When Wall Street's in freefall, the housing market's a mess and economic uncertainty makes cranky bastards of us all, the band for the moment is the Drive-By Truckers. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley specialize in the Battle Hymn of the Working Class, nowhere more precisely and powerfully than in last night's "People on the Moon," which benefitted from an arrangement that racheted up the tension during the verse.
Even before John Neff sat down at his pedal steel, the Truckers struck me as 21st Century Honky-Tonk band, playing the guitar rock that people drink, fight and fall in love to, and that was certainly the vibe last night at the Varsity, where three guys brawled like a wrecking ball through the crowd to my right, and one couple took every occasion to slow dance that they could find.
The set focused on Brighter Than Creation's Dark , and the fragmentary nature of the songs made them feel less like Big Rock and more short story-like - not what I always want from the Truckers, but it's a nice step away from precipice of Bigness for Bigness' Sake that they flirted with in song styles, song lengths, show lengths, and raw sonic poundage.
The oddity in the set was a cover of Tom Petty's "Rebels." At first, it seemed superfluous. Every song Hood and Cooley write is obviously southern, and there's no escaping the south in their voices. But in the set and in the Varsity, it was something smarter than that - it the interior monologue of the people in the songs and the people in the room. It was people finding a simple, fixed identity to claim and hang on to when everything else in their lives was unstable and complicated. It's a semi-truth that will do when you're not quite sure how rich assholes can fuck up on such a large scale that they get bailed out to the tune of billions while you can't get out of doghouse for getting drunk tailgating before the LSU game and puking in the window of your girlfriend's father's car.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Michael P. Smith
Photographer Michael P. Smith passed away Wednesday [Sorry - Friday]. Smith documented in black and white photography New Orleans music-based cultural practices in pictures that accorded dignity and vitality to Mardi Gras Indians, second line paraders, jazz funeral marchers, gospel singers and musicians. His photos record the early days of Jazz Fest, and they've presented some of the lasting images of artists such as James Booker, Professor Longhair and George Porter, Jr. Smith's photographs did what Jazz Fest has done - suggest that the music that came from New Orleans street/neighborhood culture was more than a Sunday afternoon racket, and popularized it by helping it reach beyond the city limits.
There's a good sample of Smith's work at his Web site.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Rock 'n' Roll is Hard to Do
Recently, Shout! Factory put out yet another repackaging of Mott the Hoople, Old Records Never Die: The Mott the Hoople/Ian Hunter Anthology. The twist in this two-disc set is that the second disc draws from Ian Hunter's post-Mott solo career, though many of the songs might as well have been Mott songs.
By coincidence, I finally found a cheap copy of Hunter's Diary of a Rock and Roll Star, which chronicles Mott's American tour after the release of All the Young Dudes. The book's a throwback to the days when rock had yet to become an industry of its own, and because like so many British glam bands from the early 1970s, Mott had a hard time making an impact in the States. Once the band gets away from the coasts, it's out of place and struggled through shows where soundcheck and billing issues along with their own nerves meant the shows were often disappointing by Hunter's standards.
The common theme between Hunter's song and book writing is his dark take on the rock 'n' roll myth. "Rock 'n' roll's a loser's game," he sings in "Ballad of Mott the Hoople," The good days were always some point in the past, and Hunter always found himself looking back with disappointment, so much so that John Lydon's "Ever have the feeling you've been cheated?" would have suited him well. At the same time, the songs' riffs are so big and melodies so memorable that there's no resignation in the songs.
Today Mott sounds a little quaint because so few bands aspire visibly toward bigness, and because it's so unlikely for most bands to reach for a mass audience. There are surely rock 'n' roll queens still out there looking to bed members of bands, but "groupies" seems like a part of a bygone era. But the rock 'n' roll mythology still has power and Mott captures the mixed feelings we all have toward it as engagingly as anybody does.
By coincidence, I finally found a cheap copy of Hunter's Diary of a Rock and Roll Star, which chronicles Mott's American tour after the release of All the Young Dudes. The book's a throwback to the days when rock had yet to become an industry of its own, and because like so many British glam bands from the early 1970s, Mott had a hard time making an impact in the States. Once the band gets away from the coasts, it's out of place and struggled through shows where soundcheck and billing issues along with their own nerves meant the shows were often disappointing by Hunter's standards.
