Tony's Music and Screening Room

Tony's Guitarist Picks - David Gilmour

2012-01-24T02:18:00.003-06:00

In retrospect, the last blog I wrote about Duane Allman was [in my view] extremely long-winded. Today I will keep it much shorter. The object of today’s exercise is David Gilmour, the man with the humungous Fender who is responsible for all the guitar noise from Pink Floyd.

It was the week between the last day of high school and graduation. I decided to expand my musical horizons beyond the Beatles, so I bought four albums – two by the Doors [Morrison Hotel, LA Woman] and two by Pink Floyd [The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall]. What struck me about Pink Floyd besides all the cool sound effects was the guitar playing of David Gilmour. I noticed that he didn’t get very many songwriting credits while Roger Waters was in the band, but I did notice that fact didn’t stop David Gilmour from shining brightly. Gilmour sang well [much better than Roger Waters], he played lots of different guitars, and he played them with an economy unheard of in most bands, especially the metal bands. I thought he played a lot like George Harrison in that he always seemed to choose his notes wisely, the notes that he chose always seemed perfect for any song he played, and he was never in any hurry to say what he wanted to say musically. In short, Pink Floyd was a very cool-sounding band. After the Floyd reportedly went their separate ways after The Final Cut [1982], both Roger Waters and David Gilmour put out solo albums [The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and About Face, respectively]. What caught my ear was how much Gilmour’s album sounded like Pink Floyd, and how much Roger Waters’ album did not sound like Pink Floyd. That little tidbit didn’t escape Kurt Loder either when he reviewed The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking for Rolling Stone. I believe his comments were along the lines that Gilmour had the patent on Pink Floyd’s sound, and that About Face had taken on a new luster in comparison with Roger’s work. But I’m not here to trash Roger Waters. Roger may have had all the songs, but without Gilmour to give them shape and form I didn’t think they were as good as what he produced when he was the guiding hand of Pink Floyd. David Gilmour really was [and still is] “the guitar and voice of Pink Floyd.” And as such, he also became my favorite guitar player. What makes David Gilmour such a standout? Let me count the ways…

The acoustic – Given all of their electronic wizardry, Pink Floyd doesn’t come to mind as a group that would play what David Crosby calls “wooden music.” Given the opportunity, Gilmour can unplug with the best of them. Wish You Were Here is the obvious example of Pink Floyd going “unplugged.” Fat Old Sun from Atom Heart Mother is another good example. He uses the acoustic as a soloing instrument on songs like Lost For Words [from The Division Bell] and Near the End [from About Face]. He’s used it as a rhythm instrument – the rhythm track for Dogs [Animals, 1977] is acoustic. He’ll play half a song on an acoustic before abruptly switching to an electric for solo work like On the Turning Away [A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987]. He did a live DVD where he unplugged for Shine On You Crazy Diamond. I wasn’t sure how he’d pull that off, but he did so effortlessly. Another good usage of the acoustic is found on Murder [About Face]. His use of a capo [on the second fret, I think…] makes the song sound like Norwegian Wood [both songs are in the same key]. That’s appropriate since the subject of Murder is John Lennon.

The “Nashville” tuning - This tuning on an acoustic guitar substitutes the wound E, A, and D strings with lighter gauge strings of the pairs of a twelve-string guitar. The guitar sounds like it’s an octave higher. Gilmour replaced the lower E string with a second six-string high E. I first heard this tuning utilized by Keith Richards on the Stones Wild Horses [Sticky Fingers, 1971]. Keith’s usage made Wild Horses sound more like a country song [hence the name of the tuning], but Gilmour’s use lends a shimmering, ethereal quality to whatever song he thinks needs such a quality. Gilmour first used it on I Can’t Breathe Anymore [David Gilmour, 1978]. He also used it for Hey You, Mother and Comfortably Numb.

The lap steel – Sometimes Gilmour used the lap steel for coloring [Breathe, Hey You, The Great Gig in the Sky, Comfortably Numb], other times he used it for soloing [Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part VI, High Hopes], and one time [the only one I can think of] he used it for taking over a song [One of These Days]. Until I heard One of These Days [Meddle, 1971] I had no idea you could play very loud power chords on a lap steel.

