In Memoriam - June 2009

Not so well known and very crazy, but one of us none the less - Sky Saxon, Lead Singer and Bassist for the Seeds
Sky Saxon, the mop-haired bass player and front man for the psychedelic protopunk band the Seeds, whose 1965 song “Pushin’ Too Hard” put a Los Angeles garage-band spin on the bad-boy rocker image personified by the Rolling Stones,died Thursday in Austin, Tex. He was thought to be 71.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/arts/music/27saxon.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Oh, Yeah - and Michael Jackson died, too. Enough Said

Listening To Tracks - 6-28-09

Tracks:
The Budos Band - The Proposition (-)
William Gokelman - Only A Memory (++)

Albums:
Billy Joe Shaver - Greatest Hits (++)
Christian McBride & Inside Straight - Kinda Brown (+++)
Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow, Antonio Sanchez - Quartet Live! (+++)

Listening To Tracks - 6-25-09

Today has been a day to make some progress editing the recording of my old band, Elliptra, from a live performance in October 1974 at the old Timber Tavern in Boulder, Colorado. We recorded on very basic equipment but the sound has held up pretty well over the years while being transferred from reel-to-reel to cassette before being digitized.

Here are the tracks, mostly covers of R&B & rock hits and not-so-hits:
Give Me A Kiss
It's The Thing To Do
Freeway Baby
Oldies Medley: Nadine/I Fought The Law/Wonderful World
Sweet, Sweet Baby (Since You've Been Gone)
Brown Sugar
Willie and The Hand Jive
The City
You Got Me Hummin'
Lookin' For A Lover
Baby, I Love You
634-5789

Listening To Tracks - 6-24-09

Tracks:
The Tragically Hip - Coffee Girl
Todd Snider - Slim Chance
M Ward - Hold Time
The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight
The Decemberists - The Rake's Song

Albums:
Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale - Breathing Under Water
Allison Moorer - Mockingbird
Jack DeJohnette / Danilo Perez / John Patitucci - Music We Are
Todd Snider - The Excitement Plan

Found On The Web: Five Peace Band

Since I'm listening to them now, here's a short clip from YouTube that will introduce you to the Five Peace Band, led by Chic Corea and John McLaughlin. Captured live in Adelaide, Australia. See comments in earlier post for more details.

The lineup for this gig is:
—Chick Corea, keyboards
—John McLaughlin, guitar
—Kenny Garrett, alto sax
—Christian McBride, bass
—Brian Blade, Drums

In Memoriam - June 2009

Those musicians who made a contribution to the music of our generation often die without most of us noticing their passing. As we get older, there are fewer and fewer left - not only musicians, but producers, writers, and engineers. Hopefully, we don't read the obituaries everyday and mostly these people don't make the obit column. I'll try to keep up with the list of those joining the big band in the sky and pass on the key player's obits as they are published. Many musicians labor in obscurity for most of their lives, many work in the background supporting the famous and infamous, and many make contributions as members of bands long gone and nearly forgotten. Their stories are worth knowing, their impact remains long after their gone.

Last week, we lost two guys who had a big impact on rock & roll and country music.

Bob Bogle, Ventures’ Guitarist, Dies at 75

Bob Bogle, a founding member of the Ventures, the long-running guitar band whose jaunty 1960 hit “Walk — Don’t Run” became an early standard of instrumental rock ’n’ roll and taught generations of guitarists how to make their solos sparkle, died on Sunday in Vancouver, Wash., where he lived. He was 75. Although not the first instrumental band of the rock era, the Ventures were the most successful and enduring, applying their twangy, high-energy sound to dozens of albums. Older than the typical teenage garage band, the members of the Ventures cut wholesome figures, their guitar gymnastics coming across as good, clean sport. The Ventures scored a total of six Top 40 hits throughout the ’60s, including a surf remake of “Walk — Don’t Run,” which reached No. 8 in 1964, and a version of the “Hawaii Five-O” television theme, which went to No. 4 in 1969.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/arts/music/17bogle.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Barry Beckett, Muscle Shoals Musician, Dies at 66

