Friday, January 29, 2010 ... 11:03 AM
Holden
What the detractors don't get is that it's not Holden's privileged adolescent complaining, not his lousy spoiled attitude, that makes him such an indelible, lasting, loved character -- although, frankly, his bitching and moaning is the most hilarious and heartfelt in literature. But what really sticks, what changed me, personally, the reason I go back to Catcher again and again, is the way he loves the world around him, without quite understanding that he does, but showing his love through his description of it -- his "DIGRESSION!" In phrases he coins like "rollerskate skinny"; the way Allie's hair was so red Holden sensed that if he turned around, Allie would be standing behind him; the feel of a skate key in his hands; a jazz record called "Little Shirley Beans"; the way the kettle drum player at Radio City was so attentive even though he only got to hit his drum once; the way Jay Gatsby was always calling people "old sport"; Jane Gallagher's kings in the back row, which despite what high school teachers insist is not so much an algebraic symbol for Jane's self-defense as just a sweet, cute thing that she did that made Holden happy when he thought about it; the way girls, "every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are." It's a way of relating to the world, of experiencing and loving the world, that is distinctly literary -- and encompasses, contains, all of his disgust and his crushing melancholy. It is poetry. He felt the tiniest things so fully, and he didn't know how to handle it, because he was just a kid.
Brendan
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 ... 4:04 PM
There's a new album out this week.
Brendan
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 ... 8:09 AM
Early christmas present
From Anti- Records, a behind-the-scenes-of-Middle-Cyclone video.
Brendan
Friday, December 05, 2008 ... 10:42 AM
Streamin Eilen
I'm thinking about baking up a new banner image, but I probably won't get around to it. I'd love to Photoshop this blog's long, majestic/goofy name onto some kind of a wood- or linocut print of something spooky and musical and Americana. I'd take up relief printmaking myself, but let's be honest. I never even finished my 2005 top ten. (While we're dreaming, though, I've long considered, and am now again, making this an MP3 blog or podcast or something. So we can listen to songs and then talk about them. But besides being lazy, I have ethical issues with file sharing. Though I'll admit those scruples are mysteriously dissipating at about the same rate as my discretionary income.)
Anyway. Did I mention that I saw Eilen Jewell & her band in October? Well, I did. It was the first full set I've caught from Eilen, and it was excellent. Her rapport with the audience is so calm and easy, I'd guess a skill picked up from her busking days. Songs the band has played probably a couple hundred nights in the last year still feel fresh and energetic. They played a couple of new tunes, including a terrific garage-rocky number called "Sea of Tears."
If you haven't caught the Eilen Jewell Band yet, here's just what you've been missing:
That's a full 1.5 hour set for your streaming pleasure. You can't download it without forking over $60 for membership, but the stream sounds good and is safe for the cube or the littluns. Eilen's voice takes a couple of songs to warm up, so stick with it at least until the giddy Jerry Miller guitar break at about 10 minutes, and then see if you're not wholly on board. Oh yeah and listen for the aforementioned garage-rock tune at about 1:10:00, and the complementing 60's pop cover at about 1:19:00 -- both of which suggest, I think, an artist really growing into her own voice and a comfortable ensemble itching to explore their varied interests. I'm guessing, pretty presumptiously, that you won't be seeing the names Gillian or Lucinda in any but the laziest reviews of Eilen's next record, which she says we'll see in the spring.
Brendan
Tuesday, December 02, 2008 ... 3:05 PM
Oh shit.
I just realized all my pictures are gone, my web banner and signature and so forth, like busted-out windows in the house where nobody lives. Well I do still live here, in the dark with the mice and the owls, and now I'm gonna have to see about getting the pictures replaced. And maybe the roof too.
Brendan
Neko Case + 200-yr-old barn + "piano orchestra" = good news from Paste.
I think it's awesome that a poor young woman can get rich enough to buy a farm in Vermont by making spooky music with Bigsby-bent guitar lines all reverbed out, and oblique lyrics about the ghosts of woodland animals. I wonder if a poor young guy can get rich enough to buy a farm in Iowa by blogging about her.
Well, anyway. In the meantime, I'm trying to think of what albums were new this year that I would put in the "best of" stall at the county fair. I don't think I'm gonna come up with ten. Help me out.
Brendan
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 ... 2:56 PM
I review the new one from Old Crow Medicine Show. It ain't pretty.
http://www.hickorywind.org/001884.php
Brendan
Friday, July 11, 2008 ... 1:55 PM
A new Gillian Welch album, a Fiddler's Convention, some reductive rumination ... It's the Tent Revue's greatest hits!
I'm here in blog limbo (where all the blogs that died before their first post go). We canceled internet at home, downscaling the budget like everyone else who isn't Myspace friends with Dick Cheney, so until the WPA starts hiring music bloggers, I'm posting less often, and when I do it's on another man's dime.
