Too Hot To Come Up With A Clever Title

        

     

It's hot.  Blisteringly, mind-numbingly, hallucinatingly hot.  This morning my wife said, "The high today is supposed to be 91."  "Oh, good", I responded, "it's cooling off."  That's how hot it is--I can't even think of a good joke to make about it.  I'm reading Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (thanks Mr. P), the first part of which takes place in Venice, and it's incredibly hot there.  So it's kind of nice how that's jibing with the actual weather here.  Also too, it provides a good excuse to stay inside and read, listen to music, paint, which is what I prefer to do most of the time anyway.  So don't get the wrong idea--I'm not complaining.  Heaven forbid.

     So what does that have to do with the subject of this post?  Nothing really, just a way to kick things off I guess.  It's just my favorite song of the moment.  It's got some clever lyrics, some of which refer to the CBC and hockey (yes, she's Canadian, bless 'er), and it sounds like the Jayhawks are backing her up, though I don't think any of them play on the cd.  I like the languid pedal steel lines.  Her voice reminds me of someone, I can't quite pin it down, and the way she sings makes it seem like she isn't trying too hard, which I tend to like in a singer.  Maybe she is but she hides it well.  This is from Asking for Flowers, which came out last year.  I haven't figured out whatever in hell she's saying in this song, but it sure stimulates the pleasure center in my little brain.

I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory--Kathleen Edwards

Metal Buffoonery

Welp, just watched the Anvil documentary last night. Devastating. I know everyone keeps talking about how Spinal Tap it is, but you can't even begin to grasp it until you start soaking it in. There's riffage, there's tour retardation, there's lots of wasted time, energy and talent. But there's also some redemption -- just enough -- and some real emotional spots: family coming through; reckoning with parents; trying to maintain dignity when there's little to allow it.

It made me think of this Manowar documentary that a friend had worked on years ago. He gave me a VHS copy back in the 90s, which I mistakenly loaned to a former co-worker who never returned it. This is metal buffoonery Phase VIII, where it's all headed. Trying to decode whether the band is being ridiculed by the film-makers they hired to celebrate them is half the fun. When they visit Wagner's estate you know it's for real.

Thoughts on MJ

When I saw him do the moonwalk for the first time on TV in 1983, sitting in my living room with my parents in Ohio, I gasped. We all did. Everybody tried it at school the next day, EVERYBODY.

Now it's over and one of the big iconic American storylines of our lifetimes is officially written. So much like the Elvis story it's almost a Joseph Campbell archetype at this point. Uncanny talent. Innocence lost. The self-made prison. Money, high walls, the weirdness, then the curdling darkness. Marries Elvis's daughter! Multiple personas, story lines, periods, myths, rumors, faces, all constantly at odds till the images of the man escape the man entirely, leaving a wretch, a ghost, a bad dream. Felt like he died before he actually died. What remains are his songs, which are like pure charisma captured in sound. They're cultural bedrock now. Feels like a cord to the past was cut today.

The New York Times has a poll asking readers to pick their favorite of MJ's No. 1 hits. In the comments section I said this: "'Rock With You' splits the difference between the innocent years and the evolving adult incarnation of MJ. There's a sweetness to it, pre-weird, romantic, yet still has the sharp, ultra-tight Quincy Jones production that let's MJ's quirky funk angles poke through. Makes me miss him."

Rock With You - Michael Jackson

Washed Away By Magnitude

JP and the kids and I just got back from a week at the beach in NC. Kure Beach, near Wilmington. We had a duplex with loads of family – moms, in-laws, nieces and nephews, siblings. We just drank and watched the little ones pretend they were super heroes, spies, or nurses during a catastrophe. I love how people just set up chairs and blankets and shady structures and just hang out facing the ocean. The sun and wind, the sound, the salt breeze, the sting and stupor of the heat, the powerful push and pull of the water, the grinding going round, the drop-off expanse of horizon – there’s plenty of reason to stand vigil there, but I just appreciate the air of spiritual pilgrimage to the whole affair. It’s not Varanasi or Canterbury, but it works. It helps if you’re sozzled from bloody marys or sleep-deprivation or just in a baked stupor. I always thought of going to hear loud music as being kind of the urban, dark, smoky, night-time, electric version of a day at the beach. You face the noise, and soak it up. It can hurt you, but it feels good. It’s a doom aesthetic. But everything is, as Lefty has noted.

