A Sunday Kind of Love

"and the tin pan bended and the story ended" ... but only for THIS blog!

2010-06-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

I have been invited to join the crew at The Sound of Blackbirds, and I've accepted the invitation. That means that 99% of all further blogging will take place there. Please direct your browsers accordingly.

The Sound of Blackbirds is the brainchild of Matt Winter and Ellen Stanley, two fine music lovers who've taught me a lot and are great people to boot. Please read us here.

All the best to my readers, few of you though there may be!

Nick

Crooked Still @ Memorial Hall, Shelburne Falls, MA, May 15th, 2010

2010-05-15T19:44:00.001-07:00

Sleep deprivation did not stop me from taking the 45 minute drive up to beautiful Shelburne Falls to see Crooked Still. They played at Memorial Hall, which is a few buildings down from Mocha Maya's, the place where I saw Jenny Godspeed and Patty DeRosa with Naomi Fox, two summers ago. In fact, this was only the second time since then that I've been to Shelburne Falls, and I really ought to come this way more often. It's a gorgeous town, all the more so in the spring.

At any rate, good vibes were in the area when I arrived. When I walked into Memorial Hall, a lovely old building, I was greeted by a number of older ladies selling cookies and some pre-teens working a merchandise table. Jim Olsen of Signature Sounds was there too, wandering around the Hall's downstairs (the show was in the theater, upstairs), chatting with people, and he would later be on stage to introduce the evening's performers. Corey DiMario, Crooked Still's bass player, was also hanging around. After I took my seat, I went back to the lobby to kill some time, only to look across the tiny lobby to see the one and only Chris Smither, with his little daughter. I actually looked over at him just as he was looking in my direction. Something about his worn, almost gaunt face, with those deep dark eyes, looking for a brief moment into mine, made me a little uneasy, even though I was excited to see him. Would there be a Crooked Still-Chris Smither jam? No. Although I did see him talking with Corey DiMario, Smither was just there to enjoy the show.

Anyhow, the performance itself was a celebration of the Still's newest album, Some Strange Country. I've been listening to it plenty since it was first made available, a few weeks ago, and I like it a lot. So I was happy to hear the band open with three songs from it--"Henry Lee," "Cold Mountains," and, one of my favorites, "Calvary." In fact, in their first set, they did 9 songs, all but one ("Ain't No Grave") being from the new album. The second set included "Railroad Bill," "Little Sadie" (intense as usual), and "Did You Sleep Well" along with more Some Strange Country songs.

The band was in fine form, with Dr. Greg Lizst a bit less hammy than he usually is, with he and cellist Tristan Clarridge soloing to great effect. I was sitting in the fourth row of the theater, right in the center, and I found myself paying more attention to the lead singer, Aoife O'Donovan, than I usually do. It struck me in a way that it hasn't before exactly how beautiful she is. She was wearing a superb red and white striped dress, knee-length, and hardly a moment passed where she didn't seem completely thrilled to be on stage. If she wasn't singing or, occasionally, picking at a guitar, she was standing back a bit, eyes closed, listening to her bandmates lay into the songs. At some points, a big smile would break out on her face, and she'd look over at Brittany or Tristan or Corey or Greg with an expression of pride and satisfaction. The high point of the concert for me was during the opening instrumental portion of "Locust in the Willow," when Aoife was slowly shaking her head, immersed in the sound of the band, looking serene. The band smoked on that song, and it was definitely the highlight of the first set, if not the entire evening. On the basis of the magnitude of applause, I wasn't the only one who thought so.

Aoife was, as usual, the band's spokesperson. Aoife mentioned that the band had gone through some changes since the last time they played in Shelburne Falls, in 2006. She was talking about the personnel changes--new cellist, new fiddler--and she asked Tristan and Brittany if they were having fun yet. She also spoke about the band's upcoming tour stops, including some shows in Alaska, which prompted two women sitting near me to cheer excitedly. They were both from Alaska, and they claimed not to have known that until they sat next to each other that evening. Aoife laughed with amazement.

Most everyone else had something to contribute. Dr. Greg Liszt talked about the last time the band played in Shelburne Falls, describing a strange iron hanging around backstage. He'd been excited to see it, because he'd wanted to iron his favorite shirt before the show. The iron didn't work, but both he and other band members discovered that other appliances worked just fine when plugged into the particular socket they were trying to use. They only discovered later that, when that iron was plugged in and turned on, due to (apparently) the combination of the wiring in the building and some problem with that iron, power went out in the building next door...which happened to be the police station.

After Aoefie introduced their version of the Rolling Stones' "You Got the Silver" with a dedication to a recent Yale med school graduate who'd made the drive up, Corey DiMario talked about a show in Minneapolis when Greg Liszt's title actually caused some problems. During the show, he'd been introduced as Dr. Greg Liszt, since the man has a Ph.D. in molecular biology. Less than a minute later, an older gentlemen in one of the first few rows collapsed. The ambulance was called, and he wound up being ok. But in the first few moments after everyone realized that the man was seriously ill, all eyes turned to the doctor on stage, man who is not and probably never will be a physician. Personally, I was amused by the disagreement among bandmembers as to how long this took. Corey said it took the ambulance about 30 minutes to get there and get the man out of the theater. He glanced over at Aofie at this point who looked at him as if he was crazy and said, "five minutes." Corey looked a little confused and said there was no way everything happened that quickly. Looking a bit exasperated, Aoefie raised her hands reassuringly and said, "it's your story."

Crooked Still's sound has deepened and diversified a bit since the days of Hop High. Having a fiddler opens some doors for them to access different sonic spaces, and the aggressiveness of their sound is less pronounced. There is more texture, more subtlety on their recent recordings than on Hop High and Shaken by a Low Sound. Personally, I like their recent stuff best, although I also think the material that shows off what makes them great is the more aggressive, ominous stuff: the murder ballads on all their albums, along with the numinous, spooky songs from Still Crooked: "The Absentee" and "Did You Sleep Well?" It's hard to resist the hooks on Hop High, which is their catchiest and most accessible album, but the renditions on their live album trump the studio versions. My verdict? Crooked Still are at their peak in the here and now.

odds and ends

2010-04-28T17:26:00.000-07:00

Not much music lately. I seem to be taking a break. Although I felt the need to commit the following thought to this blog: I am passing up the Neil Young show in a few weeks. The great man is doing a solo acoustic tour, and I just can't quite justify the $100+ ticket. If I had never seen him before, then maybe. But I'm a veteran of 3 Neil Young concerts--1996, 2000, and 2003--and, much as I'd love to see him again, that's a steep price.

On the other hand, I'd pay $22 to see Crooked Still again. And I just did: they're up in Shelburne Falls in a couple of weeks.

I see that Loudon will be at the Iron Horse again this summer. The Nields, Richard Shindell, and Cheryl Wheeler this fall. Chris Smither will be in Norfolk, CT in a few weeks, and I might have to go out of my way for that one. After all, he's the greatest.

Xiu Xiu, Tune Yards and Twin Sister @ The Middle East, Cambrdge MA, April 10th, 2010

2010-04-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

Saturday night, Norah and I went to the Middle East for some rather strange music. At least, it's not the kind of thing I normally gravitate toward. I don't remember exactly where I first heard of Xiu Xiu, but when Norah mentioned them in an e-mail, they rang a bell. I associated them with the indie hipster set, but I knew nothing about their music. I listened to a couple of iTunes clips to get a feel for them, but it was a rather poor introduction. Even after having heard a one hour performance, I'm not sure exactly how I'd describe them.

It was my first time at Middle East since Anthony, his girlfriend, a couple of her students, and I met there for breakfast one Sunday, a long time ago. It was long enough ago such that I didn't realize until rather late in the game, as Norah was driving us around Boston, that we were way over on the wrong end of Massachusetts Ave. My fault. Anyway, after getting settled in, Nora and I spend a solid hour or so talking about the finer points of 1970s rock music--beginning and ending with Neil Young--before going downstairs to catch Tune Yards and Xiu Xiu (we skipped Twin Sister).

Tune Yards didn't do much for me. They are a guy-gal duo, the guy on bass, the gal on vocals and guitar, and both on percussion-heavy synths. At least, that's what it seemed from where I was standing; I didn't have a clear line of vision. The gal looped some strange vocal noises that she made and mixed them in with the synthed percussion and bass. Parts of it--the parts that were beat-heavy--kept my attention. Other parts of it--almost everything pertaining to the vocals--turned me off. So, while I didn't hate it, I didn't particularly like it either.

The featured act was also a duo. The bandleader, Jamie, played electric guitar, and he and his bandmate had a wide variety of percussion devices arrayed in front of them, along with a series of other devices, musical and non, placed on a table. The bandmate (Angela, I think her name is) seemed to focus more on synths and keyboard, although she really knew how to whack her percussion equipment. She had drumsticks, and she knew how to use them. I guess. Since I didn't know any of their songs, and it was difficult to make out what the singer was singing about, I paid more attention to the instrumental stuff and the overall tone and mood. I'm still not exactly sure what to make of it, or if there is anything to be made of it. Norah says this guy's a genius. I'll reserve judgment until I take the time to listen to some of their songs. There was certainly a lot of emotion, and I sense that this guy was exposing himself up on stage. And some of the sounds, even the cacophonous stuff, was interesting, like something I might want to listen to again one day. For the moment, though, Jamie is a bit of a mystery to me. When I saw him, for some reason, all I could think about was Vincent Gallo, the dude who made The Brown Bunny.

I see that these two groups are playing at Hampshire College Monday night. I also see that Robert Christgau has written reviews of both of their albums. See here and here. Interesting. Again, perhaps there's more to both Jamie and Merrill than I could tell from a single live performance. Geniuses or full of shit, they were quite a change of pace for me, and I'm glad I saw them.

Brooks Williams w/Lisa Bigwood @ The Iron Horse, March 7th, 2010

2010-03-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

My oldest favorite, Brooks Williams, played the Iron Horse last night. Unlike his previous Iron Horse appearance, it was a solo gig. Just Brooks alone on stage, switching off between two guitars. It was a CD release party for his new album, Baby-O. I'd just heard the album for the first time the day before the show, and it's a real good one, bluesy and finely picked, and including songs from Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, not to mention Cole Porter's "I Got It Bad, and That Ain't Good."

I knew I was in for a treat the moment I walked into the 'Horse. I glanced over to the stage as I walked in to see a woman who I assumed was the opening act, tweaking her guitar, and accompanied by none other than Tracy Grammer and Jim Henry. These folks seem to turn up unannounced at a lot at Pioneer Valley gigs. I took my seat up close to the stage, fantasizing about the Jim Henry-Brooks Williams jam that wound up not happening.

Now, about that opening act....I had never heard of Lisa Bigwood before, but after her performance Sunday evening, I'm pretty sure I'd seek her out again. She began with a haunting, hypnotic song about a down-and-outer called "The Ballad of Charlie Asher" that had the half-full Iron Horse in the palm of her hand. She played for a little over 30 minutes, half of which included Tracy and Jim, sitting in on fiddle and guitar respectively, along with some harmonies. They were quiet in between songs, letting Lisa Bigwood shine, as was only appropriate. She talked a lot in between songs, mostly about one of two topics: how incredibly lucky she's been in life, and how she talks too much in between songs. A bit less of that would have been nice. Her songs and picking are too good; I wanted to hear more of them.

Brooks took the stage at around 7:45, maybe 10 or 15 fifteen minutes after the opening act left. His set was focused on material from the new album, and he opened with a Son House tune from it, "Grinning in Your Face." He also did several songs from The Time I Spend With You (2008) and Blues and Ballads (2006), but nothing from any of the earlier recordings.

It was a typical performance from the great man, full of amazing guitar playing, and a voice that keeps getting better as the man's gotten older. He used to sound a bit like James Taylor, and there's still some of that mellow sound there, but there's a bit of throatiness there now too. Some grit that you didn't really hear on the albums he did for Green Linnet during the 1990s. And his guitar playing is a marvel. Watching him playing impossible-looking stuff, a big grin all over his face, I thought of Richard Thompson, only to realize, the moment I thought of him, that I preferred Brooks. Thompson is an edgier songwriter, to be sure, but Brooks' guitar-playing is every bit as accomplished and, I believe, more tasteful.

A few songs in, he asked for requests. Someone asked for "Drowsy Bee," an instrumental which I don't think I've ever heard him play. He laughed incredulously at that request, explaining that he'd forgotten how to play it and that it was a song so complicated that he couldn't believe he'd written it. He agreed to other requests, including "Mercy Illinois" and "Weary of the Moon," but he actually never got to them. I wasn't disappointed. The man has too many great songs to get to. Here's a complete list of what he played:

1. Grinning in Your Face
2. Moon on Down
3. Statesboro Blues
4. Belfast Blues
5. Shady Grove
6. 61 Highway
7. Amazing Grace
8. Walk You Off My Mind
9. Baby-O
10. Last Chance Love
11. The Time I Spend with You
12. Louis Collins
13. Trouble in Mind
14. Rich Tonight
15. I Got it Bad and that Ain't Good
16. Frank Delandry
17. Sugar Sweet
E: instrumental whose title I don't know

On my way out of the Iron Horse, I stopped to chat with him. He remembered me and, after he told me that "we go way back, don't we?" I reminded him that I'd first seen him at a young writers' conference in Vermont back in the spring of 1994. He laughed and shook his head in amazement and thanked me for following him and the music for all these years. It was my pleasure, I told him.

I put Brooks on the short list of artists who I'll always go out of my way to see, and I can hardly wait for the next time.

Crooked Still @ The Iron Horse, January 10th, 2010

2010-01-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday evening, Crooked Still played a very satisfying show to a sold out audience at the good ole' Iron Horse. I didn't keep track of the time, but they played two sets of roughly 50 minutes each, with a 15-20 minute intermission. The performance was a nice balance of laid-back and sharp, with some material from a new album due out in May, a few songs from each of their 3 studio recordings, and, for their first encore, a rendition of the Rolling Stones' "You Got the Silver."

I took Danielle with me, and I was delighted that, toward the end of the opening song ("The Golden Vanity"), she leaned over to tell me that the banjo player was cracking her up. He was cracking me up too. As usual, Dr. Greg Liszt acted like he was Neil Young up there, bobbing his head up and down, stomping, and holding and playing his banjo like everything he played was a cross between a blues guitar solo and feedback-laced grunge. During the second set, a few seconds into his solo on "Come On In My Kitchen," not only did I burst out laughing, but so did Aoife O'Donovan, the band's singer.

Anyway, after "The Golden Vanity" came "Ain't No Grave" and "Orphan Girl." That latter one is the opening song to their recent live album which is my favorite of all their stuff. It's sort of a "best-of" for someone who doesn't want to shell out the bucks for their other albums, and the performances of the songs are first rate. It sounded great the other night, and so did the next song, "Undone in Sorrow," which opens their 2007 album, Still Crooked. They also played a couple of their new songs in the opening set, including one called "Calvary" and a very quiet hymn about a pilgrim that kept the audience quiet. And the first set ended with Aoife announcing a "knee-slapper," a comment that cracked her up. In fact, she botched the opening of "Lulu Gal," she was laughing so hard.

The atmosphere was upbeat, despite the noticeably downbeat material: murder ballads ("Little Sadie" and, to end the second set, "Darling Corey"), blues ("Come On in My Kitchen"), death-oriented spiritual numbers ("Ain't No Grave" and "Ecstasy"), and the like. Unlike so many folkie/blurgrass/oldtimey acts, Crooked Still's instrumental sound echoes the grimness of the lyrics. Take away the mandolin and most of the guitar, add the cello, and make sure that a) the purity of the singer's voice is offset by a touch of huskiness and b) the banjo player's solos sound nothing like standard bluegrass playing...and there you have the Crooked Still sound, which is menacing in a way that bluegrass music never is. As Danielle mentioned to me, the cello is an important part of the sound. It makes them sound less fun and more aggressive...and that's a compliment.

Hard to pick out a favorite moment but, being rather fond of Still Crooked, I was happy to hear "Undone in Sorrow" during the first set and "Did You Sleep Well?" during the second. "Lulu Gal" is one of the their best uptempo songs, and I was thrilled to hear it too. "Darling Corey" and "Little Sadie" sound even more intense in concert than they do on record. And after "You Got the Silver," they played and had us sing along with "Shady Grove" to send us home. I was also amused by some of the band's banter, whether it was Aoife O'Donovan congratulating fiddler Brittany Haas on her recent graduation from Princeton (and asking her how it felt), to bassist Corey DiMario talking about being in Cooperstown and using the concert stage as a soapbox for requesting Pete Rose's induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, to Dr. Greg Liszt's standard off-the-wall comments...the band sounded cheerful when they spoke, grim when they played.

Looking forward to their new recording. In the meantime, I highly recommend their live album, Crooked Still Live (2009). I think I'll go listen to it right now.

Christgau's best albums and songs of the decade

2009-12-28T13:32:00.001-08:00

http://robertchristgau.com/xg/list/rs00.php

follow-up from Jorma on the Beacon concert

2009-12-09T10:07:00.001-08:00

From time to time, Jorma Kaukonen posts personal "thoughts" on his website and, just yesterday, he posted some comments regarding the Beacon show from this past weekend. Have a look.

Hot Tuna @ The Beacon Theater, New York City, December 5th, 2009

2009-12-07T13:44:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday night, I attended one of the best concerts I've seen in a long time. It was electric Hot Tuna, and they blew the roof off the Beacon Theater. They played for just shy of 2 hours, and it was the loudest, most raucous I've ever heard them. Intense, guitar-laden psychedelic blues-rock...and yet adjectives like that don't seem sufficient for what I heard.

The band hit the stage at about 5 minutes past 9:00, and I picked up on two things very quickly. One thing was the new drummer, Skoota Warner, who came on stage with a big smile on his face, a smile which rarely vanished. I instinctively knew this guy would be good. The second thing was the 5th member of the band--it was none other than GE Smith, the former Saturday Night Live band leader. I'd known that he'd played with Jorma before and that he'd given lessons at Jorma's guitar camp, but I didn't know that they'd be playing together this evening. Good news, I suspected...correctly as it turned out.

The relevance of these two things became apparent very quickly. Jorma, Barry, and GE took up their instruments, and a bit of quivering feedback emanated from the stage. Jorma and Skoota looked at each other as the noise got a bit louder. Then Skoota counted off a 1-2-3-4 on the drum sticks, and the band launched "Wish You Would" into the Beacon as their first offering. It was faster than I'm used to hearing it, and it was also loud, loose, and heavy. And fabulous. Jorma was singing particularly well this evening. He must have realized that he'd better bring it to rise to the sound of the electric band. During the instrumental portions, he played his solos the way he always does, sort of a mixture of Chicago-style blues, finger-picked blues of the sort that he loves best, and the feedback-drenched licks that he played as Jefferson Airplane's lead guitar player from '65 to '72. He was glorious. But so was Barry, who moved from electric mandolin to electric guitar to other electric stringed instruments that looked like combinations of mandolin and guitar. And then GE Smith was the added bonus, playing some flashy blues rock guitar that reminded me some of Joe Perry from Aerosmith: much more "standard" guitar playing than the other two, but at a very high quality and in a context that made his playing seem aggressive and tasteful at the same time. I didn't time that opening song, but it felt like it must have been almost 10 minutes long.

I hope that Tuna recorded the concert and puts a recording on sale on hottunatunes.com, because it was the best I've ever heard them sound in concert. The show bore little resemblance to the shows at the Calvin that I've seen. In fact, the band even sounded a bit different from the other electric Tuna shows I've seen (both at the Beacon, one in 2006, the other in 1999). With GE Smith playing guitar, and Skoota Warner rocking harder than either of the other drummers I've heard them play with, Hot Tuna sounded more like the mid-1970s hard rock version of Tuna than I ever imagined they would. It was loud; damn loud, and I was sitting in the 4th row of the loge, immediately underneath the balcony. Great seats...and the volume level was still getting to me enough that I wish I'd had ear plugs.

Skoota and GE made their presences in the band felt. After "I Wish You Would," they moved on to another oldie: "True Religion" from Burgers (1972). Skoota Warner kept a steady beat for that one: it didn't speed up like it does on the record. It gave the guitarists ample room to stretch out and solo. Then came yet another oldie, recently rerecorded for a Jorma album: "Been So Long," which was the most lyrical moment of the entire show. GE Smith sat out for the next number, "Living Just for You," from The Phosphorescent Rat (1973), another lyrical number that still managed to be pretty hard-rocking. It's one of the most commercial-sounding songs Jorma has ever written I think. Listen for the steel drums on the studio version. After that, GE Smith returned to the stage and didn't leave again.

That opener, "Wish You Would" was full of intense jamming, but there was plenty more to come. "Come Back Baby" was so great that half the Beacon stood in appreciation as the song came to an end. "Good Shepherd" and "Rock Me Baby" stretched out to over 10 minutes. At the end of "Bowlegged Woman," which featured Jack's fabulous bass part, Skoota immediately began a drum beat that sort of reminded me of the beginning of Richard Shindell's "Arrowhead." Then, GE stepped up to the mike and sang, "Mama...if you could see me now...." Good Lord--it was "Arrowhead!" Hot Tuna playing a Richard Shindell song: will wonders never cease? During that one, Jorma and Barry sort of stood back and let GE take over. There was even a new verse, here repeated from memory: "Mama...there's a noose around my neck / this is what deserters get / there's a horse resting between my knees / he'll move soon, then I'll be free / Mama...there's a noose around my neck." How 'bout that? GE Smith also sang lead on something called "Let it Rock," or something like that. It was a straight-up hard rock song; nothing too special, but loud and raucous and fun. And Jorma sang lead on a brand new song that he introduced as being about "a different kind of candy man" and is called "If This It Love, I Want My Money Back." I loved it: again, loud and rocking.

The finale was "Talking 'Bout You" and then "Funky #7." After "Talkin'," someone came out a few paces from the wings to hold up a sign to Jorma, clearly letting him know that it was time to wrap things up. And "Funky #7" is the way to do it. Rather than describe it, I will simply recommend looking for a recording, either from hottunatunes.com or from iTunes: looking for either the original recording from America's Choice (1975) or the live version from Double Dose (1977).

I sense that, as with the last show I saw at the Calvin, there was a bit of improvisation that went along with the set list. A set list there clearly was, as I noticed Jorma looking down at it after every song. But it looked like that band was acutely time-conscious, and Jorma was making some quick decisions as to what would be skipped and what would be played. I read some comments from Jorma once about the 11:00 curfew at the Beacon; something having to do with union rules, perhaps. Anyhow, in between songs, Jorma would walk around the stage, having a word with band members, presumably about the progress of the set. His stage presence is rather reserves. During the performances, the other band members stood out more, bopping up and down, moving around the stage, and grinning up a storm (incidentally, Barry Mitterhoff, as good as he sounded, looked a bit uncomfortable "rocking out"--this is not the kind of thing he usually does as a bluegrass player; looked like he was having fun though). Jorma is more reserved...but there is no mistaking whose band this is: Jorma's and Jack's. But mainly Jorma's.

Here's the full set, double-checked from Jorma's website:
1. Wish You Would
2. True Religion
3. Been So Long
4. Living Just For You
5. Come Back Baby
6. Let It Rock
7. Cracks In The Finish
8. Good Shepherd
9. If This Is Love, I Want My Money Back
10. Bowlegged Woman, Knock-Kneed Man
11. Arrowhead
12. Rock Me Baby
13. Talkin’ Bout You
14. Funky #7

I can't say enough good things about electric Hot Tuna. Something about seeing a couple of 60-somethings leading such a loud band makes me very happy. That the band is also really, really good just doubles my joy.

Loudon Wainwright opened the show with about 45 minutes of solo guitar and songs. For the first time in a while, he seemed not that impressive, but I think that had to do with the atmosphere. Popular though the man is, this was a Hot Tuna audience. Anyhow, he played a bunch of new songs, most of which I heard him play at the Calvin earlier this fall, that he calls "Songs for the New American Depression" or something like that. He played "Heaven," during which he made reference to how great everything would be when we're all "gratefully dead," which elicited big applause from the audience. "You're easy to manipulate," the singer said in response. He also did a couple of songs from High Wide and Handsome (2009), along with two--count 'em: two--other songs: "The Grammy Song," in honor of the Grammy nomination for his most recent album, and "The Acid Song," in honor of the fact that he was opening for former hippies. That last one I never expected to hear him perform live, and I was delighted. It was easily the high point of his performance.

Josh Ritter w/ Low Anthem @ The Calvin Theater, December 3rd, 2009

2009-12-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

This was Dani's idea. She vouched for the opening act, Low Anthem, but neither of us was too familiar with the featured act. I knew Josh Ritter mainly because of his having been a Signature Sounds recording artist. If you watch the video of Signature's 10th anniversary show at the Calvin, his performance of "Kathleen" is a great moment. And I also know a song of his called "You Don't Make It Easy, Babe" which is a great title. Oh, and I think Richard Shindell does a song of his on South of Delia.

Opening and featured acts both put on great shows.

Low Anthem are difficult to categorize. But if I were to "box" them somehow, I'd say they fit the recent trend of "roots" music that tries to expand beyond the traditional (c.f. Crooked Still, Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers). They comprise 4 musicians, each of whom moved between a few different instruments during the performance. The songs ranged from scratchy, distorted rockers to quiet, subtle hymns and ballads. There were drums, basses, and guitars, but there was also accordion, musical saw, clarinet, horns, and pump organ. I should note that, for me, the sound of that last instrument made me think, immediately and reflexively, of none other than Neil Young. The overall sound of this band bears little resemblance to Neil, but the minute I heard pump organ, I couldn't help but think of "What Happened Yesterday" and "Fallen Angel" and the "unplugged" version of "Like a Hurricane." Maybe that helps to account for my preference for the songs that featured the organ.

The Americana feel to the band was also there in the lyrics. I didn't notice what too many of the songs were about, but I did notice blues motifs. The second song, as I recall, featured the line, "Sally, where'd you get your liquor from," which I know from Reverend Gary Davis. There was a song about a ticket taker that had an eerie, Harry Smith Anthology-ish sort of feel to it. And the lyrical highlight for me was a song whose refrain ended, "your demons tamed / your flowers uncut."

The band was at its best when it focused on longer, gentler pieces. When they tried to rock out, they lost their appeal, mainly because of the scratchiness of the singers when they felt the need to sing over the other instruments instead of through them. But their longer, subtler pieces were haunting and beautiful (and yes, I do think the pump organ was an important part of the sound). I would seek them out to see again and, in the meantime, I'll look into purchasing a recording or two. Really: they're very good.

Josh Ritter sounded a bit more familiar. He led a 5-piece band that played distorted, psychedelic folk-pop, in the style of folks like REM or Matthew Sweet. He and his bandmates radiated eagerness, excitement, energy. Josh's face must be sore from all the smiling he did. He spent most of the set smiling and bouncing excitedly around the stage, strumming rhythm guitar and seeming to have difficulty containing his happiness. I found it difficult not to get caught up in all the fun. The Calvin was pretty full (though noticeably not sold out) and most everyone seemed to be getting into it. When Josh expressed his excitement at playing the Calvin, I believed his sincerity.

Although he and his band looked and sounded like they'd love to be commercial superstars (and, given the kinds of gigs they play, they're well on their way), that doesn't mean that the music didn't make an argument of its own. As with the opening act, I preferred the slower and quieter songs (two categories that didn't overlap with Josh Ritter in the same way they did with Low Anthem), but his band's loud and fast ones were better than Low Anthem's. Unfortunately, it was difficult to understand what Ritter was singing on some of the louder ones. But this guy can write. He played not only "Kathleen" and "You Don't Make It Easy, Babe," but several other songs unaccompanied or with very quiet, country-ish playng from the band, and they all sounded wonderful. "Girl in the war," one was called, and he sang part of it standing away from the microphone, singing out directly to the audience. He can sing and play and write, and I wish I could have heard more of him without all the rocking, good though the band was (in fact, I didn't mind the rock songs; I preferred them to Low Anthem's, anyway).