The common theme between Hunter's song and book writing is his dark take on the rock 'n' roll myth. "Rock 'n' roll's a loser's game," he sings in "Ballad of Mott the Hoople," The good days were always some point in the past, and Hunter always found himself looking back with disappointment, so much so that John Lydon's "Ever have the feeling you've been cheated?" would have suited him well. At the same time, the songs' riffs are so big and melodies so memorable that there's no resignation in the songs.
Today Mott sounds a little quaint because so few bands aspire visibly toward bigness, and because it's so unlikely for most bands to reach for a mass audience. There are surely rock 'n' roll queens still out there looking to bed members of bands, but "groupies" seems like a part of a bygone era. But the rock 'n' roll mythology still has power and Mott captures the mixed feelings we all have toward it as engagingly as anybody does.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Inside Baseball
Get music writers together and eventually, they'll mope about the towers of promo CDs that threaten to swamp their desks and consume all the available space in their cubicles/offices/bedrooms/apartments. The stacks become emotionally taxing as they represent people's hopes, and each stack represents a dream ignored.
The not-so-secret secret of promo CDs is that they often end up in secondhand stores or being resold on the Internet. The L.A. Weekly's Randall Roberts gets as into the issue as his sources will permit, revealing his own standing in the story and the sort of personal ethics you only face if you have a box of CDs that you can't imagine listening to serving as an end table:
Normally I use any money I receive to buy more music, and in this way I feel that I’m funding an arts grant writ small. Each dollar gained from swapping out mediocre music goes into a pool that I disperse to worthy musical geniuses. (These days, South American and African reissues, and black metal.) Also, I have a few hard-and-fast rules. First, I never sell a promo sent to me by an L.A. band. I don’t sell promos sent to me by small, interesting L.A.-based labels. There is also a list of artists and record labels with which I’m so philosophically attuned, that it would feel like a betrayal to sell one of their CDs. And I never sell a CD before its official release date, because I think leaking music on to the Web is lame, and does way more damage than selling a measly promo.
There are parts of the story that you have to be a music writer to care about - I think - but as the story pertains to the major labels, particularly Universal, things get more complex. He examines the disclaimer attached to Universal promos, which claim the label still owns them, even though they sent them to reviewers, frequently unrequested. In answer to a suit, on reseller of promo CDs found a legal analogy in the pages of Harry Potter:
In Roast Beast Music’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed against it by Universal Music Group for auctioning promos, lawyers introduced their argument with a dialogue from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
Bill Weasley: To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs.
Harry Potter: But if it was bought—
Bill Weasley: Then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard.... They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft.
The not-so-secret secret of promo CDs is that they often end up in secondhand stores or being resold on the Internet. The L.A. Weekly's Randall Roberts gets as into the issue as his sources will permit, revealing his own standing in the story and the sort of personal ethics you only face if you have a box of CDs that you can't imagine listening to serving as an end table:
Normally I use any money I receive to buy more music, and in this way I feel that I’m funding an arts grant writ small. Each dollar gained from swapping out mediocre music goes into a pool that I disperse to worthy musical geniuses. (These days, South American and African reissues, and black metal.) Also, I have a few hard-and-fast rules. First, I never sell a promo sent to me by an L.A. band. I don’t sell promos sent to me by small, interesting L.A.-based labels. There is also a list of artists and record labels with which I’m so philosophically attuned, that it would feel like a betrayal to sell one of their CDs. And I never sell a CD before its official release date, because I think leaking music on to the Web is lame, and does way more damage than selling a measly promo.
There are parts of the story that you have to be a music writer to care about - I think - but as the story pertains to the major labels, particularly Universal, things get more complex. He examines the disclaimer attached to Universal promos, which claim the label still owns them, even though they sent them to reviewers, frequently unrequested. In answer to a suit, on reseller of promo CDs found a legal analogy in the pages of Harry Potter:
In Roast Beast Music’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed against it by Universal Music Group for auctioning promos, lawyers introduced their argument with a dialogue from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
Bill Weasley: To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs.