I’ve recently had a mid-life return to criminal file-sharing. I guess I have pangs of guilt. Anyway, one thing I had been looking for forever and finally "found" was this tune by Don Covay. If you’ve never heard Covay, listen to just how much he sounds like a famous big-lipped singer from England. Mick has spelled out his debt to Covay in places, I think, but once you know to look for it, the connection is almost distracting at times. But beyond that, this tune operates with the one of the mystical core values of musical greatness: the slowness. It’s got an elemental, glacial, unperturbability. It’s really meant for surprise exposure in the Driftatron, a stealth sonic attack, spring it on a muddled friend, stump the host, but this will have to do.

The absurdist deconstructed horn accents. The warped reverb guitar filigree. The ghostly choir. I had hoped to have this tune handy when I did my wind-themed (it recurs with me) post a while back, but here it is now.

"It's in the Wind" -- Don Covay

Speaking of Bert Jansch

And speaking of getting your roots of Led Zeppelin on, and speaking of infinite revival, and speaking of great band names, and speaking of folks who look like the ecstatic crowd shots (floppy felt hats) from the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, and speaking of potent Scottish situations, here’s a track from Trembling Bells. Listening to the vocalist, it drives home just how few people sing without affect these days. The drumming – a bit like Pentangle – is heroically jazzy and brawny, not something one expects from thoughtful folk revivalists. Even the repurposed Dylan Thomas-ism of the chorus points to some fruitful throwback. I understand that the lead singer is also a student of medieval and Renaissance music, so the band is clearly ready to dredge where they need to. The record, Carbeth, is leavened nicely, with bits of festive madness, filtered through a free jazz perspective, to keep the museumy aspect in check.

“When I Was Young” – Trembling Bells

Mellow Out

Exultation of Despair

Roscoe Holcomb is a sonic memento mori. A skull on the desk. Switching between banjo and guitar and employing a style on each that evokes the other, Holcomb sounds like Dock Boggs superimposed on a Skip James jam. It’s bluesy, but it’s also high lonesome, deep holler, mountain madness – stretching back to hermit monks in beehive caves, the rocky coast of some desolate fringe of Ireland or Scotland, waiting for the invaders to wipe away history. And he looked like William S. Burroughs leading a scouting troupe. This version of “Moonshiner” makes me think of Cormac McCarthy, both because of the bug-juice theme, the backwoods spookiness, the revenue coming to get you, stilling up all his corn, etc, but also for the bone-dry aesthetic, the compressed-into-dust austerity. Cat Powers, Uncle Tupelo and Dylan (all of whom have done versions of the song) need to take it home and work on it for a while longer. Someone once referred to Holcomb’s “exultation of despair” and I think that’s about right. You can see footage of Holcomb on YouTube -- and there's a movie, The Lonesome Sound, which features him as well. I love the thought of Holcomb sitting alone on his front porch in Daisy, Kentucky, not far from the lumber camp, singing Old Regular Baptist hymns. I’m not sure what the physical-physiological factors are, but this one of those performances that always sets up sympathetic vocal harmonies in my head whenever I hear it. I’ve seen others express the sentiment about Holcomb’s music and I share it: it’s what you want played at your funeral. But even more, it practically makes me want to hop on a pyre and light a match.

“Moonshiner” – Roscoe Holcomb

“The Wandering Boy” – Roscoe Holcomb

DOOM METAL SPELUNKER

Here's a tale that readers of The Driftwood Singers may find familiar: a curious writer takes a trip into the sub-basement of heavy metal and lives to tell about it. A look at Boris and Sunn O))) in this week's New York magazine.