I'll mention two particularly great moments from Josh's set. First, during the solo portion of the show, Josh asked for the stage lights to be turned completely off. Then, in darkness, he played a song that I think is called "The Curse." In the dark, it was easier to focus on the words and the melody, and I remember being moved. It told a story of some kind, as I recall, and I remember being caught up in it. It's a brand new song, and he mentioned that he'd recently recorded a new album up in Maine with his touring band. Second was a song called "Another New World," also recorded for the new album. This one featured the very best interplay between singer, song, and accompaniment of the night. When it was over, Dani and I looked at each other and said "wow."

So it was a very good show. Better than I'd anticipated, even. I would see either band again, given the chance and a reasonably priced ticket. On to the electric Hot Tuna show this weekend at the Beacon.

Hot Tuna @ The Calvin Theater, November 28th, 2009

2009-11-29T16:31:00.000-08:00

Hot Tuna returned to town this past Saturday night for an acoustic show. This is the 5th time I've seen them and, as usual, I was delighted. All the more so because I was sitting in the 5th row, slightly off to stage left, so that I was staring straight ahead at Barry Mitterhoff, the multi-instrumentalist that Jorma and Jack having been playing with for the past 5 or 6 years. Boy is he good.

There was no opening act. The band hit the stage at about 8:10 and they left after their encore at about 11:10. In between, they played about two dozen songs, separated by a 30 minute intermission. So, the band was onstage for about 2.5 hours. It was clearly a bit chilly backstage, and maybe onstage too. Jack walked on rubbing his hands together and, in a clearly exaggerated way, rubbed the neck of his bass guitar with a cloth to warm it up. Jorma smiled at him as he did this. Jack has always been the showman of the band, hamming it up with winks and nods and occasional commentary.

I could hardly have been more satisfied by the performance. It opened with "Search My Heart," the same song they opened their Calvin show with last year. Here's the entire set, double-checked from Jorma's own website:
Set One:
1. "Search My Heart": This was recorded for their 1970 debut album, still my favorite album of theirs, and they opened their last Calvin show with this song as well. Sounded very good, slow and deliberate.
2. "There’s A Bright Side Somewhere": A Reverend Gary Davis song from Jorma's 2009 album, River of Time. Not one of my favorite of the Gary Davis songs the band does, but it sounded just fine.
3. "I’ll Let You Know Before I Leave": a nifty instrumental from Jorma's 1974 solo album, Quah. Featured some tasty playing from the two guitarists.
4. "More Than My Old Guitar": a Merle Haggard song that Jorma sang with Barry harmonizing. I like this one a lot.
5. "I See The Light": the highlight of the concert, just like it was at their Calvin show last year. The interplay between all three musicians is delicate one moment, sharp and aggressive the next, and the climax over the course of the last minute or so is incredible every time I hear it. A classic.
6. "Come Back Baby": a song that dates back to Jefferson Airplane days, although the version from this past weekend was slow and bluesy. Great solos from Jorma and Barry on this one.
7. "River Of Time": title track to the recent Jorma album. Very nice Jorma original.
8. "Breadline Blues": a song about the 1932 presidential election. Some great jamming here, and a false ending, prompting the audience to applaud, before the band starts up again with the final verse. Barry shone on this one.
9. "Hesitation Blues": there was some "hesitation" before playing the song, as Barry and Jorma appeared to disagree about what should come next. When Jorma announced this one, the audience exploded. This is also from the first Hot Tuna album, and it's one of the great ones. The instrumental section always smokes, and it sure did Saturday night.
10. "99 Year Blues": from 1972's Burgers. Jack's first bass solo of the night, and it was a dandy.
11. "I Know You Rider": from the first Tuna album. Better than the Grateful Dead's version. Or anyone else's.

I confess to having been pretty tired during the second set. Partly that had to do with not getting enough sleep the previous night. The intermission was about half an hour long. Too long, in my humble opinion. At any rate, I don't remember as many specifics as I probably should have noticed....

Set Two:
1. "Trouble In Mind": Hot Tuna recorded this for Live at Sweetwater (1993), and it's also on the new Jorma album. An excellent one.
2. "Things That Might Have Been": brand new Jorma song. I liked it.
3. "Cracks In The Finish": a Jorma original from River of Time. One of his better originals from recent albums.
4. "Full Go Round": a Roy Book Binder song from River of Time. A great one.
5. "How Long Blues": another from the first Hot Tuna album. There isn't a bad track on the first album, and I'm always excited to hear anything from it performed live.
6. "Serpent Of Dreams": another highlight of the concert. I love hearing the acoustic version of this song, and I'm thrilled that it's one of the songs from Hot Tuna's "Metal Years" (say, 1974-1978) that they continue to perform today. A touch of the psychedelic mixed in to the blues.
7. "The Terrible Operation"
8. "Sea Child": one of my favorite songs from Burgers. Beautiful picking from Jorma and Barry.
9. "Good Shepherd": longest jam of the night, although I didn't time it. All three musicians had ample time to solo.
10. "3rd Week In The Chelsea": originally recorded on Jefferson Airplane's Bark (1971).
11. "Just Because"

12. Encore: "Embryonic Journey"

By the time the band finished up with the old Jefferson Airplane instrumental, I was ready for bed. A very satisfying show, just like their Calvin show of last year was. And there's still the electric show coming up at the Beacon next weekend!

Ani Difranco @ The Calvin Theater, November 15th, 2009

2009-11-15T20:09:00.000-08:00

About half a dozen songs into Ani Difranco's recent Calvin Theater show, I had as emotional an experience as I've had at an Ani show for many years. The singer-songwriter-bandleader had already knocked my socks off by opening with "Anticipate" and following it up with "Swan Dive." And she made me want to revisit To The Teeth (1999) by following that with "Providence." And then there was one of her new ones, "Promiscuity." But the truest, realest, awesomest moment came next. After thanking her friend Animal for the inspiration, and with Todd Sickafoose playing a keyboard part, she began singing "She Says."

My reaction had less to do with the greatness of the song and more with my own personal history. I cannot really identify with what goes on in the song. But from the opening line, I was transported back to my lonely college dorm in the fall of 1995. The previous summer, my friends and I had seen Ani play the Newport Folk Festival, and it seemed that everyone I knew had to buy a copy of Not a Pretty Girl after that. Me, I was pretty uptight about saving my pennies at the time. But, a couple of months into college life, I shelled out the big bucks to buy the only Ani album I could find at the local CD store: Like I Said (1993). I listened to it constantly for the rest of the academic year. Hearing the opening to that tune, "She said forget what you have to do / pretend there is nothing outside this room" actually made my chest clench up a bit and brought tears to my eyes. When I was a college freshman, I didn't think nearly enough about the world outside my room, outside my own head, and I was a scared little pup.

So, this isn't about Ani's greatness. It's about the fact that I came of age with her, as I've written in previous entries.

The greatness was on display elsewhere, namely in the the depth of her catalog (which is, by now, astonishing, prompting her to say, early on, that she's had to learn new old songs, "to the keep the old new, as it were") and in her freakishly intense guitar playing and singing. But let's dwell for a moment on her back catalog, shall we? That's where "Swan Dive" and "Providence" and "She Said" came from, and it's also where "Garden of Simple" came from. Other old ones were "old" old ones: "Fuel" and, for the first encore, "Both Hands." She whipped the crowd into a frenzy toward the end with "Alla This" from Red Letter Year (2008), and she also did "Present/Infant," one of the best from that album. She played new songs, like "Promiscuity," "Albacore," a cute ode to anarchism, played on the ukulele, and, for the second encore, "If You're Not." She closed the regular set with her take on the old union song, "Which Side Are Your On." I winced a bit when she talked about, when she changed some of the words, she did so in the folk music tradition of "fucking with the past." That's not exactly what they do, Ani, although I know what you mean. Made me think about Patti Smith's declaration: "I don't fuck much with the past / but I fuck plenty with the future" or something like that.

Ani was charming, as usual. After the opening song, she said something that I've often thought: "Northhampton, Massachusetts--well, well, well!" with emphasis on the last "well." After "Albacore," she stared incredulously out into the crowd and repeated what a fan had just screamed: "You just got your swine flu vaccination?! Good for you! You clearly understood the subtext of that last song." And, after taking up the ukulele for a new song, said something like, "Well, "Dilate" would sound kinda funny on the uke, so...." She laughed, she stuttered, she semi-sermonized, she joked. That is, she was herself.

Oh, and she led a reformed band. Todd Sickafoose remains on bass, but Mike Dillon is gone, and the new drummer is a guy named Andy something-or-other. He's good. At first, I thought he was a real rock drummer, kinda like Allison Miller, but as the show wore on, I realized that he bears a stronger resemblance to Andy Stochansky, a drummer who *can* rock out, but is every bit as interested in swinging and adding quiet, subtle touches to the songs that require it. I had grown to really like the Dillon-Miller-Sickafoose band, but I sense that I'll grow to like this one even faster. His playing on the opener, "Anticipate," was especially great, starting off by slapping a wooden box positioned in front of the drum kit for a couple of verses before moving to the kit to hammer out the rest of the song. He made "Alla This" sound like the raging storm that it is. Verdict: this guy is good.

Kudos to Gabby Moreno for opening the concert with 30 minutes worth of music. She has a big strong voice, and the high point was a medley of Spanish-language songs. She is from Guatemala and speaks English with a slight but very charming accent. Her embarrassed stage patter was comparably charming, not cloying in the way that a lot of Difranco openers have been over the years. Thank goodness.

Chris Smither @ The Iron Horse, November 7th, 2009

2009-11-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

As promised, I attended the Chris Smither show this past weekend. He was performing with the band that he recorded his latest album with: the guitarist "Goody" Goodrich and the drummer, Zak Trojano. I'm still not 100% sold on his non-solo performances. Something about the foot-tapping gets lost with a drummer accenting the beat. Nevertheless, I could hardly have been disappointed, and I wasn't.

I arrived at the Iron Horse at around 6:20, accompanied by the beautiful and talented Dani Carriveau, and we had a dinner of burgers and fries. The Iron Horse does fries pretty well, but I'll pass on the burgers from now on.

The opening act was a woman named Caroline Herring, who records for Signature Sounds. She performed a series of covers, including "Long Black Veil," "C C Rider," and Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors," along with an original song that, Dani and I agreed at the time, was the best thing she played. An enjoyable performance, if nothing special.

After a 20 minute break, the man himself came onstage. For the first time in all the Iron Horse shows I've seen, there was someone on stage to do the introduction: Jim Olsen, from Signature Sounds. He announced that this was now a hometown gig for Chris; he's moved to the Valley. What great news!

The show began the same way that his shows have been beginning for years now: "Open Up," from Leave the Light On. It's a song that hits the spot, every time I hear it. From there, he moved back in time a bit for "Link of Chain" and then to a more recent one, "Lola," which is a favorite. And from there, he took us through more than half of his new album, along with older tunes like "Drive You Home Again" and "Help Me Now" and stuff from his most recent couple of albums, including "Train Home," "Never Needed It More," "Origin of Species," and, to close his set, "Leave the Light On." He didn't do any of the Bob Dylan material that he's been fond of lately, but he did do Dave Carter's "Crocodile Man." I hope that, one day, he'll tap his back catalog of songs from the early 1970s. Every once in a while, he'll play the song that kept food on his table for years, "Love You Like a Man," but I crave "Homunculus," "Don't It Drag On," and "Every Mother's Son." Maybe next time.

The audience was consistently appreciative. Certain lines in songs yielded applause: "I'm not evil / I'm just bad," "If I drive you to distraction / I will drive you home again," and about half the verses of "Origin of Species" and of "Surprise, Surprise" from the new album, a song that looks like it'll be an audience favorite before long. Goody Goodrich's guitar accompaniment was simple and tasteful, and the audience let him know it. And Smither was a gracious host, telling variations on stories I'd heard him tell before--about how his mother disliked "Lola," about his wanting to write songs for and about his father, about his adopted daughter--and some new stories--about his wife wanting him to write a "bad boy" song for her, about the inspiration for a song from the new album ("Call Yourself" was a reaction to watching Sunday morning religiously themed self-help programs), and about the dilemmas of writing and performing topical material, like "Surprise, Surprise." Smither's speaking voice is warm and comforting, and I don't think he gets the credit he deserves for being able to match a warm, deep baritone with lyrics that are cold-eyed and shot through with experience. I've always loved hearing him perform "Drive You Home Again," a song that is, in a sense, about warmth without actually being warm. The same goes for one of his greatest covers, which he did not perform the other night: Rolly Salley's "Killing the Blues." Listen to a recording of either of them, and tell me if you know what I mean.

Much to my surprise, one of the high points was the encore. He did a song which I haven't heard him perform live in years, "Statesboro Blues," and he really used his voice on that one, roaring the words like he'd been made to do so. Beyond that, some of the new material sounded great, especially "Surprise, Surprise" and "Don't Call Me Stranger" and "I Don't Know." There really weren't any dull moments for me. Every time I see this guy, I am amazed anew, and I've seen him perform live maybe 10 times or so. He is one of the grandmasters, and I'm sure I'll return for more.

Dar Williams @ The Iron Horse, October 16th, 2009

2009-10-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

After a brief, but rather disconcerting episode of "lost my keys," Annie and I left for the Iron Horse at around 6:00 last night, arriving to a packed house. As she and I discussed on the way there, we hadn't been listening to Dar much over the past few years. Me, I hadn't seen her since Falcon Ridge '08 and, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I associate Dar with outdoor performances. I'm not sure when the last time was that I saw Dar play indoors; maybe never. But she pops up at most of the folk festivals I've attended. It was a bit odd seeing her at the Iron Horse, cozy and warm though the environment is. I kept wanting to hear her make remarks about the mountains and how beautiful we all looked on our blankets.

Anyhow, Dar hit the stage at around quarter past 7:00, maybe a bit later, wandering through the room and up to the stage with her musical sidekick (whose name I forget), as the lights dimmed and a smattering of applause turned into a warm ovation. The memories that I just described overwhelmed me at that point and, I have to admit, I was only half paying attention during the first song. But then, after talking about her emotionally disturbed past, which coincided with her stay in Northampton, she played "Spring Street," and I found myself getting into things.

A Dar Williams performance feels like kicking back in someone's living room, listening to stories that, in a strange way, blend into the songs themselves. I associated her stage presence with her musical sound in a way that I don't with a lot of other performers. That is all for the best, since I don't know her songs all that well. That said, I recognized more of what I heard than I thought I would. I remembered hearing "The Buzzer" the last time I saw her; she described this song as an effort to write a commercial love song that took a left turn when she got distracted by thinking about the Milgram obedience experiments. She also played "The Easy Way" from her newest album, and she closed her set with "Midnight Radio," written by her old friend Stephen Trask (who co-wrote Hedwig and the Angry Inch). I actually loved that song: a simple, quiet, passionate expression of love for the women rockers of the radio who make you feel less alone. One of the more touching moments of the evening for me.

Dar told lots of stories, about life in NYC, about self-grown food, about her time in NoHo, about her newly adopted daughter, and about children in general (before playing "The One Who Knows," a lovely song about raising children and letting them go out into the world). In between stories, she played songs from every period of her career. No songs from Cry Cry Cry, which was too bad, but her performance of "If I Wrote You" hit the spot. And her accompanyist shone on "As Cool as I Am," playing the opening instrumental passage on the piano, leading into the opening verse, with Dar strumming gently at first before really leaning into the refrain; another great moment.

We were distracted a bit midway through the show, when I realized Annie was in a bit of pain. Turns out she'd leaned back a bit in her seat and touched an exposed pipe, burning herself. During "Calling the Moon," she had to get a glass of ice to apply to her burn. The waitress was horrified; so was the manager, who gave us a free dinner and offered a pair of free tickets for a subsequent show to Annie. I can't believe that the staff at the Iron Horse hadn't known or done anything about a dangerously exposed pipe, but that was their story.

For her encore, she played "The Babysitter's Here," a song that always seems to work when she performs it in concert. When I hear the recording of it, it's just a good song on a good album. Last night, when the narrator tries to understand, I teared up.

Erin McKeown plays the Iron Horse tonight, but I'm skipping out. Next weekend, I'll try to catch The Nields with Lucy Wainwright Roche. And, not long after that, Tracy Grammer is playing with Brooks Williams up in Shutesbury, a pairing that fills me with happiness at the thought of it. Speaking of filling up with happiness, that's what Chris Smither's newest album does. I can't believe I wrote an entire blog entry about Richard Shindell's and Jack Hardy's newest albums when the Smither album was sitting on my desk, unplayed. Like most of Smither's albums, it blows most everything else out of the water. I'm in the midst of writing about it, and it's been a pleasure to do so.

Smitherology as musical preference and life option

2009-10-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

How do I love the new Chris Smither album? Let me count the ways. I love it for its songwriting, which has never been sharper, its vocals, which get blurrier and more textured as Smither gets older, its guitar playing, which means Smither plus David Goodrich on electric guitar, its Bob Dylan cover, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," and, never forget, the foot stomping. The sound of that foot stomping evokes...stolid fortitude, compassion, spiritual uplift, courage in the face of the void. And it fills out the man's overall sound in a miraculous way. Think about how Johnny Cash sounded with the Tennessee Two (and Three) backing him; that's what I think about when I think about what the foot-tapping does for Smither's sound. It is unutterably simple and, like the simplest of things, profound. Every shade of meaning of each song is somehow, miraculously, deepened by the sound engineer's simple act of putting a separate microphone at the man's feet. The man stomps on a piece of plywood that he carries with him on tour for just this purpose, not just keeping the beat but creating a groove. I once heard him say in an interview that he has had his shoes resoled multiple times to ensure that the tapping is completely toneless. The worst thing, he said, is when you can hear his feet play notes. And the best thing I've heard him say in concert is an instruction to the sound man: "could I have some more feet in the monitors, please?"

Chris Smither, in case you didn't know, is one of my absolute favorites. I get as much pleasure out of listening to his music as I do Neil Young, Mississippi John Hurt, Sue Foley, Marshall Crenshaw, Hot Tuna, and Jefferson Airplane. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Ani Difranco. Not to mention Chopin's nocturnes and etudes, and the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony. Gershwin's Concerto in F. Smither will never have the popularity or fame of any of the aforementioned, but I rank him in the same league. Apart from his songs, which I am partial to, he has a distinctive sound, a sound that has changed as he has aged and, if anything, has improved over time. His voice is rich and full and, as he has grown older, it has gained resonance and beauty. He has what the greatest blues singers have had, what Dylan and Mitchell have grown into in their own ways: an undefinable, undeniable presence. You hear these musicians and it is very difficult not to listen.

At least, that's what I think.

His newest album is called Time Stands Still. As usual with him, there are a bunch of news songs and a few songs written by others; in this case, Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, and Frank Hutchison. The eight originals deal with his usual lyrical concerns--selfhood, freedom, love, life and death, the process of thought--but puts new twists on them--questions from his new adopted daughter, grief over his father's death, gratified realization of love's persistence. There's even a topical song, "Surprise, Surprise," about the financial crisis which, as you listen, you realize isn't really about the financial crisis at all. The arrangements are typically austere: a drummer who knows how to stay out of the way, and his producer, David "Goody" Goodrich, throwing in some distorted guitar to add menace and gloom. But when those two guys back off during Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh..." leaving the featured performer to lay in to the song, I get chills. I've listened to this album 3 times so far, and I'll be damned if it isn't this track that stops me short every time I've heard it. It has the feel of his performance of "Killing the Blues," somehow cold and warm at the same time, mysterious and grand. It feels nothing like Dylan's original.

There are careful, subtle musical flourishes throughout the album. Check out the unusally hot groove to "I Told You So," or Goodrich's guitar work on the opening track, "Don't Call Me Stranger."

I contemplated throwing out sample lyrics, but narrowing down favorites is difficult. Let's just say that no song on the album is "ordinary," though some are perhaps ordinary by Smither's standards; that is, the standards of greatness. And many of the songs echo others. "Don't Call Me Stranger," for example, reminds me of "Drive You Home Again," which opens the album of the same name. Similar lyrical idea, similar overall feel. The language is spare. Nothing feels forced. Smither's best songs always have the feeling of being fully formed on delivery, as if the songs had been waiting to be plucked from the air. It's an illusion, of course, but some songs sustain the illusion beyond my point of (dis)belief. Listen to "Slow Surprise" from Small Revelations or "Tell Me Why You Love Me" from Drive You Home Again or "Time Stands Still" from the new album, and maybe you'll see what I mean.

In the Smither cannon, the two greatest are from the late '90s: Small Revelations and Drive You Home Again. After those two, and the two live albums, Another Way to Find You and Live as I'll Ever Be, I'd say that this newest one ranks next. But you'd wouldn't be sorry if you shelled out the money for Leave the Light On or Train Home.

He's playing the Iron Horse next week, and I do believe I'll stop by. You should too.

Loudon Wainwright and Richard Thompson @ The Calvin Theater, Northhampton, MA, October 6th, 2009

2009-10-06T20:41:00.001-07:00

I bought tickets for the "Loud and Rich" concert, as it was billed, at the good old Calvin Theater, not long after I heard about the show's existence. I have been a Loudon Wainwright III fan for an awfully long time now and, while I don't know Richard Thompson's music as well, I'm routinely impressed when I hear him. And they've played on each other's albums quite a bit over the years.

The initial plan was to go with my man Anthony. He couldn't make it. Matt Winters' man Sandro didn't return my e-mail. So, I invited a former student to accompany me.

Although their musical styles are a bit different--Thompson is more of a rock and roller and more of a guitar stylist, while LWiii cares more about mood and song form--I sense definite spiritual similarities. They both have a strong sense of fun and a love of life that comes out most clearly in their songs about death. I said "fun," not humor. The latter would be Loudon's area of expertise. The performance of one of his death songs, "Donations," elicited laughter from the audience Tuesday night, while Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lighting" was one of the highlights of his set: fun without being at all funny. And the great thing about both of those songs is that they really aren't about death at all; they're about living well and being ready to meet one's maker.

Both of them also have woman problems. Not relationship problems; woman problems. I have heard people accuse both of these guys of being misogynistic, which I think is an overstatement. Their efforts at exploring their dysfunctional romantic lives are more engaging, thoughtful, and courageous than those of most of the younger singer-songwriters who fill their professional careers with such efforts. The liveliness of their songs, and the performances of those songs, doesn't suggest woman-hate to me, so much as confusion and desperation. I sense that their fans understand, at least subliminally, the tension between the skillfulness of these guys' arrangements (even on solo guitar), the cunning but emotive singing, and the songs themselves, whose lyrics are an often uncomfortable fit with the style of the playing. Sometimes, they don't get it at all: during Loudon's "Motel Blues," an audience member shouted "Roman Polanski!" audibly enough to be shushed by folks clear on the other side of the Calvin. On one new song, about how a poor housing market might yet save a marriage, there were titters of nervous amusement from the crowd. Loudon, whose inner life as revealed through song and performance seems a lot more interesting than Richard's, was conjuring up the tension that his best songs always do, between idealism and cold reality. And his performance, with all those facial ticks and leg lifts and tongue wagging, generates lots of different emotional effects: desperation, confusion, humor, sometimes all three simultaneously. Richard, meanwhile, appears to find his salvation through guitar solos. That's fine, too, especially when he goes through his lover's bureau drawers in "Cold Kisses."

I'll recap the show for the sake of readers interested in specifics. Loudon walked onto the stage at a few minutes past 8:00 and began with "Donations," from his fabulous 2001 album, Last Man On Earth, asking a friend if he or she would mind being the one to deal with his remains upon his death. Makes a generous offer too: "as for my corneas / I don't care who gets 'em / but all other organs and parts are for you." From there, he focused on newer material, both from his collection of Charlie Poole songs, High Wide and Handsome (2009), his rediscovery of his early catalogue, Recovery (2008), one song that he wrote for the play Lucky You, and some as yet unrecorded songs which he is calling "Songs for the New Depression." One of those new ones yielded one of the funniest moments of the night, "Paul Krugman Blues," while another yielded a particularly poignant moment, the aforementioned song about a couple possibly selling their house. And, much to my delight, he played two other songs from Last Man on Earth, "Surviving Twin" and "White Winos," both of which yielded great applause. From Recovery, there was "Motel Blues" and "Muse Blues" and "New Paint." And, in the middle of the set, Thompson came out to play on a couple of songs, including "Animal Song," which they recorded together for I'm Alright (1985).

Richard Thompson began with "Cooksferry Queen" and "Cold Kisses." I don't really know his songs as well as Loudon, so there were a few he played after that that I'd didn't recognize. In fact, my mind was actually starting to wander a bit, particularly during a modern sea shanty that he tried to get everyone to sing along with. But then, after explaining the idea of an LP to an audience old enough to enough, he infused the show with a jolt of energy that carried over to the end of the show. He nailed "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight," which led into the quiet, lovely "Sunset Song" from Sweet Warrior (2007), and then into "1952 Vincent Black Lightning." He may have better songs, but the audience's cheer of recognition when Richard got that one going was priceless, the highlight of the night. And the man's roar when the angels in leather and chrome "come down from heaven to carry me home" I won't soon forget. As if that weren't enough, he followed up with one of best quieter songs, "Persuasion." Then came a song about some departed friends that I didn't know. Somewhere in there was a song about the worst tour he'd ever had, a song that I sense he hasn't recorded. He finished up with "Dad's Gonna Kill Me."

For the encore, Loud and Rich did one song each from each other's catalogue: "Down Where the Drunkard's Roll" and "Smokey Joe's Cafe."

Odds and ends

2009-10-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

October looks to be a good month for concert attendance. First off, there's the "Loud n' Rich" shows at the Calvin on the 6th. Then, there's back to back shows on the 16th and 17th: first, Dar Williams; second, Erin McKeown. Finally, there's the Nields with Lucy Wainwright Roche on the 23rd. And there will be plenty more in November: Ani Difranco, Hot Tuna, Robert Cray, Chris Smither, and more.

I bought the new Chris Smither smither album as soon as it became available, a couple of weeks ago, but I've been holding off on listening to it. Trying to savor its existence a bit before plunging it. Robert Christgau gave it an "honorable mention" in his October Consumer Guide column...but I'm sure I'll rave about its awesomeness some other time.

I have, however, been listening to the new live Crooked Still album. It's great, the one that, from now on, I'll instinctively grab when I decide I want to hear some 'Still.

Getting Hardy on my Shindell

2009-08-21T18:49:00.001-07:00

Over the past month or so, I have been trying to digest the most recent albums by Richard Shindell and Jack Hardy, entitled Not Far Now and Rye Grass, respectively (and NFN and RG hereafter). They didn't go down as easily as I thought that they would. Initially, the glossiness of NFN stuck in my craw as irritably as RG's rhythmic woodenness and occasionally overwrought verbiage did. But after multiple listens of several songs at a time and, over the past couple days, listening to each in its entirety, I think I'm ready to reflect more positively...much more positively in the case of Jack's newest.

Let's start with NFN. I haven't gone back to the recent Shindell albums in some time now so, in a way, I feel like more of a stranger to his music than I did, say, when his live album, Courier (2002), came out. NFN feels familiar, like I've heard it before, but that's because it doesn't sound too substantially different from Vuelta (2004) or Somewhere Near Patterson (2000) or Reunion Hill (1997). As with those albums, the sound is folk-rock, with an emphasis on the folk. No distorted guitar, nothing especially uptempo. The hooks lie in the melodies, sometimes in the refrains, and, on one song, "Gethsemane Goodbye," in both.

