Let’s see? What can I remember of my friends back in the late sixties and early seventies, and their parents trying to go all Hait and Ashbury on us? No, I can’t think of being offered anything other than a martini. More often were instances where long hair and parental types peered at each other from opposite sides of the doors of perception. Those moments made for some funny encounters.
Yet, back then the counter culture was in fact right in the greatest generation’s face. This clip shows Mike Douglas working too hard–ha, ha!
And here The Byrds visiting Hugh Hefner on Playboy After Dark.
If you sense the large energy somehow captured in this photograph of Bettye Lavette, then imagine what its sonic equivalent sounds like. (biography) I saw her perform before a partially packed house at The Beachland Ballroom several years ago, and it was both the most soulful singing and most intense soul performance I’ve had the pleasure to be overwhelmed by.
She’s released a new record, one with an unlikely concept, Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook. Except it’s Bettye, and she could sing a phone book into fire and fury.
Once or twice in her promising career the soul songstress had the rug pulled out from under her cha-cha heels. The story of her long-waged war on going unheard started in 1962 when, at the age of 16, she was dropped from her label on the eve of a tour to promote “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man”, her Top 10 R&B hit. There was another less notorious incident, when “Let Me Down Easy” (a sweet and low slice of mid-’60s soul released by another record company) failed to take the world by storm as planned. But LaVette’s infamous blow came in ‘72, on a second bet with Atlantic, following the completion of her session in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with the Memphis Horns. It was hoped that the masterful Child of the Seventies would be her overdue breakthrough, though the record was inexplicably locked in a vault for the next 28 years.
Between ‘62 and ‘02, LaVette recorded (she charted R&B a few more times) and performed, though she was often relegated to hotel bars and stages even less illustrious. “The same show you see now I was doing for $50 a night. That’s the way I was raised. That’s the way I work mine,” she says. And yet the stone survivor hasn’t lost her ability to laugh at what’s been framed as her tragic fate. “I figured that if I could live long enough to get over to everyone’s house and do a show on their porch, I could get to ‘em all,” she says. Meanwhile, offstage she fielded dumb-ass questions like, “Didn’t you used to be Bettye LaVette?”
And then, at the turn of the century, the winds of change started to blow for the artist who was once and always Bettye LaVette. First off, a French record label dug up the tapes of Child of the Seventies and released it as Souvenirs, setting the gears in motion for her now-famous comeback “from the crypt,” as she calls it. By 2004, a collection of newly recorded works, A Woman Like Me, had earned her a W.C. Handy Award for contemporary blues achievement. Her steady and recent ascendance is owed to the critical and commercial acceptance by rock audiences for two albums recorded and released in the last three years for hipster haven, Anti Records, starting with 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise (a collection of songs produced by Joe Henry and written by women, among them Aimee Mann, Sinead O’Connor, and Fiona Apple). But mostly it’s last year’s Scene of the Crime, for which she returned to Muscle Shoals to record 10 handpicked songs produced by herself, David Barbe, and Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers that brings it all back home for LaVette and kicks things up a notch.
I’ve explained somewhere here sometime ago that my own organic journey through the sonic worlds is unapologetic in its forty year attempt to square Flatt and Scruggs with John Coltrane. These exemplar/examples are but two of the ways I can stretch the dichotomy. Noting this, on the right side will always float country air. This has ratified some biases too, because my tastes tend to put a premium on the instrument rather than the letter, and to prize naivete over bombast.
The other aspect is simply finding the first sonic grades in the school of hippie psych and cowpone. So, for example, I can dig (Untitled) and The Guilded Palace of Sin endlessly. If you miss the reference, its way too late. On the other side is a bigger subject, a subject for another post–enough to say on the left hand are the rivers of Duke and Monk.
So, it is, turning back to the folky right, that I keep an ear out for those retiring, dimming hippie folk country vibes. As it happened a very long time ago, on May 14, 1970, I ventured with a much straighter object of affection and some long-haired friends down to Public Hall to see a typical, weird, 1970 bill: John Mayall, Poco, setting up, of all possibilities, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. So: lucid appropriation; naivete; and, ear splitting bombast.