Meanwhile, Dewey Dell and I saw the Japanese psych rockers Ghost over the weekend. We're too old to be standing on our feet for that long, but I have to say, they were really sensational. They had the cello player/singer from freak-folkers Espers with them, a woman who looks like a hollow-eyed Gilda Radner in an Edward Gorey skit. They played all manner of Japanese wood instruments and also clarinet and saxophone to build these expansive psychedelic suites that sounded like Fairport Convention and Jefferson Airplane and Can, but all of it off by whatever subtle number of degrees that Eastern culture is off from Western. The singer/shaman, Masaki Batoh, was a quiet force of mysticism, swinging what looked like a wooden lantern on the end of a rope and producing a ghostly drone, swaying about like he was in a trance. And when guitarist Michio Kurihara, who I discovered through his work with doom metallurgical stars Boris, went into his off-the-chain solos, it was like you were driving through an electrical storm at night, except later you realize you're in that submarine in Fantastic Voyage and you're actually inside the nerve center of a wizard's brain. Here's some hazy pictures I took using my new iPhone (click through for larger versions).





Ghost - Hazy Paradise

The Curious Case of Scott Walker

     My dear wife and I saw the Scott Walker documentary 30 Century Man recently, and it left me befuddled and bemused.  Many of you may be familiar with the Walker Brothers, thanks to oldies radio (I heard the song included below the other day whilst perusing the used clothing and records at Goodwill).  They weren't brothers, and none of them were named Walker.  But that was swinging London in the '60s, I guess.  Scott was born Noel Scott Engel in Hamilton, Ohio, and found pretty major success and fame in England as part of the aforementioned group.  Scott was clearly the auteur, the artistic one, and couldn't stand the strictures of pretty-boy pop stardom for long.  Before you could say "Jaques Brel", he was off on his own, recording album after album with only his first name and a number as the title.  Pretentious?  You betcha.  Here's a sample song title, from Scott 4: "The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime"). And dig these lyrics from "It's Raining Today", off of Scott 3: "It's raining today/And I watch the cellophane streets/No hang-ups for me".  It's like the Carpenters for denizens of the Left Bank.

     The Walker Brothers eventually reunited and put out a few albums in the latter half of the Seventies; one of them is called Nite Flights (David Bowie, one of the famous or semi-famous Scott fans featured in the documentary, included a song entitled "African Night Flight" on his album Lodger, which I suspect is a tribute).  The stuff from Nite Flights that they put in the doc sounded pretty good to me, but the album is out of print and prohibitively expensive so I probably won't own it anytime soon (unless I happen to stumble upon it in the crazy cat lady's store).   In the last twenty-five years or so Scott has only recorded sporadically--he's the Thomas Pynchon of pop, occasionally surfacing to lob another musical missive at a largely unresponsive public (which doesn't seem to bother him very much).

     I was struck by a few thoughts while watching 30 Century Man: it's probably not a very good idea to have people listen to music and film them while they're doing it (does anyone really want to watch Radiohead listen to the music of Scott Walker? Not me!); a side of beef makes an intriguing visual statement in the recording studio, but it's not the best percussion instrument (take a listen to "Jolson and Jones", from the 2006 album The Drift, and you be the judge); and is it possible to get around that vibrato of his?  It's pretty off-putting to me, disturbingly so.   "Jolson and Jones" is nightmarish, there's no other word for it.  (It also features the braying of a donkey).  It's like one of the people featured in the documentary said--he finds a chord, and then finds the dischord.  (You gotta love the line "As the grossness of spring lolls its head against the window", though).  This is music for a bad, bad trip--a far cry from the perfect pop 

of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", which I prefer. I know he's considered to be a brilliant artiste by some, but still.  He comes across as a thoughtful, intense guy in the film, and his music is definitely unusual, but I find it borderline unlistenable, and therein lies a problem--it all but screams, "Listen to this!  This is difficult, brilliant music, and you should listen to it simply for that reason!"  It's kind of hard to believe these two songs were done by the same person.  Maybe it's persons.

