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
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.
Brendan
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.
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
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
OTHER THAN MUSIC
Rusty Barnes
Mixed Animal
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