Speed kills – David Gilmour can wring more emotion out of four notes than Yngve Malmsteen or any other shredder [ahem…Steve Vai or Joe Satriani] can with one hundred. Why four notes? Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Those four notes that start Part II [3:56] of this song were all that Roger Waters needed for inspiration to write about Syd Barrett. How else can one make those long string bends that he gets on Part I of the same song? You can’t get there by playing lightning fast. Since Gilmour plays slowly compared to many guitarists, he can inject a lot of melody into his playing. You can practically sing his solos [I’m listening to Mother as I write this…].

The solos – David Gilmour’s soloing prowess is legendary. His solos are not terribly complex. It’s the age-old argument of “speed vs. feeling.” David Gilmour has feeling in abundance. For him, soling is a fun thing to do. He told a BBC interviewer once that he can’t imagine what it’s like being in the audience and listening to it. He went on to say that soloing “is the best way that some of us express ourselves.” He has a bunch of great ones [in no particular order]: Young Lust, Mother, Hey You, Wish You Were Here, SOYCD, Dogs, Time, Money, High Hopes, Have a Cigar, The Final Cut, On the Turning Away, Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2, Echoes, Comfortably Numb. Those are just the ones off the top of my head.

I remember one particular moment when I thought Gilmour’s playing coerced a “wow!” out of me. It was at a midnight movie showing of Pink Floyd: The Wall. Movies shown in a theater are fairly loud, but on this night it seemed especially loud [maybe because I wasn’t sober? who knows?]. The moment happened on the second song, The Thin Ice. The song itself is quiet, the piano sounding almost like someone is playing “Chopsticks” until suddenly there’s a drum break and there’s Gilmour’s guitar. The sound was ominous, sinister, and HUGE. It was a definite “whoa!” moment. It definitely set the tone for what came later. There’s a certain quality to Gilmour’s soloing that makes one drop what he’s doing and pay attention to the music. Comfortably Numb does that for me. I’ve heard that song hundreds of times, but whenever I hear the solos [especially the second one] I have to stop what I’m doing [unless I’m driving], crank up the volume and enjoy.

The rhythm – Overlooked in Gilmour’s playing is his rhythm prowess. One needs to look no further than Have a Cigar [Wish You Were Here, 1975] where Gilmour injects a shot of rhythm and blues after the bleak Welcome to the Machine. Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 [The Wall, 1979] is another example of rhythm playing at its most un-Floydian. His rhythm guitar sounds almost like Chic. Then there’s the aforementioned Dogs. His acoustic rhythm playing sounds like a scythe cutting through the fog.

Know when to support, know when to lead – Gilmour knows when to play, and more importantly [I think, anyway…] when not to play. When Dick Parry plays his sax solo in SOYCD Part V, Gilmour plays a nice arpeggio figure in the back. He also does the arpeggio thing on Dark Side of the Moon’s Us and Them. No guitar solo is required for this song, but his playing on top of Rick Wright’s song sets the appropriate mood. As good a support player that he is, he also knows when to step to the forefront. Hey You [The Wall, 1979] is Roger Waters’ song, but it has Gilmour’s stamp all over it. He throws in practically everything in his guitar arsenal into the song. The intro is played on an acoustic guitar in the “Nashville tuning.” He sang the verses before the guitar solo, he played the fretless bass as well as all the guitar solos and acoustic overdubs. Plus, he’s got the lap steel on there that you can hear right after he finishes the guitar solo. Everything you want to know about David Gilmour’s talent as a guitar player and arranger can be found in Hey You.

Have guitar, will travel – In addition to his work with the Floyd and his own solo work, Gilmour lends his talents to other people as a session player. He’s worked with the likes of Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney, Supertramp and Kate Bush. His latest contribution outside his own work came with The Orb. Such was the nature and extent of his contribution to their work, their latest album [Metallic Spheres] was credited “The Orb featuring David Gilmour.” My favorite bit that he did for someone else was to provide the lead guitar for Pete Townshend’s song Give Blood [White City: A Novel, 1985].

