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The Band
Posts about The Band
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Hm, looks like me and John should start coming up with a set list... On my 42nd birthday, Friday the 18th, we'll be featured artists at Michael's Songwriter's Circle, at Tapastry in Montclair. Today's practice session had a couple of great new and old tunes in it...
Get up high, and come down easy
The Sailor's Hornpipe
Suicide is painless ("Here's the tune M*A*S*H stole from Johnny Mandel, we're stealing it back!" shouts the guitarist)
The Swallowtail Jig
The Galway Girl
Danko/Manuel
Coulter Hue
Long Black Veil
Commuter Rail
Bonaparte's Retreat
(an abortive) See Emily Play
East Tennessee Blues
The L&N don't stop here anymore
Carrie Brown
Let's listen to the Drive-By Truckers singing "Danko/Manuel".
Tapes of some of our rehearsal tunes will be forthcoming... Some of these came out really nicely!
Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band is the group that got me listening to old-time music. Not the first old-time I listened to, certainly; but when I heard Maria d'Amato (who would marry the group's banjo player and become one of the great popular music voices of the 60's and 70's as Maria Muldaur) sing "Richland Woman Blues" -- this was in the late 90's sometime, after I had come home from a Christmas visit to my parents with a cassette dub of two records, Jug Band Music and See Reverse Side for Title -- was a signal moment for me, it was when I knew what kind of music I wanted to play, what I wanted to sound like.
It was fun to happen on that Wyos cover of "Rag Mama Rag" last night -- that was one of the first songs I learned to play when I was taking lessons in finger-style guitar from Eric Frandsen. I've added a couple of tracks to the end of my You Ain't Goin Nowhere playlist, ending up with The Band's song "Rag Mama Rag". And re. The Band, exciting news! Ellen and I are going to see Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble at the Wellmont Theater on Friday the 10th.
Update: Midnight Ramble show in Montclair is postponed until April.
I compiled a video playlist of most of these songs on YouTube -- particularly recommend checking out the almost hallucinatory quality of the two The Byrds versions and the really striking fan video for the Rave-Ups' version. And the Venus 3 number, while it strays a bit from the theme of the playlist, fits in quite nicely and fits into a broader playlist theme of "Songs I would wish to cover". (Plus some bonus tracks added, if you listen to the end...)
Haven't done one of these posts for a while; I was inspired to by cleek.
"The Brave Engineer", The Carver Boys. About as Appalachian a song as I can imagine.
"How You Want It Done", Big Bill Broonzy. Really nice, strange-sounding guitar, I think it's a National?
"Mo Jo Hanna", Tami Lynn. (from an Apo mix.) -- This song ought to be on a mix tape right in front of "Polk Salad Annie".
"Yah! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread", Dylan and the Band. The comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus. A good candidate for favorite Basement Tapes track.
"The Wonderful City", Jimmy Rodgers. Cool, this mix is really drawing pretty deep on the breadth and depth of my music collection. (And wow, not even one Robyn Hitchcock track so far!)
"Honky Tonkin", Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
"Original Midnight Mama", Sylvia Smith.
"Avalon Blues", MS John Hurt.
Bonus track, "Pablo" by Sol Ho'opi'i and his Novelty Quartet.
Lots of Apostrophic tracks in this selection; and I would be remiss if I did not mention that he has published another mix tape, Unfunkked X: Stretch -- a FB friend asks whether the image is a still from the live-action movie of "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers". Looks like a good mix; but I haven't been listening to it because I'm listening to another recommendation from Apo. Ain't no sunshine.
Janis lent me a copy of Dylan's recent disk, Modern Times. The first thing that hits me listening to it is what a huge range of variation there is in Dylan's work. I mean listening to this you recognize instantly who is the author -- his voice and his personality are unmistakable -- but it's a brand-new sound, not quite like anything he's done in the last 40+ years. (That I can think of anyway. I don't have an encyclopædic familiarity with his work, but I do know a lot of it. The closest thing to this that I can think of, is Basement Tapes; but that's not at all a perfect match.)
It's a groovy sound, too, different though it is from any of the Dylans I know and love. It's going to take a bunch more listening to really get to know the songs -- on first listen it seems like the real highlights of the record are "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and "The Levee's Gonna Break"; the only song I really didn't like was "Workingman's Blues #2" -- it seemed plodding and lifeless. A couple of the other songs were not perfect lyrically -- the quality of inspiration that you feel in Dylan's best work was not always present -- but the instrumental power carried them. I'm looking forward to keeping this on my car stereo for the next while and listening to it every day until I really get to know the songs. Also interested in finding out more about the source tunes these are based on; the only one I really know is Muddy Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin'."
posted evening of November 17th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Modern Times
My mix tape of happy music is now online -- an hour of tunes with the common factor being that they all lift my spirits when I listen to them. ("Easy Listening"?) Download the mp3's here: Feel Alright mix. Track listing and some notes below the fold. Let me know how you like it!