The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore--The Walker Brothers

Jolson and Jones--Scott Walker

Got a Bag of Red Man and a Bottle of Beaujolais

Being ahead of your time in 1989 could mean any number of things. It could have meant that you were making the kind of bad rap-rock garbage that became prevalent 10 years later in the 90s. It could have meant you were a testosterone-spewing proto-nu-metal meat head. But in the case of Urge Overkill, I think it meant something about understanding the fundamental silliness of all the established big-rock gestures while at the same time realizing the transformative power of the bombast. Instead of signing on for the punk-grunge Dogma-style refutation of stagecraft and riffage, UO came up with some noms de rock, put on medallions and jumpsuits and pretty much fused arena preening and hooks with the sonic sneer of Chicago noise rock. These guys were rocking ascots and cummerbunds, smoking cigars and hoisting snifters, long before anyone thought that was okay. I’m feeling nostalgic, I guess, and so I’ve got to share – these tunes are fist-pumpers and booze-swilling anthems. If Polvo warned their fans that they’d “just got a sitar, so be prepared” on Celebrate the Next Dark Age, Urge Overkill went practically as far, maybe further, by rocking the fake-sitar-sound guitar solo on “Positive Bleeding.” I still find myself thinking of the Darkness and the Hold Steady when listening to these. A weird midpoint.

“A Ticket to L.A.” –Urge Overkill

“Out on the Airstrip”- Urge Overkill

“(Now that’s) the Barclords” – Urge Overkill

“Positive Bleeding”- Urge Overkill

Exit Reality

Hearing Rodriguez’s debut record when it was re-issued last year served to rekindle the idea that not everything had been dredged up and pawed over yet – there’s still gold in the hills, you just got to dig. The people at Light in the Attic are sonic saints in my book. Selflessly preaching to the barnyard animals, mortifying the flesh to fortify the ear holes. Light in the Attic is releasing Rodriguez’s sophomore record from 1971, Coming From Reality (out next week), a genius title, I think you have to agree for its ambiguity. (Is the music rooted in reality, or are we entering a realm outside of reality?) And title of this track – “Heikki’s Suburbia Bus Tour Ride” – sounds like something from the coffee and bongwater-caked scrapbook of Robert Pollard. Rodriguez still sounds a lot like Donovan here, but the folkie troubadourisms of Cold Fact (his first record) have given way to a more softened soft-rock pantheism. He sounds like Dion. At the rate he’s going, his third record will likely just sound like Don, which will be cool, too.

“Heikki’s Suburbia Bus Tour Ride” -- Rodriguez

King and Queen

This record -- Juju Music by King Sunny Adé and His African Beats (1982) -- is amazing. It's hard to believe I've gotten this far into life without hearing it, but I got it on vinyl today for $1 at a yard sale and it's like I just heard Bitches Brew for the first time or tripped upon a bootleg of a secret jam session involving Animal Collective and Steve Miller Band. At times it sounds like drums/space for Mensa members. Other times like Blues for Allah as interpreted by a supergroup composed of Lee Scratch Perry and Yes. Or it's as if Girl Talk is blending together rare outsider funk samples from Ohio and later it turns out it's just one band playing all the samples and they're Nigerian. You get the idea. A revelation.

Sunny Ti De Aribya - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats

Mo Beru Agba - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats

Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats << If you just want to dip your toe, start here.

Samba/E Falabe Lewe - King Sunny Adé and His African Beats




The more I've listened to Betty Davis, the closer I've come to deciding that she is a major musical figure. Majorly unsung, certainly. I can't think of anyone else who sounds like her. It's funk rock stretched to near-Beefheartian looseness, the singing just wig-out, bat-shit crazy, almost 3D. She wields estrogen power like a rocket-propelled grenade. Booty will move. The bass player on this track (Larry Graham, from Sly & the Family Stone) is so monstrous, so assertive and in tune with Davis' funk, it's like they're having an affair behind Miles's back.