Careful With That Axe, Eugene – Gilmour’s axe of choice on the electric side is a Fender Stratocaster. I have seen him use other guitars though. For his solo on Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 he used a Les Paul. He uses a Fender Esquire with the heavy E string tuned down to D for playing Run Like Hell. I saw him use a white Fender Telecaster for Astronomy Domine. For Sorrow [A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987] he broke out a headless Steinberger to get a tone from Hell. For some of his solo work he has taken to playing a Gretsch Duo-Jet. He uses it to great effect on Where We Start [On an Island, 2006]. It’s a very nice sounding guitar – I want one! For acoustic work he’ll use a Taylor 712 CE acoustic steel string, a Martin D-28 acoustic steel string, a Jose Vilaplana acoustic nylon string, and an Ovation Custom Legend 1619-4 acoustic steel string with high strung unwound strings. They all sound very good in his hands.

I won’t go into what amps or other gear he uses. There is a website called Gilmourish [http://www.gilmourish.com/] that provides an exhaustive look at how David Gilmour gets the sounds that he does. It claims to be the largest David Gilmour gear source on the net. And having looked through the site, I believe them. If you’re a gearhead, and especially a David Gilmour gearhead, this site is your one-stop shopping to get your gear fix. It’s a very good site.

Not much else needs to be said about David Gilmour the guitar player. Carol and I had the pleasure of seeing him in person twice, both times on Pink Floyd’s last tour in 1994. The sound was crystal clear, the laser lights were very cool, the films shown on the round screen behind the stage complemented the music well. Throw in a giant mirror ball and a couple of inflatable pigs for good measure and you’ve got yourself a very good show. With Rick Wright’s death a few years ago, Pink Floyd is now history. David Gilmour has seen it all and done it all. He doesn’t have to work if he doesn’t want to. I understand that he’s working on another record these days. If so, it will be mine!

Tony's 2011 Picks - Eleven from '11

2012-01-23T00:26:00.000-06:00

I didn’t buy a lot of “new” music in 2011. There wasn’t a lot of new music that jumped out and screamed “buy me.” Some of those that I did buy I’ve already written about at length. I pretty much stuck to stuff that’s come out in years past that I didn’t get when they were new. So my list of favorite releases from 2011 is a short one. Ten of them contain new music, and one of them is a monster of a box set. As one would expect from me, the list is filled with the usual suspects, but as long as the usual suspects continue to make new music, I’ll continue to buy it and write about it.

Tom Waits – Bad As Me The only surprise about this Tom Waits release is the brevity of the songs. All thirteen songs (16 if you got the “deluxe” version) run under five minutes. Sound-wise, there are no surprises. The “human beatbox” that was prevalent on 2004’s Real Gone is gone, and keyboards that were absent from that release make their return on Bad As Me. As usual, Tom Waits barks, hollers, croons, and rasps. Keith Richards makes an appearance on four of the songs, the funniest of which is Satisfied. Here Tom Waits mocks Mick and Keith by name and tells him that, unlike the singer who “can’t get no satisfaction” he will be satisfied by the time it’s his turn to depart planet Earth. There’s an anti-war rant called Hell Broke Luce, which features machine-gun fire and snarling guitars. He’s got poetic ballads like Back in the Crowd and Kiss Me. Bad As Me has the mix of the old-timey and the surreal one expects of any Tom Waits release. The songs sound like they were recorded after all the bars closed. There’s dark humor and sorrow, anger, disgust and heartbreak. The disgust comes in Talking At The Same Time: “We bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit, we got the rind…” The sadness comes in Pay Me where the singer tells of his family who pays him not to come home. The only way down from the gallows is to swing… To borrow a phrase, Bad As Me is chock full of brawlers, bawlers and bastards. It is essential for any Tom Waits fan. Same as it ever was…

Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down Ry Cooder’s most recent works have looked back in the past. There’s his “California trilogy” – Chávez Ravine [2005], My Name Is Buddy [2007], and I, Flathead [2008]. These albums serve as an alternative history of California one won’t find in the text book. Chávez Ravine dealt with the Los Angeles Hispanic neighborhood that “disappeared” [it was bulldozed in the name of “progress”] to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium. My Name Is Buddy chronicles the travels of a red cat named Buddy and some of his animal friends as they encounter dust bowl refugees, union organizers, union busters, anti-Communists, and a country music singer named Kash Buk. Kash Buk reappears in I, Flathead, with its tales of drag-racing aliens, hot rods, honky tonks, hot blondes, his dog [his “homeland security”] Spayed Cooley, and 5000 country songs nobody wants to sing. Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down doesn’t have an underlying them like the aforementioned trilogy. Here, Ry Cooder channels his inner Woody Guthrie, and boy is he pissed.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down finds Ry Cooder commenting on current events. He has a well-earned reputation of being a renowned Americana musicologist, and he puts that expertise to work on this CD. Here he mixes blues, folk, ragtime, norteño, rock, and country. Some of Ry Cooder’s usual suspects appear here – son Joachim [drums], Flaco Jimenez [accordion], Terry Evans, Willie Green and Juliette Commagere [vocals], Rene Camacho [bass]. Ry has the rest of the instruments covered – guitars, banjo, mandola, bajo sexton, bass, marimba. Like Tom Waits he skewers those bankers who received financial bailouts from the government in 2008 in No Banker Left Behind. In El Corrido Jesse James the outlaw asks God for his guns back so he can dispense some frontier-style justice on Wall Street. In Quicksand a Mexican man describes a border crossing during which the guide for his group leaves in the middle of the night, and the man who takes over dies the next day in the sun. He shows his disgust for Republicans in I Want My Crown [Republicans changed the lock on the heavenly door / keys to the kingdom don’t fit no more…]. Christmas Time This Year is Ry Cooder’s scathing indictment of America’s involvement in wars overseas set to a Mexican polka. But there’s humor here as well. John Lee Hooker for President imagines a world where all the Supreme Court justices are “fine looking women,” and if you’re nice you’ll have one bourbon, one scotch and one beer three times a day. The children get milk, cream and alcohol if they stay in school. If only…

Emmylou Harris – Hard Bargain For most of her career, Emmylou Harris has contented herself with being an interpreter of songs written by other people. She’s always been insecure about her songwriting. I think she sells herself short in that regard – she wrote From Boulder to Birmingham! What I didn’t realize [and I probably should have – I have many or her albums] was that she was the primary songwriter for only three of her albums before Hard Bargain. Emmylou wrote all the songs on Red Dirt Girl [2000] and Stumble Into Grace [2003], but returned to recording other peoples’ songs for All I Intended to Be [2008]. On Hard Bargain, Emmylou returned to songwriting and produced a wonderful collection of songs. There are three elegies on Hard Bargain. The Road is for Gram Parsons. In this song she can still remember every song he played. My Name is Emmitt Till is told in the first person, telling how a black boy from Chicago was murdered in 1950s Mississippi for talking to a white woman, how he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten, stabbed, shot, and thrown in the river “like trash when they were done.” And she tells of how Emmitt Till’s mother kept the casket open to show her son’s mutilated body “for the whole wide world to see.” Darlin’ Kate is for her late friend Kate McGarrigle, a frequent collaborator who lost her battle with cancer.

The album includes Six White Cadillacs. Here, death is a welcome respite from the road that “we won’t have to wander anymore.” The Ship on His Arm is about a wartime marriage that was inspired by her own parents, who married during World War II. There’s New Orleans, where “the whole world stood to watch us drown,” but “to cut and run ain’t in our blood.” It’s interesting how Emmylou chose to make “hurricane” and “Pontchartrain” rhyme in a song. There are songs of lonely women – Lonely Girl and Nobody. Given her long-time advocacy for animal rights, she even wrote a song about a Big Black Dog. There’s a lot of melancholy on Hard Bargain, but it’s a good album nonetheless. Her voice is still as angelic as ever. I read in Billboard not too long ago that her next project will be a duets album with Rodney Crowell. It’ll be good, that much is certain.