Harry Potter: But if it was bought—
Bill Weasley: Then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard.... They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Theresa Andersson
Preparing for an upcoming television show appearance (WLAE Wednesday 7 and 9:30 p.m. in New Orleans)reminded me that I never got around to writing about a recent Theresa Andersson show at the Republic. Andersson's new Hummingbird, Go! is her most idiosyncratic album, speaking in a more personal, less genre-oriented voice than she has in the past, and it's more interesting for it. The songs are small, in some cases fragments, and they're firmly rooted in indie rock though, as her show made clearer, they embraced where she's been as well. She opened with "Mary Don't You Weep," a song consistent with her self-titled roots rock EP, and her version stands solidly beside Springsteen's Seeger Session recording. For the album and tour, she developed a circle of instruments and pedals to allow her to loop parts so she can accompany herself, the version of "Mary" grew in power and richness, while Springsteen's is unquestionably powerful, but is the case of so much Springsteen, his recordings hit one level of intensity and stay there.
One measure of success of the show is how quickly people stopped pointing at the pedals and whispering about them - how quickly the method of production became secondary to the music - and how effectively she used the looping technology. Too often, the live process of building and layering parts is inefficient, and good three minute ideas become slack five minute songs as the first minute or so is spent laying down parts. In Andersson's case, she builds the layers as quickly as possible, and the parts she adds were almost always musically interesting at the moment she added them. They felt like more of the performance, not the capturing of a part.
In fact, the show became a form of performance art, a sort of dance she performed as she moved from drums to guitar to pedals to pedals to microphone to her violin, and so on. It became hard to see which movements were expressions of the joy of playing and which were purpose-driven. It all came together for the set's most ecstatic moment, "Birds Fly Away," the album's highlight. She reminded us she's a New Orleans musician when she snapped on a sample of a drum loop of Smokey Johnson playing a portion of "It Ain't My Fault," but like Stereolab, she immediately adds parts that recontextualize the beat, in this case making it sound more Motown than New Orleans. Like Stereolab, there's a cool, mechanical precision to the sound, but her vocal in the chorus is anything but remote. The natural vision obviously reassures her ("Birds fly away / they seek shelter. / Trees stand tall / they don't falter."), so much so that she extends the song to repeat the chorus a few more times, singing it like a spiritual revelation. She returned to the song for an encore, but the magic was spent the first time around.
I gather the process of recording and looping was designed to make traveling cost-efficient; what's impressive is how successfully she took a challenge and made something personal and rewarding out of it.
One measure of success of the show is how quickly people stopped pointing at the pedals and whispering about them - how quickly the method of production became secondary to the music - and how effectively she used the looping technology. Too often, the live process of building and layering parts is inefficient, and good three minute ideas become slack five minute songs as the first minute or so is spent laying down parts. In Andersson's case, she builds the layers as quickly as possible, and the parts she adds were almost always musically interesting at the moment she added them. They felt like more of the performance, not the capturing of a part.
In fact, the show became a form of performance art, a sort of dance she performed as she moved from drums to guitar to pedals to pedals to microphone to her violin, and so on. It became hard to see which movements were expressions of the joy of playing and which were purpose-driven. It all came together for the set's most ecstatic moment, "Birds Fly Away," the album's highlight. She reminded us she's a New Orleans musician when she snapped on a sample of a drum loop of Smokey Johnson playing a portion of "It Ain't My Fault," but like Stereolab, she immediately adds parts that recontextualize the beat, in this case making it sound more Motown than New Orleans. Like Stereolab, there's a cool, mechanical precision to the sound, but her vocal in the chorus is anything but remote. The natural vision obviously reassures her ("Birds fly away / they seek shelter. / Trees stand tall / they don't falter."), so much so that she extends the song to repeat the chorus a few more times, singing it like a spiritual revelation. She returned to the song for an encore, but the magic was spent the first time around.
I gather the process of recording and looping was designed to make traveling cost-efficient; what's impressive is how successfully she took a challenge and made something personal and rewarding out of it.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Earl Palmer
The obituaries for drummer Earl Palmer are flocking in - I've linked to a few interesting ones here - but most simply recount his resume, rhyming off the number of hits and hitmakers her was connected with. Backbeat, his memoir, addresses the central question in Palmer's life for music fans: Why leave New Orleans where he was making groundbreaking records to become a session drummer in Los Angeles, where he was faceless? Having a white girlfriend certainly played a part, but Palmer's takes on playing provides some insight:
Palmer on Ornette Coleman: "Ornette was a drag to play with, man, he sounded terrible. Whether he knew the right changes or not, he didn't play them. Played the bridge in the wrong places; sometimes he didn't eve play the bridge."