Don't Call Her No Tramp - Betty Davis

40 Years Too Late

"I'm So Sick of the 21st Century." Now there's a sentiment I can get behind. This song makes the case for Younger Brother Complex as indie rock attitude, guys shamelessly copping Dylan vocals and Strokes riffs, but in the noble pursuit of hating the present they've inherited. It's like they just threw up their hands and gave in to their older brother's continual arguments that the new shit sucks and it used to be better and he was there back in the day and they weren't. Ipso facto, you suck. I feel almost guilty about it now, beating on the brats, invoking fogy precedent to bolster superiority. But the honesty here somehow makes it sound fresh. I'm feeling nostalgia for things I've never known. It's funny because it's true.

I'm So Sick of the 21st Century - Radical Sons (link fixed)

Dead Horses Beaten Here: Nick Lowe!

I know, I know: Enough already with the Nick Lowe! After writing 10 or so posts on him, I should take the crickets-chirping silence from my colleagues as a sign that they simply aren't on board for his idiosyncratic genius. But give him one more chance! Or in this case, five more. Five songs, below, each a polished gem from an alternate Top 40 universe where the IQ of the listening public is about 50 points higher. What's interesting about Lowe's 1984 album, Nick Lowe & His Cowboy Outfit, is that it's clear he's actually responding to the Top 40 radio of the time. In some of these songs you'll hear bits of Dire Straits, Springsteen, Billy Joel, Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, all reconfigured with Lowe's pop classicism. My read of the cover of Lowe's album is that he's saying, "OK, move over and let me show you blokes how this is done." Gotta love the hoisting of the slacks. A pub scrapper with a pop hook. In "Love Like a Glove," it almost seems like he's writing a better Billy Joel song than Billy Joel can write. In the case of "Half a Boy and Half a Man," I think there was actually a counter-response a year later with Dire Straits' "Walk of Life" and John Fogerty's "Centerfield" (listen to Nick's song: there's just no way these guys didn't hear it). The stuff from The Rose of England sounds more like his take on The Byrds, almost the blue print for Teenage Fanclub.

>>> DOWNLOAD THESE FIVE SONGS HERE <<<<

From Nick Lowe & His Cowboy Outfit, 1984:

Love Like a Glove - Nick Lowe

The Gee and the Rick and the Three Card Trick - Nick Lowe

Half a Boy and Half a Man - Nick Lowe

From The Rose of England, 1985:

Everyone - Nick Lowe

The Rose of England - Nick Lowe

[Note: If I don't get some feedback on these songs, I'm going to have to continue my Nick Lowe jihad for a few more weeks. Whether that's a promise or a threat is up to you!]

New (Oxford) Speedway Boogie

     Lefty, you'll like this:  After I read your post,  Mrs. F.L. and I got into the car to go somewhere, and we turned on the radio.  Wouldn't you know:  "Truckin'" was playing, and we immediately heard the most oft-quoted line in Dead history:  "What a long strange trip it's been".  Not only that, but I was looking at the grid of photos from the NYT project you mentioned, and I clicked on one at random.  It was from the Oxford Speedway, Maine shows in July of 1988--the first time I ever saw the G.D.  Wow, man.  (No, but seriously, you gotta admit that's a little weird).  There were probably, oh, 90 thousand people at that show.  Pretty overwhelming.  I only ever saw 'em one other time, at the Cap Center outside D.C.  that same year.  I remember meeting the Rainbow People, who kind of freaked me out.  One of them was stirring a huge pot of stew or something, and he was using a canoe paddle.  (There's an image that'll stick with ya).  My friends and I were staying in a tent,  and somehow I got stung by some sort of caterpillar while I was tripping.  I remember looking down and seeing a huge welt on my arm.  (I'm serious--it really happened.  It wasn't a hallucination or anything.  Really.)...I guess that would qualify as a "bad trip".  