Thematically, nothing more holds this album together than anything on his previous albums. Over his past few albums, Shindell has specialized in open-ended character portraits and unusual and provocative settings. The opening song, "Parasol Ants" features "a well-known local hood," busted, lying flat on the ground, as a line of ants marches past. "Mariana's Table" is the subtlest song on the album, with "trucks hauling wheat grain" roaring through Buenos Aires, interrupting a quiet scene about a woman, Mariana, selling her empanadas and beer. There is the hint of conflict, of political frustration just beneath the surface. He reports on his website that "Get Up Clara" is about a mule, but when I first listened to it, it seemed to be addressed to the singer's lover. Silly me, I had thought that he was working the old blues tradition of referring to his lover as a beast of burden. Since he once laid down a great version of "Sitting on Top of the World," I didn't put it past him. Anyway, "Get Up Clara" and "Gethsemani Goodbye" and "Balloon Man" are the best tracks on the album, along with Dave Carter's "The Mountain." I would rank it slightly below recent efforts, but I imagine that the real Richard Shindell fans will eat it up. I'll stick with his live album and, maybe, Patterson, or maybe his album of covers, South of Delia (2007), when I need a Shindell fix. "I still maintain that he's a bum," who's at his best at his most objectionable ("Are You Happy Now?" which reminds me of Loudon Wainwright III) and his most mysterious ("Transit" which reminds me of Flannery O'Connor).

So, what does it all add up to? A skilled craftsman working his craft. Nothing more. As usual with Richard Shindell, his newest album offers solid songwriting, smooth singing, and glossy production and arrangements. I never really get the feeling that there is any larger message to this guy's music, and that's not a criticism. Or, at least, it wouldn't be if the songs featured anything particularly uplifting or life-affirming. But so much of this guy's music in full of the soft fatalism that so many singer-songwriters indulge in. It's especially clear on the couple of examples of lyrics that reach out a bit; there's simply no reflection in the music of the emotions suggested by the words. This proves Stephin Merritt's comment that there isn't enough information contained in songs to signal the meaning of a performance to a listener. Artists like Richard Shindell verify the truth of that claim. In "State of the Union," for example, there is a quiet anger in the lyrics that simply isn't reflected in the music or arrangements or singing. To me, that's a sign of someone so middle-class (not to mention resigned to the capitalist world order) that he doesn't even realize how weak his politics really seem. On one recent listening to NFN, I had hoped that the Lilliputian story of "Parasol Ants" might reveal a broader, more originally expressed political message hidden in the album. But I don't think so. Interesting to note that he recorded this thing in Buenos Aires at a place called Amalgamated Balladry.

Still, there is such a thing as craftsmanship, and Richard Shindell has got it. Listen to NFN if you want to hear well-constructed contemporary folk songs, marked by carefully controlled singing and staid arrangements. Since I have a taste for this sort of thing, I'm sure I'll return to it from time to time, despite my more intellectual misgivings.

Jack's RG also feels familiar. It feels like part two of a saga of country music albums begun with Bandolier (2002). The arrangements are similar: guitars, dobro, bass, fiddle, a little piano, no drums. And, like Bandolier, RG improves with repeat listenings. The melodies and words and arrangements blur comfortably within each other, and Jack's weathered voice is appropriately cradled by his harmony singers who, on this record, happen to be his daughters. Jack's technical vocal proficiency isn't at Richard Shindell's level, but he's got more soul and a better understanding of his gifts than I bet Richard will ever develop. Really, his voice hit me the first time I ever heard him, at the Postcrypt Coffeehouse in the spring of 2000.

RG is Jack Hardy's 19th or 20th album, and I think it's one of the better ones; in the top half, let's say. In its thematic coherence and suitably austere arrangements, it may even be top 5. As he's gotten older, that weathered voice of his has deepened, its cracks combining with the man's personal history--his brother was in one of the Twin Towers when it collapsed and, over 30 years before, he was deeply involved in radical politics on the University of Hartford campus--to evoke world-weariness and political despair. The album opens with the song that best evokes that meaning: "Soundtrack," which overviews recent political issues and events with various references to pop and folk songs of years past. The refrain features his daughters' harmonies: "bye bye American pie / bye bye Blackbird." Later on, there's "Ask Questions." And, in between and thereafter, there are a bunch of above average country songs.

But while Bandolier was little more than an album of country songs (and at least three great ones: "The Moon Is Full," "Autumn," and "Everything's Bigger in Texas"), on RG, there are darker things going on. There is a disillusionment that, like Ani Difranco's, is earned. RG may have some good country songs on it, but it is quietly and brilliantly an album about how and whether people will face down the evil in their midst. "Soundtrack" suggests that "There's still time to lock up your daughters," and its use of older folk and pop songs helps evoke an innocence that Jack surely knows didn't define the era that they're usually associated with. "Crime of the Century" squeezes in references to the touring life and illegal downloads, while quietly suggesting that the real crime is the political disengagement in that lifestyle: "You headed out to save the world / wound up drunk and chasing girls / buddy can you spare a dime / for the crime of the century?" The title track is quiet and hypnotic in its evocation of an American south terrorized by the Klan and argues that we don't "Ask Questions" enough about that facet of America's past. "Prisoner"'s "And there's no one to ask questions / and there's no one to reply / to ask why i was taken / on the fourth day of July" evokes the same themes. Meanwhile, "If I Were to Lay Me Down" and "Kansas" and "Now and Then" are stark and beautiful, with Jack sometimes using his higher vocal registers to evoke restlessness and discontent.

I don't usually think of Jack Hardy's albums as having thematic coherence, but RG does, and the more I've listened to it, the more I've come to admire it. And, while it isn't as listenable as some of his more recent stuff, it's also a bit more ambitious in its own subtle way. I like it more than Richard Shindell's NFN; the songs and the voice have more depth than most of the stuff on NFN, and the austere arrangements take on a haunting, mysterious quality that Shindell can only approach (and never really does on NFN).

Jack Hardy's stock-in-trade is songs. I find that his focus on songwriting sometimes results in unimpressive albums. As I've said to Matt Winters in the past, his albums can be hard to listen to, because the instrumentation becomes monotonous over a dozen songs. Occasionally, an arrangement will nail the song perfectly: the guitar parts on "Porto Limon" from 1984's The Cauldron and the title track of Through (1991), the male harmonies on the title track of White Shoes (1982), the Roches' harmonies on "The Tailor," from The Mirror of My Madness (1976), and the slow-but-solid beat and lead guitar lines on "Johnny's Gone" and haunting mandolin part on "111th Pennsylvane," both from Civil Wars (1994). At their best, his recordings are extraordinary: two of the highlights are "The Tinker's Coin" from Landmark (1982) and "Eclipse" from Omens (2000). His best albums combine great songwriting with consistently good melodies and arrangements--The Mirror of My Madness (1976), Landmark (1982), Civil Wars (1994), Omens (2000), and Noir (2007) are my top 5, in chronological order. This year's Rye Grass deserves mention as a great one too. It's the first album of his I've heard that I've enjoyed a lot, in spite of its all-too-consistent arrangements. Why? Because the music, the lyrics, the voice, and the thematic consistency add up to something; it's not just a collection of songs. Whether he meant to or not, Jack Hardy has made a serious album of folk and country songs about a decaying United States of America, about how hard it is to speak out against the injustices therein, and how necessary it is to do so.

Odds and ends

2009-08-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

I am listening to Jim Henry’s One-Horse Town (2005) as I type this. It is one of the CDs I bought at Falcon Ridge this summer. It is one of a series of “seven-song six-packs” from Jim Henry and Tracy Grammer over the past few years. Tracy’s are called The Verdant Mile and Book of Sparrows. Jim Henry has this one, and another called King of Hearts. I’ll write about the others soon. For the moment, here’s what they have in common. They are all short; seven songs each. Tracy plays and sings on Jim’s six-packs, and Jim plays on Tracy’s.

Anyway, One-Horse Town is excellent. It opens with “deep river blues,” a Doc Watson-arranged traditional song, which sounds like it came from a Jorma Kaukonen album, with some delicate finger-picking and tasty dobro solos (Jim overdubs his own parts; Tracy is credited with vocals and violin). The title track comes next. It’s a Jim Henry original, and it’s very sweet, about the power of roots and their power over the children who leave small town life. The portrait of small-town life is conservative—“a peck on the cheek when there’s no one around”—but loving, and the melody is simple and direct. Think of it as a more optimistic, less fatalistic version of Dave Carter’s “Ordinary Town.” The version of “St. James Infirmary” that follows is straightforward. Then comes a previously unrecorded Dave Carter song, “Quickdraw Southpaw’s Last Hurrah,” typically excellent, yearning and sad and hopeful. “A sad farewell” is instrumental, pretty good. “This Lullaby” is a Jim Henry original, a lovely ballad about growing up. Finally, there’s another Jim Henry original called “Ruby,” about his daughter, that begins, “when Bob Dole spoke / your mom went into labor / her water broke / she started screaming for the savior.” I love it.

I hadn’t realized that Jim Henry is such a good songwriter, but he is. On the basis of “One-horse Town,” “This Lullaby,” and “Ruby,” I want to hear more.

I’ve also just listened to Richard Shindell’s latest album, Not Far Now (2009). It is good but, so far, I’m not sure what else to say about it. It actually peaks toward the end: the final three tracks are "Get Up Clara," in which Richard lets his lover be their guide, Dave Carter's "The Mountain," and "Balloon Man" which had me spellbound at the Signature Sounds concert last month. Based on two listens to the disc, they are the best songs on the album, the ones in which lyrics, music, arrangement, and performance yield something I'd like to hear again. None of the other tracks have made contact yet, although "Parasol Ants" has a great lyric. I think I need to listen again.

I've also been listening to the Flatlanders' Wheel of Fortune (2004) which has stuff on it that makes me smile, even laugh out loud, and all the singers are great. I'm starting to get the feeling I've stumbled onto something great. After perusing some of their other stuff via iTunes, I now realize that I know some of their other songs. WFUV used to play a couple of songs from their 2002 disc, Now Again, that I really liked.

I have yet to listen to Jack Hardy's newest, and it's on my agenda to give it a spin tomorrow. Ditto Carsie Blanton's newest. And Loudon Wainwright and Chris Smither both have new albums coming out in the next month or so. Goody!

Erin McKeown joins Righteous Babe

2009-07-29T18:36:00.001-07:00

See here.

Falcon Ridge, 2009

2009-07-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

I returned from Falcon Ridge earlier this afternoon. After a few days worth of music and camping out on Dodds Farm, I decided around 10:30 this morning that I’d had enough. I ducked out during the Gospel Wake Up Call. With some help from some twenty-somethings, pushing my car through some mud, I made it out of the Lower Pasture and onto the muddy path leading past the mainstage and out to the main road. As I passed the mainstage, I heard a performer announce that they were going to play a Patty Griffin song, which turned out to be “Mary,” just as I was leaving the festival grounds. I momentarily thought about parking somewhere and wandering back to see some more of the show, but exhaustion and lack of enthusiasm about the Sunday afternoon performance schedule and a vaguely melancholy feeling that Patty Griffin would never again record an album as great as Flaming Red won the day. There would be some good stuff happening on the workshop stage, it looked like, but not good enough to induce me to go back. Actually, the Gospel Wake Up Call, usually one of the festival highlights, didn’t do much for me; what I heard of it, anyway. Really, without Eddie from Ohio or the Nields or Vance Gilbert or any of the other Falcon Ridge stalwarts, I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. And as for this afternoon’s mainstage…Wild Asparagus, Dan Navarro, Hickory Project, Cliff Eberhardt, N+K Nields, Ellis Paul, and Mecca Bodega: I salute you. Hope to see some of you sometime.

There you have a large part of the story of this year’s Falcon Ridge: a lot of the regulars were absent. And there were a number of newcomers to the festival, along with a number of folks who had been away for some time. Given the destruction from last year, the festival promoters had seriously considered not putting the show on this summer. A friend told me yesterday that Anne and Bub were a bit distressed by the audience turnout this year: through Saturday evening, the crowds were smaller than they had been last year.

This summer’s folk fest was historic for me: it was the first time I’ve ever attended a music festival on my own. Matt Winters and company had other business, and the crowd that I used to folk out with a decade ago have either scattered all over the country or faded away. About twenty minutes after I put down my tarp, however, I discovered that my next door neighbors were Jessica and her mother and their friends. Jessica is the woman who drove me to the Ani show at the Pines last summer, and she also showed up at Falcon Ridge ’08. She is also part of the scene, acting as a manager (or street coordinator or something like that) for Girlyman, who were a big deal at this year’s fest. We caught up with each other and shared blanket space. So I had some company.

On to the music….

Thursday evening began with Kim & Reggie Harris and Magpie. These are two duos who date back to the 1970s, literally, and play 1960s-style commercial folk music. That is, they perform a lot of political music, clearly inspired by the songs of the protest singers of that time. In tone, spirit, and overall sound/feel, this was political music in the vein of Peter, Paul, and Mary or Joan Baez or Pete Seeger (as opposed to, say, Randy Newman). Pretty innocent stuff, for the most part. Kinda bland, but with one standout exception. Magpie performed one song without the Harrises, and it was a great one: “Barons of King Coal,” about mountain top removal in Appalachia. The four singers finished up with Phil Ochs’ “When I’m Gone,” and their harmonies took on that choral quality that I associate with the protest music that thrived during the era of the Civil Rights Movement and late as (beginning of) the sexual revolution (should that be capitalized? Yes). Throughout, they were backed by Mark Dann on bass, a Jack Hardy bandmate, and a part of the Falcon Ridge house band. Overall, an entertaining, if unspectacular start to the festivities.

Next up came John Flynn, another singer in the same mold, although he only dates back to the 1980s. He’s more in the vein of someone like Arlo Guthrie (who he’s travelled with), or maybe Steve Forbert. Some political stuff, but more like social commentary and topical tunes. His performance gained power as it progressed. An opening song that referenced “two wolves” was a like a bad Dave Carter song, but when he dumped the metaphors and took on concrete realities, his songs (and his performance) improved. He has a warm stage presence and made a couple of jokes and gently teased Arlo G’s harmonica playing. A couple of his more recent songs, “Semper Fi” and “America’s Waiting” were genuinely touching. He got a standing ovation from the Falcon Ridge audience. It was a step up from the opening act, and I felt like we were really underway.

The Folk Arts Quartet consist of four classically trained Berkley College of Music students playing music that they call “chamber grass.” What does that mean? What I heard reminded me of seeing Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas last year: fairly staid melodies, tight arrangements, and entertaining enough for a short time. Special kudos to Ivonne Hernandez, who showed off some toe-tapping and step dancing that, in conjunction with the music, was a lot of fun. Hannah Read hails from Edinburgh, Scotland, and has a charming stage presence. All four of them were all smiles. Very clean cut, a bit perky, great musicianship. Not much more to say, really. What do you think?

I decided to call it a night after that, and I wish I hadn’t. By the time I’d returned to my tent, Oneside had begun. I heard something really uptempo and fun-sounding. I heard a rollicking version of Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues,” and I sang along as I set up my sleeping bag. So I missed out. And, rumor has it, Kathy Mattea put on a fantastic performance. Oh well. I got a good night’s sleep by Falcon Ridge standards, and I was ready for a full day of music on Friday.

I made it to the Workshop stage at 11:00 for something called “Heart & Soul,” with the Falcon Ridge house band (including Mark Dann and, does the guy ever get a break?, Jim Henry), Tracy Grammer (with Jim Henry, as usual), N+K Nields, Jon Vezner, and Dan Navarro. Navarro, the workshop MC, sang a song about songwriting, and it was witty and, yes, soulful. When John Vezner sat down at the piano a bit later for his second tune, he introduced himself as Kathy Mattea’s husband and proceeded to play a song that, from the opening line, made the Nields’ heads perk up, and they began to whisper excitedly to each other and to Jim and Tracy. It turns out that Jon had played whatever song it was on the Today Show about 15 years ago. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Jon Vezner has been a songwriter for a long time, working mostly for country singers. On the basis of what I heard at the workshop stage, the man not only can write, but he can sing too. A little while later, Nerissa Nields made a point out of not having met Jon until shortly before the performance and only now realizing that she was a fan. The Nields were charming, as usual, and they were very attentive to the other performers when they were on. In particular, they paid close attention to Tracy and Jim, who played David Francey’s “The Waking Hour” and, a bit later, “Gentle Soldier of My Soul” from Drum Hat Buddah. Tracy mentioned that, if she had learned what the title of the workshop was going to be a bit sooner, she would have learned how to play “Magic Man,” which elicited joyful laughter from the Nields and from a lot of the audience. The Nields did their classic “This Town is Wrong” and “The Endless Day,” from Sister Holler, a recent album of theirs which I enjoy more than anything of theirs (that I’ve heard) since their fantastic If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now (2000).

As usual, Friday afternoon’s mainstage was devoted to the Emerging Artist Showcase. I caught maybe 16 or 17 of the 24 acts and, on the basis of those, I’d say this Showcase topped last year’s. I was surprised to discover more than half a dozen acts I would love to see back. I really enjoyed the openers, Colleen Kattau & Some Guys, who opened with a kind of faux-Irish dance-chant. Later, Sean Rowe sang in a Greg Brown-ish voice and turned Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” into a soul tune, beating the crap out of Johnny Cash’s version. I finally got to hear chuck e. costa, who I’ve been hearing about for a long time, and I was pleased (though more by the delicate guitar playing than by the songs). A woman named Emily Elbert (who I’ve since learned is only 20) sang like an angel, although I can’t remember her songs. The Brilliant Inventions opened with a hilarious song about a dream the singer had had about someone’s girlfriend…a dream which did not involve sex, he assures us in the refrain. And I got to see Jenny Goodspeed for the second time. Someone out there thinks she’s pretty special; Jim Henry was there to play some guitar for her. While I confess I liked her performance more than the first time I saw her, I remain underwhelmed. When it came time to vote on who should return, my selections were: Angelo M. (a fifty-something blues singer who played a couple of sharp songs and played some mean guitar), John Elliott, and, one of my favorite acts of the entire weekend, Swing Caravan. Swing Caravan are a four-piece group—two guitars, stand-up bass, and “kitchen percussion” (including washboard, a couple of pans, and a spit bucket)—that plays “gypsy jazz,” in the style of Django Reinhardt. Their two songs concluded the Showcase, and they were fantastic. All four musicians are hyper-talented: the ensemble playing, the solos, and Matthew Ruby Shippee’s understated singing were all treats, and the material was choice. And much to my delight, during the 5:00 dinner break, the group set up next to one of the food tickets booths to play, and play they did, for a little over an hour. As it turned out, they had some competition: about twenty feet away, a circle of six or seven folks, featuring the young Anthony da Costa, had gathered for some picking and singing, and they attracted quite a crowd. Between 5:00 and 6:30 or so, I wandered between the two acts, but I really spent most of the time with the Caravan, which really knocked my socks off. They popped up again for another hour or so of performance Saturday afternoon, around the dinner hour again. As it turns out, this group has a regular gig in Northampton, MA (where they are based) at the Yellow Sofa Café through the end of September, and I’ll be sure to catch them.

Between 4:30 and 5:00 (that is, after the Showcase ended but before the dinner break), Sarah Lee Guthrie (daughter of yes-you-guessed-it and granddaughter of you-know-who) and Johnny Irion performed on the mainstage. Their performance began with Sarah Lee stepping up to the mike and, without introduction, performing “Birds and Ships“ (a you-know-who lyric recorded by Wilco and Billy Bragg for the first Mermaid Avenue album) a cappella. Then, Johnny Irion basically took over. He was the frontman, as it were, and he had a gentle, comforting stage demeanor. They concluded their set with a lyric that, Sarah Lee explained, was sent to her from her “Aunt Nora” in NYC, who works for the you-know-who archive. Her proceeded to tell us about a snippet of dialogue that you-know-who had recorded toward the end of his life in which he talked about songwriting. I play my G chords and my D chords, Sarah Lee quoted the man (trying to imitate his voice), “but every once in a while I throw in a C chord to impress the ladies.” With that, they went into “Folk Song.”

After the dinner break, I positioned myself on Jessica’s blanket, center stage up close, with a friend of her mom’s to watch the Doc Scanlon Trio. Doc Scanlon sang and played stand-up bass, and his bandmates played guitar and clarinet. Their set was made up of old jazz and blue tunes. Blues as in Sinatra, of course, not as in Howlin’ Wolf. The highlight came when Doc invited Jonathan Russell, a 14 year old jazz violinist, to join them. He did, and they tore into “Sweet Georgia Brown.” On that tune, and on a couple of others, the kid violinist smoked. Doc called out for him to solo on the couple of other tunes they played together. Impressive stuff. Not exactly the kind of thing I expect at a folk festival, but it was a nice bit of energy.

I only caught the very first and very last songs of Karen Savoca’s set, as Jessica returned to the blanket and asked if I’d like to take a walk with her, which I did. Actually, what I heard of Karen Savoca made me want to hear more. I might seek her out at some point.

On the way back to the blanket, though, a friend of Jessica’s stopped to inform us that a major storm was coming. Memories of 2008 immediately flashed through my mind, and I packed my belongings and hustled back to my tent. Just in time: a drizzle began…and it turned into steady rain with thunderstorms about a minute later. Eileen Ivers & Immigrant Soul were slated to go on next, but they didn’t. Instead, I later heard, they gave an impromptu performance at one of the other tents. Sorry I missed it; it was supposed to have been great. The Refugees set was cancelled, although they apparently were given a slot to perform on Sunday sometime, I think. And the traditional Friday Night Summer’s Eve Song Swap was cancelled altogether. Bummer. I hid out in my tent, reading Chuck Klosterman essays, until around midnight when I went to sleep, with the rain hammering my tent. There were some song circles going on that night, but I decided to get some sleep.

The good news: I woke up the next morning completely dry. My brand new tent did its job.

Saturday began at 11:00 with Stonehoney. This is a four piece band—three guitars and bass—and they also performed with an accordion player whose name I forget. They were flat-out great. Their arrangements were really tight, and their harmony singing was outstanding. Their sound was basically country-rock—sample lyrics: “walking hand in hand / alone with you,” “I’m stoned again / if it’s a sin / i just don’t care,” “could have turned right but I turned wrong / now I’m here and here’s as good as gone,” and “two years gone in the city of angels / two years down [or “alone”? not sure].” Their songs are hooky and propulsive. I sensed that they were dying to have a drummer on-stage to power them over the top. There isn’t a lick of originality in Stonehoney, but tons of energy and commitment, and I loved hearing them as the opening act on Saturday. I now see that you can get a bunch of their songs on iTunes—for free! Sitting here at my computer, they still sound pretty darn good.

For the next act, Tracy Grammer with Jim Henry, I once again moved down to position myself on Jessica’s blanket, once again positioned center stage up close. Tracy and Jim sat alone on stage and opened with “Gentle Arms of Eden” and “Crocodile Man.” With that, Tracy announced that they would perform the set that they had planned to do last year, eliciting cheers from the audience, many of whom had clearly been around for the destruction last summer. Jim took up the electric guitar for “Shadows of Evangeline,” from Tracy’s album of previously unrecorded Dave Carter songs, Flower of Avalon, produced by Mary Chapin Carpenter and Jim Jennings. Without the glossy production, the song’s basic weirdness was even cleared than it is on the recording. The antiwar song “Travis John” came next, followed by Jim Henry’s lead on “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Then came “28th of January,” which I heard at the SigSounds show last week. Before the next song, “Dirty Little Town” (from Tracy’s The Verdant Mile album), Tracy explained that she was from southern California and, “like,” grew up with smog days (as opposed to the snow days of the northeast—much more fun). “The Mountain” came next, a song that Dave Carter wrote specifically for Tracy to sing; Jim Henry sang the Buddhist blessing toward the end of the song. Then came “The Verdant Mile.” And, to finish the set, a great version of Townes Van Zandt’s “Poncho and Lefty.” It was a lovely set of music. Tracy’s banter was charming, and occasionally off kilter (like when she told us to put sun screen on because, she assured us, skin cancer was no fun). And Jim Henry is awfully funny. When Tracy introduced the final song by mentioning that it was about a couple of outlaws, “much like Jim and myself,” her bandmate said, in his best outlaw growl, “gimme a double lat-te…whole milk!”

The Most Wanted Song Swap took up the 1:00-2:00 time slot. Two of my three picks from last year were there—Lucy Wainwright Roche (LWR hereafter) and Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers (BMUZ hereafter)—along with Abi Tapia and Amy Speace, both of whom played at least one song that I actually sort of remembered from the previous year. LWR played entirely new material, including one called “The A & E,” about a date that she went on in England which ended with her spending the night with her date in the emergency room, after he had what in the end turned out to be a collapsed lung. Amy Speace probably had the most impressive singing voice (although I’m still partial to LWR). Her best song, a really great one in fact, was hooked around the line “the only thing I’ve learned / is that i haven’t learned a thing.” Abi Tapia, a very cute woman, was my favorite. She sang three superb songs “Another State Line,” about her inspiration for what she’s done with her life, the catchy “Let the Lover Be,” and the ready-for-country “Hand Over Your Heart.” Watch for her. Finally, BMUZ were also superb. Their sound is a difficult to describe, something I bet their press agent, if they have one, would love to hear. But really, they sounded like a cross between Crooked Still and Bartok’s string quartets—there were some bright melodies, but they were undercut by dissonance and a kind of eerie quality that made me pay attention. There was some singing too, but I was paying more attention to the instruments: two fiddles, guitar, and nyckelharpa. It’s an enticing sound, and I would love to see them again.

I skipped Susan Werner and Jon Vezner to walk around, eat, and rest back at the tent. I came back to the mainstage for Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams. Their set was high energy, as always, and I had fun. But I think the enthusiasm of the audience played a big part in my enjoyment of their performance. I like ‘em just fine, but I am not that impressed. If it’s the instrumental stuff that people like, then I wish they’d pay more attention to folks like BMUZ (pushing boundaries) or Swing Caravan (above average neo-traditionalism). If it’s the danceable rhythms, then why are they at a folk festival, and why not get one of those bouncy country or bluegrass groups to the fest? And why wasn’t Eddie from Ohio there this year? And I’m sure there’s an explanation for all the umbrellas going up for the final song that has nothing to do with the weather, but I’m not sure what it is.

I missed almost all of Lisa Haley & the Zydekats and, based on what I heard at a distance, there might have been something there worth hearing. In fact, I was attracted back to my tarp by the sound of a guitar solo. But, by the time I was back, it, and the rest of the set, was over.

Pamela Means played next. A graduate of the Ani Difranco school of guitar playing and writing (but not, unfortunately, singing), her performance was forceful, if nothing else. But she opened with a preachy song about New Orleans that had me pining for Ani’s “Red Letter Year” and thinking that, if this performer really was a Difranco graduate, I’d give her a B for guitar and a C for writing and maybe something in between for singing. She preceded the next song by asking, “where my bi-racials at?” She listened to the smattering of applause, announced “this is for both of you,” and went into the next tune. She told a story about fixing her car’s muffler with some guitar strings while on the road in Wisconsin, where she’s from, before playing a song about Maine. She played a jazz tune. She got my attention with a song I later learned is called “Maybe You Should” in which she told a “drunken swine” to “shut your face and drink your beer.” That was more like it. Maybe the Ani comparisons aren’t fair, but that’s all I could think about during her set. That said, she was okay.