Barry Beckett, an Alabama-born keyboardist who helped create the distinctly Southern amalgamation of rhythm and blues, soul and country that became known as the Muscle Shoals sound, and who as a producer recorded a wide range of music with Bob Dylan, Kenny Chesney, Bob Seger, Dire Straits and others, died on Wednesday at his home in Hendersonville, Tenn., north of Nashville. He was 66. As a studio musician in the 1960s, Mr. Beckett played in the band affiliated with Fame Studios, the production house that turned an unlikely Southern town, Muscle Shoals, Ala., into a center of indigenous American popular music. The band, known as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and also called the Swampers, split from Fame in 1969 and, helped by the producer Jerry Wexler, created its own studio, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in nearby Sheffield. In the mid-1980s Mr. Beckett moved to Nashville, where he worked for a time producing records for Warner Brothers, including Hank Williams Jr.’s album “Born to Boogie,” which reached the top of the Billboard country chart in 1987. He later became an independent producer, working with rock groups like Phish, and country artists like Kenny Chesney and Alabama.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/arts/music/16beckett.html?ref=obituaries

Focused Or Not - All The Music That's Fit To Discuss

Lately, I've been listening to a mix of jazz, folk, new age and blues. I've been looking for a sound or a song that blows the top of my head off and makes me want to tell everyone about what I heard. A few albums have been really good and deserve a quick listing and a good listening:

David Darling: Prayer for Compassion Probably the best New Age Cellist around, David Darling is worth giving a listen to. He has worked with everyone from the Paul Winter Consort to Steven Halpern and was an early contributor to Hearts of Space. He can be very New Age, accompanying poets and zen teachers or way out there with some of his earlier ECM recordings. He brings jazz, classical, country, pop, and new age music into his playing and compositions.

Darol Anger: Heritage Darol Anger is fiddler who's played with everyone and has a big recorded library, this is his tribute American historical folk music. Allmusic has this to say: "as a key member of new-acoustic pioneers the David Grisman Quintet, whose blend of folk, bluegrass, and jazz virtually defined the new acoustic genre, as well as advancing the harmonic and instrumental frontiers of traditional musics; as a member of the Turtle Island String Quartet in the late '80s and early '90s, Anger also helped bring virtuosic improvisation and boundless eclecticism to what had been an essentially classical, strictly composed musical format.

Chick Corea & John McLaughlin: Five Peace Band Both John McLaughlin and Chick Corea played with Miles Davis during his electric period and they've brought back some of that energy. This is electric, live and not for the faint of heart.



How about an oldie for the blues - I dug out an old box set called Chess Blues on Chess Records out of Chicago. Spanning 30 years from 1947 to 1967, these discs have all the blues songs from all the original players. Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf - they're all there. I want to spend a little time some other post discussing the influence that these guys had on all of us old rockers from the 60's, when we got the blues from the British Invasion that was let by the Beatles, Stones and Animals.

Song Of The Month - June

My June Song of the Month: Hard Times, Come Again No More by Stephen Foster.
A classic American folk song that's going through an amazing revival, due in a large part to Bruce Springsteen. This song is being used during Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's performances to close each nights concert during the Working on a Dream tour, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHrqpOju0k8&feature=related for a number of good videos of Bruce wrapping up the concert.

My favorite version of the song is sung by Willy Nelson on the Darol Anger recording called Heritage. Willie's lonesome voice and Darol's fiddle combine to dig deep into your heart. Listen to a clip on eMusic at http://www.emusic.com/album/Darol-Anger-Heritage-MP3-Download/11309966.html

There are other excellent recordings of this song by James Taylor and Nanci Griffith as well as very traditional versions by Douglas Jimerson on his album Stephen Foster's America.