It was all good, yet I came for the ebullient middle set of Poco. The band, formed by Richie Furay and Jim Messina, ex-Buffalo Springfield, was–I’d argue–the most earnest country rock outfit of that era. This quality of sincerity would be snuffed as genre convention not more than five years later given the drug-fueled excesses of much more successful ensuant country rockers. (I’m thinking of one band in particular.) Poco would labor on through the decadent seventies and longer too. But, 1970-1971 was their true ‘hayday’.
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You Better Think Twice (Poco/Poco 1970)
Anyway. . .I was set up in more ways than one for maximum enjoyment. For one thing my mentor the amazing Dynamo Man had helped me to leverage Flatt and Scruggs and Moby Grape so as to appreciate Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, The Byrds, The Band, and, The Flying Burrito Brothers. I had seen The Byrds (and Clarence White) kick down a gym the previous fall. And, I had gotten down into the grooves of Poco‘s excellent first two records. The result remains etched: Poco-Public Hall-May 1970, remains ensconced in the roster of the ten best rock shows I ever sunk my ears into.
The spring tour later evoked live Deliverin’, their third and best record. It almost captures the ebullient gift I witnessed. A few months later lead guitarist Jim Messina was gone and Paul Cotton was in. Cotton’s thicker guitar sound helped take the band in a slightly harder direction. CBS Records sponsored a showcase before a small audience of friends and industry type at the end of September 1971. The tapes have surfaced 39 years later. Poco, live at Columbia Studios, 9/30/71, is a good one. The new, very old recording, is just as earnest and upbeat as the classic Deliverin’. The recording itself is vintage; the ol’ 8 into 4 into 2 track gains separation and looses a bit in the ambiance the Felt Forum provided for the spring date. Always a highlight was Rusty Young’s innovative, at times startling, pedal steel work.
Then there’s the context, because as much as Americana and countrified folk rock came back to the table and has remained there for two decades, the fact is by the end of the seventies the earnest originators had been sent to the far margins.
Still, it was a good feelin’ to know and this archival set is a stirring gem.
Here’s a chunk of latinized rock, pulled from a bootleg of a gig at Duke U. five days before the CBS Studios set. . . okay, mild bombast too but with some of the most psychedelicious steel work ever by Mr. Young.
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(Richie Furay put out a excellent record last year, Alive.)
Interesting article from way back on 2/27 over at the music issue blog. It has a very dry title, Archive of Macedonian Music. What drew my attention was the brief discussion of music archiving. The internet has called forth a mind-boggling informal effort to serve up personal archives. Where this is really earth-shaking is when recordings that have been hidden away in darkness, again see the light of day. At the same time, dedicated specialists finally have a forum where their efforts might earn some recognition.
This presents a fascinating paradox: this cornucopia has helped lower archival standards, and, at the same time, the wasteful attitudes of the past have been mitigated to some extent. To say the internet and its free-wheeling and free-archiving constitutes the world’s biggest record store, (or, for that matter, library,) doesn’t describe the actual status of the various collections come to be based on the net. Many of which are labors of love, even if these various outlets for what used to be, for example, the impossibly rare, reside in the wild west.
This, overall, has grievously harmed the old record business. Yet, at the same time, all the archiving and sharing has built resources the old vertical record business never had any interest in constructing. Obviously, the argument based in one-to-one lost sales is bogus, but the declining sales numbers speak for themselves. At the same time the actual reach promoted by networked interest and archival fanaticism obtains a different order of magnitude. This is a scale of enthusiasm the old record business never could even dream about. In fact, it was unthinkable a record could sell 1,000 copies and yet be heard by 10,000 (or 100,000) people.
1 JAMES PLOTKIN & BRANT GUTZEIT Sand Scroll 9:26
2 CHRIS & COSEY Over Abyss 4:35
3 LIGHTS IN A FAT CITY Aluna 10:31
4 IONE & PAULINE OLIVEROS Dear Thunder 6:05
5 NADJA-AIDAN-LEAH Hypostasis 10:19
6 BRANNAN LANE Unfamiliar Territory 8:39
7 PHILIP GELB & JOELLE LEANDRE Omissam 15:36
For May, a mix, drawn from relatable but not directly related sources. By which I mean there are sonic relations, yet this mix is basically a genre mash-up. Nothing Over is making a point about genres, in intended effect. …can’t call this dark ambient or experimental or jazz or noise, and wouldn’t wish to. Enjoy. let me know what you feel.
