Tuesday, October 05, 2004 ... 8:08 PM
Potpourri
I haven't been posting much partly because I'm missing my period. That is: the period key on my iBook broke. Magically, I guess, in my sleep. I woke up the other morning and lifted the lovely blueberry clamshell from the armchair near my head where it keeps vigil o'er me, and I discovered the period key detached from my keyboard. It had been attached when I'd gone to sleep, so I don't know what the fuck -- elves, or terrorists, or what. I'm learning to hit the tiny rubber nub that's left in the gap at just such an angle as to make the mark, but it's taking practice. It's a tactilely disconcerting stroke. The nub feels flesh-like beneath my ring-finger tip, and slightly flaccid, like a mole. One of these days I'll get a replacement keyboard, but they cleared out the trees that money grows on here in the suburbs, along with the elms and the poplars.
That paragraph reads disturbingly like something you'd read in a housewife blog -- the archetypal "Why I haven't posted in awhile" -- eeesh -- so let's get back to the music before I start telling you what I had for breakfast.
Recent Purchases
Neko Case: Furnace Room Lullaby. Despite my stubborn resistance to buying buzzy alt-anything (I bought my first Ryan Adams solo CD less than a year ago) (more on that stubbornness in a future entry), I rely on a few friends to keep me tuned in and turned on to what's going on in twang post-1960, and K.'s Neko suggestion was golden: I picked up Blacklisted a week and a half ago, and by the third listen its melodies and snatches of imagery had taken up in my head like a bunch of hobos in a boxcar (today's corny figurative: check). "Deep Red Bells" haunts me the most profoundly, particularly the line, "Who took the time to fold your clothes?" posed to the victims of the Green River killer, for whom the song is a prayer and an elegy. I'm not as impressed with Furnace Room Lullaby. The affected drawl of the first two tracks in particular makes me cringe, though I'll get over that; more disappointing is the slipperiness of the melodies. They get lost between the crowds of Telecaster runs and snappy bright snare drums. The melodies may just be subtle; they may grow into you slowly, as Grant-Lee Phillips's melodies do; but the melodies of Blacklisted were so instantly satisfying and indelible, it's difficult to not just go back to that CD and binge binge binge. For now, I'm forcing myself to see Furnace Room Lullaby through until something from it gets stuck in my head.
Etta Baker: One-Dime Blues. I've been looking for Etta in stores since last year at Tower Records I stumbled over Tradition's 1956 field recording, Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, bundled with the Kossoy Sisters' folk revival gift Bowling Green, itself a miraculous brick&mortar store serendipity. Along with Hobart Smith's scathing fiddle stab at "Pretty Polly," Etta's knife-slide version of "John Henry" was the standout track on the Instrumental Music CD -- the most compelling and memorable swing at that dead horse of a ballad that I've heard. So when Betsy and I stumbled over this little Rounder gem at a different Tower on Saturday night, I snatched it up. Not much to say about the 1991 session but to iterate that Etta is the queen of Piedmont blues, an intriguing and elusive sub-genre -- more of a Greek monster than a mutt -- for which I have particular affection, if not a deep knowledge. The unattributed liner notes are perfunctory and heavy on the quaint ("She treasures a well-tended garden, an afternoon visit with a friend, childhood memories of awakening to the sound of her father playing his guitar" blah blah), and the cover design is Rounderesquely frumpy; the playing is the thing, here, as it should be. And the playing ... well. As a really lousy self-taught guitar player whose first lesson was the tab for Chris Thomas King's kiddie-menu arrangement of "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," my main impression of Etta is always the same: Holy fucking shit. On tunes like "Lost John," the sheer virtuosity of her picking: the thumbed bassline, the strummed rhythm chords, the melody picked so clearly and expressively -- all with one hand, simultaneously -- echoes, yeah, Blind Boy Fuller, but also Beethoven. Always of interest to me is black banjo-picking, sort of a missing link between the white and black branches of the American country music tree, here heard on Etta's rambling string band versions of "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" and "Marching Jaybird." The record's single vocal number, the very Mississippi "Broken Hearted Blues," gives us a voice not good, but that glimpses, in a way that her brilliant playing maybe belies, a woman whose path to a late-life career was cleared only by the deaths of several loved ones in close succession.
Recommended? Do you love music?
Coming Up
Lest this become more of a drooling fansite than it needs to be, I'm trying to spread out the Gilliancentric material some, but I do have my darling Betsy's terrific review of her first Gil & Dave show coming up soon.
Ah, what the hell
For breakfast, I had a medium Red Delicious apple, and a cup of green tea.
Consecutively, not concurrently.
Brendan
0 Comments:
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