Bob Malone won the Emerging Artist Showcase over 10 years ago and now played the mainstage. I knew nothing about him coming on, and I was impressed. He leads a 9-piece band, including 3 horns and 2 back-up singers, one of whom is his wife (and the subject of what I thought was the best song he played). The sound is a Memphis soul-type deal with some great piano, courtesy of Mr. Malone, and some simple but effective horn arrangements and soloing. The back-up singers danced and sashayed around their corner of the stage and, if anything, didn’t sing enough. Because the one weakness I heard was in the singing. It sounded like there were some good songs, and the instrumentation was hot, but Bob Malone’s singing voice simply doesn’t cut it. The guy is clearly pretty talented, but this kind of music absolutely requires a singer capable of putting over this kind of material. I thought of Taj Mahal singing with the Phantom Blues Band, and I tried to picture Malone’s band, with Bob himself at the keys, and Martin Sexton handling the mike. That would be something. At is was, I enjoyed the set quite a bit and found myself a bit put off by the fact that a lot of the same people who were up and dancing for Gandalf Murphy a few hours earlier had their asses planted on the ground for what was, I thought, a much more danceable set of music. Maybe everyone was tired.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the festival came next. I’ve seen Janis Ian a couple of times at festivals over the years, but I’ve never been as impressed as I was Saturday night. With the sun having set, the stage almost completely bare, and a big crowd assembled at their blankets, the performed was announced. Then, she stepped up to the microphone and, without any guitar accompaniment, began singing “Jesse.” After a few lines, she began to pick and strum, quietly. She had me completely and, by the end of the song, I semi-consciously realized that she had everyone. There was huge applause. Then she played a song called “Through the Years” that, from another singer, might have sounded mawkish and embarrassing but, from this woman, in this context, opened up a torrent of emotions in me (the short version being that I felt very intensely single by the end of the song). From there, she had me (and, it seemed, the rest of us) in the palm of her hand as surely as Chris Smither did during his nighttime performance at the 2002 fest. She told us a harrowing story about performing “Society’s Child” on a California stage when she was 15 years old and booed off the stage to the cries of “nigger lover” and how, after running off stage and crying and being convinced to return, the majority of audience, who was there to hear her after all, physically forced the racists back into their seats, racists who eventually “slunk” out of the theater, to use Ian’s word for it. Then she played the song, a song I’ve heard before, but never with the effect it had Saturday night. The tragedy of the song seemed unusually clear; this was a young teenager’s song, written during a very different time (something Ian herself mentioned when telling the story). It occurred to me that I would not be sympathetic to a white teenager who didn’t have the courage to stay with her black significant other…but then I thought some more about my own contact with racism, and I thought some more. Anyway, the point is that Janis Ian’s performance was transcendent, both for her music and for her talk. And it was more notable still for her announcement that the crew had to shut the generators down and that she had to leave the stage! No shit: she walked off and Claudia Marshall, the WFUV dj who’d introduced her, told us that we might have to wait for 25 minutes before she returned. It wound up being something under 20 minutes, during which some folks sitting a few yards in front of me began singing. First, there was Dar’s “Iowa.” Then, a bit later, “This Land is Your Land.” Miraculously, when Janis Ian returned to the stage, the spell resumed, as if it had never been broken. There was more chat, there were more songs: “At Seventeen” and a funny song about her autobiography. She was forceful, poised, confident, funny, and the highlight of the festival, interruption and all.

At that point, I made a spontaneous decision to call it a night. So, I skipped Girlyman and Ryan Montbleau. As I wandered around the campgrounds, I could hear Girlyman, and I’m not convinced that I missed anything too special. But I promise I’ll give them a chance some other time.

So…my personal highlights were Janis Ian, much to my surprise, and Swing Caravan, also to my surprise. Beyond that, I’d check out anyone from the Most Wanted Song Swap if any of those acts came anywhere nearby (which, given the Pioneer Valley, is pretty likely), and maybe Stonehoney too. And about half a dozen of this year’s “Emerging Artists” were darn good as well.

Special thanks and notice are due my tent, which held up under some pretty heavy rain on Friday night....See you next year!

Ani, in all her forms

2009-07-19T19:13:00.001-07:00

I had been planning on writing on so many other things for so long--the Jack Hardy cannon, Robert Christgau's cool music reviews--but something else has come up. Thanks to a friendly trader I met on www.onherown.net, I now find myself with several (more) hours worth of live Ani recordings, over four shows: one from '94, one from '97, and two from '08. This particular trader has a fine selection of boots, and I had to choose from among a pretty wide selection. I won't bore readers with extensive reviews of each one...but some commentary is definitely in order.

Let's start with the performance from July 7th, 1997. This is from her European tour, her last series of shows before an August jaunt, opening for Bob Dylan. The legendary Andy Stochansky on drums, Jason Mercer on bass--a Canadian rhythm section. After she introduced them, she proceeded to inform her audience: "If you have any rhythmic or melodic complaints, you can address them directly." No complaints here: after listening to this show, I regret my recent comments about Ani's current band being my favorite. With all due respect to Allison Miller, Andy Stochansky has so many tricks up his sleeve, he makes Houdini look like Bozo. What he does with "Fire Door" and "Worthy" and, in particular, "Buildings and Bridges," make both songs sound better than they have ever sounded. Meanwhile, Jason Mercer is every bit the Sarah Lee. But Sarah looked so cool on stage. I was fortunate enough to see both of them play bass for Ani back in the day. I can hear their comparable musicalities on recordings, but I have a very fond recollection of seeing Sarah Lee grooving to the music on stage, looking oh so cool. As I write these words, I realize that my enjoyment of this recording has something to do with nostalgia. I remember seeing this band at the Meyerhoff in Baltimore and being blown away by everything. I remember hearing her sing the then-new, unrecorded song "Glass House" at Newport in 1996, and being mesmerized. I remember being with old friends at the Providence Performing Art Center not long after that, when she opened with "God's Country," which I'd never heard before that night. Strange in a way that Ani Difranco would be someone that I would associate emotional growth and the transition into maturity with, but I do. Anyway, she and her band were on fire on July 7th of 1997. "Glass House" sounds great, but the peak moment, I think, is "Letter to a John" leading into her old poem, "The Slant." And before she gets to the poem, she offers her lapdancing services for "10 deutchmarks a song."

If Andy S. sounded subtle and sensitive in 1997, he sounded raging and hard in 1994. The show from February of that year, from the now-defunct Wetlands in New York City, was a drums-and-Ani show, and it features some really hard-rocking stuff
from Andy...on basically every song. She covers her early catalog in lots of detail, including stuff I've basically forgotten about, like "4th of July" or "Falling is Like This," which reminds me that I should give Out of Range (1994) another spin one of these days. "Pick Yer Nose" is introduced as "a little dance tune." "In or Out" is so intense, it's almost unhinged. She precedes "My IQ" by asking her audience if she'd mentioned how happy she was to be there, and Andy's percussion is on overdrive on "Anticipate." And, after "Not so Soft," but before the encore ("Out of Range"), she ends the performance with an a capella cover of Bruce Cockburn's "Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long." Now, I can totally understand her affinity for Cockburn...but why that song, I wonder?

The material from 2008 is outstanding. The band captured on these recordings is the one that she continues to tour with today. It's been her touring unit since around 2006. Alison Miller isn't as subtle a drummer as Andy Stochansky, she's more of a power drummer. Todd Sickafoose has been playing bass for Ani since 2002 or thereabouts and is excellent, maybe her best bass player ever. And Mike Dillon handles vibes and a bunch of other percussion devices.

The recordings of her April 6th and July 13th shows from 2008 show off a slightly jazzy band, looking back at what has become a huge catalog of good and great songs. The April show has a tad too much audience noise for my taste, but the performance shines through anyway. What I love is the way that the old material shines through with Mike Dillon's contributions. When they play recent material, like "78%H20" and "Nicotine," he is spot on. For the April show, they opened with "Shy," and "Not a Pretty Girl" came a few songs in, and "As Is" a few songs after that...and Dillon is there with some subtle flourishes that elevate the material (and that goes double for "As Is"). This is something that her horn band didn't do (exhibit A: my recording of her April 14th, 2000 show at UC Davis, when the horns really muck up "Shameless," among other songs). On July 13th, a lot of oldies were performed, including "You Had Time," heartbreaking, and "Anticipate," harsh, but I was especially to hear "If He Tries Anything," performed solo. And "Untouchable Face" with a lot of vocal tricks and some typically subtle and effective touches from Mike Dillon's vibes. Final note on the April 6th show: they did "Evolve" to finish up. On record, it's just fine, or maybe slightly better than that. With the full band backing her, and a screaming audience, it becomes a fireball, a call to arms, a hard rocking rant. My recollection of her performance of that one at the Pines from last summer is a treasured memory.

Ani is one of very few touring musicians on the scene right now who I always go out of my way to catch, and these live recordings verify that I'm not making a mistake. Good thing too, because I have tickets to see her twice in November.

Signature Sounds 15th Anniversary Celebration @ The Green River Festival, Greenfield, MA, July 17th, 2009

2009-07-18T15:15:00.001-07:00

A lovely evening of music last night in Greenfield, MA....The original plan had been to attend the Carsie Blanton CD release party @ Club Passim this evening and skip out on the Signature Sounds 15th anniversary festivities in Greenfield last night. In the end, the opposite happened. After discovered that Matt would be there (and would most likely not make it to Falcon Ridge), I got in the ole' rental car and moved on up to Greenfield. I thought at the time that I would make it to Cambridge tonight but, after an afternoon of sitting in front of a computer without getting a lick of work done on my book, I've decided to stay in tonight. I'm writing this blog entry, and then I'll be a busy beaver all night long.

So, then. Signature Sounds has been the home for a lot of my favorites over the years. I was happy to see a former SigSounder, Erin McKeown, hit the stage for a song or two last night. Knowing then that even former SigSounders were welcome, I held out hope for a Brooks Williams sighting. No such luck. One wonders why anyone would leave as cool a label as Signature, but I digress.

The festival began with the house band jamming on a few tunes. I was happy to see David Goodrich and Jim Henry playing guitars, and Mark Erelli joined them too. Paul Kochanski, who plays with the Nields from time to time I think, was on the drums. Didn't catch the bassist's name, but I learn from Matt's review of the show that the dude's name is Jason Beek (I promise, by the way, that everything that follows is being written without consulting Matt's blog; just wanted to get that detail right). They were solid. The opener was a jam on an instrumental Peter Mulvey song. Then they moved on to something called 28th of July, with Tracy Grammer, looking lovely and upbeat, joining in on fiddle. After yet another instrumental, a special guest arrived.

Erin McKeown is special indeed, special enough to get her own paragraph. Her first album for Signature was Distillation (2000), and it's one of the best pieces of singer-songwriter product of the past 10 years. I think I discussed it a bit in my review of her Iron Horse show from last year. At any rate, she played "Blackbirds" from that album, with the drummer producing a slightly off-kilter rhythm to the song that fit the tune just right. She showed up again later to sing some harmonies.

What followed was a series of short sets, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-25 minutes for the first five or six acts, followed by longer sets for the final four performers. There was a second stage too, but I never made it there. Hence I missed Rani Arbo with Daisy Mayhem, the Winterpills, and a few others.

Up first was Tracy Grammer with Jim Henry. It occurs to me that Jim has now been playing with Tracy longer than Tracy played with Dave Carter, a sad thought in a way. But the music was lovely. She opened with "Crocodile Man." The performance was good, but there were sound problems that would persist for the first few performances. Buzzing in the monitors, and an overall sound that was too bass heavy. Anyway, the first song sounded good, although it signaled to me that Chris Smither probably wouldn't be playing that song in his set later that night. After that came Carter's greatest song, "Gentle Arms of Eden," and a cover of Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," very good. Tracy mentioned, with a laugh, that that was the song that brought last year's Falcon Ridge Folk Festival to a rather disastrous conclusion (see here). They finished with Tracy's own, "Verdant Mile," a line from which became the title of Matt Winters' blog.

Next up was Mark Erelli. I don't know this guy's songs, but I've seen him live a few times before, and I always enjoy him. He has a Steve Forbert-ish singing voice, and he's comfortable with a band, and last night's band in particular. The highlight was Tracy Grammer's assistance on Erelli's version of Dave Carter's "Cowboy Singer." Back in 2002, this is the song that Mark Erelli did at the Falcon Ridge tribute to Dave Carter, about 9 days after Dave's death. His version of it sparkles.

Third: Caroline Herring, who I'd never heard before. She opened with "Long Black Veil." When I mentioned to Matt that this was the first song I ever learned how to finger pick on the guitar, Matt told me that I probably played it better than Caroline Herring. Ouch. Next up came Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors," an interesting pick. But then the singer redeemed herself with two originals, one called "Wise Woman," with reference to a number of folks that Herring met while traveling in southwestern Mississippi, and another, whose title I forget, about a southern artist. Both were good songs, performed smoothly.

Jeffrey Foucault performed next. The main thing I recall about the performance was the rockingness of the band, featuring some distorted rockish guitar solos from Goody Goodrich. I have yet to be really impressed by Foucault. He's far from bad, but he doesn't blow me away. He didn't play anything from the one CD of his I own, Stripping Cane.

I saw Peter Mulvey for the first time in Newport about 10 years ago, a performance that I don't remember in the slightest (although I have the photo of him that I took back then). He also enjoyed rocking out a bit with the band, and two of his songs from last night were memorable: "Some People," which sounded like a second-rate version of Chris Smither's "Hey, Hey, Hey" (and that's no dis), and "Sad, sad, sad, and so far away from home" (or something like that), for which Jeffrey and Erin (and Kris? can't remember) came back out to sing, and Mark Erelli came back out to play some electric slide guitar. They sounded fabulous together, even if the sound system really pounded the music out a bit too loud.

By the way, speaking of Foucault and Mulvey and Smither, have you seen this?

Anyhow, up next came Kris Delmhorst, Jeffrey Foucault's wife. I think I saw her for the first time at the new artists' showcase at Falcon Ridge. I also saw her at the Postcrypt, with Joanna and Marisa, back in 2001 or thereabouts. She's really cute, and she can write. The memorable moment from her set was a song called "1000 Reasons" that featured the Winterpills, another Signature Sounds band that I once saw open for Erin McKeown, backing her. I was hoping for "North Dakota" but no such luck. Her husband came onstage to sing harmonies for a song or two, but I can't remember the particular songs.

After a short break, the festival performers went from the very good to the great. Richard Shindell played alone onstage, sitting front and center with his guitar. He opened with "Clara," a song from his most recent album that I had not heard before. On the basis of that song, and one other from his new album, something about a balloon man, I think the album is probably great. Richard Shindell is an excellent songwriter, a strong guitar player, and an expressive singer. He played a brand new song, "Abby" (or "Abbie"?), about a dog, a song which he reports having written while in Florence (Italy, not Massachusetts). "There Goes Mavis" was from Vuelta. James Kellaghan's "Cold Missouri Waters" and Shindell's own "Transit" were the highlights. Both of them were spellbinding. After "Transit," all I could think about was Falcon Ridge in 2001, where I heard Shindell play that song on a workshop stage. I remember that it was a songwriting workshop and, after Shindell played, it was Dave Carter's turn to play. But before he did, he glanced at Richard Shindell and said, into the microphone, that that was one of the greatest songs he'd ever heard. I know what he meant.

Finally came the performance I'd been waiting for, the one that I suspected (correctly as it turned out) would be the highlight. Chris Smither performed solo, which is what I like best. The last two times I'd seen him, he had a couple of backing musicians (including David Goodrich on guitar). But he doesn't need them, not with his foot-tapping and his incredible guitar playing. He opened the show with the song he's played to open each of the past four or five shows of his I've seen: "Open Up." The opening lines are, "I don't think for pleasure / it's just hard not to do / my thinking is a measure of / how much I need a clue" and that alone, along with Mississippi John Hurt-ish guitar playing and a rich, full, deep, weathered voice, got me hook, line, and sinker. Not much he could do to screw up after that. I mean, I think of that song as one of his more ordinary songs, but it beats the pants off of 90% of the other performers I see at folk festivals. With his second song, "Link of Chain," it's more like 98%: "can't you see / i can't explain / i'm a little like a link of chain / just a ring around another / running in and out again." The rest of the set was devoted to new songs, which I imagine will appear on his new album, due out in September. There was a song about his new adopted daughter called, I think, "I Don't Know" that wound up not being about his daughter at all. There was a topical song called "Surprise, Surprise." And there were two others, both in the mold of "Mail Order Mystics" or "Drive You Home Again," that sort of thing. And if you don't know either of those songs, you're missing out....Once again, Chris Smither shows what 40+ years of writing, singing, and performing experience will do for you. The highlight of the evening.

That's not to say Crooked Still didn't knock my socks off too. They did, particularly by opening with a cover of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" before doing one of my favorites of their originals, "Lula Gall" (or "Hop High," as I know it). Really, this is a great band. Their performance was hot, and it featured some dynamic interplay between bass, cello, and fiddle, with the banjo occasionally asserting itself in some wild solos. They finished up with their version of "Shady Grove" and invited us to sing along, which we did.

We left before the final performance, by someone named Eilen Jewell, who I've never heard (of) before.

So that was that. Looking forward to Falcon Ridge, coming up this Thursday.

Odds and ends

2009-05-31T20:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a month or so since I last posted, so here are some Sunday evening reflections (music-related, of course)....

I've been listening to Tracy Grammer's Book of Sparrows a lot lately. It connected with me for the first time in a powerful way this past March, while Denise and I were in the car, on the way to New Jersey. The scaled-down arrangement of Dave Carter's "Gypsy Rose" is the highlight, a definite improvement on the version she recorded for Flower of Avalon. The unreleased Dave Carter song "Lord of the Buffalo" is a gem. And, on our drive from the outer banks of North Carolina to Norfolk, Virginia, I found myself tearing up at Tracy's version of Jackson Browne's "In the Shape of a Heart." The CD is 7 songs long, about 30 minutes of music; those three songs, plus Tom Russell's "Blue Wing" and Simon and Garfunkle's "April, Come She Will" are all great. There's also a song called "Travis John," which is (a bit obliquely) about a boy killed in war on foreign soil. I think Tracy Grammer has become a better and better singer over time, or maybe it's just me. I've never disliked her, but I've never liked her as much as I do now. She'll be playing Falcon Ridge this year, and I can hardly wait.

What else? Some of the greats have new material out. The new Neil Young album is very good. It's full of loud, toneless crunch, and there are at least three really good songs, two of which bookend the CD. I'm not sure it's quite at the level of Living with War, although Christgau disagrees with me. I like it better than the new Dylan album, which has some great hooks here and there (like on "Jolene") but doesn't connect with me as well as Modern Times or "Love and Theft" or Time Out of Mind.

I recently bought a used copy of John Hiatt's Crossing Muddy Waters, parts of which I heard for the first time on WFUV in New York. The opening three songs are all excellent, and so is "Gone," about halfway through the record. Still trying to listen to the other songs to see what's there. Also bought a used Flatlanders CD, but I haven't listened to it yet.

I've been thinking a lot about Jack Hardy lately. I'll be sure to write more about his stuff in the weeks to come. Excited to see that Richard Thompson and Loudon Wainwright will be playing some shows together on the east coast this fall. I've already got tickets for their show at the Calvin Theater in Northampton.

What your favorite Grateful Dead song says about you

2009-04-29T18:31:00.001-07:00

Also on the topic of the Grateful Dead:

http://www.slate.com/id/2217149/

Ani Difranco @ The Colonial Theater, Pittsfield, MA, April 21st, 2009

2009-04-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

For most of the beautiful drive to Pittsfield, up in the Berkshires, I listened to a Grateful Dead channel on the satellite radio that came with my rental car. One of the things that I learned about the Dead when I was in high school was that, from night to night, their sets changed. They would play different songs from night to night, and they would play the same songs in different ways. I can remember rifling through the pages of Relix magazine, looking for anything Jefferson Airplane or Neil Young related and, instead, looking through Grateful Dead setlists, marveling at how many different songs the same six people knew how to play together. And they seemed to be touring constantly! Over the years, I learned about various band personnel changes and, now that the Dead are touring again, I have been reading stories in the New York Times about the degree of Deadhead sophistication when it comes to understanding what different periods in the history of the band reveal about changes in the band’s music.

A quick perusal of www.onherown.net reveals many of the same things about Ani Difranco. Her sets don’t vary quite as much as the Dead’s—whose do?—but she and her band mix things up quite a bit. And her sound, like the Dead’s, has somehow managed to simultaneously change while still being unmistakably Ani. Since she and her bands haven’t jammed with the same degree of improvisatory abstraction as the Grateful Dead—the Dead were never, ever as tight as an Ani band at its loosest—there isn’t as much variation between performances as you’d hear in Dead recordings. Ani Difranco, after all, cares too much about songs to mess with them too much; for the Dead, the songs were simply an excuse to jam. But for the faithful, the small details with which Ani and her bandmates infuse performances of familiar material are little treasures, adding new shades of meaning or, for me, eliciting joyous smiles at the band’s musicality. Oh, and one more thing…both the Dead and Ani’s various bands are anchored by a singer-guitarist of enormous power and charisma. The late Jerry Garcia, I am told, interacted less and less with audiences as the years went by. Ani Difranco, on the other hand, is conversational and informal.

I was thinking about the Dead and Difranco together for the entire ride to Pittsfield, and then the performance verified everything I had been thinking. After greeting us, Mr. Difranco played the opening lick to “Shy,” and the four-piece band made the song sound both different from the versions on Not a Pretty Girl (1995) and Living in Clip (1997) and the various other live recordings I own, and somehow the same. It occurred to me in the middle of the second song, “78%H2O,” that this is my favorite band in Ani’s history. Perhaps that has more to do with me than with her, but Allison Miller and Mike Dillon and Todd Sickafoose make her music jump and groove and careen forward with a very cool mixture of tightness and lively energy that makes every single song raise the levels on my internal emotional thermometer. Even when I found myself listening more to the music than to the words, I found immense satisfaction in everything. And there was, of course, the charismatic stage presence. Ani talked about all the new songs she’d be playing for us. After we cheered, she told us that “this isn’t one of them,” before ripping into “Manhole,” to our collective delight. It was most satisfying night of live music I’ve experienced in months.

Last night, Ani’s set was focused on newer material. There were four or five songs that have yet to be recorded, including “Promiscuity,” which she told us that she’d written after compiling the material for the Cannon (2007) anthology, which revealed to her, she said, how much she’d lied to herself over the years. There was also a wedding song, performed on solo guitar, and a song about appreciating one’s own life, set to a very danceable Latin rhythm. There was “Here for Now,” a great song from Evolve (2003) that I’d forgotten about, until I felt it shake my hand hello from the stage. She talked about Katrina and New Orleans before and after “Red Letter Year,” atomic energy before and after “The Atom,” and Barack Obama before and after the unrecorded “November 4th, 2008.” There was also “Good Luck” and “Smiling Underneath” from Red Letter Year (2008), both songs sounding better in front of an audience than they do on record.

While picking out a particular high point from the show is tough, there was a definitely a pivotal moment in the second half of the set. Ani announced that she had been invited to attend Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday party at Madison Square Garden, before performing the song that she had been asked to perform at the party: “Which Side Are You On?” She updated the lyrics a bit, and the band piped in to harmonize. She also invited us to sing along, reminding us that, after all, this was folk music. And from there, she dedicated an intense version of “Alla This” to Utah Philips. And finally, after telling us that we’d warmed up our singing voices, she pulled out one of the warmest of Difranco oldies (what she would call “a crusty old one”), “Both Hands,” to end the set.

We screamed for more, of course, and we got more: the percussion-heavy arrangement of “Every State Line,” plus the biggest sing-along moment of the show, “Gravel,” and, finally, a gentle “Hypnotized” to send us home.

I listened to more of the Grateful Dead on the way home. Heard a version of “Sugar Magnolia” that rocked. It went on for about 15 or 20 minutes. Hmm. Anybody ready for a half hour jam on “Shamless”…? Thought not.

Odds and Ends

2009-04-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

I've got another Ani Difranco show coming up in a couple of days at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, MA. That's about an hour's drive away. I'm pretty excited about it. I've yet to be disappointed by one of Mr. Difranco's performances: over the years, they've ranged from pretty good to fantastic.

I recently discovered--by accident, while surfing the net looking for something else--that Neil Young's newest album came out. Of course, I shelled out the bucks for it. This is probably the one and only popular recording artist whose product I'll pay for, sight unseen and sound unheard. That said, I'll probably pass on the Neil Young Archives. Much as I love the guy's music, this seems like overexpensive overkill to me. Anyway, the new one is called Fork in the Road. It's a rocker, but without Crazy Horse...more like Living with War than Greendale or Broken Arrow. It was recorded with the rhythm section of Rick Rosas and Chad Cromwell. They are more of a straight-up rock band than Crazy Horse, but the crude, offhand crunch of the guitars sounds a lot like Neil and the Horse. Pay attention to the rhythm to hear the difference. I've only listened to it a couple of times but, so far, I like it. I'll post something more substantial about it sometime soon.

The Two Man Gentleman Band @ The Iron Horse, March 13th, 2009

2009-03-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

The original plan was to stay late at the Iron Horse this evening for their free concert: The Two Man Gentleman Band (2MGB hereafter, www.thetwogentlemen.com) and The Primate Fiasco (www.primatefiasco.com). But about 24 hours ago, I decided to drive down to NYC on Saturday, which nearly moved me to abandon the whole night. Then I decided to go after all, and the schedule cooperated: I really only wanted to see 2MGB anyway, and they wound up opening. It turns out that The Primate Fiasco is a local group, and they like to bring outsiders into town for gigs like this one. And if I weren't going to drive to the city, I would have stuck around to hear their whole set--they are a kind of psychedelic, dixieland jazz ensemble (that actually sounds pretty appealing), with drums, clarinet, banjo, guitar, and tuba. I listened to their first song, a jam on "Sweet Georgia Brown," and split.

But, before then, the 2MGB worked their magic. At around 10:15, they hit the stage with a sign reading "Free Kazoos." True to their word, their lead singer, Andy Bean placed a box full of the things at the foot of the stage and, before you knew it, the entire place was armed and ready. By the way, I have never seen the Iron Horse so packed as it was this evening. Amazing the number of people who will attend a free show! I'm surprised it wasn't a fire hazard. I mean really: the staff had pushed or taken away all the tables to clear the floor for dancing and the crowd, mostly college-aged, filled the space and was seen still jiggling around by the time I left the establishment.

So, on to business. I know of the 2MGB by way of Matt Winters, who put a song of theirs, "The War of Northern Aggression" on one of his New Years CDs (see here for a video of a performance of that one). They are--yes, you guessed it--a duo of male musicians. Their shtick is that of the conservative, depression-era gentlemen. They are anti-prohibition, they praise the fat man, William Howard Taft, and they compare a breakup to the War of Northern Aggression. Beyond that, they get pretty silly, as the Iron Horse audience quickly learned. The opening number was a saucy little thing called "When Your Lips Are Playing My Kazoo." Songs like "Prime Numbers" and "Fancy Beer" yielded some raucous singalongs, and lead man Andy Bean encouraged us to play our kazoos. Which we didn't do very often. People were much more interested in dancing, although lots of the dancers--the women in particular--picked up on the gleefully filthy lyrics and found themselves laughing pretty hard as they shook and shimmied.

What else? There was "The Rabbit Foot Stomp" from their newest album, Drip Dryin’ with The Two Man Gentlemen Band (2009), about making meat out of your pet rabbit. "Drip Dryin'," about the newest dancing sensation, which Andy Bean demonstrated for us in the middle of the song. There was "Sloppy Drunk," very danceable, and "I've Been Drinking," which featured the other Gentleman, "The Councilman" Fuller Condon. In between songs, the rapport between the two consisted of quietly homoerotic gestures by way of Mr. Bean, who would reach out and stroke The Councilman's bass and touch his fingers, as he spoke affectionately of his bandmate and their life on the road together. The Councilman responded by looking nervous. The 2G were dressed in lovely suits and hats, and The Council wore a spiffy bowtie.

