests some cultural associations, again I don't believe that the blackness of the singer influenced my experience of the blues until much later. ![]() Friday, February 01, 2008 ... 2:04 PM Making Notes ![]() Yeah, I talk a lot of trash about Charlotte. About how it's culturally bombed-out. How the region overflows with banker tools choking up the roads and the sky with their corny SUV's. About how the city is sprawling crime-ridden ugly and all the history is paved over to make room for more more more overpriced faux-industrial loft condos for the overpaid banker tools. About how Inland Empire didn't play here, though it played in Columbia, SC (WTF?). And most of all about how most of the bands I want to see only stop here to fuel up the van between Asheville and Carrboro -- and who can blame them, as when they do schedule a date with the Queen City, the Queen City stands them up? Well all that is true, yes. But now I feel compelled to say -- and not only because they're publishing my essay in one of their books -- I feel compelled to say that the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County is pretty cool. I check their books out frequently, and so does my wife, and so does my kid. Right now I'm reading Drop City by T.C. Boyle, which I checked out yesterday. I just got an e-mail that an Alec Wilkinson book I've reserved is ready to be picked up. There's a whole big library uptown just for kids. The main grown-up library uptown, its exterior decorated with subversive and inspirational quotes about literature and free speech, impressed Cowboy Junkies when they stopped here last year. The library presents free film series and holds an impressive Festival of Reading (though it's lamentably and, for po' folks like me, prohibitively expensive, unlike the Decatur's superior festival, all of whose readings are free free free, but hey, whatever). Oh and they also publish some handsome books under the imprint Novello Festival Press. It's clear that, though the rest of Charlotte may have all the culture of a Wal-Mart parking lot, the people who work at the Library care about what they do and where they live. One handsome book that Novello Festival Press will publish in April is titled Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas. Which you can pre-order from the distributor's web site. And if I were you, I'd take that very action. ![]() Wednesday, January 30, 2008 ... 4:04 PM "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #7, #8, and #9 Sorry I've been remiss about these. Here are some more. Dan writes:
Emma generously shares with us this terrific coming of age vignette: I guess I'll fall for your ruse--I'll swap you my Gillian Welch writing for your recording of a song which I have only heard through the grapevine is a must-have. Gladly. I'm in the library of my college at a tiny wooden carrel with the window open and freezing Maryland air blowing in on me but I can't bring myself to close the window and I And Tommy tells a story of meeting Gil & Dave that legitimizes the song title "Throw Me a Rope" ... and the Tent Revue's speakeasy distribution of the MP3. So my story with Gillian goes like this: Thanks folks for contributing! Still more to come. Labels: Gillian Welch "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries ![]() Saturday, January 19, 2008 ... 7:32 PM Self-congratulation! I just learned that my short appreciation essay, "Link Wray," has been selected for publication in a Music of the Carolinas anthology to be released in the Spring by Novello Festival Press, a publishing imprint of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I developed the essay from a short entry I posted here when Link Wray died, a couple of years ago (though I removed the post from here when I decided to work it up for submission). Usually associated with D.C., where his career found its legs, Link Wray was born in the I-95 truck stop town of Dunn, NC, where a circus performer named Hambone introduced an 8-yr-old Link to the blues. If you wanna read more, buy the book! I'll post more details when I get 'em. ![]() Friday, January 04, 2008 ... 3:20 PM Brendan's 2007 lists My favorite new albums of 2007, some disappointing new albums of 2007, and a few favorite discoveries from years past. Cross-posted at HickoryWind.org. Top 8 Albums of 2007 8. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings: 100 Days, 100 Nights Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings continue to do that thing they do. I'm the last to catch on as usual, but happy I caught on at all. Now I have to catch up. 7. Mighty Ghosts of Heaven: Mighty Ghosts of Heaven Mighty Ghosts of Heaven call up Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Moonshine Kate on the Ouija board of an open-back banjo, and take a roll in the hay with Old-Time string band music, and they do it with so much joy and verve it's impossible not to remember that some of our smilingest moon-faced moonshine music came out of a Great Depression. 6. The Sadies: New Seasons The Sadies zero in on their heretofore neglected deftness with lyric and melody and come up with their first album that doesn't sag or lag between peaks in their instrumental acrobatics. Pure distilled Bigsby-bent energy. 