     I think the first time I heard the Dead was when the older of my two sisters was living at home for a while after graduating from college--she had the two-record Long Strange Trip best-of collection, and she would play it from time to time.  I must've been a freshman in high school.  I remember hearing the line "We can share the women, we can share the wine" and thinking "That doesn't seem right..." but I liked the music anyway.  Later on in my high school years a friend made a tape of Live Dead for me and I listened to it quite a bit.   I went through an anti-Dead period after getting into other stuff, but I eventually came back around and wound up really liking American Beauty and Workingman's Dead.  I have to say, "Box of Rain" is one of my faves.  I guess I've always been more of a studio-album guy instead of a bootleg-tape guy (although I do have a copy of the Oxford Speedway show somewhere).

      I like this cover a lot (it was on the Masked & Anonymous soundtrack).  Some nice guitar work from ol' Jerry.  Quite lovely, really. 

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Dead Days

If you haven't seen it yet, you better check out this photo project assembled by the New York Times (god bless'em) in which they invite readers to send in their personal photographs from Grateful Dead shows. It takes you on this great, faded-glorious and democratic journey through the years-long subculture of space noodling and noodle dancing. If you were ever part of it, you'll invariably see some snapshot of your own youthful past. In my case, the late 80s/early 90s, before it all went kaput. In the captions, they never once mention drugs, but you can plainly observe that almost everyone in the pictures is stoned. Though I still have lingering feelings of embarrassment and self-loathing about my Grateful Dead past, I figured we should talk about this, because it's funny and we're old now. And we're all friends here, right?

I first heard the Dead when a stony, crusty friend played "Dire Wolf" on a cassette tape in my dorm room in 1989. I immediately hated it. Sounded like bad country music. Then I went to an off-campus party a week later where the first thing I saw was a sundress-draped girl putting mushrooms on a peanut butter sandwich. The guys who owned the house, Will and Dave, were campus legends for having seen more Dead shows and taken more acid than anyone ever should or could. Their black Labrador retriever was named Space. Next thing I knew I was taking my 14th bong hit in a 30-person hippie circle in a tapestry-covered living room while listening to "Going Down the Road Feelin' Bad" and I was hooked (the abundance of smiley-flirty bra-less girls didn't hurt). In any case, within six months I had my own case of bootleg tapes. I saw them for the first time at Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts in July 1990. We had bought some tickets from a scalper in a McDonald's not far down the road. It was 95 degrees out and we drank beer and smoked pot and then scored some whippet balloons, which basically put me into a wobbly, tweaked-out first-man-on-the-moon condition while I stumbled around the scorching, dusty parking lot gawking at the dirty hippie bazaar. Next, we met a seedy guy in a red VW who was selling large quantities of acid. My friend bought a sheet while I kept a bloodshot eye out for the fuzz. As if. The tabs had blue unicorns on them. I took one about 30 minutes before showtime. My friend and I got in line, giddy. The ticket-taker tore my ticket to see if it was real -- it wasn't! Of course it wasn't. My head kind of imploded temporarily and I stumbled away in a confused daze, back into the now-explosively chaotic parking lot. My friend and I decided to wander around separately and meet up later. Ha! Minutes later I was offered a sandwich from a random dude sitting in a small circle of hippies next to another VW bus. I sat down and next to me was an old quasi-homeless burnout in his late 40s with a bandanna around his head. He was rocking back and forth and complaining nonstop about his miserable life and how everything had gone wrong for him. His story struck me like waves of emotions pounding on a rock. Vibes. Sad, pathetic ones. I asked him if he wanted a hug. He did. "I'm sorry, man," I said, hugging him as the smoke from tofu hot dogs burning on the mini-grill wafted over us. It was as incredibly intense as it was ridiculous. I got up and wandered around some more until I saw my car. I got in and locked the door. I wrote in my notebook for maybe an hour and a half -- drawings, poems, observations, philosophical ramblings. Eventually I went looking for my friend. When I found him, we heard tell they were about the let people into the show for free for the final 45 minutes. We rushed into the gaping coliseum door and ran up some stairs and the next thing I knew I was staring out at 90,000 people roaring and sparkling like confetti. Helicopters circled the sky shooting purple laser beams. The stage swirled. Jerry was a solitary speck. Goin' down the road feelin' bad... They closed with "We Bid You Goodnight," which I loved. When we got back to the car, everyone was wasted and I was the only one fit to drive. Me! I remember how much concentration it took to keep the tail lights in front of me from fanning together into fractal patterns. I had to slap myself and roll down the windows. We drove all night up I-95 to get home to Maine. The clouds in the dawn sky kept forming Jerry Garcia faces with long flowing beards (that's when I knew my brain was tapped out of interesting hallucinations). The boy that my parents saw the next day was sunburned, bleary, greasy, wearing beads and a dumb steal-your-face t-shirt and generally giving off a bad funk. Two days later my dad found the notebook lying around in my room and read it. Let's just say there was a crisis around the Lefty homestead until I returned to college (where my friend still had the sheet of acid and we both nearly failed out that semester as a result). I stopped listening to the Grateful Dead around 1993 and have since dipped back only briefly now and then. It's hard to separate the songs from the memories. But hearing "Attics of My Life" while peaking on acid was a highlight of my youth that I like to remember. Eyes closed, I soared through a white marble palace of multicolored windowed vortexes and was dipped in a golden lake of infinity. Felt pretty good.