The 2MGB played for about 40 minutes. Andy Bean played 4-string banjo and a little guitar, along with a Jesse Fuller-style set-up, including cowbell, cymbals, horn, and so forth. "The Councilman" Fuller Condon played stand-up bass and sang harmonies. Andy played lead kazoo and The Councilman played back-up kazoo ("tenor kazoo," he protested, when Andy Bean introduced him, prompting him to make the correction).

I had wanted to say hello to the gentlemen after the show and maybe offer them a lift back to Queens tomorrow, but I lost them in the crowd. It turns out that they are making their way to Boston tomorrow, anyway.

Martin Sexton @ Town Hall, NYC, February 14th, 2009

2009-02-16T14:25:00.000-08:00

Denise and I arrived at Town Hall a little after 9:00 for the second of Martin Sexton’s two nights at the venue. Good vibes were in the air; at the restaurant we ate at before the show, we encountered a couple half of whom told us that she had been to see Martin Sexton fifteen times—whoa! While I was in the restroom, she proceeded to ask Denise if I was a big fan…and was I obsessed? You know, like all the Martin Sexton fans?

Well, I wouldn’t say that. But I saw him in Newport once or twice. And I shelled out the money to see him at Irving Plaza on a cold night toward the end of 2001, thinking I’d meet up with a certain young woman there (didn’t work out). And this past summer, his performance was the perfect nightcap to Saturday night at Falcon Ridge, the best part of a day of performances that included Chris Smither, Dar Williams, Eddie from Ohio, and a startlingly fun set from The Nields.

Why so great? Martin Sexton is a man not of songs or arrangements or guitar pyrotechnics, but of voice. His natural instrument is a wonder to behold, an enormously gritty, elastic, soulful thing that bounced and soared around Town Hall Saturday night like lightning in a bottle. He roared and moaned and scatted and crooned and whispered and shouted and hollered and generally raised the roof with his voice. And it was clear from the opening song, “Diner” from the Black Sheep (1996) album, that he could play the jazzy guitar parts to set his voice off just right. That song was relatively tame. But “Hallelujah” (of no relation to the Leonard Cohen song of the same name) enabled the man to flex his pipes, and his voice let off enormous torrents of sound, much to the delight of an audience that cheered and clapped and, when the performer asked for it, echoed his hollering.

It would be unfair to say that he isn’t much of a songwriter but, I’ve got to say, a number of songs suffered from the sound in the room. Maybe it wasn’t the room, but there was a lot of reverberation in the vocals, which made it difficult to make out what he was singing on a number of occasions. I noticed that when he stepped back from the microphone, the problem vanished. Anyway, that was too bad. “In the Journey” is a great song, one of several great road songs Marty has written (the others being “Glory Bound” and “Freedom of the Road”). “Hallelujah” is a good one, and so is “13 Step Boogie.” “The Beast in Me” is funky and sexy. The set concluded with “Gypsy Woman,” not one of my favorites on record, but it sounded great from where I was sitting.

Denise marveled at the voice too. Or, as she pointed out, the several voices, since it really sounded like he had multiple singing (and speaking) voices. She also pointed out his musicality and his soul and his coolness vis-à-vis the audience. It sometimes seemed that he was really singing for himself. I recently read a review of one of his albums on iTunes that made that point too. True: at times, the audience participation moments seemed mechanical, as if the performer didn’t really care whether they happened or not.

I learned from listening to WFUV a few years ago that Marty had also performed with the band Assembly of Dust from time to time, and I heard an in-studio performance from them that was pretty good. Among other things, they played Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” with Martin on vocals. And I seem to recall hearing, either during the following interview or in some other context, that he was raised on classic rock. So it was cool, but unsurprising, to hear Marty intersperse themes and lyrics from old rockers, both canonical (U2’s “With or Without You” and, played in its entirety, The Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends”) and non (Led Zep’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and “That’s the Way”), along with a classic blues ballad (B.B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone”).

The stage was austerely decorated. Just an amplifier (with a lava lamp on top), two microphones, all on a plain-looking carpet. No band, no pretensions of any kind, although one of the two mikes was, Sexton told us, about 55 years (“or 65? Something like that.”). He used that second mike for some distortion effects, which were used to particularly impressive effect on “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
He sent us out into the night with a short medley comprising the opening verses of “Amazing Grace” and “America the Beautiful.” It was like a lullaby, or the gentle breeze that seems so especially welcome after the raging storm.

The Demolition String Band @ The Rodeo Bar, January 25th, 2009

2009-01-26T14:04:00.000-08:00

Up until yesterday, my acquaintance with The Demolition String Band was limited to their honky-tonk cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” Also, Matt Winters once introduced me to Boo, their lead guitar and banjo player. In fact, that introduction also took place at the Rodeo Bar, a small, fun bar with a tiny space for live music in the back and free peanuts available up front. Matt, a few of his friends, and I had been there to catch Marshall Crenshaw a couple of years ago, and we bumped into Boo on the way out.

Denise, her son Julián, and I saw that the Demolition Band were going to play a special Sunday afternoon show at The Rodeo Bar, and we decided that morning that we would attend. We arrived at about quarter after 3:00; a bit late, although I discovered that the band had actually begun a bit late, so I doubt we missed any more than 10 minutes, maximum, of the performance. The (advertised) theme of the program, aside from its child-friendliness, was Americana music, by the great American songwriters in what we now call the folk and country music traditions: Woody Guthrie, Stephen Foster, Leadbelly, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and so forth. Given that this was an afternoon out with Julián, his enjoyment (or at least contentment) was crucial. Fortunately, he was into it.

And so was I. First and foremost, the song selection was choice. “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain When She Comes,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Cotton Fields” (introduced as a Leadbelly song; I hadn’t known that, although I did know that it hadn’t originated with Creedence Clearwater Revival, whose version of the song I was most familiar with), Johnny and June Carter’s “Jackson” (one of my personal favorite moments of the show), “Lovebug,” “I Come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee,” and some others that I’ve forgotten. I was particularly delighted with the Woody Guthrie selections: “Union Maid,” one of his two greatest union-themed songs (the other being the much gloomier, not very family-oriented “1913 Massacre”), “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” (probably the best-known of his “Dust Bowl Ballads”), and “This is Your Land” (inspired by the recent performance on Capitol Hill, led by the venerable Pete Seeger, and featuring the verses about private property and exclusion that are not taught in school).

An interesting moment came approximately half way into the performance when the band’s frontwoman, Elena, called a special guest to the stage: Hank Williams. A voice-over announced his appearance on a radio show, and the great country singer walked to the stage and greeted the audience as if he were performing on the radio circa 1950, complete with a medicine advertisement. After the greeting, he launched into a medley of his hits, beginning with “Jambalaya” and “Hey Good Lookin’,” before moving through “Move It on Over,” “Why Don’t You Love Me,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and a few others that I can’t remember. After the medley, he did “Lovesick Blues,” took a bow, and left. It turns out that this was the actor who plays Hank Williams in the off-Broadway show Lost Highway, based on the life of Hank Williams.

The band was sharp. Basically, the set-up was four-piece bluegrass, with Boo doubling on guitar and banjo and Elena on guitar and mandolin, with a turn on banjo too (clawhammer, though; she left the more traditional picking to Boo). The fiddler soloed sweetly and often. The bass player was content to go unnoticed (although Denise pointed out his resemblance to Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans).

I wish I had caught the name of the waiter at the Rodeo Bar who was serving the patrons in the little section of the place where the music was happening. He was clearly very busy, and he did his job with a smile. When I asked if they had hot chocolate, he assured me that they did with a tone of reassurance mixed with pride, and I could not help but smile back at him. He served drinks to the band, he covered the couple of dozen parents and kids in attendance, and he bashfully pumped his fist when the band recognized his good work.

I was happy to see a nice turnout for the show. We arrived not long before the performance area had filled up a bit; not to capacity, but a nice bunch nevertheless. We sat very close to the band’s fiddle player’s wife and seven week old daughter; Denise shared a few words with her. I chatted with her a bit as well, as Denise and Julián made their way up to the stage after the show to take a closer look at the instruments. A few children were a bit rambunctious; at one point, a couple of boys sitting not far behind us were screaming about something, at another point, a boy approached the stage with a peanut launcher for no other reason than to shoot a few peanuts onto the stage.

The Brooks Williams Trio w/Beaucoup Blue @ The Iron Horse, January 22nd, 2009

2009-01-22T20:03:00.000-08:00

Just got back from a fabulous evening of music at the Iron Horse. My first folk music love, Brooks Williams, played 90 minutes of music with his band. That's right: his band. I had never seen him play with a band prior to a few hours ago. Once, many years ago, I saw him play as a duo with Rani Arbo (the fiddler from Daisy Mayhem and, before that, Salamander Crossing). Other than that, I have only known Brooks as a solo performer.

So, the boys of Beaucoup Blue, David and Adrien, opened the evening with a little over 30 minutes of guitar playing and singing. Their music is certainly bluesy, but they definitely are not slaves to some wrong-headed notion of authenticity. The two voices are quite different: the young man smooth, the old man rough. And so was the guitar playing: the young man focused on rhythm, the old man breaking out into slide guitar solos. When the youngster soloed, he didn't seem entirely comfortable. Their songs were pretty good. "Delta Rain" was about a trip to the south, about a month after 9/11. "Four in the Morning" and "Catch Me When I Wake Up" sounded particularly good. And they were called back for an encore, a cover of "CC Rider."

At around 7:50, Brooks Williams hit the stage with his band, bassist Richard Gates and drummer Sturgis Cunningham. I couldn't have been happier with how they began: Brooks' arrangement of Buddy and Julie Miller's "My Love Will Follow You." And, although I was a bit skeptical of how Brooks would sound with so much backup, the band provided real electricity. They were not there for show, they were there to back up the main man and, in this case, that meant rocking out here, swinging a bit there. I thought back to the Marshall Crenshaw show I had seen in Brooklyn. There, I saw a man who made his name with a rock group adjusting to the challenges of playing alone. Here, I was watching a man work with a band in the midst of a career of playing solo gigs. I was not disappointed, not even once.

After that opener, Brooks announced that he was going to play songs from his latest album, The Time I Spend with You (2008). That was fine by me. It's one of his best albums, I think. It's a fun-loving album, not at all introspective, and concerned mainly with giving pleasure to its listeners. "Everywhere" was a light, jazzy number, inducing the drummer to mellow out a bit. I'd expected a long sequence of new material but, after "Everywhere" came the first real test with the band. "Belfast Blues" has been a staple of Brooks' live shows for over 10 years and, apart from the original recording on Knife Edge (1995), I'd never heard it with any instruments other than guitar. The band arrangement was fun. I can't say it revealed anything new or different about the song, but it wasn't a letdown either. Up next was one of Brooks' sexiest numbers, "Rich Tonight." Like "Belfast Blues," "Rich Tonight" originally appeared on one the albums Brooks recorded with the Green Linnet label during the mid-1990s, before rerecording it many years later. It is one of the highlights from Seven Sisters (1997). On his newest album, it's different, less subtle, more rocking. And it was a peak moment at the concert. The band slammed into the groove, and Brooks was clearly having a ball.

Throughout the concert, Brooks Williams looked positively joyful. If he wasn't totally focused on getting just the right notes out of his guitar, he was grinning up a storm on almost every song. His enthusiasm shone through, and it reminded me of why I've loved going to his concerts for almost half of my life. This was the first time I'd seen him since the spring of 2003, and I'd forgotten what a pleasure his shows are.

At one point, the band left the stage--a "union break," Brooks joked--and Brooks played two songs on his own, the way I'm used to seeing him. And I was overjoyed by the selections, John Martyn's "May You Never" and, by request, "Seven Sisters." I don't think I had ever heard him play "May You Never" live before, and my heart leaped as I realized what he was playing. Both of the songs were models of exemplary finger-picking guitar playing and deep, soulful singing. "Seven Sisters" is among the best songs he has ever written, a song about renewal and recovery, as nature reclaims some of what was taken from it. There was an amusing moment before that song, as Brooks searched the stage for a capo. He couldn't find his, so one of the Beaucoup Blue boys lent him one of theirs.

After those two songs, the band returned, and, with each song, they seemed to get hotter and hotter. "The Time I Spend with You" and "61 Highway" (preceded by a great story about being smitten by Bonnie Raitt, after seeing her on TV as an adolescent) and "Lightning" from the new album, "Weeping Willow Blues" from Blues and Ballads, and, a "hidden track" from the new album, "Same Old Me," which was probably the hardest rocking song of the night. Then Beaucoup Blue joined the band, and they did "Statesboro Blues," "Little Wheel" (a song from BB's repertoire), and "Key to the Highway." The jamming was like...I don't know what. It felt like I was listening to a really good bar band, full of musicians who just didn't get a chance to play with each other as often as they liked to. Their enthusiasm was plain as day, in their faces, and in their playing. I don't mean to pick favorites, and I don't mean any disrespect, but when they laid out to solo, Brooks was head and shoulders above the Beaucoup Blue boys. Brooks has a command of many different styles, and his solos were not straight blues, in the way that BB's solos were, but were something above and beyond that.

For those readers not in the know, a lot of these songs are either old blues standards or make lots of reference to old blues songs. "61 Highway" is Mississippi Fred McDowell, "Weeping Willow Blues" is Blind Boy Fuller, "Statesboro Blues" is Blind Willie McTell, and I don't know who originally wrote "Key to the Highway," but I've heard lots of folks play that one. "Lightning" is a reference to Lightning Hopkins. Earlier in the set, they had also done "Trouble in Mind" which Brooks attributed to Snooks Eaglin, although I'm familiar with it through Hot Tuna's version. I love the blues. I love the fact that I was watching something almost ritualistic, as these folks paid their respects to musicians they loved by playing their songs, songs whose vocabularies were absorbed into rock and roll so long ago that it's hard to remember just where the words and notes came from.

For an encore, the trio performed "Honey Babe," from Blues and Ballads.

Afterwards, I shared a nice moment with the man. I said hello to him. It took him a moment, but he remembered me. He definitely remembered Anthony Spano, my man from Boston, who takes an occasional guitar lesson from him, and we talked a bit about what a nice guy he is. I shared my exciting news with him, that I was learning the guitar myself. It felt great to talk with him again. The last time I spoke with him, almost 5 years ago, I was giddy with excitement, all the more so because he knew my name! I remember bouncing down the street afterwards, my girlfriend very highly amused. It wasn't quite like that this time around...but I left the Iron Horse in a very good mood, indeed.

Marshall Crenshaw @ BAM Café, Brooklyn, NY, January 9th, 2009

2009-01-14T14:03:00.000-08:00

Interesting, the way that the evolution of a musical career can display things about an artist’s work that might not have become clear had the trajectory been different. Why Marshall Crenshaw no longer tours with a full rock band, I don’t know, but I saw a performance of his in a two guitar-plus-drums combo back in the summer of 2006 that was a revelation. A few nights ago, I saw him play about 75 minutes worth of music without any backup at all, and the revelation was confirmed. This man can write songs and play guitar with the best of them.

But let’s start with the man’s history and what, I imagine, will be his legacy: great, three-minute pop songs of the kind that I thought had died with the 1960s. His greatest hits compilation, This is Easy (2000), is dominated by songs from his first two albums, which contain song after song that are passionately sung, perfectly arranged, and almost maddeningly catchy. A few of them are also noticeably good songs. The lyrics and melodies to “Cynical Girl,” “There She Goes Again,” and “Whenever You’re On My Mind” are profound in the simplest way and simple in the most profound way, and each of those songs has been a repeat player on my internal stereo at different times over the past few years. His biggest commercial hit song, “Someday, Someway,” is less impressive as a song, but it’s still great pop. And, for people who know anything about Marshall Crenshaw, for people who remember him during his hit-making days, that’s that: a constructor of superb pop music.

Okay. But what Denise and I saw a few nights ago in Brooklyn revealed other things: great songs, expressive and surprisingly nuanced singing, an upbeat and quirky stage presence, and some really excellent guitar playing. “There She Goes Again” came first, and it is one of my favorites. At first, there was something slightly off-putting about the lack of precision in the way that his songs ran up against the guitar playing. But my ears adjusted quickly, as I began to hear the way he’d adjusted to the challenges of performing solo, and I began listening to the lyrics in a way I hadn’t before. “I’ll be stronger when she's off my mind / I hope she finds what she's been trying to find / And as life goes on and time goes by / Will her heart ever be satisfied?” Simply stated and simultaneously self-affirming, empathetic, and wondering. There is a real innocence to some of Marshall Crenshaw’s songs, as he expresses good-natured confusion about the opposite sex. By the same taken, his later songs express a mature, experienced take on older, more experienced love. “Alone in a Room,” one of Denise’s favorites from the other night, feels lived-in.

Anyway, the performance at BAMCafé touched on material from each part of the man’s career. The old ones included “There She Goes Again,” “Cynical Girl,” “Whenever You’re On My Mind,” “You’re My Favorite Waste of Time,” “Mary Anne,” “Someday, Someway,” and “Something’s Gonna Happen.” He played “Fantastic Planet of Love,” “Dime a Dozen Guy,” “Television Light,” “2541,” and, my most favorite song of his, “What Do You Dream Of” from his ‘90s albums. That last one expresses an intimate sentiment so beautifully that, when I heard it for the first time, back in the summer of 2006, I actually gasped aloud with pleasure when the refrain began.

I'll leave it at that. I hope to catch him again someday.

Some random thoughts

2008-12-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

Listening to Loudon's Recovery album (2008) right now. His voice has become noticeably...weathered? Not quite sure what the right word is. The earliest album of his that I've heard from beginning to end is Unrequited (1975). Back then, he sounded like the snotty little jerk that I'm sure he used to me. Now, he sounds wearier, more desperate somehow. Sometimes, that really puts the songs over. The theme of the album, for readers unfamiliar, is songs that were written during the early 1970s, rerecorded. So these are the songs of the young Loudon, performed by the old Loudon. Some of the performances are really good, like "Saw Your Name in the Paper" and "Muse Blues." Sometimes, the strength of the songs has to do with the fact that a young man was singing them. That's my take on "Motel Blues" which, great though it is, sounds most unattractive coming out of the mouth of a 62 year old. It sounded desperate as sung by a young man, and now...well, it still sounds desperate. But the singer sounds defeated in a way that doesn't work for me. On the other hand, "School Days," from his very first album (1970) has improved with age. And his band's arrangements are wonderful on that song, stroking the melody and providing perfect counterpoint. And "Old Friend" and "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" would be powerful songs in almost any context; they are two of his greatest songs, I think.

I see that Joe Henry produced this CD. Joe Henry is the same man who is credited as producer for Ani's Knuckle Down (2005). That's Ani's best disc since Little Plastic Castle (1998), and I have often suspected that Joe Henry is a big reason for it being so good. Sometimes, having that outside voice can make a big difference. Ani seems to think so too:
http://www.righteousbabe.com/ani/knuckledown/interview.asp

About a week ago, I played Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer for Denise. "When I Go." She pronounced it the most beautiful thing I've ever played for her. We listened to a few more songs from When I Go, before playing her a few songs from Tracy's Flower of Avalon. She seemed to be impressed, although she pointed out that the arrangements on "Gypsy Rose" didn't work.

I've never played my favorite Neil Young songs for Denise. How can that be?

Speaking of Dave and Tracy, did you know that they have a Christmas album? It's called American Noel (2008) and I just listened to it for the first time two days ago. I'm putting it back in the CD player right now....Dave Carter had the magic touch. The opening song is "Go Tell the Fox," a Carter-written carol announcing the birth of the "Christ child." The music swings gently and has a simple, catchy melody, with guitar and fiddle (and bass?). And Tracy harmonizing beautifully. Tracy takes the lead on the next song, "Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella," with Dave her backing up on all the instruments: guitar, bass, and banjo. Then comes "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming." I do not like Christmas carols as a general rule, but Dave and Tracy...what can I say? The soul and the melodies and the harmony singing just keep on coming. I'm convinced that Dave Carter was an enormously gifted songwriter, who probably could have hung his hat on songwriting, without ever performing, if he had chosen that path. But he and Tracy sound natural together, meant for each other.

Brooks Williams is playing at the Iron Horse in mid-January, and I'll be there. I haven't seen Brooks since the spring of 2003, at the All Angels Coffeehouse at Broadway and 80th in Manhattan. Since that time, my friend Anthony has begun taking guitar lessons from him.

I'm not satisfied with what I said about "Motel Blues," above. I'm not entirely sure why this recording doesn't work as well for me. Listen to the version(s) on YouTube, or the one on A Live One (1980), and you tell me what you think. The desperation actually sounds more acute on these versions. Joe Henry, in the liner notes to Recovery, writes that the original version sounded like a come-on, from someone who just wanted to get laid, pure and simple, and that the current version sounds like a plea, really desperate. Me, I've always felt like the song sounds like a desperate plea, especially when he gets to "save my life!"

The Nields @ The Iron Horse, December 13th, 2008

2008-12-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

The first time I saw the Nields was over 10 years ago, at Newport. I remember very little about that performance. I do remember that, for a shamefully long time, I used to confuse them with...Little Feat?! Yes, Little Feat. Could I have been so ignorant back then? The thing is, Little Feat played later that afternoon in Newport, and something about their music got tangled up in my head with the Nields'. Anyway, I saw the sisters perform a couple of times thereafter at Falcon Ridge and at First Night in Northampton. Then, this past summer, I saw them play at Falcon Ridge with the full band, and it was 45 minutes of pure up. So that primed me for their Iron Horse show.

I can't say that I saw 85 minutes of pure up in Northampton, but I certainly enjoyed myself. Nerissa and Katrina took the stage at about 20 past 7:00, introduced by Nerissa's husband. I had expected an opening act: according to the on-line schedule, Lucy Wainwright Roche was the opening act. I never found out why, but she was nowhere to be seen. Too bad. Anyway, the Nields sisters played a very relaxed set. It was so relaxed that Katrina's two children, young William and older Amelia (who was once declared "World's Cutest Baby" at Falcon Ridge), wandered on and off the stage more or less at will to cling to their mother, sit at her feet, run and dance around, and basically hang out. At the end of the set, Nerissa's husband brought their two children (much younger) onto the stage to join in.

The songs were a mix of new and old. After a short discussion about how wrongheaded she had been about the mother-child bond when she was younger, Nerissa led the sisters in a performance of "Merry Christmas, Mr. Jones" from the Bob on the Ceiling album. This is a song about a pregnant teenager in which the young woman, after she gives birth, declares that she has no feelings for the new baby. Beyond that, there was the classic "Best Black Dress," with Katrina doing her usual enthusiastic dancing that looked slightly awkward, as if her self-consciousness was intruding on her enthusiasm. Nerissa looked more comfortable on stage, perhaps because she was the one with the guitar. There was "Give Me a Clean Heart" and "This Train" from their newest album, Sister Holler. Katrina's daughter, Amelia, came on stage to do some Irish dancing, which moved Katrina to crouch and lean against the side of the stage, laughing her head off, as her sister strummed a suitable rhythm on the guitar. Later, she held Amelia in her arm while singing another song, her son William sitting at her feet, throwing a little piece of paper (gum wrapper, maybe?) up into the air.

Their harmonies were lovely, although I can't say I received much emotional kick from the performance. My favorite moments were when Dave Chalfant, Katrina's husband, was on stage to play some guitar. Those moments added a touch of heat, just when it was needed. Overall, it was a relaxed performance, as befitting a musical act that drew more heavily than most "contemporary folk" on the folk music tradition. I miss the band. But I like what has been left behind just fine.

Tuna delights

2008-12-11T17:38:00.000-08:00

I was happy to discover that http://www.hottunatunes.com/ recently posted a recording of the Northampton Hot Tuna concert from this past September 4th. I downloaded it last night and am delighted with the recording.

Loudon Wainwright w/ Carsie Blanton @ The Iron Horse, Thursday, December 4th, 2008

2008-12-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

This past Thursday night, Loudon Wainwright paid a visit to the Iron Horse for the best night of music that I’ve had since I arrived in Pioneer Valley back in late June. Only the Ani Difranco and Hot Tuna shows rival what I saw Thursday night. I forgot to bring my glasses to the show, so I was especially glad that I arrived at the Iron Horse early. I was seated very close to the stage.

Loudon was in fine form, but before I write about his performance, there is the small matter of the genius opening act, a little, curly-haired woman named Carsie Blanton. She got on stage at 7:00 sharp and immediately attracted my attention with her poise, her serious expression, and her outfit, which featured a black, knee-length dress and a red top that hugged her curves and showed off a fair amount of cleavage. None of this would matter much to me (I swear) if the performance had fallen flat. But, not only was her voice as sexy as her appearance, but it was also smart, playful, painful, and jaunty. Her guitar-playing was nimble and assured. So, in terms of song-writing talent and lyricism, she resembled the main act. I sense a lot more psychic and spiritual strength in her than in Loudon, though. If she’s been as abused and mistreated as some of her songs suggest, I can understand how that came to be.

The opening song was, I later learned, called “Belle of the Ball,” a statement of purpose pertaining to the mating ritual. If he can’t see that I’m the you-know-what, he can’t be right for me. The hook was the voice, the careful way it cradled the lyrics, and the skillful, jazzy guitar melody. I don’t know exactly how long Carsie Blanton has been doing this, but within 15 seconds of her performance, I was convinced that she was a pro. Nothing that came next made me think anything less. Next came “Buoy” which was a clever series of unfamiliar similes, then “Money in the Bank,” my favorite song of the set, which she introduced as a song that she’d researched by looking up gambling on Wikipedia. Then came the title track to her CD, “Ain’t So Green” and, the most painful song in her set, “Closer to Him.” “Closer to Him” is about the singer’s attraction to angry, abusive men, and the hard lessons learned by acquaintance with them. By the end of her set, I knew that I would be spending money on her CD and on some demos that she mentioned she’d posted on her website….Now, having listened to both demos and the polished CD (from 2005), I think I prefer the demos.

At around 7:45, Loudon Wainwright wandered through the crowded Iron Horse and up on to the stage, to great applause. There was a brief delay as he looked for a place to put his glass of water. First, someone gave him a chair. Then, staff member came up on stage and replaced the chair with a stool. This exchange prompted the performer to laugh and say, “It’s like an Ionesco play—‘The Chair and the Stool!’” From there, he launched into his first song, a charming, upbeat ditty about how much fun it is to cheat on his sweetheart. He played fat chords on the guitar and sang the cheerfully offensive lyrics with a big smile. And away we went.

Like what I remember of the last time I saw Loudon (October of 2001 at the Bottom Line in New York City), this performance was a mixture of old and new material, serious and silly, songs about family and songs about the life of a touring singer-songwriter. His new album is called Recovery (2008) and it consists of rerecorded songs from his first two albums from the early 1970s. He played four or five songs from it, the highlight among them being “Old Friend,” one of the most serious songs I’ve ever heard from him, a song to an old friend about how the friendship has changed: “slap your back I can no longer / I can only shake your hand.” His great autobiographical song, “Westchester County” came second in the set, with its immortal statement of how upper class kids get their kicks: “steal a kiss, cop a feel / off a girl in high heels / we came in our cummerbunds.” Then came a double header of great holiday material, “Thanksgiving” and “Suddenly, It’s Christmas.”

I was impressed by the number of requests he took: “Saw Your Name in the Paper” from the new album, “Red Guitar” on the piano, “White Winos,” “Daddy Take a Nap,” “Daughter,” and maybe one or two others. He announced that the anniversary of his dad’s death was coming up, before performing “A Handful of Dust,” a song his father wrote, and “Surviving Twin,” about his relationship with his father, from the great 2001 album Last Man on Earth. He played two great songs that he wrote for a musical, currently playing in England, about a winning lottery ticket being shared between a black woman and a redneck somewhere in Florida. He played a shattering, painful song about family trauma that was strangely enhanced by the lyrics about his difficulty with playing the piano in any key other than C.