5. PJ Harvey: White Chalk Polly takes it down a notch and delivers her strongest album since To Bring You My Love. 4. Nina Nastasia & Jim White: You Follow Me Nina overcomes partner Jim White's Throw-My-Drums-Down-the-Stairs technique to deliver the strongest PJ Harvey album since Rid of Me. 3. Josh Ritter: The Historical Conquests of ... "The Temptation of Adam" threatens to crack beneath the weight of its cleverness. Each progressively cute couplet creaks the rafters. But that last line is so haunting, so chilling -- both beautiful and horrifying. With that tune and the rollicking first track, Josh reminds us that right up to apocalypse, be it Biblical or nukular (or both, as our case might be), boys and girls will continue to fall in love and sing songs to get each other into bed. That assertion of the essentially carnal human spirit, both gentle and animal, is comforting in this gloomy age of the decline of our empire. 2. Eilen Jewell: Letters From Sinners & Strangers Eilen, with a voice made of liquor and wildflowers and a band of crack sidemen that would comfortably back either Patsy Cline or Rose Maddox, uncovers an astonishing treasure of melodies from the same three-chord creek in which American songsters have been panning for gold a century or longer. 1. Wilco: Sky Blue Sky Yeah, it's sort of a boring pick. I didn't mean for it to be my favorite 2007 album. But I put it on the car stereo around Christmastime, for the first time since the early Summer, and I realized that I knew all the words to all the songs, and felt as though I always had. I think it's no coincidence that on the heels of their tour promoting this record, which itself plays like a career retrospective, Wilco have forted up at home in Chicago to play through their entire back catalogue, one album at a time. Sky Blue Sky feels like the end of a decade-long ride, and I'm curious as hell to see where they go next. Disappointing Albums of 2007 Grant-Lee Phillips's half-baked Strangelet disappointed, too heavy on the rocknroll drums and curiously light on the loving lyrical tangles that made Virginia Creeper Grant-Lee's best album before or after the Buffalo. For its stray moments of melodic invention (listen to the second line of the first track's chorus), and for its bombast that suggests Buffalo nostalgia, I considered tacking Strangelet on for a number 9. I would still follow Phillips's luxurious and raggedy voice over the edge of a waterfall, but comparing Strangelet to similar artist Josh Ritter's pretty amazing Historical Conquests ... they just aren't in the same league. C'mon, G-L, you can do better. Meanwhile, with At the End of Paths Taken, Cowboy Junkies made a third much-diminished return to their 2001 peak album Open. They do this every six or seven years: one great album and its several receding ripples. Maybe their next record will make the next big splash. After their deeply affecting previous two albums, Okkervil River's The Stage Names felt flimsy and forced to me, unable to sustain the weight of its own whininess. And if I may indulge a moment in contrarian blogger snark: The Everybodyfields? Somebody hand these kids a mop. Jesus Christ. I agree that life is full of suffering -- but damp, lacy Victorian bathos like Nothing Is Okay is partly why. 5 eMusic Explorations Why top 8? Well I'm sure there'd have been two more new albums I'd have loved this year if I had heard them, but I spent so much time riffling around in eMusic's dusty shelves and drawers and shadowy eaves, I think I ought to spend some space reporting on a few of the nuggets I discovered there this year. Band of Blacky Ranchette: "Getting It Made" Howe Gelb's oddball country music side project wobbles in quality across a full album, but Neko Case's gusty melodic contribution to this country-pop tune made it one of my iPod favorites this year. Alela Diane: "Dry Grass and Shadow" A hay-flavored slice of New Weird American pie, Diane's honey-sunny apple orchard voice turns her words over and over to taste their consonants and connotations. Her album The Pirate's Gospel wears itself out early thanks to the sameness of its bare-guitar texture, but this fully fleshed single is an expert-cut little gem. Corrina Repp: "Safe Place in the World" Somewhere I read that she's a combination Neko Case and Portishead, so, you know -- I was right there. Turns out Repp is more Nico than Neko: cold and alien, though still dampened enough by rainy Northwestern hominess to soften her snooty Mod influences. She tends toward moody more than groovy, but this tune grooves in its spacey way, like Nancy Sinatra heard through Martian underwater radio. Simon Joyner: "You Don't Know Me" Soul-scarringly bleak, this Bright Eyes forebear sings like Lou Reed if Lou Reed were an Omaha hobo. The backing band sound like Patti Smith's band on Horses, hard-edged, strung-out and hungry, only with cowboy hats. Oh but there's so much jaw-dropping poetry and honest emotion brimming across the whole despair-dazed record, it's worth plumbing the unremitting grimness. Just don't listen to it if you're already feeling lousy, because it will stifle your last breath of hope. Oh and don't listen to it if you're in a good mood, because its pelt of freezing rain will break up your parade and follow you home and into your bed and beneath your covers and into your dreams. Powerful stuff. Karen Dalton: "Same Old Man" The late Middle Weird America matron too late catching a piece of long-owed recognition in 2007, thanks to eMusic's promotion and a spot on Oxford American's Southern Music CD, Dalton worked mainly on pedal steeled-up Memphis soul, to uneven results, ranging from exemplary to what my wife rightly characterized as Bad Karaoke ("When a Man Loves a Woman"). But it's Dalton's pair of banjo tunes on this cult classic album In My Own Time that rappel most deeply the steep misty face of Amerian folk music. The clawhammer "Katie Cruel" and up-picked "Same Old Man" seem to belong to no time period at all, but only to the ground beneath their feet, reminding me most of Washington Irving's supernatural Alleghenia, sowed with the blood of warring Europeans and enslaved Africans and thousands of years of Native Americans, and growing these strange mushrooms, hallucinogenic and bitter. ![]() Friday, November 16, 2007 ... 