(Hat tip to Leonardo Solaas, who unknowingly helps me conjure and appropriate cover art for this mix. For the graphics I employed his Force Knots.)
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Often I read a band described as sounding ‘Stones-like.’ This always seems to be attached to gritty blues-based rock and has become a generic, not very helpful description.
Yet there’s something odd about this description too. The Rolling Stones have always been a very eclectic band in mixing garage, blues, soul, psyche, and hard rock. I know what the description means; think Midnight Rambler. But, the bands that have earned the description, such as The Black Crowes, don’t sound much like the Stones.
Maybe it’s more accurate to suggest comparison to the Stones implies a band sounds like a greasy blues-rock band, and, the Stones are the archetypal example.
This comes to mind when I reflect upon the classic influences extant in contemporary hard rock. I don’t track the various genres closely at all, but when I hear something with the ring of the long gone era (say, 1965-1975) I perk up.
There was a long period from the late seventies through the nineties when it wasn’t even respectable to wear those influences loudly. Oh, there was the so-called Paisley sound, but between punk and grunge and all those drum machines, it seemed (at the time,) the classic sound had been consigned to outposts like southern rock, several dinosaurs who still walk the earth, and bands loaded with chart appeal, like the Del-Lords, Jellyfish, but with no chart to appeal to.
Cycles of regeneration work in the background. Popular styles mature and begin to become weary. Still, the means for evolution lay there in the storehouse of the past. New approaches come to straddle influences. For example, take Animal Collective–moving away from alternative rock and back toward old fashioned west coast harmony pop.
One of my favorites of this new breed is The Quarter After, a L.A. quarter led by Rob Campanella, who square and update the psychedelic folk of early The Byrds and Moby Grape. But, darnit, their last record Changes After, came out way back in 2008.
When I read a review of The Dirty Sweet, they were described as sounding like the Stones. (Oh, no.) I checked out 2007′s …Of Monarchs and Beggars. As it turns out, this San Diego band does play greasy blues-rock, but their sound is much more in the vain of The Black Crowes. Harder. Except singer Ryan Koontz, who sounds much like Chris Robinson, isn’t as much a howler; a good thing.
What delights is their appealing referencing of classic hard and psych styles. The Dirty Sweet never ape their antecendents. They dial the influences in, so, don’t be surprised if you listen and muse to yourself, ‘Hmmm, Thin Lizzy, Quicksilver Messenger Service.’
Their new record American Spiritual is just as good as their very solid earlier record. It rolls more 70′s flavors into their hard rocking recipe. At times the classic model they echo is a good, little duplicated one, Spirit.
Even better is Earl Greyhound. They’re a power trio with a lock down drummer Ricc Sheridan, a jazzy bassist/singer Kamara Thomas, and a terrific guitarist with an encyclopedic grasp of antique guitar slinging, Matt Whyte. Their music doesn’t usually mine the stripped down power trio territory. Instead, they weigh in with an ambitious synthesis of disparate genres.
Their second record Soft Targets, following their debut EP, is very good. It reminds me of the hard power pop of Kings X. A typical move here grafts Brit pop harmonies onto anthemic crunch. Four years later, their brand new record Suspicious Package–great title–is altogether more adventurous and even more syncretic. If you can imagine what it means to meld Savoy Brown with Santana, you’d be onto just one of Earl Greyhound‘s stylistic fusions. And, overall, the emphasis shifts from sparkling pop to heavy driving grooves.
Earl Greyhound is daring, reaching beyond their influences, and they’re posed to be a sonic leader in the second decade of the new century.
From the youtube goldmine, soulsters Spooky and Sue, (Iwan Groenendijk and Sue Chaloner,) ebulliently lip-synching over a boho-soul workout. They had 4 Dutch top twenty hits and it was over. Holland was where they found success, yet Spooky was from Aruba, Sue from the UK. They broke up their partnership in 1977, leaving some fine party tunes to be rediscovered in our era–when all sorts of dim traces of brief comets can be followed back to their source.