Palmer on Ray Charles: "We avoided Ray Charles too. There was a time when Ray and Big Joe Turner and Al Hibbler was all hanging around the Dew Drop doing nothing. ... When we come in after a gig, Ray would be waiting to jam with us. I thought he was good and played a hell of a lot of piano; it's just that all he wanted to do was his Nat Cole imitation and we'd played Nat Cole all night long. Came to the Drop, we were ready to play some bebop."
Palmer on Lee Allen: "Lee Allen ... was a honking tenor player. Lee was from Denver, he came to New Orleans to play football and basketball at Xavier. He played the shit out of the blues; any other tunes, he had trouble with the chords. He didn't have the knowledge of the chords to be a first-rate bebop player. He didn't read music very good."
Palmer on Shirley and Lee: "When Shirley sang, you felt around to see if you was cut - that girl sang sharp! Lee always sounded like he was trying to compensate by singing flat."
Palmer on Fats Domino and rock 'n' roll: "What was rock 'n' roll to me? I lived in a jazz world. ... It's something that we did that was not important to us musically."
Palmer on cartoons: "When it dawned on me that I could do this was when I had to play cartoon music, the hardest music I ever had to play. ... Tom and Jerry fucking cartoons. I'd think to myself, 'Here I am playing music I used to be scared to listen to, let along play!' At one time I was doing damn near all the cartoons Warners made. That music looked like fly shit, notes all over. ... I took pride in trying to do it as fast and good as I could."
The common thread in all of that is the level of challenge from a musical perspective - what's hard, what isn't. It's a way we're not used to valuing music, but it was more important to Palmer than anyone would imagine.
Palmer on Ornette Coleman: "Ornette was a drag to play with, man, he sounded terrible. Whether he knew the right changes or not, he didn't play them. Played the bridge in the wrong places; sometimes he didn't eve play the bridge."
Palmer on Ray Charles: "We avoided Ray Charles too. There was a time when Ray and Big Joe Turner and Al Hibbler was all hanging around the Dew Drop doing nothing. ... When we come in after a gig, Ray would be waiting to jam with us. I thought he was good and played a hell of a lot of piano; it's just that all he wanted to do was his Nat Cole imitation and we'd played Nat Cole all night long. Came to the Drop, we were ready to play some bebop."
Palmer on Lee Allen: "Lee Allen ... was a honking tenor player. Lee was from Denver, he came to New Orleans to play football and basketball at Xavier. He played the shit out of the blues; any other tunes, he had trouble with the chords. He didn't have the knowledge of the chords to be a first-rate bebop player. He didn't read music very good."
Palmer on Shirley and Lee: "When Shirley sang, you felt around to see if you was cut - that girl sang sharp! Lee always sounded like he was trying to compensate by singing flat."
Palmer on Fats Domino and rock 'n' roll: "What was rock 'n' roll to me? I lived in a jazz world. ... It's something that we did that was not important to us musically."
Palmer on cartoons: "When it dawned on me that I could do this was when I had to play cartoon music, the hardest music I ever had to play. ... Tom and Jerry fucking cartoons. I'd think to myself, 'Here I am playing music I used to be scared to listen to, let along play!' At one time I was doing damn near all the cartoons Warners made. That music looked like fly shit, notes all over. ... I took pride in trying to do it as fast and good as I could."
The common thread in all of that is the level of challenge from a musical perspective - what's hard, what isn't. It's a way we're not used to valuing music, but it was more important to Palmer than anyone would imagine.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
A Belated Gustav Thought
The national media has understandably moved on to Hurricane Ike's devastation, but overlooking Hurricane Gustav because there was minimal physical damage is wrong. Its economic impact on New Orleans has been brutal. Think of it this way - the entire city was forced to go on vacation at the same time whether people had money to go or not. That forced many people to spend money they didn't have, which meant they came back needy and in danger of missing bill, mortgage and loan payments. That also meant the city's businesses for the most part lost a week of business, and because people were financially strapped after the storm and evacuation, no one did good business after opening with the exception of places like Sam's Club and Wal-Mart. That sort of financial blackout at the end of the worst time of year for New Orleans - the summer - may not be devastating on the order of Katrina, but it has been much harder on the city than anyone who isn't living here realizes.
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