12:21 PM "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #5 & #6 Folks, it pains me to say this, but I'm fixing to get sick of reading about Gillian Welch. So before I cross that line, I'm cutting off the MP3 offer for now. It may come back some day. I wish I could think of a way to honor, in the same fashion, other artists we love, but no other music I write about here generates the volume of Google referrals that "Throw Me a Rope" does. Except possibly, mysteriously to me, Critter Fuqua of Old Crow Medicine show. That's something I still mean to look into -- what's with the global Critter obsession? (If you're reading this because you followed a "Critter Fuqua" Google search to this post, please for Chrissake drop me a line and help me understand.) Anyway, I have enough "Throw Me a Rope" guest entries to take us into the new year. I don't want to post them all in one batch, because I think that's unjust to the folks who spent time writing them, and I don't want to post them one after another, with none of my own entries between, because I don't want new visitors to this site to think I only feature Gillian Welch content. (I don't. Really. Scroll down!) Also it's sort of lazy to let other folks write my blog for me. All right, so here are a couple more guest entries. Emily Amey writes: why i love gillian welch (you too david) in 100 words or less... It's like heroin, isn't it? And Lacy Garrison tells a great story about the night he met the dynamic duo: I saw Gillian Welch play at Carnegie Mellon University a few years ago. My friend Rob and I drove from New York City to Pittsburgh to see the show. Needless to say, the show amazing. After the show, Rob asked if I wanted to meet Gillian and David. We stood outside and waited. I was extremely nervous. We waited for seemingly forever before they came out of the building carrying their guitars. Rob walked over to them and said hi. I was dumbstruck. I don't remember what Rob said but they agreed to take pictures with us once they put their guitars in their bus. I was beside myself. I could barely say my name when I introduced myself. Rob and I patiently waited. They emerged from the van. Gillian walked over to Rob and me. Without pausing, she stood between us and put her arms around our waists. David surprised me. I never thought of him as an extrovert until he took Rob's camera and started snapping pictures of the three of us. I have the pictures in a box. I love them. Especially the one that David took from arm's length. It has David's face, Rob's face, Gillian's face, and my beaming, smiling face pressed against each other check-to-check. Thanks you two! More to come. Labels: Gillian Welch "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries ![]() Tuesday, November 13, 2007 ... 7:36 AM Eilen Jewell on Venice Beach busking On Friday I interviewed Boston-based singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell, and wrote a feature on her for HickoryWind.org, which you can read here: Eilen Jewell Has Arrived Her record Letters From Sinners and Strangers is I think my most listened-to new album this year. Although in my story I sort of decry this exact facile comparison, fans of Gillian Welch (readers of this blog, in other words) will take much pleasure in Eilen's sepia-toned phrasing, either on the new record or last year's impressive, mournfully toned debut Boundary County, which with its sleepy tempos and whispered regrets and wide-open-spaciness compares, I think, to early Cowboy Junkies. Betsy and I attended Eilen's show late Friday night. She opened for the Two Dollar Pistols, of Raleigh, whom we did not stick around to see because I'd been up since 5:30am and had a 100-degree fever. Still, I wish Eilen had headlined, and I was not the only one in the sizable crowd who did. The set flashed by, finished far too quickly. The tension between Eilen's energetic rockabilly band and her wry smoky vocals makes for a really compelling live sound. Her guitar-picker Jerry Miller lights up his orange Gretsch Round-Up like a lightning rod. (Note: a few weeks ago I e-mailed Miller to ask whether he's the same Jerry Miller guitarist from 1960s psychadelic rock band Moby Grape. He isn't. When I met him on Friday I learned that not only am I not the first person to ask, but that at least one journalist has gone to print with an incorrect assumption.) Anyway, it's probably not nice to say so, but I can't help suggesting that another up'n'coming young-woman-led alt-country act whom I reviewed here not too long ago could take a few or twenty lessons from Eilen Jewell and her ensemble. I detained Jewell for longer than we'd planned, but she was focused and attentive, and very nice. Some of my favorite parts of the discussion -- specifically, an account of her summer spent busking at Venice Beach, CA -- just didn't work into the already long HickoryWind.org story, so I am going to post them here, informally: Since doing that [Venice Beach], I haven't really been able to busk anyplace else. I got spoiled. Eilen plays Atlanta tonight, and then she's on to Florida, and finishes the year out west. Catch her when you can. ![]() Friday, November 02, 2007 ... 