Firstly, a very big thanks to Günter at the blog It Was Colonel Mustard for the very nice thing he's done for the Tent Revue. I gotta think on't before I get more specific, and I will soon.
*
Last month we visited the Mt Airy Fiddler's Convention, and were disappointed to find not much going on. Maybe four vendors had come out to pitch their tents and hawk their wares, and two of them were selling food. Last year a variety of instrument vendors hosted all sorts of pick-up jams all round the periphery of the mainstage, where the pretty monotonous instrument competitions proceeded throughout the day, until the sun set and the main event -- band competitions -- launched. This year the midway was bare and quiet.
Also low in attendance: Bluegrass bands. Fewer than ten appeared, compared to last year's many, many competitors. Maybe a couple dozen Old-Time bands turned out this year to compete, which is what we came to hear, and I loved to listen to them ... but while I'm not a big fan of Bluegrass music, it's still sad to me that those pickers couldn't round up the gas-money to travel to the convention. I'm sure it's a result of fuel prices, in cooperation with food costs, healthcare costs, and so forth, and suggests to me a rift between the essential Bluecollarness of Bluegrass musicians and what's perhaps a more middle-class/information-worker tendency among the new Old-Timey set.
Of course, I'm an Old-Time youngster myself, and there's no room in my budget for an M.F.A., a Plasma TV, a hybrid car, or even broadband -- so what do I know. On the other hand again, I do have a bachelor's degree, work in a cubicle and there's no mud on the soles of my shoes. My high school friends are all buying big suburban houses and shop at Whole Foods, so maybe the difference is milieu and not income bracket. Old-Time music is more romantic (by way of Gothic) and less sentimental about rural living and manual labor than Bluegrass is. Old-Time music -- even reanimated by the likes of Old Crow Medicine Show, the Crooked Jades, the Mammals -- is a ghost genre, like silent film. It continues to wow and influence and some artists can still specialize in its techniques. But Bluegrass lives and breathes and breeds and continues to mutate and evolve like, say, Film Noir. If Bluegrass is meat-and-potatoes, Old-Time provides smoke and mirrors for those of us who need a little spooky reflection in our cube-shaped lives.
Which maybe makes ironic the paucity of Bluegrass at this year's Fiddler's Convention, and the surplus of Old-Time acts. But if you consider that as life everywhere grows more and more expensive for the people already less able to afford it, small-time musical acts will tour less and live music will by necessity become, as it was until recently in human history, a largely local affair. Parlors, front porches, and town square bandstands, with internet lyric sites substituting for broadsheet ballads -- while recorded music becomes more and more global. It'll be interesting to watch the diverging, changing tunes of the studio fiddler and the town-square fiddler, as Rome, or Constitutional democracy, burns.
Anyway.
Before I duck back into the tent I also wanted to point out news from a few of the Revue's favorite artists. Jolie Holland's new record, the excitingly characteristically morbidly titled The Living And the Dead will emerge from the dank basements of the collective unconscious on October 7th. Prepare yourself: the label's press release points out the presence of Moog synth. Which I think is awesome.
One of Eilen Jewell's side projects, trad-gospel act The Sacred Shakers, will release their first record August 16th ("Much sooner" on the label's website), but word on the Google alerts is that Eilen, whose band is on tour right now, is selling advanced copies at her shows. Eilen's getting more popular by the hour, folks, so catch her while you can.
Lastly: Ginger Kowal, co-founder of the Dave Rawlings Machine fan-club and friend of the Tent Revue, had a chance to chat with Gillian and Dave when they stopped in Asheville last month, and she learned first-hand from Gillian that the new Gillian Welch album -- and there is one coming -- will probably not land on your iPod until 2009, thanks to record label red tape. I don't have any more details for you, but you should go join the DRM fan club on Facebook and get the full scoop from Ginger.
Brendan
Monday, May 26, 2008 ... 7:01 PM
From my personal stash: a Muxtape of Gillian Welch live tunes, including rare originals and covers. If you've never heard Gil do "Snowing On Raton," then my friend, you've never heard "Snowing On Raton."
http://tentrevuegillianwelch.muxtape.com/
I didn't edit out any of the stage banter, so you get the true live experience. Some of the banter is pretty good, such as the intro to "Dusty Boxcar Wall" and the banter following "Single Girl, Married Girl."
Yes, and "Throw Me a Rope" is on there too. So what are you waiting for?
Brendan
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!
Brendan
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
it was colonel mustard!
Dig and Be Dug in Return
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
Faking It
Honey, Where You Been So Long?
whiskey-girl
Porchlight
Charlotte-related
Emily A. Benton
Laurie Koster's Charlotte & Area Events
Evening Muse
Neighborhood Theatre
LITERATURE
Mixed Animal
Night Train
Fried Chicken and Coffee
Mungo
Staccato Fiction
Wigleaf
Tom Drury
Shrinking Violet Promotions
OTHER
Cat and Girl
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!***
Old Crow Medicine Show:
Tennessee Pusher (at HickoryWind.org)
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