British Invasion & The Stones

I was totally immersed in the British Invasion. Including the Dave Clark Five – yes, the Dave Clark Five – I even went to see them live when I was 15. They were on the bill with Them featuring Van Morrison singing ‘Gloria’. It was those first Rolling Stones lps that turned me on to the blues and led me down the path to explore Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Rufus Thomas and the rest. The music was an awakening from the pop rock of the 50’s, the end of the surf guitar, the release from the sweet harmonies. It was a kick in the ass that said, “boy, you’ve got rock n’ roll to play, to get down & dirty”.

I was listening to Hot Rocks 1964-1971 recently – so many great songs. What struck me was the diversity of the instrumentation on their hits – harpsichord, funky organ, sitar, Brian Jones harp, Mick Jagger’s tambourine, the acoustic guitar front and center on so much of their early stuff. I think that Brian Jones had an influence that, when he died, evaporated and caused their sound to change pretty quickly. Hmmm, I’ll have to research that. I’m in the process of downloading all the albums that eMusic made available, so I’m listening from the beginning. They only released the 14 ABKCO albums – before the Stones switched to Virgin for Sticky Fingers in 1971.

I didn’t see the Stones live (that I can remember) until the Bridges To Bablyon tour in 1996 in Belgium at an outdoor festival. It was fun to see people from 7 to 70 enjoying the music. Some groups are timeless in their appeal. I think that this big digital release of their old stuff is timed to the movie release of Shine A Light. I guess we won’t see another tour for awhile since they just wrapped up an 18 month tour towards the end of last year. They’ve got enough cash in the bank not to have to worry – ever.

Random Album Reviews

1966 And Jefferson Airplane Takes Off

This album was my introduction to the powerful voice of Marty Balin, paired in this first recording with Signe Anderson. This was Marty's album - still close to the folk roots in rhythm and meter but adding the searing guitar of Jorma Kaukenan and strong melodic bass lines from Jack Casady. This album came in the period of innocence for the Airplane - before Grace Slick joined and before Skip Spence left for Moby Grape. While Surrealistic Pillow was the recording that made the Airplane famous, the Takes Off music defined them as the perfection of the San Francisco sound - soaring harmonies and dreams of a different world.

The message carried by the lyrics was absolutely in tune with the times - youthful love and lust, the vision of a new world order. Naïve, yes, but this was a time of change in the country and the Jefferson Airplane were one of our leading spokes bands for this change. When Marty Balin sang "It's No Secret", and "Come Up The Years", he was telling us all that it was alright to be young and in love and anything was possible.

I was 17 years old when this album was first released and I felt that the world was about to be made over in the image that my generation was creating. This was the moment in time when the magic was starting to happen - the Grateful Dead, Sons Of Champlin, The Youngbloods all had a message that spoke to us. The San Francisco Summer Of Love was happening - and this was the perfect album to mark that time.

KERA 90.1 Sound Sessions - 1992

North Texas has one of the liveliest music scenes in the country, and KERA 90.1 FM helped to shaped this image by supporting local artists. KERA 90.1 Sound Sessions CD is a compilation of songs recorded for KERA 90.1 by local favorites including Sara Hickman and others.

I've had and enjoyed this CD since it was released in Texas in the early 90's by the local NPR station, KERA. I recently rediscovered this wonderful rarity and ripped it for my digital collection. I don't have all the background on the sessions but this music is a time capsule of the bands and sounds from Texas in that creatively fertile period. There's a definite folk rock orientation to the music, with some pop and jazz mixed in - as well as the bluegrass style from the Dixie Chicks.

You'll love the unique cut from the Dixie Chicks, "Northern Rail", that's not available on any of their other recordings. This was still the 'old' Chicks and the song is a bluegrass classic that they perform at breakneck speeds. Great stuff!

The CD opens with Trout Fishing In America doing an excellent version of their Last Days Of Pompeii, followed by Josh Alan sounding like a smooth version of Steven Stills doing 'Black Queen" with a solid band behind him. You get Brave Combo (no Polka) and a couple from Sara Hickman as well as some excellent music from lesser known bands like Trees and Little Jack Melody.