U2 – Achtung Baby Box Set Carol got me this for my birthday. When author Bill Flanagan wrote his book U2 At the End of the World, he wrote about U2 in their Achtung Baby/Zooropa period. Manager Paul McGuinness described this time as a three-year campaign. This box set is the product of that period. Included in this set are six CDs and four DVDs. The six CDs include the original Achtung Baby remastered, the original Zooropa remastered, B-sides and Rarities, 2 CDs of remixes [the Über and Ünter remixes], and the “alternate” Achtung Baby. The hardest core U2 fans have heard all of these before, but not me. The remastered Achtung Baby and Zooropa sound as good as one would expect. The B-sides and Rarities are interesting. I could do without the remixes. The “alternate” album [‘Kindergaten’] is for U2 what Let It Be…Naked is for the Beatles. Take away the studio tricks and underneath you still get a pretty good album. The DVDs include the documentary U2: From the Sky Down. U2 returned to Hansa Studios in Berlin to discuss the making of Achtung Baby with director Davis Guggenheim [he also made It Might Get Loud]. Half the film is devoted to the history of the band until 1990, the second half is devoted to the making of the album. The best part of this film is when Bono and the Edge listen to some of the original session tapes. You can almost see a light bulb go one over both of them when they hear how One came out of a working session for a different song. One DVD contains each of the videos made from the Achtung Baby/Zooropa period. A third DVD is the Zoo TV – Live From Sydney concert. This show was quite a bit of sensory overload, but it was good to see Bono not take himself so seriously for once. The fourth and last DVD has lots of goodies – a Zoo TV special, an MTV documentary, MTV’s show Most Wanted where a fan got to see a U2 show via satellite from his house, a video short about Trabants [‘Trabantland’], U2 on Naked City, U2 on TV-AM. There’s CD-ROM content as well, complete with links to websites. This is how to do a box set the right way.

Glen Campbell – Ghost On The Canvas The country icon makes his final album and says goodbye to his fans. http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Glen%20Campbell

Gregg Allman – Low Country Blues Gregg’s first solo studio album in fourteen years has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Blues Album category. In fact, of the five albums nominated, three were made by members of the Allman Brothers Band. Perhaps for this year they should rename the category “Best Blues Album by a member of the Allman Brothers Band.” http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/08/gregg-allman-low-country-blues.html

Warren Haynes – Man in Motion Also nominated for Best Blues Album [the third being the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator]. The hardest working man in the music business, Warren took a year off from Gov’t Mule to release and tour behind this soulful gem. To these ears, Man in Motion is more of a soul album than blues, but I tend to nitpick. http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/05/warren-haynes-tale-of-two-albums.html

Neil Young – A Treasure Neil Young changed musical directions with every album he made for Geffen during the 1980s. This CD captures Neil and some legendary Nashville studio pros in his “country phase.” http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/neil-young-treasure.html

Levon Helm – Ramble at the Ryman Recorded at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2008, Levon Helm and friends keep the spirit of The Band alive. Levon doesn’t do all the singing, but with Larry Campbell, Theresa Williams and daughter Amy Helm along for the ride, he doesn’t have to. http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/levon-helm-ramble-at-ryman.html

Joe Bonamassa – Dust Blow This is the first of three releases Joe Bonamassa put out in 2011 [the others being Black Country Communion 2 and Don’t Explain (with singer Beth Hart)]. With three releases in 2011 Joe is trying to take Warren Haynes’ title as the hardest working man in the music business. Unwilling to be put in a blues-rock straight jacket, Joe goes in a more eclectic direction as he did with his previous two releases, Black Rock [2010] and The Ballad of John Henry [2009]. I love to hear this guy play.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Black Country Communion – 2 After a not-so-stellar first album, Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa and company fulfill their potential on their sophomore release. At times Black Country Communion sounds like the second coming of Deep Purple. Everything is better – Kevin Shirley’s production is better, Glenn is singing better, Joe is playing like a hard-rock guitarist, and Derek Sherinian can finally be heard in the mix. Jason Bonham didn’t need to improve his drumming it’s still rock-solid as it was on the first album. Father John would be proud. http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Tony's Guitarist Picks - Duane Allman