He concluded the performance with a completely straight take on “Have Yourself a Merry Christmas.” I was a bit turned off by that. At the end of the song, he flashed us a big grin and exclaimed, “It’s the new optimism!” It was amusing, I guess, but it still felt like an anticlimactic finish.

I skipped the Chris Smither show Saturday night at the Iron Horse to be with Denise in New York. But this Saturday, I’ll be around to catch The Nields, who putting on a rocking performance at Falcon Ridge this past summer. Expectations are high!

Ani Difranco @ Town Hall, November 21st, 2008; Jack Hardy, Tim Robinson, and Chris Fuller @ The Postcrypt Coffeehouse, November 22nd, 2008

2008-11-24T18:27:00.000-08:00

A study in contrasts this past weekend, as two different kinds of performers dominated two different kinds of stages. On Friday night, Denise and I attended the Ani Difranco concert at Town Hall, the first of two nights for Ani at that venue. Saturday night, however, we traded the screaming Difrancophiles and the concert hall for the more quiet, but nearly as passionate folkies at the Postcrypt Coffeehouse of Columbia University for a trio of fine local singer-songwriters: Jack Hardy, Tim Robinson, and Chris Fuller.

The Town Hall show began with Pieta Brown. I learned, several songs into her set, that this was the daughter of the great Greg Brown. She has a lovely singing voice. Rather like the Cowboy Junkies, Denise suggested to me during the set. True, that: you could hear a bit of Margot Timmins in the singing. I don't remember the songs as well. Bo Ramsey played guitar with her. This is a guy who has played with a lot of the greats, from Iris Dement to Lucinda Williams to Greg Brown. I just now went to peruse his website (www.boramsey.com) and I see that he has even played with Ani. Quite a resumé. Anyway, his fills and flourishes were very good. In fact, they were my favorite part of the performance. I think I'd like to see Pieta Brown again, but at a place like the Postcrypt, with a bit more intimacy. I bet she would have been at home in a round robin-style set-up with Jack Hardy and company.

Ani took the stage with energy and excitement, leaping to the front of the stage as she launched into "Little Plastic Castles." Unlike the Ani show I saw up here in Massachusetts back in July, this one really focused on new material. Half a dozen songs from her newest album, Red Letter Year (2008), and several songs that have to appear on an album, along with representative songs from each of the four albums from Evolve to Reprieve. The band was in fine form, with Mike Dillon hammering his percussion devices, Allison Miller pounding away and harmonizing beautifully, and bassist Todd Sickafoose taking a turn at the pump organ at stage left.

The new songs all sounded good; no surprise there. The real surprise was hearing a song about Barack Obama. Has Ani ever written a song that praised an American politician like this? I don't think so. She also complemented the President Elect three songs into the set as she replaced the line about "Tweedledum or Tweedledumber" in "Fuel" with "fucking Barack Obama." Nice touch.

Highlights? I think my favorite moment was the performance of "Nicotine." I've noticed that, not only does the Reprieve album improve every time I listen to it, but its songs improve enormously in concert. I suppose that's true of most of Ani's material, but it's particularly noticeable for Reprieve, an album that I didn't immediately make contact with but now enjoy almost as much as its predecessor, Knuckle Down (2005). Anyway, Ani played the opening chords to "Nicotine" before stopping to fix one of her nails. Then, she resumed playing, as her bandmates accompanied her quietly. It was one of the subtler moments of the performance, and a great one. From the new album, "Present Infant" and "Landing Gear" were particularly good moments too. I had been hoping for "Way Tight," but no such luck.

As I mentioned a moment ago, she played fewer old songs (say, anything before 2000) than she did when I saw her earlier. "Napoleon" came about halfway into the set. "Gravel" ended the set. For the encore, all four musicians took up percussion instruments and played a guitar-free version of "Every State Line," which was very satisfying. Finally, to send us off into the night, "Overlap" from Out of Range (1994).

It was a satisfying show, Denise and I agreed. The crowd was energetic, although it didn't dance, we were sorry to see. But we sang, we cheered, we screamed for our Ani, and she gave up the folk and the funk for around 90 minutes. Ani's songs are good-to-great, but in concert I'm moved by the sound of the band, and this is a real good one. I do miss Andy Stochansky, but the Miller-Dillon-Sickafoose band just keeps sounding better to me. Denise didn't care for Mike Dillon's percussion, and I admit that, the first time I heard him play with her at the Beacon in 2006, I didn't much like his contributions either. But every time I've heard him since, I've liked him more and more. Just the same, the simple fact of the matter is that Ani Difranco is one of a small handful of performers I can think of who absolutely own the stage they walk own. Her guitar playing is a miracle of intensity and precision, and she's one of the most brilliant and talented popular singers I've ever heard. What more do you want?

At the Postcrypt (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/postcrypt/coffeehouse/), on the other hand, all the performers have to work with is songs. There is no sound system, and there is no room for a band. Ani herself played the Postcrypt stage in her early days (May of 1993, according to www.onherown.com), a show I would have loved to have seen. Who shared the stage with her, I wonder? .... Okay, I just checked at the Postcrypt's website: the answer is Amy Correia, a pretty good singer-songwriter in her own right, but not someone I'd put in the same league as Mr. Difranco. At any rate, on Saturday night, there was a round-robin style performance from 9 to midnight.

Denise and I arrived at around 9:40 to find a packed Postcrypt. For the last few years, the fire marshal has been cracking down on the 35-person limit. That's unfortunate. I have a lot of great memories of Postcrypt shows with the room crammed full of 50 or more people, many of them sitting on the floor. This time, Denise and I spent the first half hour or so standing at the doorway. But it was a typical Postcrypt crowd: they were there to hear the songs. They were utterly silent during the performance, except when the songs elicited laughter or singalong moments.

The performers on stage were part of Jack Hardy's crew. As I wrote in a previous post, if you don't know about Jack Hardy and his accomplishments (musical and otherwise), you owe it to yourself to check him out (www.jackhardy.com). On stage left, closest to where Denise and I stood (and, later, sat), sat Chris Fuller who, I believe, is a more recent remember of Jack's songwriting circle. He was good. The standouts were a song about a Mexican woman wrestler and another one called "Get a Room," which was what he demanded of "church and state." Pretty clever. Tim Robinson has been with Hardy for 10 years or more, if I'm not mistaken. Again: a very talented guy. His singing voice is an acquired taste, I've often thought, although Denise approved right from the outset. His stage presence is wry and relaxed.

But Jack was the man I was most excited to see. He performed a number of new songs (included a few that he played before Denise and I arrived, I was told). The ones we heard included "Kansas," the first song we heard him perform that night, and, to close the evening, a song that might have been called "Ask Questions," which was marvelous. In between those two, Jack took some requests, and he treated us to several recent, and a couple of older songs. First came "Johnny's Gone," which was a real delight. It's a favorite of mine, from the album Civil Wars (1994). The recording features a firm, but slow rock beat and an electric guitar solo: not arrangements you usually hear on a Jack Hardy album. Saturday night, however, the man played it solo on the acoustic guitar. If Ani Difranco is a cunning, canny singer, blessed with a plastic, pliable singing voice and a brain that knows how to use it, Jack Hardy is all heart and passion. He can't do the things that Ani can do, but his natural instrument is so beautiful that he can put over his love ballads and political songs and story songs with ease. This is a man who has made a career, an entire lifestyle around songwriting. A week does not pass without him writing a song, and that has been so for over 30 years. His talent is immense. He played "The Bells of San Blas" and "I Oughta Know" (which turned into a singalong), "The Zephyr (Take it Slow)" (also from Civil Wars), and my favorite single moment of the evening, the title track from White Shoes (1981). "White Shoes" is a beautiful ballad and, by the end, the entire audience was singing softly along with the refrain.

It was a sweet Postcrypt homecoming for me. Matt Winters was there, along with his father. Jack Hardy's daughter, Morgan, was there, and she introduced me to Jack, which was cool. I think I recognized a couple of the other older folks in the audience from Postcrypt shows of years past. It felt like home, somehow. Town Hall had felt different. There was a communal feel to both shows, but the communities were quite different. Denise and I went home feeling tired but content.

Chris Smither @ Joe's Pub, November 1st, 2008

2008-11-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday night, the great Chris Smither played two shows at Joe's Pub, accompanied, unusually but effectively, by a drummer and a second guitarist (his producer, David "Goody" Goodrich). I was there for the early show, accompanied by the brilliant and beautiful Denise Milstein.

We dined at Joe's Pub too. We had a lovely dinner of Gemelli pasta with spicy sausage, and glasses of a Spanish Crianza that really hit the spot. I left to use the restroom, and I returned just as the man himself took the stage with his bandmates. The last time I was at Joe's Pub to see Chris Smither, that second guitar player was there. But this was the first time I had ever seen him with a drummer. I feared that such an addition to his sound might make his foot-tapping superfluous, but I was wrong. Both he (forgot his name) and Goodrich were unobtrusive contributors. There was no doubt as to whose show this was.

Each of the last few times I've seen him, he's opened with "Open Up" from his most recent album, Leave the Light On (2006), and this time was no exception. From there, he launched into material from his last few albums, beginning with his version of Dave Carter's "Crocodile Man." As Ellen Stanley (https://www.kfai.org/user/28) once remarked to me, this guy's shows don't vary too much, as far as the set lists and overall sound are concerned. But I was particularly glad to hear "Never Needed It More" third in the set, along with "Lola" a bit later. "Love You Like a Man" made an appearance, which made me think happily about the jam on that song with Chris, led by Eddie from Ohio, at Falcon Ridge this past summer. He played two of his more socially/politically cutting songs, both from his most recent album: "Diplomacy" and "Origin of Species." He played "Hold On," his manifesto about freedom, "Drive You Home Again," about selfhood, and "Help Me Now," about solipsism. Denise's favorite was "No Love Today," and the singer preceded it with his imitation of the fruit and vegetable man that he recalled from his childhood in New Orleans. I'm rather partial to that one myself.

The crowd at Joe's Pub was appreciative. There were some calls for "Slow Surprise," and I would have been delighted with that one myself. It's one of my most favorite songs by him, or by anyone else. He talked about his father, remembering his reaction to his son wondering whether he'd go to hell (his father's response: "well, it would not surprise me."), and he was careful to note the songs his mother liked ("Never Needed It More") and disliked ("Lola").

Next up: Richard Shindell @ The Iron Horse....

Erin McKeown @ The Iron Horse, October 11th, 2008

2008-10-13T08:56:00.000-07:00

Erin McKeown played to her home crowd on Saturday night. She sounded wonderful. I sensed that life hasn't been especially kind to her lately; she made a few comments that betrayed a bit of sadness. And she told a gripping story about a recent drive from the Valley to New Orleans through Texas, in which she saw the devastation from the latest hurricane. So much of what Erin sings and plays is wrapped in irony, sarcasm, layers of metaphor, and/or some other kind of linguistic tension that the tone of bewildered disappointment that hung over the performance seemed fitting somehow.

The first half of the set was devoted entirely to new material, first on the guitar, and then a ballad at the piano that was probably the highlight of that part of the performance. She finished recording a new album a few weeks ago, and she played six or seven songs that will appear on it. Based on what I heard, I sense that the new album will be a treat, more like Distillation (2000) or We Will Become Like Birds (2005) than Grand (2003), which still doesn't impress me, its high points notwithstanding. I maintain that Distillation is a work of genius, and at some point I'd like to write an essay entirely about that album and why it's so great, and Sing You Sinners (2007) is the easiest album of hers to listen to. In fact, it's playing as I write this. Anyway, the new material sounded jaunty, fun, and, in a couple of cases, tense in the same way that best of Distillation is tense. One song was about a long car ride with someone she wanted to sleep with. The piano ballad sounded almost like Randy Newman, and she introduced it by claiming that it featured some adult language and themes, before muttering into the microphone: "fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck."

After the new song on the piano, she began dipping back into her catalog for more familiar songs. She began with a drawn-out, elegiac version of "James!" from Grand. Then came "Cou Cou" from Sing You Sinners, a song that she introduced as being "very old." Then the guitar came out, and "A Better Wife," "Cinematic," "Rhode Island is Famous for You," and "La Petite Mort" from Distillation to end the set. For the finale, she had us all standing and chanting "oh, Estelle" during the refrain while shaking our fists in the air. It recalled my first experience with Erin McKeown, back at Falcon Ridge 2000, when she was part of the new artists' showcase. To prepare us for the same song, she had us all raise our fists...before reprimanding us: "right now, I should be looking out into a sea of left hands!"

For her encore, she played two more great songs from Distillation. First came "Blackbirds," on the guitar. Then, after saluting the state of Connecticut's recent move toward modern civilization by recognizing gay marriage, "Daisy and Prudence," on the piano.

I should mention that there was an opening act. Mark Geary is an Irish singer-songwriter who is fond of putting his guitar through electronic loops and playing duets with himself. It's a cool effect. Nothing too special in his songwriting, but it was a pleasant way to start off the night. On my way out of the Iron Horse, he was sitting at the bar. We made brief eye contact before I made my way out into the Northampton night.

in other news

2008-10-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've got Erin McKeown coming up this weekend. The following weekend I'll be in NYC, so I'll skip the Crooked Still show. Music essays are currently on hiatus--too much to do!

Randy Newman @ The Calvin Theater, September 28th, 2008

2008-09-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

I can't remember the first time I heard Randy Newman. He's one of a handful of performers I learned to listen to properly through reading Christgau's analyses of his albums. I have a bootleg concert recording from Germany, 2004 that I listen to a lot. I had only heard good things about his newest album, and I loved his appearance on the Colbert Report some months ago. So when I saw he'd be at the Calvin, I was curious, and I was rather eager to plop down the cash to see him. My man from Boston, Anthony, came with me.

He hit the stage at 8:00 on the dot and wasted no time by launching into two of my most favorite songs of his: "It's Money that I Love" and "My Life is Good." From there, he took us on a nice, long tour of his cannon. He played almost all the songs from his newest album, Harps and Angels, and, during the second set, he dipped way back to his first album for "I Think It's Going to Rain Today." His new album sounds great. "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" was a beauty, and so was "Korean Parents," which had the audience in stitches.

But it was his old songs that people came to hear, and he did not disappoint. I didn't keep track of the set list, but he played "Short People" and "Birmingham" and "Louisiana 1927" and "Dixie Flyer" and "Kingfish" and "Have Pity on the Working Man" and "Sail Away" and "Baltimore" and "Last Night I Had a Dream" and "Political Science" (a crowd favorite, which closed the first set) and "In Germany before the War" and "Rednecks" and "You Can Leave your Hat On" and "Marie" (which I found heart-wrenching). He had the audience chant the words "he's dead" and "you're dead" in "I'm Dead But I Don't Know It." That song is from Bad Love (1999), and he also did "I Miss You" from that album. I'd hoped to hear "The Great Nations of Europe." No such luck, but he did play the other great political song from Bad Love: "The World Isn't Fair." Let's see...what else? The "We are the World" answer song, "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do." "I Love L.A."

Seeing this guy play was like seeing someone like Neil Young or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. I was watching a guy who had written so many great songs that he could hardly disappoint. And he was a good enough performer that songs that you might think had worn out their welcome sounded brand new as they were played on stage. The audience was appreciative from beginning to end. Even during the most well-known songs, folks were laughing, like during "Political Science" and "Short People." It occurred to me during "Rednecks" that Randy doesn't seem to have too many black fans. I wonder why...?

If he comes to your town, don't miss him!

update

2008-09-30T14:44:00.001-07:00

I'll be posting here soon. There was Vance Gilbert a few weeks ago, and something really special this past Sunday night.

Vance Gilbert @ The Iron Horse, September 12th, 2008

2008-09-21T13:00:00.001-07:00

I last saw Vance Gilbert at Falcon Ridge this past July. He autographed one my CDs, making it out to "NicKKK." To paraphrase Matt, my colleague in all things political science and folk music, Vance Gilbert gets away with saying things that no white performer could get away with (especially not at a folk music concert). On the evening of the 12th, he did not disappoint either Naomi or myself, treating us to some tasty guitar playing, extraordinary singing, good-to-great songs, and some politically incorrect comments about the very few blacks in the audience.

The opening act was Rebecca Correia. We only caught her last couple of songs. She has some pipes; no doubt. Her songs didn't really register with us. Naomi thought she was boring, and I had to agree. She came out to join Vance Gilbert for his encore, and she showed what she was capable of by (almost) matching Vance's vocal gymnastics. Impressive.

Vance Gilbert....The man knows how to sing. And write. And work a room. Upon pointing out all the black people in the audience: "we're the only chocolate chips in this cookie." His latest album is his latest gimmick: a bunch of songs written in the style of some other songwriter. "Whatever Louise Wants"--Richard Thompson. "Old Man's Advice"--Tom Waits. "Judge's House"--Bruce Springsteen/Steve Earle. And so forth. They were good. He also did "Unfamiliar Moon," which I recall really enjoying at Falcon Ridge. Plus, "Taking it All to Tennessee." In between songs, he joked around, told us about his dog, told us about his touring life, told us about how privileged and successful he felt to be doing what he was doing, and called out to some folks who'd just entered the Iron Horse: "you're late!" He made some small talk with some folks sitting in the front row. He praised his opening act. After the show, Naomi pointed out his warm stage presence. It's true. This ain't no Loudon Wainright III or Randy Newman, bad boys who probably are the jerks they often seem like in their songs. Vance is an ole' softie. Who can really sing.

Hot Tuna @ The Calvin Theater, September 4th, 2008

2008-09-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

Good old Hot Tuna played the Calvin in Northampton last night, and Naomi and I were there to catch it. After a hastily prepared but tasty dinner--featuring, what else, Hot Tuna! Lovely tuna steaks, that is, with cous-cous and other goodies--we walked to the theater and walked in on the opening act, a mister David Lindley. I didn't know it at the time (last night, that is), but I now learn that this guy got his break as one of Jackson Browne's backing musicians. What I saw was an old guy, sitting on stage playing a variety of stringed instruments on his lap, with a slide (sidenote: people not sympathetic to this kind of music might snidely suggest that this distinguishes Lindley from the featured act by the fact that the featured act consists of three old men with stringed instruments and don't use slides, a thought that makes me smile even though I know it's unfair). Highlights included Bruce Springsteen's "Brothers under the Bridge," Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road," and a David Lindley original about being brought down by the backstage food.

But enough about that.

Hot Tuna are a marvel of musicianship. This was the fourth time I've seen them, and the third time I've been blown away. The second time I saw them, at the Beacon in November of 2002, their show was a bit too laid back as I recall. Plus, at that time, Michael Falzarano was still playing with them, and I'd never been too crazy about his contributions to the band. But even then, the interplay between Jorma and Jack was tasty, and then some, and they even whipped out "Serpent of Dreams" at that show, a song from America's Choice (1975) which I never could have imagined performed acoustically until it happened. Last night, with Jorma and Jack accompanied by another virtuoso, Barry Mitterhoff (who stole the show at Tuna's electric gig at the Beacon in 2006), the magic was there right from the opening number, "Search My Heart." On that song, it was all about interplay and responsiveness between the musicians. Not much heat, but plenty of warmth. The heat came next, with Reverend Gary Davis' "Candyman." On record, this one always features a Jack Casady bass solo and, last night, he did not disappoint. After the "get your baby some beer" verse, Jorma and Barry strummed the rhythm while Jack laid out and showed why some folks (including me at various times in my life) think this guy is the bass player to beat all bass players.

Their set tapped songs old and new (for the complete list, see Jorma's website: http://jormakaukonen.com/journal/). They played a few songs that they had recently recorded for a Jorma solo album, including "Nashville Blues" and a fantastic Roy Book Binder song called "Full Go Round." They played a couple of tunes from Jorma's most recent solo album (Stars in My Crown, recorded on Red House): "Heart Temporary," which sounds much better on record, with the full production, and "Late Breaking News," one of Jorma's funnest originals. They dipped way back into their catalogue, as they generally do, for songs from their first albums. They even did a long jam on "Good Shepherd," which originally appeared on Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers album (1969), which featured particularly fine solos from Jorma and Barry.

Picking a favorite from the show is hard, but I recall feeling the most satisfied by "I See the Light." This is one that was originally recorded with the electric band for Phosphorescent Rat (1973), was the highlight from the live album Double Dose (1977), and later made an acoustic appearance on Live at Sweetwater (1993). Last night, it was a wonder to behold, an aboslutely fantastic example of virtuosos devoting their talents to ensemble playing, keeping the solos to a minimum and really working the song over. The bridge and instrumental climax to this song made me indescribably happy. Later on, their jams on "Bread Line Blues" and "I Know You Rider" were both fantastic, with all three musicians given space to solo.

The audience was a bit disappointing. The show clearly did not sell out, and people were leaving pretty early. The band played for over two hours (a longer set than plenty of musicians half their ages play these days) and only an hour into it, the Calvin had already begun to clear somewhat. Naomi pointed out that a number of women sitting nearby had begun to fall asleep. And, as always happens at Hot Tuna shows, there were occasional shout-outs of "Hot Fucking Tuna!" and one pathetic, mind-addled moron screaming out random junk about the band to no one in particular: "Talk to Me!" "That's a REAL bass player!" "67!" "San Fransisco Sound!" and on and on. Amusing in limited doses, annoying when extended throughout the performance.

The musicians didn't talk too much from the stage. Jack didn't speak at all. Jorma introduced a few of the songs, and he looked amused by some of the audience...participation. "Well then," he said a number of times. A couple of people had called out for songs from the Burgers album (1972), so, after Jorma announced that they were going to play "Sea Child" (which they opened with back at the Beacon in '06), he then said, "and that's from Burgers--so there!" It was actually the first half of a Burgers twofer; they followed it up with "Let Us Get Together." Barry was the most verbal. He actually gave a long advertisement for the band' merchandise, announcing certain products that had sold out (including Jack's solo album, which was a surprise to hear), and generously recounting the history of the Jack-and-Jorma relationship. He even noted that there were some Tony Trischka band albums for sale, on which he himself played, and suggested them, with surprising sheepishness, for “any bluegrass fans out there.” He paused at this point, clearly hoping for a big shout-out for bluegrass. He (and I) were a bit disappointed by the response.

The set ended with “Just Because,” from Jorma’s Blue Country Heart (2002). I don’t know who wrote this one, but I know that Elvis Presley has a great version of it, and it sounded damn good last night. The encores were solid versions of “Uncle Sam Blues” and the one (and, to my knowledge, only) song of Hot Tuna’s to get any significant radio airplay during the 1970s, “Keep on Trucking,” also from Burgers. David Lindley joined in on those two, and his slide guitar solos were mighty keen.

I loved the show so much, I’m already contemplating a trip to see one of their electric shows during their annual Thanksgiving-to-Christmas tour. They’re playing Town Hall in NYC and a couple of New England dates. I’ll see if I can catch one. You should too.

Hmm

2008-09-05T13:55:00.001-07:00

For some reason, I'm having trouble posting my Tuna review. More later....

Test

2008-09-05T13:50:00.001-07:00

This is just a test.

Soon to come

2008-09-04T12:31:00.001-07:00

Two essays are in progress. One is about the difference between taste and judgment. The other is about Jack Hardy's first five albums. Hot Tuna plays the Calvin Theater this evening, and I'll be there with Naomi. We'll also check out Randy Newman at the end of the month. In between time, there's Vance Gilbert at the Iron Horse, but that might not happen.

Friday and Saturday's love

2008-08-16T19:36:00.000-07:00

Nothing much new to report. My 31st birthday was today, and I celebrated last night with Naomi and company. She will accompany me to the Hot Tuna show at the Calvin Theater on 9/4. I can hardly wait to explain the "If you don't know Jorma, you don't know Jack" t-shirt to her.

Coming up...reflections on the early Jack Hardy albums, and maybe something about one of the other Falcon Ridge CDs. The Jeffrey Foucault album has begun to sink in somewhat, although it still doesn't blow me away.

Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer

2008-08-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

When I was at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival for the first time, in 2000, I didn’t know who Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer were. I wasn’t alone; although they had their following, they were not a featured part of the festival. Big enough to have their own 50-minute time slot, but small enough not to entice the majority of festival-goers to return to their blankets to lend their ears. What I recall best from their 2000 performance was their energy and conviction. However you choose to describe the world they evoke in their songs (Dave’s songs, that is), they clearly believe in it. After I began listening to their music regularly—only after the last time I would ever see them play together—I would find further proof of that, from the Buddhist blessing they reprint on their CD covers to the stark instrumentation of the recordings. At that first Falcon Ridge performance, I remember feeling a rawness from the duo that is missing from most singer-songwriter duos. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a performance from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings that moved me as much as that first Dave and Tracy show, let alone from the Indigo Girls. Not much registered about those songs the first time, but the performance was meaningful to me, solely on the power of the singing and playing and passion. For some photos of the duo, including one of them at Falcon Ridge 2000, with Dave Carter looking rather intense, see here: http://www.hvmusic.com/article/alexander/carter_grammer/.

I only saw them together twice after that. At Falcon Ridge the next year, their popularity had clearly grown, and my festival companions were impressed. I was impressed enough by their performance that I made my way over to the songwriting workshop later that afternoon, or maybe it was the next day. I don’t remember what song they played, but I remember the mike being passed to Dave Carter after Richard Shindell had played “Transit,” one of that man’s very best songs. Dave was clearly a bit overcome. He pronounced it one of the very best songs he had ever heard, a sentiment that he repeated when I reminded him of it the one time we met, many months later. That last time I saw Dave and Tracy was in March of 2002 as part of Joan Baez’s touring band. They played Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, and Richard Shindell opened with a solo performance, playing his finely-crafted songs sitting alone on the Hall stage. I remember bounding town the aisle at Town Hall with my colleague at Columbia, Georgia Kernell, in the middle of his opening song, “Beyond the Iron Gate.” During Joan Baez’s set, the great women graciously let her new protogés take the stage for a few songs. They played “Ordinary Town,” “The Mountain” (which Joan had performed for the Dali Lama), and “Hey Conductor” which enticed Joan to return to the stage to dance. After the whole show was over, Richard and Dave and Tracy returned to the stage to greet audience members. I got autographs from Richard and Tracy, but I stopped to talk to Dave for a few minutes. I only recall two things. First, he had only glowing things to say about Richard Shindell. Second, he was tall. I don’t know how tall he was, but my recollection of him was that he was easily over 6 feet tall. He seemed to tower over me. He had a lot of hair too, not like what you see in photos of him in the CD jackets. Something about his presence seemed very intense, like whatever he was doing he meant to do and was meant to do. As with his presence, so too with his music.

One of the pitfalls that folk-based songwriting often falls into is a kind of soft fatalism. I’ve heard far too many songs that evoke pastoral imagery, mysterious women, the road, or explicit political disengagement in a way that conjures up an image of hippy-mysticism, middle-class escapism, or both. I have very little patience for either of these phenomena, although I make allowances for the latter (more than I should, probably). All sorts of stuff can redeem either one, of course, including unusual arrangements, extraordinary musicality, or a damn good sense of humor. Albums that move between songs of this kind and other, stranger (or hyper-normalized) material are often success stories. Listen to Richard Shindell’s Somewhere Near Patterson as an example.