You also don't want to miss this related Times article, which takes you down the wormhole of Grateful Dead taping and "best show ever" arguments among hardcore heads and how the myths of Cornell '77 and other "greatest shows ever" actually occurred because of non-musical events (when a sound engineer's home went into foreclosure, hundreds of hours of beautifully-mixed original tape were sold off, including Cornell '77). The podcast that goes along with it is four Deadhead nerds, including Ben Ratliff, geeking out in a way that is simultaneously embarrassing and awe-inspiring.

If you've got a story -- and don't lie, you know you do -- post it.

Eternal Uplift

I interviewed Brendon Massei, aka Viking Moses, not too long ago. We talked about, among other things, the saint-like genius of Dolly Parton. The Viking Moses cover of “I Will Always Love You” is a beautiful profound and skeletal thing, like he turned a Whitman’s sampler into a piece of Shaker furniture. Going back and looking through the Driftwood archives here, I’m shocked, and a little embarrassed that we’ve not featured Dolly here. I was telling Massei about “For the Love of Dolly,” a fascinating documentary about 5 super Dolly Parton fans. The film captures both the unrealistic devotion of some of Parton’s biggest admirers – a couple of whom are mentally and emotionally impaired in one way or another -- but also Dolly’s surprising humanity in dealing with must at times be creepy levels of fan obsession. I remember when they re-issued a handful of deluxe editions of classic Dolly a few years back – Jolene, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Coat of Many Colors and others – reading up on her, one was struck by how many hundreds of songs she’d written, including dozens of hits and great tunes. It’s easy to forget that Dolly is on par with Willie and Merle – don’t try to give me any attitude about that because I won’t hear it – because one gets blinded by the boobs and rhinestones. I just got a re-issue of 9 to5 recently. It’s a record I’d not listened to much, but there are gems. One thing about Dolly that always perplexed me was the way that some of her songs seem to evoke the melodies of other classic tunes – “Jolene,” for instance, always reminds me of Dylan’s “Wedding Song” off of Planet Waves, and with someone like Dylan, you never know who got where first (both came out in 1974) – and I’ve never known if she was soaking up other people’s tunes or vice versa. Don’t really care, I guess. These two tracks are mysterious. “Working Girl” reminds me of one of those weird Neil Young cromag disco/Kraftwork tunes, the plodding eighth notes in the verse with clipped vocals, the slightly out of place wailing guitar mini-riffs, and the general country template. I love the themes of uplift, the of-the-people vibe, the return to constant love. “You Know That I Love You” sounds like Brian Adams and Mutt Lang might have stewed in its juices (gross, I know) for a while.