9:00 AM Gillian Welch ... Speed Demon: "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #3 & #4 I'm slow at thinking up stuff to post between them, and so I'm falling behind on the Gillian Welch guest entries. So today I'm going to double up. Annie T. of Ape Kabuki writes: last night there was an out of the blue, kind-of-secret-in-that-it-wasn't-really-advertised and only 40 people were there, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings concert at Tangier in Los Feliz. they usually make it out to L.A every October, but they usually play at the Avalon, which is a much bigger venue. when they came out dave said, "welcome to the world's most informal gig." Can't you just hear Gillian telling that story? Love it. Carolyn Fryberger, who co-runs a Dave Rawlings Machine group over on the Facebook, shares with us a Cultural Event paper she wrote for one of her classes:
Thanks Annie and Carolyn. More on the way! Labels: Gillian Welch "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries ![]() Wednesday, October 31, 2007 ... 9:04 AM TRICK OR TREATING DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS All right so this isn't a music post exactly, but all arts aspire to music, yeah? And Richard Brautigan's drunken wee-hour memoirs summon, as well as any prose I think, the same tasty melancholy you hear in a familiar sad song. Lots of songwriters could take a lesson or three from Brautigan's prose. I sort of worshiped Richard Brautigan when I was in college (R.B. the prose writer; R.B. the poet not as much). When I was about 20 I found his story "Corporal" in a Flash Fiction anthology, and its last sentence felt like a wrecking ball to the chest. In all my reading since that two-page-long story I've mainly hoped to feel again the same pure stunning pain. It's olympian, the emotional acrobatics R.B. pulls off with his bone-naked prose. On a dime he pivots from quirky bitter funny to universally fucking devastating. Devastation is Brautigan's gift, and he smuggles it in a birthday cake, the more unexpectedly to shatter your whole heart. But, you know, to shatter it beautifully. This little bit of R.B. above is not devastating, but it is sad. When I was 20 I didn't know it was sad. Now I'm 30, an old man, an ancient artifact practically, and reading it for the first time in years I feel this sigh at the end, which I never felt before. It's small and bittersweet as October burning leaves. You can almost inhale it. Here's more Brautigan stuff for Halloween. I like "Halloween in Denver." The mental somersault ending doesn't work perfectly, but it shouldn't work at all, and that it does as much as it does blows my mind. It sneaks up on your blind side and pinches you a little bit, and it hurts. It reminds me of the many similar disorienting turns in David Lynch's inscrutable but occasionally stunning Inland Empire. Anyway, happy Halloween folks. More Gillian Welch entries posting soon. ![]() |
![]() About ![]() Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas (Novello Festival Press, April 2008) includes my essay, "Link Wray" MUSIC Flop Eared Mule The Celestial Monochord HickoryWind.org Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog Faking It Honey, Where You Been So Long? whiskey-girl Porchlight Charlotte-related Girl About Town Laurie Koster's Charlotte & Area Events Evening Muse Neighborhood Theatre OTHER THAN MUSIC Cans and Jars Night Train Cat and Girl Tom Drury Ian Frazier Film Freak Central November 9, 2007 Eilen Jewell The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC ***review!*** June 16, 2007: Carrie Rodriguez w/ Tim Easton The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC ***review!*** June 2, 2007: Mt. Airy Fiddlers Convention ***review!*** July 10, 2005: Chris Scruggs The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC ***review!*** July 8, 2005: Tim Easton The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC ***review!*** February 19, 2005: Neko Case and The Sadies w/ Visqueen Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA ***review!*** September 17, 2004: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings w/ Old Crow Medicine Show Theater At Lime Kiln, Lexington, VA ***review!*** August 17, 2004: Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA ***review!*** August 7 & 8, 2004: Newport Folk Festival Newport, R.I. ***review!*** July 11, 2004: Cowboy Junkies Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA ***review!*** Various Artists: Friends of Old Time Music: the folks arrival 1961-1965 (at HickoryWind.org) Neko Case: Live From Austin TX DVD (at HickoryWing.org) Old Crow Medicine Show: Big Iron World Sampson Pittman: "Highway 61 Blues" Baby Boy Warren: "Stop Breakin Down" Nina Nastasia: The Blackened Air Ryan Adams: Jacksonville City Nights Robert Wilkins: "Rolling Stone" Neko Case: Furnace Room Lullaby Etta Baker: One Dime Blues Steve Earle: The Revolution Starts Now Grey DeLisle: The Graceful Ghost |