With some exceptions here and there, I’ve never thought that Dave and Tracy fell into this trap. Something always saves what could be overwrought or overwritten songs and makes them register for me, with a tingle down the spine or a smile on the lips. Let’s take two songs, both from their first (and least impressive) album as examples of what they were able to accomplish: “Where I Go” and “The River Where She Sleeps.” “Where I Go’s” mysticism doesn’t truly lead anywhere, not really. The narrator does appear to transcend life and death by the final verse, and it happens organically, line by line in the song. It’s impressive, like a monument or an oil painting, but just as escapist…right? Insofar as all music is, yes. But, like I said from the beginning, these musicians sound committed. Like-minded souls (and I use that word advisedly) are free to listen along and accept it all as is: at the Dave Carter tribute at Falcon Ridge 2002, Pete Kennedy actually referred to Carter as a bodhisattva. The banjo part that opens the song (and album) is haunting and sets the stage for Dave Carter’s stark vocal. “Come, lonely hunter / chieftain and king / I will fly like the falcon when I go.” Later, Tracy Grammer enters the sound, putting an exclamation point on the mystery of the opening verse with an enchanting violin part that carries me easily to the next verse. I won’t go into a line-by-line analysis—I’m not sure if I could—suffice to say that the banjo-fiddle duo creates a lonesome, slightly creepy feeling that stands in contrast to the mysterious-but-not-creepy vocal. And after the climactic final verse, with the singer’s soul freed from its body, the instruments finish off the track by jumping into triple-time in order to evoke…what? “Spirits dancing in the flesh,” Carlos Santana might say. “Your mind has left your body,” Paul Kantner once sang. But Carter’s songs move me than anything either of those old Frisco hippies has recorded since the 1960s and We Can Be Together.

“The River Where She Sleeps” shows you just how well an austere arrangement can suit a song if it’s good enough, the singing is just right, and the melody is assertive. If you don’t like the melody that opens the song, I’m not sure what to tell you. The rolling banjo part just keeps chugging, and the lyric that follows sounds inevitable, with the line “when the sun refuse to shine” re-hooking each verse throughout, a strategy that would be used to great effect on “Mother, I Climbed” on Tracy’s album of Dave Carter songs Flower of Avalon. On this song, as much as on any song Dave Carter has ever written, the tumble of mystical imagery, pop music line dropping, furious rhyming, and seriously committed romanticism just plain works. And what really takes the cake is the reference to Alan Watts, which contextualizes every reference to Eastern philosophy I’ve ever heard in one of his songs. The whole thing is a masterpiece.

Those are the best two songs on the album, but they aren’t the only good ones. The first minute of “Kate and the Ghost of Lost Love” didn’t immediately strike me as anything major, although even here the melody is a good one. But it’s when Tracy Grammer pipes up on the second verse that the song’s power lifts off like a bumble bee from a flower. “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Little Liza Jane” both feature Dave Carter’s sense of joy and fun. And “Grand Prairie Texas Homesick Blues” picks up where John Prine’s “Paradise” left off. Not ever lyric works. But, after several listens, I began to notice the calculated goofiness of Dave Carter’s singing, a big plus. And the final track, “Elvis Presley,” contains a lot of stuff that, in most other contexts, would make me roll my eyes. But even there, the song’s soft fatalism is evoked with a tricky mixture of metaphors and images that add up to an enticing follow-up to Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”

Their second album, Tanglewood Tree (2001), is an improvement. Every element of their music—songs, melodies, harmonies, arrangements—kept getting better, album after album. Here, the arrangements are fuller, bringing more life to the music without intruding on the lightness and sense of fun. They are richer, but I still wouldn’t call them anything other than austere. Listen to the opener, “Happytown” with its quiet percussion and lovely organ which, on the final verse, makes Dave Carter’s self-amused singing seem to ring out with more passion and humor. But this is also the album wherein Tracy Grammer’s contributions become important to the overall sound. Her violin part on the title track and her lead singing on “The Mountain” make those entire songs work. Her harmony singing is more assertive than on the debut. Beyond that, the murder ballad is keenly written and sung, the “Farewells” are bittersweet, and “Crocodile Man” would later take on new life in Chris Smither’s hands (and voice). Listen to his version of the song on the Train Home album for evidence of the song’s greatness. In the end, though, what I like best, I think, is Dave Carter’s singing, which is probably the thing I’ve read and heard the least about, as far as these albums are concerned. It’s not a technically accomplished voice, but it’s lively and it puts across lyrics that wouldn’t necessarily work from other singers’ lips. “Happytown” is an example of that, and so is “Hey Conductor.” But “Walking away from Caroline” is priceless as written, taking a very familiar masculine boast/lament and taking it to town. How about this opening: “Caroline puts Dylan on / she always sings along / she gets the words all wrong / she falls out of time / but it sounds just fine.”

The third and best Dave and Tracy album is called Drum Hat Buddah (2002) which improves still more on the same basic Tanglewood Tree framework. The only noticeable difference, and I think it’s an important one, is that Tracy Grammer is even more involved. Her lead vocals on the best songs, like “Ordinary Town” and “236-6132” are a revelation: not perfect, but perfect for the songs. They also liven up material that might otherwise falter, like “I Go Like the Raven” and “Love, the Magician.” And her harmony vocals and fiddle sweeten Carter’s very best song, the eco-spirituality hymn, “Gentle Arms of Even.”

But here’s the amazing thing: I probably listen to the two posthumous albums as much as I do to Drum Hat Buddah. Seven is the Number (2006) is the last Dave and Tracy studio release featuring “new” Dave Carter songs that anyone will ever hear. It’s the album they were working on when Dave suffered his fatal heart attack in July of 2002, and much of it is a rerecording of Snake-Handling Man, a cassette-only release that dates back to pre-When I Go days. On this disc, every single melody is a keeper. On purely musical grounds, it may well be their most consistent album. The arrangements are the duo’s most austere since their debut. The songs may not be quite as good, as a whole, as those on Drum Hat Buddah. But I miss Dave Carter not because his songs tell some kind of primordial truth, but because of the sense of fun tucked away in his voice, because of what sounds like a spontaneous musicality in his sense of language and melody, and because I could do with more references to Mr. Rogers and lines like “I got nothin’ up my smile” in my folk music. And Flower of Avalon (2005) is even more miraculous. It’s an album of Dave Carter songs that the duo never recorded, that Tracy engaged with on her own...with a little help from John Jennings and Mary Chapin Carpenter. I wonder why she decided that these folks would be the ones to help her realize these songs on record. John Jennings is the producer that helped propel Carpenter to country music stardom in the early 1990s. His production is nothing like what you hear on the Dave and Tracy discs. I figured that this marriage would not work out and, on first listen, I thought I was right. But, repeated listening has made the glossy recording and insistently hooky arrangements more and more appealing. I don’t understand why “Mother, I Climbed,” is sung so mournfully (something I don’t blame Jennings or Grammer for). But I would say that as many as five songs from this CD are among Carter’s best, mining familiar themes to great effect. The male “Gypsy Rose” is cold and virginal, “Hey Ho” is Carter’s best (only?) political song, and “Anyway I Go” is half chorale, half lullaby and is elevated by Grammer’s soaring vocal. “Mother I Climbed,” sad though it sounds, is a remarkable statement of atheism, hooked around the lines, “open up your gate, Marianna” and “lay me down / in the dark womb of your love,” both of which have to be heard to be understood. Even when the songs aren’t winners as written, the production livens the material considerably. I remember seeing Tracy Grammer at the now-defunct Satalla in New York City, and she introduced “Phantom Doll” by telling us about Dave Carter’s love of Rufus Wainwright’s music, and you can hear it in the arrangement to the song. Much to my amazement, Flower of Avalon gets as much playing time as Drum Hat Buddah.

Well, in the end, it’s all about taste anyway. And I am hypersensitive to this duo’s virtues. Their music does more for me than dozens of other folkies, duo or otherwise. I couldn’t guarantee that someone who didn’t like this kind of music would like these folks. But I would be surprised by anyone open to the world of contemporary folk music, singer-songwriterdom, or what the late Dave Carter called “Postmodern Mythic American Music,” who wasn’t captivated by the Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer recordings. Their songs are expansive and ambitious, the harmony singing and melodies delights, and, never forget, Dave Carter was a joyful and fun-loving performer…whether he was a bodhisattva or not.

Jenny Godspeed and Patti DeRosa @ Mocha Maya’s, August 9th, 2008

2008-08-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

A couple of good local singer-songwriters played Mocha Maya’s in Shelburne Falls, MA Saturday night. Shelburne Falls is a lovely old town in northern MA, about 25 miles up route 91 from Northampton, and Mocha Maya’s, I’ve recently learned, has a pretty good concert series (http://www.mochamayas.com/). I see that Gretchen Witt (http://www.gretchenwitt.com/), a New Artists Showcase performer at Falcon Ridge a couple of weeks ago, will be playing there on the 16^th.

I attended the show with the lovely and charming Naomi Fox, who first clued me in to Jenny Godspeed (http://www.jennygodspeed.com). I listened to a couple of cuts from her album Under the Ash Tree, including a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “The Arrangement,” which I haven’t listened to since the last time I gave Ladies of the Canyon a spin. And I noticed that her album came out on Signature Sounds, a mark of quality in my book, and had contributions from Jim Henry, Duke Levine, and Beth Amsel. That’s a pretty good array of supporting musicians.

When Naomi and I arrived, Jenny Godspeed had already performed her first set of the evening, and Patti DeRosa (http://www.pattiderosa.com) was well into her own. We walked in on a song called “Complicated Woman” that was nothing special as a song, but the singer performed confidently, with assurance. Her next songs were more substantial. She did a cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America” and a lovely song of her own called “Italian Heart.” She talked about seeing Gil Scott-Heron live in the 70s and her elderly Italian grandmother, now deceased. Her guitar playing was clearly a cut above the folkie norm: mostly chords, but with some tricking-looking moves up and down the frets. The overall impression she gave was of relaxed calm, someone who knew who she was and where she’d been. Now, looking at her website, I see that she’s received accolades from her betters, including Vance Gilbert. No surprise.

Jenny Godspeed’s mini-set was pleasant, although nothing more than that. Her voice is more pristine than Patti DeRosa’s, and her songs are wordier. Dare I say artier? She played a song called “Compass” that made we wince a bit. On the other hand, she also played a love song called “More than Just Friends” that made me smile. It was simpler than her other songs and, like a lot of simple songs, was plenty profound in its way. As Pete Seeger once said, “any fool can be complicated.” Naomi and I both agreed that Patti DeRosa is worth checking out.

Naomi and I also noticed that Memorial Hall (http://www.shelburnefallsmemorialhall.org/), also in Shelburne Falls, has a nice movie series. Astaire and Rogers in Shall We Dance? (1942) this September 12^th and 13^th, and we might just go.

I’ve been immersing in two early Jack Hardy albums, The Mirror of My Madness and The Nameless One. Both are great, and I’ll write more about them another time.

Writing away

2008-08-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

My original plan with this blog was to post something of substance every Sunday. I'm not sure it will happen today. Although I have been writing obsessively as of late, a lot of that writing has been for professional purposes. I've been working on an essay about Ani Difranco and another about the evaluation of singer-songwriters, with a focus on Jack Hardy. The two essays have been bleeding into each other, which leads me to believe I need to think a bit more about what I want to say.

I'm slowly making my way through all the CDs I bought at Falcon Ridge. At its best, Vance Gilbert's One through Fourteen is excellent. "Waiting for Gillian" and "Eliza Jane" are every bit as good as I remember them being when I heard him play them at Makor back in 2001 or so, there's some pretty good band playing on some of the tracks, and there's a pretty good blues song too. His newest disc is good. At Falcon Ridge, his Tom Waits tribute made more of an impression on me, but on disc, it's the Bruce Springsteen/Steve Earle tribute that hits home. I've also begun making my way through the first CD of the first Jack Hardy box set. It seems that his earlier recordings were closer to straight country music than anything he recorded until Bandolier, although I don't think his voice lends itself as well to the strident singing he does on the early 1970s stuff. I need to listen a bit more, but so far "Go Tell the Saviour" sounds better on the Folk Brothers album. I can hardly wait to play Mirror of My Madness, which has some stuff I've heard live plenty of times but haven't heard on album since I listened to the album five years ago in Harvard Square at the long-gone used CD store on Mass. Ave. Lucy W. R.'s newest is as good as her first, and I'm starting to warm up to Lori McKenna's first while hearkening to hear her newest. I'm still trying to make contact with Jeffrey Foucault's Stripping Cane, and, I'm sorry to say, Tracy Grammer's Book of Sparrows.

More to come.

Ani Difranco @ The Pines, July 12th, 2008

2008-07-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

On July 12^th, Ani Difranco paid a visit with her band to The Pines in nearby Florence, Massachusetts. The Pines is an outdoor venue, sort of a miniature version of what you find at folk festivals, with a small hill leading down to the stage and, at the top of the hill, a series of vendors selling food and young women pushing progressive politics. I positioned myself fairly close to the stage, a move that I would later reconsider as I found myself squeezed in by a bunch of drunken dancing Difrancophiles who didn’t treat me much differently than a tree that happened to be in their way. But, for the hour or so before the opening act took the stage, it was a nice area to sit and enjoy the warmth and the beauty of Look Park.

As usual at Ani Difranco shows, I was an outsider. Back when I was with Emily, I could play the part of the chastened boyfriend, attending because his girlfriend wanted to go, even though, in reality, I was always every bit as enthusiastic as Em. The past couple of times I’ve seen Ani (this past November, in Boston, MA; this past January, in Portland, ME), I’ve been on my own, and that meant being a single heterosexual man in a sea of folks who were…well…not. I’m a bit too old to let something like that bother me, but it sure is noticeable.

One big difference between this show and recent Ani concerts I’ve seen was the popularity of the opening act: Kimya Dawson. This is the young woman who wrote a bunch of the songs that appear in the movie Juno. In concert, she strummed a guitar and half-sang, half-recited a series of wordy flights of fancy that had me smiling with pleasure. She conveys a real sweetness of temperament and a sense of fun that I love in my folk music. I don’t remember much about the songs, to be honest. I do remember that she played a few songs from an upcoming children’s album, one of which included an audience participation part in which Kimya had us make animal noises (“okay now boys and girls…”). And she played a song written by her brother, a love song that had some fun with the name of that most classy of professional wrestlers, Randy Savage. She was on stage for no more than 45 minutes or so, and I’m glad to have seen her.

When Ani and her band hit the stage, the crowd let out a yell, and we were off. I couldn’t have been happier with how she opened: “Anticipate,” a chestnut from Not So Soft (1991). Her band’s accompaniment was supple and functional, supporting the song rather than taking it over. More to the point, the band was supporting the guitarist-singer. There was no mistaking whose show this was. Ani sounded fantastic; she was very much on. On “Anticipate,” she eliminated gender specificity, as she sang “Get a firm grip / before you let go,” dropping the “girl” that used to say all that needed to be said about her target audience.

From there, she took us on a tour through her two most recent albums, a few new songs, and a couple of visits into her back catalogue. There is plenty of room in an Ani Difranco set for fan favorites, “classic” material, and songs that sound like artist favorites. She played four songs from one of her best albums, Little Plastic Castles (1998). “Gravel” came four songs into her set, and triggered screams of excitement and an all-out singalong. I love that one myself. It features almost everything that makes Ani Difranco special, privileging her percussive guitar playing and exuberant singing. “As Is” came a few songs later, and that’s a song I’d forgotten about. There’s yet another sign of greatness: a song on her best album is easy to forget about but, when heard again, is like a warm handshake hello. The impact of “Two Little Girls” was enormous, coming as it did right after the lovely ballad to her “baby’s daddy,” “Way Tight.” “Way Tight” is such a cute song, played solo, that “Two Little Girls,” also played solo, felt like a raging storm. The guitar playing on that one is like a tornado, and I wasn’t surprised that, by the end of the song, she had broken one of her ought-to-be-patented Lee press-on nails that she uses to play guitar. “Little Plastic Castles” came later, as her second encore. I can remember seeing her last year with Melissa Ferrick joining her for this song to play the trumpet part and sing some harmonies. But it sounded just fine without her.

As I mentioned earlier, Ani’s song catalogue is awfully deep, and there were other welcome moments. I’m partial to “Modulation,” with its slinky groove, from Knuckle Down (2005), and “Angry Anymore” from Up Up Up Up Up Up (1999). This is a songwriter whose catalogue has grown so deep that, with an attentive band, she is capable of switching things around from night to night. A perusal of her setlists from recent gigs (see www.onherown.net) shows that she does just that. How will her career play out, I wonder? She’s been a model of under-the-radar professionalism so far, and her songwriting, singing, arranging, band-leading, and guitar playing are wonders to behold, now as ever. She’s so full of energy, I can’t imagine the new mother ever slowing down. Her gigs are, to be sure, a bit shorter than they were in the years when I first began seeing her perform. I don’t think she plays for two hours at a time anymore. But her discography and song catalogue are so chalk full of great material, with so few flubs, that I bet she could easily make a career out of recording at this point, if, say, motherhood or health problems became too much of a burden. But, again, I can’t really imagine that. This is a performer who lives for the stage.

Speaking of which, these days Ani Difranco’s touring band is a four piece: longtime bandmate Todd Sickafoose on standup bass, Mike Dillon on percussion and vibes, and Allison Miller on drums. Each time I’ve seen this band, I’ve enjoyed it more and more. Like many Difrancophiles, I miss the days of Andy Stochansky and Sara Lee, the band that was captured on her first live album, Living in Clip (1997). But the current band measures up, I think. I used to think that Allison Miller wasn’t as subtle a drummer as Andy Stochansky, and that may well be true, but she’s damn good. I think she’s more of a rock drummer than he was, a bit more balls-to-the-wall. Mike Dillon impresses me each time out with his fills and flourishes. During this show, I was close enough to notice he and Miller grinning at each other during some songs. Either they were sharing a private joke, or they were having so much fun with each other on stage that they were bursting with joy. My guess is the second: Ani Difranco’s stage looks like a fun place to be. Finally, Todd Sickafoose is clearly very comfortable onstage with Ani. He’s been playing with her since 2004 or so, after she disbanded her road bank of the previous few years. You can see him on the Trust (2004) DVD, and he looks pretty comfortable even then. He seems to blend into the sound of the band more completely than his bandmates. In part, that’s distinctive of the bass in modern popular music; so I recently learned from watching Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, a fabulous documentary about the great sound engineer, who worked the boards for artists ranging from Ray Charles to Ornette Coleman to Aretha Franklin to Eric Clapton to the Allman Brothers. Apparently, in some of the pop recordings of the 1930s and 40s, it was often very difficult to tell if there even was a bass.

Things wound down Saturday night with a new song, a rant called “Alla This.” It wound up not being the end of her political material, though. We all screamed for the encores, of course, and, before she had returned into view from backstage, she had already begun to play the opening guitar part from “Evolve,” one her best personal-is-political-is-personal-is… songs ever. I wouldn’t mind it if that became her standard concert closer; it’s a quite a feeling to chant along with her doing the instrumental parts, as the band turns the song into a rallying cry much bigger and more powerful than what you hear on Evolve (2003). “Little Plastic Castles” came next.

To send us home, Ani served up yet another oldie. “Overlap” featured Allison Miller’s harmony singing, as the band stretched out the ending of the song for a minute, chanting the final syllable of the song title with the band leader, as Miller, Sickafoose, and Dillon kept the groove going. It felt like a lullaby except that, instead of putting us to sleep, it left us wanting more. Like all of the greats, Ani Difranco knows how to pace a concert. What doesn’t she know how to do? I didn’t much care for the big band, but even then, that was a question of taste, not judgment. Album after album, show after show, I keep wondering what she’ll do for an encore, what she’ll do to stay fresh. Live her life, appears to be the answer. More than any other performer I can think of, Ani is a star for whose fans she can do no wrong.

I’m one.

Falcon Ridge, 2008

2008-07-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

This year was the 20^th anniversary of the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in upstate NY. It also marked the end of a 6 year hiatus for my folk festival attendance. I discovered Falcon Ridge in 2000, when the good folks at WFUV put up a couple of tickets to the fest on their concert hotline. I’d enlisted an old friend from the Newport Folk Festival days (say, from 1993 to 1999), and we had a grand enough time to convince me that this is where I ought to be in late July every year. The next two summers, I attended with a constellation of friends from the Newport years and their people. I can’t say it was the 20^th anniversary that convinced me to return to Falcon Ridge. More so, I just missed going to folk festivals. The lineup looked pretty good, and Newport is a shell of its former self—it’s gone downhill since Ben and Jerry’s sponsorship ended after the ’99 fest, an event that was preceded by the Unilever sale (for commentary on that, see http://www.commondreams.org/views/041300-106.htm). After that, the fest went through a series of sponsors, including Dunkin’ Donuts and Rhode Island’s own Newport Creamery. This year’s Newport lineup features the Black Crowes, Trey Anastasio, and Brian Wilson. Cool musicians, I suppose, but if that’s folk music, then I’m Ani Difranco’s love child. Anyway, what matters more is the Falcon Ridge vibe, which I recall fondly. Of course, that had as much to do with the company than anything else, but the music beckoned strongly enough to convince me that a return was in order.

I arrived in Hillsdale in Sandro’s car. Sandro is one of Matt Winters’ (http://soundofblackbirds.blogspot.com/) comrades from high school, and I’d heard plenty of good things about him. Now I can add my two cents: he’s a good guy, a good driver, and we share a dislike of having to go to sleep in leaky tents. Of course, I don’t know anyone who enjoys that, but I digress. We arrived on Thursday, mid-afternoon, and, not long thereafter, I found myself sitting with Matt and Sandro, listening to the two of them strum and pick their guitars and trying to harmonize when I knew the songs. I didn’t tell him this, but Matt’s singing voice is occasionally reminiscent of the young Chris Smither. When he sang Neil Young’s “From Hank to Hendrix” on Saturday night, I immediately thought of Smither’s version of “I am a Child” from I’m a Stranger Too! (1970). I bet Matt would kill on that one.

I’ve known Matt since I was a first-year graduate student at Columbia University, and I thought that I was the only political science student into folk music. But Matt was running the Postcrypt that academic year (1999-2000), and it wasn’t long before we were talking folkiedom and watching people like Ina May Wool, Jeff Cannon, Mark Teamaker, and others whose names I forget on the Postcrypt stage. The Postcrypt was my first exposure to the semi-famous, like Jack Hardy (www.jackhardy.com) and The Roches (www.roches.com), as well as the less-famous-but-still-awesome like Robert To’Teras and Laura Kemp (www.laurakemp.com). I was an irregular Postcrypt attendant, but boy was that a great place to hear music. And Matt, as I recall, was an excellent host, not to mention a knowledgeable someone I could ask questions of. It was an intimate enough setting such that I could occasionally exchange a few words with a performer. I remember chatting with LA-native Mark Humphreys (www.markhumphreys.com) about Loudon Wainwright’s History and the then-recently released Mary Gauthier breakthrough, Drag Queens in Limousines. I remember being too shy to even approach the bewitchingly sexy Laura Kemp, after a spur of the minute decision to go to the Postcrypt one night yielded a fabulous 50 minutes of this woman’s powerful voice and guitar playing. I remember leaving the Postcrypt, visiting an ATM to get cash, and going back to the Postcrypt to buy a copy of her short-player Alone. Getting back to Matt, I also remember once arriving at a Postcrypt show with a friend a bit late one night and finding a crowded room. We took seats at the end of the room that I thought were free, and I looked over at Matt, who was behind the concessions counter and looking over at me, rather bemused. After the set that we had walked in on had ended (was it Frank Tedesso? I think so: www.franktedesso.com), Matt emerged from his spot, and found a couple of other chairs to reserve. I only later realized that I had taken chairs that he was saving for someone else. After my friend and I had taken our seats, I glanced to my right and noticed a dude in a green velvet jacket, casually leaning against the wall. Had I just taken Jack Hardy’s chair? I never found out.

Thursday night at Falcon Ridge was a change from my last experiences at the festival. It used to be a Friday-through-Sunday event; not anymore. The Thursday evening lineup was a good one….

The Horse Flies (www.thehorseflies.com) opened the festivities. I hadn’t heard of them before, although I now learn that they are a veteran band. Their sound was bluegrassy, but not authentically so. Their website mentions a punk influence; I can’t really hear it. They definitely hinted at Eastern melodies and textures, with a wailing/droning vocal part duplicating the fiddle part in a tune that I later learned was called “Rafting.” I also sensed a jam band aesthetic at their core, as if jamming might be in their blood but being held back by something (like, say, a 50 minute time limit). In that respect, they reminded me a bit of Railroad Earth, who played on Sunday and who I saw a couple of years ago, opening for Hot Tuna in New York City and, if I recall correctly, who played Falcon Ridge in ’01, or was it ’02? They played a cool version of “Iko Iko,” but I thought they really took off with one of their faux-Eastern ensemble pieces that seem to spiral up into the air like a prayer on the wind. I don’t know the name of that one, but I want to find out. A solid set to start off the festival.

Next up was Red Molly (www.redmolly.com), a trio that first formed at Falcon Ridge in 2004. They won me over immediately by opening with their arrangement of “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.” Actually, apart from the opening verse, it bore little resemblance to either the Reverend Gary Davis or Hot Tuna renditions, but I still liked it just fine. They played a couple of Gillian Welch tunes, including the murder ballad “Caleb Meyer,” very good, and harmonized superbly. I also give them the Falcon Ridge 2008 award for Best T-shirt By an Artist: a simple white logo over a plain red background. I didn’t buy it, but that’s a shirt I can imagine actually wearing. So much of artists’ clothing merchandise is stuff that seems cool in theory but that I’d never actually make use of. Anyhow, Red Molly’s set was lovely.

The Jason Spooner Trio (www.jasonspooner.com) was third, and I say Jason Spooner is someone to look out for. He’s a Maine-based singer-songwriter, and boy do I wish I’d known about him when I lived in Maine. His voice sounded a bit like Don Henley (in a good way), a bit like John Mayer (again, in a good way), and maybe even a touch like the young Chris Smither’s (which wasn’t bad and would eventually become extraordinary). His band’s sound was quite full, impressive for an acoustic guitar-bass-drums setup, and I couldn’t help but notice that his bass player looked like Sammy Hagar (which I didn’t and don’t hold against him, I promise). And, while paying attention to lyrics in a festival setting is always a tricky thing (as Matt mentioned to me later that evening), I heard a few things that made me look up, especially on the title track to their latest CD, The Flame You Follow. And that brings me back to the band’s sound, which was inviting, both in terms of being pleasant and making me want to hear more of the music and in terms of making me want to know more about what the singer had to say. As I write this, I’m looking at the guy’s webpage, and I’m not surprised to see some thoughtful reflections on songwriting in the “Artist’s Bio” section. With his soulful (overused compliment, but the shoe fits, I swear) voice and excellent band, his foot was already in the door. But he barged into the room with a country-flavored cover of Neil Young’s “For the Turnstiles,” Red Molly harmonizing at his side. Watch for him.

Crooked Still (www.crookedstill.com) was my first “wow” moment of the festival, definitely my favorite of the Thursday night performances. Another roots band that contains bluegrass but more than that (and less: no mandolin!), they had a dense, infectious sound that left just enough breathing room for some soloing, most notably from their banjo player and their fiddler. The banjo player, Dr. Greg Liszt, was positioned stage left, a good few feet from his quartet of bandmates. There were, I learned as I watched, two reasons for this. First of all, his mannerisms during his solos were such that someone could have gotten hurt had they stood too close. The man solos with his head a-boppin’ and one foot rising up and down. Second of all, the man needs his own mike, since, while he never sings harmony, he sure has a lot to say in between songs. I learned from Matt’s blog that his strange and off-topic comments are nothing new, but I loved it. His banjo playing was good-not-extraordinary, but his banter was great-not-good. Among other things, he announced a mud wrestling contest after show (as far as I know, it never materialized). The fiddler, Brittany Haas, was excellent, both in her solos and in her accompaniment. A couple of months ago, I saw her sister Natalie perform on cello with Alasdair Fraser on fiddle, but I hadn’t known about Brittany. I was happy for the introduction; she’s super. The singer, Aofie O’Donovan, shone on a song called, I think, “Did You Sleep Well” (yup, just verified that on their website). And their playing, both ensemble and solo, hit a peak on a something called “The Absentee.” Not sure what the song is about but, during the performance, I could have cared less. They also turned the Robert Johnson song “Come On in My Kitchen” into a slow, slinky vehicle for some tasty solos, and it was hooked around a descending pattern that the performers periodically copied in unison. I wonder what possessed them to want to do this song. The significance of the Robert Johnson catalogue is very much in question these days, IMHO. Maybe at some point, I’ll write an extended essay about that. Anyway, Crooked Still is a band worth checking out. Strange note: while I bought a bunch of CDs at Falcon Ridge this year, I skipped over this band. I’ll probably check out their iTunes offerings and make my own little compilation of favorites.