(...Damn, I knew I was going to do something wrong with the metadata. If you add these files to iTunes, they will go in the wrong order. You can, if you wish to, correct the order by highlighting all of the songs, choosing "Get info (ctrl-I)", and deleting the "disk # of #" fields. ...Okay, I think this is fixed now... But if you add them into iTunes and the order looks wrong, well you know what to do.)
I open and close this mix with Hitchcock, just like I did my last one. I'm happy with this, I'll probably do it on my next mix as well. (After all, I mean he is the Alpha and the Omega.) The "Electric Trams" are (I believe) a nonce group, I've never heard of them other than this concert. Personnel include Hitchcock regulars Kimberley Rew and Morris Windsor. The mic check at the beginning of "The Museum of Sex" was sort of what made me start building this mix.
The Luther Strong and Carver Boys tracks are from a collection of early recordings from Kentucky that my parents gave me for my birthday (thanks!) -- if you like it be sure to check out the Luther Strong recordings archived at Juneberry. (Juneberry is also the source of the Jelly Roll Morton and Dixieland Jug Blowers tracks.) There's also some more recent folk-music type recordings here, and blurring over from folk-music into rock and roll. Enjoy!
...Is the bass line of "Got to do it right". And well, there are a lot of seriously great bass lines on the record -- that one just stood out for me this morning.
Ways to respond to rhythm in music
I want to think some more about this idea that I can't enjoy Funk unless I am able to shake my bootie... I was listening to Danko and Helm playing "Caldonia" this morning and I was loving it, digging the rhythm -- but my response to the rhythm was just to nod my head, tap the beat with my wrist. I mean I think I probably would have danced if I hadn't been driving; but there wasn't any urgent demand to. So what's the distinction between Blues and Funk that's driving this? I could totally also just be seizing on a single experience and trying to generalize from it in an invalid way -- this is a pretty common pattern with me.
On the topic of involuntary responses to music -- I find it impossible when listening to "Caldonia", not to sing along with the lines "Caldonia! Caldonia!/ What make your big head so hard?" That is running through my head all morning now.
Just downloaded from DimeADozen, this concert -- Robyn Hitchcock and The Electric Trams, 5/18/2008, Arts Theater, London, which includes a cover of "Up on Cripple Creek". Nice! I don't think I've ever heard Robyn perform a song of The Band's before; it is very pleasant to listen to. Dig the saxophone.
I had been thinking about
this combination of artists recently because I've been listening a lot to Robyn's "Serpent at the Gates of Wisdom", which includes the lines "Rolling down the frozen highway/ Like a burning tyre." Sounds to me like an obvious reference to Dylan's motorcycle accident by way of "This Wheel's on Fire". (And note that Robyn said he pictures Danko singing lead on this.)
Other good covers in this set: George Harrison's "Old Brown Shoe"; The Beatles' "I've Got a Feeling". Also, "Adoration of the City" off of "A Star for Bram", which I had never heard before.
...I love a coincidence: today a post on Catbird Records' blog features Robyn covering Every day is like Sunday, by The Smiths.
We saw I'm Not There this afternoon. My reaction to it was similar in a funny way to my reaction to The Nutcracker (though in the final analysis I way prefer this movie to that ballet) -- it was a beautiful series of music videos, each of them a valid work of art in its own right; but the combination left me a little cold.
I want to see Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid now, which the Richard Gere portion of this movie is billed as an homage to. The scene of the group on the bandstand playing "Goin' to Acapulco" may have been the most beautiful imagery in the whole film -- although the sequence of Cate Blanchett's character singing "Ballad of a Thin Man" was well worth while as well.
One thing that really struck me was "Alice Fabian" (I guess a stand-in for Joan Baez?) saying of "Jack Rollins", (approximately) "It seemed as if he was singing what I meant to say but could not figure out how to express" -- this struck me as very similar to my own reaction to some of my very favorite stuff, e.g. Orhan Pamuk's writing or Dylan's music.
posted evening of November 25th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
I mean listening to this you recognize instantly who is the author -- his voice and his personality are unmistakable -- but it's a brand-new sound, not quite like anything he's done in the last 40+ years. (That I can think of anyway. I don't have an encyclopædic familiarity with his work, but I do know a lot of it. The closest thing to this that I can think of, is Basement Tapes; but that's not at all a perfect match.)
My mix tape of happy music is now online -- an hour of tunes with the common factor being that they all lift my spirits when I listen to them. ("Easy Listening"?) Download the mp3's here: 
Robyn Hitchcock and The Electric Trams, 5/18/2008, Arts Theater, London, which includes a cover of "Up on Cripple Creek". Nice! I don't think I've ever heard Robyn perform a song of The Band's before; it is very pleasant to listen to. Dig the saxophone.