“Working Girl” - Dolly Parton

“You Know That I Love You” -Dolly Parton

“Jonas Boys” – Viking Moses

Like the Corner of My Mind

Hey Frankie Lee, remember when we saw Willie Nelson at Tramps back in the '90s and we smoked some grass and everybody was really rowdy and drunk and it was one of the best shows ever? That's the night we realized Willie was playing jazz guitar, his riffs like Charles Mingus bass solos played on a Spanish guitar.

And, Frankie, remember when we saw Gillian Welch and David Rawlings open for Whiskeytown in that tiny club in the East Village? And we couldn't believe how great they were? How amazing Rawlings' guitar playing was? What was that place called? I think I got drunk and mooned some people in the park afterwards.

And Mr. Poncho, remember when we (again) were smoking grass in my apartment in Fort Greene and Dewey was there and we were inventing the prototype of the Drift-o-tron and Dewey put on Gillian Welch's cover of "Hickory Wind" and it was the heaviest, most devastating thing ever? And Dewey kind of won the contest?

I started out younger
At most everything
All the riches and pleasures
What else could life bring
But now when I'm lonesome
I always pretend
That I'm gettin' the feel of
Hickory Wind

Anyway, I was thinking of olden, golden days. Later, Mr. Poncho and JP Mystery and Dewey and I all went to see Willie together. More jazz. No weed though. Yesterday I was was watching a video on my iPod of the last concert Elvis gave before he died. He was bloated and puffy, six weeks from death. In it he had an assistant handing him white scarves, which he would put around his neck to collect a little sweat, then fling into the screaming audience. Imagine where all those scarves are now. In grandma's attic. In somebody's ex-brother-in-law's sock drawer. All the years combine, they melt into a dream...


Hickory Wind - Gillian Welch

Elvis Presley Blues - Gillian Welch

Young & Innocent Days - The Kinks

Stella Blue - Willie Nelson

At A Loss For Words

I don't know, sometimes I just...I mean, I can't...you know. It's just hard to...I mean, this is...oh, never mind.

Homely Girl--The Chi-Lites

Elvisland

In perhaps the biggest book-reading feat in my recent adult life, I finished the two-volume Elvis Presley biography by Peter Guralnick last week. All I can say is, it was a devastating experience. You can't come away from reading that much about Elvis Presley and not be a little bit obsessed with Elvis Presley. He's such a genre unto himself, it's almost pointless to try explaining how all-encompassing and metaphorical he is in American life and history, but suffice to say, more books could be written, probably are being written, and probably should be. The most obvious takeaway: He had a massive virgin/whore complex, and consequently also a bifurcated sense of America, a God-fearing Southerner of the Nixon-majority stripe who toted his collection of honorary police badges around with him in a leather bag, but also an Aquarian-age sexual libertine and man of social justice for whom jeweled bat capes, Edwardian collars and gold-plated belts were as American as apple pie. The center could not hold. It's sick, but there's no end to the pleasure in reading about a man who bedded every 16-year-old he could get his mitts on while popping enough speed to kill a horse and injecting himself with Demerol every day -- and then spending his off-hours singing gospel hymns, praying with the same 16-year-old girls and regaling anyone who would listen with stories of his dearly departed mother.

What you'll find in the video clip above is astounding, to say the least. The bass playing by Jerry Scheff, who had at one time played with Coltrane and was generally regarded as a jazzhead, is the pulsing, crazy-fingers heart of Elvis stage act. I'm pretty sure this is from one of a string of hugely successful Vegas shows he did at the Hilton. He's not yet completely insane with drugs and depression yet -- not yet spending every day in a 30-foot bed drowning in prescription pills (prescribed by his own personal Dr. Feelgood) -- but you can see the eccentric signs of coming madness, including the karate master delusions and winking self-loathing. Knowing the detailed back story allows you to see layer upon layer in every moment. Caught in a trap. I can't walk out. Because I love you too much. It's savagely entertaining. Once you get past minute 2:30, you're off to the races. Just watch.