Thursday night ended with Lori McKenna (www.lorimckenna.com). Paper Wings and Halo was her first album, back in 1998, and a couple of songs from it appeared on a 1999 15-song promotional compilation for Gabriel Unger Artist Management called Fresh Tracks. Lori McKenna’s contributions, “As I Am,” and “Hardly Speaking a Word” are highlights, and Fresh Tracks was also my introduction to Erin McKeown, Jeff Lang, Rose Polenzani, Jess Klein, Mark Erelli, Beth Amsel, Kris Delmhorst, and on and on. Anyway, Lori McKenna recently put out an album on Warner Brothers called Unglamorous, and Christgau wrote a positive review (http://music.msn.com/music/consumerguide/oct07/), so I was curious to see what I’d find. At Falcon Ridge, I discovered that Faith Hill has covered her songs, that she’s toured with her, and that she’s found her home in the world of country music. Her songs speak to the country tradition somewhat, but her band was more rock than country. Her songwriting seems to be detail-oriented; the title track to Unglamorous included lines about her five kids “in shorts,” and “peanut butter on everything.” She’s from Stoughton, Massachusetts and she’s happily married. Neither of these qualities is known for being the fountain of great country songs and, really, I wouldn’t call her country. Instead, she rocked out with her band. It was basically straight up rock, with her lead guitarist breaking out a couple of rock star solos. They were good. And McKenna can really belt when she wants to. She covered “Dream a Little Dream” with a bit more subtlety, thank goodness, and, for her encore, she did “It Makes No Difference,” a country song if I ever I’ve heard one. Rink Danko’s vocal on the original recording of that song can bring tears to my eyes. Lori McKenna’s rendition didn’t quite do that, but I was glad to hear her sing it. And that concluded the Main Stage performances for Thursday night.

Friday continued a Falcon Ridge tradition: the New Artist Showcase. The Showcase consists of nearly 4.5 hours’ worth of independent musicians’ performances. Basically, each performer does two songs; I think one or two folks managed to fit a third song into their allotted time. I caught about 20 of the 23 performers. My favorites were Danny Schmidt (www.dannyschmidt.com), from Austin TX, Lucy Wainwright Roche (www.myspace.com/lwrlwr) from Brooklyn NY, and a band called Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers (www.bmuz.net) from Boston, MA. I encourage readers to check them all out. During the dinner period, 5:00-6:30, the Main Stage was dormant, but a Beatles workshop got going on the Workshop Stage. I stopped by for about half an hour, but my attention was wandering. The only thing I saw that was notable was the opening performance, which featured a whole bunch of musicians, including Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, performing “A Day in the Life.” Pretty cool, but then my attention began to stray.

The Main Stage resumed business with Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience (www.terrancesimien.com). They were fun. I really don’t know much about Zydeco music and don’t listen to it much one way or the other, but they were high energy and had a bunch of people up dancing. Matt was a part of that bunch and, in return for showing his boobs, Terrance Simien through him some Mardi Gras beads. Terrance Simien really overdid it with those beads. He threw out string after string after string of them. I find that sort of pandering exasperating; a little of it goes a long way, and a lot of it goes nowhere fast. But the beats were catchy, the singing decent, and they even threw in a rendition of “The Weight.” Not bad.

Next up: the Folk Brothers, consisting of Jack Hardy (www.jackhardy.com) and David Massengill (www.davidmassengill.com), along with a couple of backing musicians. I will not write at length about Jack Hardy. If you don’t know this man’s music and his story, you owe it to yourself to find out about it. Check out his website and, by all means, go out of your way to attend his gigs. Of his easily available CDs, the ones to start with are Omens (2000) and his most recent, Noir (2007). Massengill is a still a puzzle to me. His set at Falcon Ridge 2002 was great fun, including a tune about having his knuckles rapped by his grade school music teacher (“Ouch, ouch, ouch”) called “Culture Hurts.” And he did write “On the Road to Fairfax Country” which appeared on the Roches’ Robert Fripp-produced 1982 album, Keep On Doing. On the other hand, I once saw him play a show with Jack Hardy at the now-defunct C-Note in the East Village, and I thought his songs fell flat. Did I really need to hear a 10 minute-long song about Jack and the Beanstalk? No, I didn’t. But I knew he was an old friend of Jack’s and I was ready to be wowed. Their performance was good, but not great. Their harmonies weren’t particularly smooth and, as Allan and Matt pointed out, David’s dobro playing just didn’t mesh very well. Matt asked what the point was: the duo format didn’t add anything, and why not just have Jack sing his songs and David sing his? He’s right to ask what the point was, and I think that attentive music listeners should ask that question more often, whether the performance begs it or not. I could have asked the same thing about Crooked Still’s “Come on in My Kitchen,” but that’s a topic for another essay. I will add two things, more positive. First of all, the songs really were good: Dave van Ronk’s terrific “Losers” from Going Back to Brooklyn (1991), Jack’s “Maeve,” David’s cute “Ode to a Mouse,” a decent Bush-bashing tune from Jack, the aforementioned “On the Road to Fairfax Country” from David, and versions of “Peggy-O,” “Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies” and “Saint James Infirmary Blues” that reminded me of Jack’s serious devotion to the folk music tradition. Also, having now listened to their new album, Partners in Crime, I think whatever problems I had with their set were a question of the performance, not the idea of their duets. On record, the laid back feeling and offhand harmonizing work nicely, and their version of “Peggy-O” is really good.

The next act was one I really feared coming in to the festival. They’re called The Strangelings (www.thestrangelings.net/). They are made up of Pete and Maura Kennedy who, as The Kennedys, have been an uptempo treat at previous folk festivals, a handful of folks I’d never heard of, and Chris Thompson. I was not impressed at all with Chris and Meredith Thompson at previous folk festivals. Their big, self-involved voices reminded me of the worst sort of histrionic melodrama that you can find in this particular music genre. I remember their performance of “Tanglewood Tree” at the Dave Carter tribute in 2002, and it was a travesty. Chris Thompson repeated the travesty as part of The Strangelings in 2008, singing an overblown lead on that song. But that was the only false move in their set. In this context, which is full of rocking and Pete Kennedy’s electric sitar and some screeching, eerie violin, Chris Thompson made sense. The set reached a peak with “Matty Groves,” with Thompson (Chris, not Richard, although I couldn’t help but think of Fairport and Sandy Denny) wailing and snarling into the microphone, “I’ll kill you if I can!” And they delighted me with a cover of “White Bird” that sounded astonishingly like the band that originally recorded it, It’s a Beautiful Day. I just watched the performance of “Matty Groves” that’s on The Strangelings’ MySpace page, and it’s not as good as what I heard at Falcon Ridge. Really, they were slamming on Friday night. It was a fine dose of physical, electric music for the Main Stage and, while I’m not positive I would seek them out to see again, I would be happy to see them at Falcon Ridge next year.

Bill Evans’ Soulgrass (http://www.billevanssax.com/) performed next. They were my least favorite act of the evening. What I heard was a bunch of virtuosos showing off. Bill Evans and his bandmates (but mostly Bill Evans) treated each song as an excuse to solo. They all have some fearsome chops, but so what? After about 10 minutes, I grew bored.

The Friday night song swap concluded the evening. This is also a Falcon Ridge tradition: a quartet of singer-songwriters take the stage and perform round robin. Our contestants this year: Vance Gilbert (www.vancegilbert.com), John Gorka (www.johngorka.com), Patty Larkin (www.pattylarkin.com), and Eliza Gilkyson (www.elizagilkyson.com). I won’t go into all the details here, but I ought to begin by saying that I was not, nor have I ever been, particularly moved by either Gorka or Larkin. With the exception of Larkin’s song “Beg to Differ,” which I can remember her playing at previous Falcon Ridges and hearing on WFUV when I lived in NYC, neither of these musicians touched me. Patty Larkin can play some guitar, no doubt, but her songs don’t really move me. And John Gorka leaves me cold. He may well be a great songwriter, but nothing about this performance, or any other performance I’ve seen of his, projects any kind of musical necessity. Why is he doing what he’s doing? Is there any kind of vision here? His singing is relaxed, a bit too relaxed. Is he really performing songs, or simply reciting them? Maybe I need to get to know his songs a bit on CD before seeing him again. Then again, I didn’t know either Jack Hardy’s or Chris Smither’s songs before seeing them live for the first time, the first at the Postcrypt and the second at Falcon Ridge, and they both moved me tremendously.

But the other performers were a different story. Eliza Gilkyson is a powerful singer, and she can write. I first saw her in August of 2007 at an outdoor concert in NYC, along with Mary Gauthier, someone who I really miss seeing live. Anyhow, she was superb at that show, which included a simple but effective cover of “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” Her highlight from this evening was the title track from her newest album, Paradise Hotel. Lovely stuff. Vance Gilbert, meanwhile, was a riot. He has an energetic stage presence that often veers into the politically incorrect. I’ve seen him several times, most notably at Makor in NYC back in 2001 (with Erin McKeown opening), when he asked a woman in the audience if she wanted to know why she was at the show alone—ouch! The man can sing, play, and write at a pretty high level, and he puts his talents to excellent work. This time, he played songs from his latest album, which I bought the next day, Up on Rockfield. Songs included “Goodbye Pluto,” “Whatever Louise Wants,” and, best of all, “Old Man’s Advice,” which he intentionally wrote in the style of Tom Waits. All in all, it was a very fine evening of song swapping. It ended around quarter of 1:00 in the morning, with the quartet joining together for a final sing-along.

That was not the end of the evening’s music. That afternoon, our friends Marie, Allan (http://rattlemycage.wordpress.com), and Ellen (http://www.myspace.com/motherbanjo) had arrived and, after the song swap, the six of us headed back to the campsite. We wound up congregating in a neighbor’s tent for some late-night picking (or, in my case, harmonizing and whistling). A lovely time was had by all.

Saturday was a combination of Main Stage excellence, Workshop Stage excellence, and me trying to find a shady place to nap (we won’t get into that last one).

Patty O and the Hip Hooligans started things off on the Main Stage with a set of very light jazz. Chamber jazz…? Way too mellow. It was pleasant but forgettable, Ellen and I agreed.

Vance Gilbert was up next. His set focused on his newest album, 11 songs written self-consciously in the style of some other songwriter. He repeated some of the ones from the previous night’s song swap. Another standout was “Judge’s House,” which evoked the Bruce Springsteen of Nebraska. He also played one of his concert staples, “Taking it All to Tennessee,” which I never get tired of, and the title track to 2005’s Unfamiliar Moon, which I’d never heard before and was happy to be introduced to. A Vance Gilbert performance is incomplete without plenty of talk in between songs, and he found opportunities to praise the sign language interpreter on stage (and make a rather inappropriate comment about the sizes of their respective waist lines), yell at the pedestrians crossing in front of the stage (to sit down!), and respond to an audience member’s song request with the comment that he won’t play any song that he can’t make any money off of. As always, a class act.

I only caught part of the Most Wanted Song Swap, and I skipped Lowen & Navarro’s set entirely due to hunger pangs and exhaustion. One of last year’s Most Wanted was a guy named Joe Crookston (www.joecrookston.com), who actually sat next to me on Thursday night for the Main State performance, along with his wife and their adorable little daughter. He struck me as a nice guy and, from what I heard, the guy can write and play. He’s got a sense of humor too; the man’s first song was a cover of Supertramp. Randall Williams (www.randallwilliams.com) was another one of last year’s Most Wanted. He seemed a bit bombastic to me, although I confess I wasn’t paying as close attention as I should have been. Lindsay Mac (www.lindsaymac.com) is a cellist who strummed and plucked her instrument as if it were a guitar. I was reminded of Matt’s question about the Folk Brothers: what’s the point? Again, it’s possible that the songs were the point; I didn’t notice. In any case, I have to wonder if there was anything about the songs that required her to play the cello the way that she did. The previous day, at the Beatles workshop, she’d played “Blackbird” on the cello, and I admit it sounded real good, but isn’t that a function of the song? Ah, the greatness of the Beatles. That’s food for thought for some other essay. Oh, and I don’t think I noticed a thing about Anthony da Costa (www.anthonydacosta.com) although I heard great things about him.

Back to the John Gorka/Patty Larkin thing. I have to return to it, you see, because they were the next two performers on the Main Stage, and I missed all of Gorka’s set and all but the last two songs of Larkin’s. Matt and Ellen both told me later that Gorka’s set was great. I don’t doubt that his fans were happy…but could the man win over people who didn’t already know his material? I don’t know. I wasn’t there to find out for myself, and I didn’t interview any audience members. I should note, however, that I arrived back at our blanket to hear Patty Larkin play “Wolf at the Door,” one of about three songs I can identify upon hearing as a Patty Larkin song. I can only do that for two John Gorka songs, and I forget both of them (just kidding!). Anyway, “Wolf at the Door” is a good song. One reason it’s a good song is that it’s catchy, with a cool melody and some nifty guitar playing. The singer’s voice even takes on different tones, as she moves from refrain to verses. Those sorts of qualities are acts of generosity toward her listeners, and they make me more interested in what she has to say. In this case, the song is commentary on the music business, and the star system in particular. Does she say anything truly original here? No, but her interest and enthusiasm are palpable. I have yet to hear these qualities in John Gorka although, again, I don’t really listen to his CDs. I should give them a chance before I pass judgment. His live performances (all at folk festivals) have been disappointments. When I was at the CD tent over the weekend, I didn’t even really look for Gorka CDs. But I was curious to know more about Patty Larkin’s work. I noticed two things. First, she plays all the instruments on her new album. Second, I noticed that, on a couple of previous albums, she recruited Michael Manring (www.manthing.com) to play bass. My brother used to be a fan of this guy’s work; I believe there was a CD called Thonk that he really liked. Apart from his session work, Manring has released some albums full of instrumental music that features his bass playing. I find them basically unlistenable, but I can still appreciate the man’s talent. Anyway, moving on…. WAIT!! Before I go on, I just now saw that Manring’s website notes that he was scheduled to play with Gorka at Falcon Ridge! I need to ask Matt about that.

So, instead of attending the Main Stage for these sets, I attended the Workshop stage, where “The Blues is Still the News” was the theme. The program was great, although, as usual with these things, it wasn’t a workshop. The performers were Jason Spooner, the great Chris Smither, Eliza Gilkyson, and, the MCs of the program, Eddie from Ohio. Spooner led things off with “For the Turnstiles” and, once again, Red Molly was there to help out. The highlight of Eliza Gilkyson’s portion of the show was “Dark Side of Town,” a real crowd-pleaser. Chris Smither has been steeped in the blues ever since he first started recording in the late 1960s. I still remember Smither at the 2002 blues workshop, when he performed Mississippi John Hurt’s “Candyman” and an old Little Feat song, “Rock n’ Roll Doctor.” This time, he stuck to his own songs: “Link of Chain,” “Diplomacy” (a political song that had the crowd cheering), and “Can’t Shake These Blues.” Finally, Eddie from Ohio stole the show. I don’t know the titles to the songs they played, but Julie Murphy Wells sang her pretty ass off on a song full of sexual double entendres. And the bass player, Michael Clem, introduced their final tune by describing their encounter with Chris Smither that morning. They accosted him and begged him, “Mr. Smither! Mr. Smither! Can we please play your song?” To which he responded, “And you are…?” The song was, no surprise, “Love Me Like a Man,” made famous by Bonnie Raitt on her 1972 album, Give It Up. Diana Krall did a version of it too, a few years ago. Eddie from Ohio did it proud, with Julie Murphy Wells flexing her pipes, Jason Spooner adding harmonica, and Smither himself soloing a bit on the guitar. Throughout the performance, I kept looking over at Chris Smither, wondering how it felt to have his song performed right in front of him like that. He looked cool as a cucumber. The song is almost 40 years old now, and it really isn’t representative of the kind of the thing the man writes. Listen to his first album, I’m a Stranger Too! (1970), and the song really sticks out, sandwiched in between “Homunculus” and “Lonely Time,” both of which suggest very different concerns than “Love You Like a Man,” as it was originally called. By the time he rerecorded them for Another Way to Find You (1991), his voice had deepened and filled out, and his performance of “Homunculus” on that album is haunting and oracular.

After the dinner break on the Mainstage, I settled into a lawn chair on our blanket for the Chris Smither performance, the one I’d been waiting for all weekend long. I can’t say enough good things about this guy. As a singer, guitarist, and songwriter, he blows most other solo performers off the stage. His 2002 performance at Falcon Ridge was my introduction to the man’s work; before then, I knew the song “No Love Today,” but that was all. He had played the song swap that year, and he was the best on a stage that included Susan Werner, Greg Brown, and Erin McKeown, none whom is a slouch when it comes to writing, singing, and playing. Wouldn’t you know it, just as he took the stage Saturday evening, 2008, the rain began. Up went my umbrella, as the man launched into his opening number, “Open Up,” the lead track from his most recent disc, Leave the Light On (2006). For about half the set, the rain came and went, and it was pretty heavy at times. But the performer carried on, basically as if nothing was wrong. The performance was standard Chris Smither, a fact that Ellen pointed out later that night. She’s right: if you’ve seen the man enough times, you learn that he plays a set that doesn’t vary much from gig to gig unless a) a new album has just been released, or b) he’s been working on new material. Not much improv, not much banter in between songs. I didn’t write down the setlist in order, but he played two other songs from Leave the Light On: “Father’s Day” and, the high point of the set, the crowd-pleasing “Origin of Species.” Great stuff, and I noticed Ellen smiling when he launched into “Train Home.” Me, I was happier still that he played “Hold On” and “Drive You Home Again,” two extraordinary songs about freedom and selfhood, respectively. More extraordinary Chris Smither songs from that performance: “Never Needed It More,” “Lola,” and “Help Me Now,” along with Dave Carter’s “Crocodile Man,” which Smither introduced as a Chris Smither song that Dave Carter wrote before he, Smither, got around to it. I have a recording of the 2002 festival’s Dave Carter tribute, and Smither’s performance was the only one that had the audience cheering and wowing after the first couple of verses. And that was before he’d had much of a chance to practice the song. This past Saturday night, it sounded effortless, and it was beguiling. So there you go: a standard Chris Smither performance is still spellbinding.

The Nields (www.nields.com) were up next. I’d seen them maybe five or six times before, at festivals and at First Night in Northampton. But here’s the thing: not since Newport 1997 had I seen them with the full band, with Dave Chalfant and company. I’d always seen them as a duo, or with Erin McKeown at First Night. This night, with the full band backing the sisters, they smoked. They played old tunes like “Best Black Dress” and, with Dar on stage, “I Know What Kind of Love This Is.” They played new songs, whose titles I don’t remember, but which were catchy and fun. The only thing missing was “This Town Is Wrong,” but I only thought of that the next day, so it clearly wasn’t much missed. Their set was high energy folk-pop, and the sisters are open, friendly performers.

Next up: Dar Williams (www.darwilliams.com). I don’t remember the first time I saw her, but I’m pretty sure it was in Newport, maybe ’96 or ’97, and I remember going through a brief Dar fixation which only ended when I heard Cry Cry Cry. With that album, the Dar fixation ended abruptly, and the Richard Shindell fixation began. Saturday night, she played a fun set, bookended by crowd-pleasers: “The Babysitter’s Here” opened the show and “When I Was a Boy” closed things. “Spring Street” is a song that doesn’t do much for me on CD, but it sounded real good Saturday night. She played a new song called “Buzzer” about the Milgram obedience experiment at Yale University in the 1960s that seemed a bit preachy to me. But the highlight of the entire festival came, just as it did at Falcon Ridges past, when she led the sing-along on “Iowa.” By the time Dar hits the stage, it’s always dark, and “Iowa” always produces the cigarette lighters and flashlights from the festival-goers and, before you know it, the hillside is lit up like a midsummer Christmas tree. It’s always a lovely sight, and the thousands of harmony singers on “Iowa” lift that song into the stratosphere. It’s a wonderful thing, and you really need to be there to experience it. But this time, there was something even more special planned. Dar had Nerissa and Katryna Nields come on stage with their children, Patty Larkin with hers, along with Dar’s own son, and Dar spoke directly to them, telling them that no matter what bad things go on in the world, that there are also a lot of people working to make the world a better place here at Falcon Ridge. She had us turn off our lighters and then turn them back on, all at once, so that the kids and everyone else on stage could see us. It was really moving, a moment when the feeling of community was palpable and made even more real by the presence of the children on stage and Dar’s words directly to them that created a different kind of relationship between audience and performers. For that briefest moment, all of the clichés about feeling “one with the performers” were made real.

The Farewell Drifters couldn’t help but be a letdown after that and, anyway, I was wandering around during most of their set. What little I noticed sounded like an all too polite set of bluegrass songs, well-played to be sure, but not extraordinary.

I was really looking forward to Eddie from Ohio (www.efohio.com). At festivals past, this was always an opportunity to dance, and Matt, his girlfriend Sarah (who’d arrived that afternoon), and Ellen and myself all walked down to the front of the stage, off to stage right, to twirl and jiggle and jump around a bit. They played a few of their more recognizable songs, like “Old Dominion” and “Candido” (which I misrecognized as “Number Six Driver,” which they didn’t play). They played a cover of an old Shawn Colvin song called “Cry Like an Angel.” They played some new material. Eddie did his drum solo. Really, I wasn’t paying attention to the subtleties with this group. I was just having fun, and why not?

Martin Sexton (www.martinsexton.com) closed the show on Saturday night. I hadn’t seen him since Irving Plaza, 2001. I actually learned while at Falcon Ridge that that very show I saw had been recorded; I saw CDs of the show on sale in the merchandise tent, but I left without buying one. Anyway, I have fond memories of that show. I just remember him having one of the biggest, most pliable voices I could imagine, and his guitar playing was clearly a second voice that he played to harmonize with his pipes. And for songs, how about “Glory Bound,” “Diggin’ Me,” “Hallelujah,” “Beast in Me,” “Black Sheep,” and, from his newest album, “Happy.” He played these songs with a kind of jazzy elasticity, and his voice is a wonder of nature. I said jazzy but, as Ellen mentioned, it really felt more like gospel music. He crooned, he whispered, he scatted, he moaned, he roared. When he closed the night by proclaiming himself a patriot and singing “America the Beautiful,” he had me believing.

If I had to choose a favorite performance from Saturday night, I think Martin Sexton’s has to win the prize. There are other artists whose records mean more to me and that I’d rather listen to. I don’t think there was a single more affecting moment than Dar’s performance of “Iowa.” The Nields’ high energy set was pure up, as was Eddie from Ohio’s. And I admired the Chris Smither performance quite a bit, particularly for the man’s coolness in the face of Mother Nature. But no one puts on a show like Martin Sexton, and I can’t imagine any setting—festival, coffeehouse, theater, amphitheater, club, or stadium—in which he couldn’t win a crowd over. Maybe after multiple performances, his act would seem as rote as Chris Smither’s, but I don’t think so. The song and the performance are two different things and, while Smither’s songs may be some of the best of the last half century, Sexton is one of the best performers I’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately, the post-Main Stage events of Saturday night curtailed my Falcon Ridge experience. I had been planning to stay through until Sunday night, but, at around 1:00 AM Sunday morning, the rain began again and, this time, it didn’t let up until around 5:00. My tent couldn’t withstand the storm and, within fifteen minutes, there was water entering the tent from the sides and from up above. The temperature that night had actually been a bit milder than during previous nights but, as I became wetter, I became colder. I didn’t sleep at all that night. By the time the rain ended, most of my clothes had been drenched, what was left of the food I had brought was ruined, and the sun had already begun its ascent. I was freezing and unhappy, and I decided to take out my frustration on my tent. It probably wasn’t fair to blame the tent for having gotten wet; after all, there were some much sturdier tents around me, and I learned that a lot of the folks in them had gotten wet too. But there was no convincing me, and I vowed that, as part of my preparations to leave the festival grounds, I’d throw the damn thing in the trash.

I did stick around for Sunday morning’s Falcon Ridge tradition: the gospel set. The Strangelings, Vance Gilbert, Eddie from Ohio, and The Nields shared the stage. I was a bit out of it, but they played with energy that probably would have been infectious if I’d been able to catch a few hours of sleep the previous night. The Nields didn’t play “Keys to the Kingdom,” a surprise. But EfO did play “Great Day,” which is a Sunday morning staple at Falcon Ridge. I love that song; it shows off the band’s vocal chops better than anything else they do.

After the gospel set ended, Sandro and I looked at each other and nodded. The festival was over for us. I would have to miss Tracy Grammer’s set, which is too bad, along with Eliza Gilkyson and Railroad Earth and a few others, including the headliner, Janis Ian. Sandro and I said our goodbyes, packed up, threw out my tent, and headed off, just as the rain picked up again. Not only did it pick up, but it became a torrential downpour. I later learned that, back in Hillsdale, the rain turned to hail, and disaster ensued. After Tracy Grammer finished her set, the festival ended. I’ll leave it to Matt to post something about that on his blog or elsewhere. In the meantime, there is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjGjqmQhiTk. Be sure to read some of the comments to the video; Tracy Grammer makes a couple of contributions.

So things didn’t end as beautifully as they’d begun, which is a shame. If I’d actually been around Sunday afternoon, I’d probably be cursing out the festival right now instead of praising it, vowing never to return. But those feelings would have evaporated pretty quickly, I’m sure. The festival was more tiring than it was 6 years ago but, then again, I’m 6 years older, and the darned thing is a day longer than it used to be. I suppose it’s a good sign that I’m already eager for next year’s event. In the meantime, I’ll be living in Pioneer Valley, and there’s plenty more live music to be seen. The first order of business, then, is to start buying concert tickets.

The second order of business is to buy a new tent.

update

2008-07-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

Starting very shortly, I will begin posting here more regularly. Concert reviews will be forthcoming, both from Falcon Ridge this past weekend, and the Ani Difranco show from July 12th. I think I will be posting music essays in the weeks and months to come, along with concert reviews. If I decide to post on something else, I might redirect readers to another part of the blog. We'll see. I'll play it by ear.

why I do this

2008-03-02T07:25:00.001-08:00

Dear currently non-existent readers,

This the first posting of a blog that I hope to post to once per week. As per the title of the blog, I hope to post each and every Sunday. For today, a few words about why I am doing this. Next week, on to business.

I am doing this for fun. No other reason. A couple of my amigos from New York, Allan (http://rattlemycage.wordpress.com/)and Matt (http://soundofblackbirds.blogspot.com/), have spankin' great blogs up right now devoted to their (and, sometimes, my) beloved folk music. And yeah, sure, I'll say a few words about this from time to time. But that was part of the inspiration (and I'm also proud of my title: it's the title of an old Etta James ballad that I can't get enough of). But, really, anything's fair game. Potential topics of interest: current events, the world of work, the town of Brunswick, ME (where I have lived since August of 2007), the weather, haircuts, plumbing, Scrabble, and exercise. And I imagine music will figure quite prominently here too (do have a look at Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide, by the way (http://music.msn.com/music/consumerguide -- my favorite pop music writer, although my tastes aren't quite like his).

See you next week.

Foundation

2008-02-14T16:48:00.000-08:00

This blog created on Thursday, February 14th, 2008.