2012-01-19T20:31:00.002-06:00

Duane Allman was a musical genius who couldn’t read or write music. For those who are not devoted fans of the Allman Brothers Band like I am, Duane Allman is not a household name. His recording career was but a short five years. His genius came in “the vision thing.” His genius was in his ability to bring people of disparate musical backgrounds together [jazz, country, blues, R&B, soul, psychedelic rock], mix and match those disparate influences and come up with something new. Many would label this “something new” thing as “Southern rock.” I argue that the music that came from the original Allman Brothers Band was what Gram Parsons called “Cosmic American Music.” The kind of music they played wasn’t your standard “three chords and the truth.” The band was unique – it had two lead guitar players [Duane Allman and Dickey Betts], two drummers [Jaimoe and Butch Trucks], a bassist who played like a third lead guitarist [Berry Oakley], and the greatest white blues singer on the planet [Gregg Allman]. Rock and Roll as a genre originated from the American South, so the term “Southern rock” is a bit redundant. Duane didn’t sing, didn’t write songs, but he was the undisputed leader, the alpha dog in the Allman Brothers Band. Drummer Butch Trucks credited Duane as giving the band “the religion,” and the rest of the band were his disciples. Brother Gregg Allman said of his brother when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame “he was always the first to face the fire.” That Duane Allman was able to create a band that survived his death is a testament to his vision.

Duane Allman became interested in playing music after he and his brother saw a BB King show in Nashville. Shortly after that show Gregg bought his first guitar with money he earned delivering newspapers. Duane often fought his little brother for the guitar until Mama A bought a Les Paul Junior for Duane. Gregg taught Duane how to play the chords, but then Duane quickly surpassed his little brother. When both brothers were attending school at the Castle Heights Military Academy in Tennessee, Duane would play along to the blues records he owned until he learned them perfectly. When Gregg finished school [Duane dropped out], both went back to Daytona Beach and started a band. Without going through the history of each line-up, I’ll fast-forward to when their band became known as The Hour Glass. They were able to get a record deal with Liberty Records, and they re-located to Los Angeles.

While they were in the Hour Glass, they recorded material they didn’t like, chosen by an unsympathetic producer. The record company wanted them to be psychedelic pop and didn’t want them playing live so as not to “ruin the image.” They recorded two albums for Liberty Records, what Gregg referred to as a “shit sandwich.” The band spent money earned from the few gigs they did play and went to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. They cut a BB King medley of the songs Sweet Little Angel, It’s My Own Fault, and How Blue Can You Get. The Hour Glass’ producer didn’t like what he heard, the band broke up. But this song gave a strong hint the direction Duane and Gregg wanted to take. This wasn’t psychedelic pop – it was the blues. It can be found on Duane Allman: An Anthology. After the end of The Hour Glass, Duane and Gregg recorded an album of demos in September 1968 with Butch Trucks’ band The 31^st of February. They cut an exceptional version of Tim Rose’s Morning Dew. The Grateful Dead and the Jeff Beck Group had also cut the song. Duane and Gregg’s version is more like what Jeff Beck cut. They also cut an early version of Melissa. This version is the only one you’ll hear featuring Duane Allman. The album stayed in the can until after Duane’s death. It came out in May 1972 under the title Duane & Gregg Allman. The album is long out of print, but some of the cuts from it can be found elsewhere. Morning Dew can be found on the Allman Brothers’ box set, Dreams. The early version of Melissa with Duane can be found on Gregg’s anthology One More Try: An Anthology. This music was another clue as to where Duane wanted to go musically.

BB King Medley – The Hour Glass

Morning Dew – The 31^st of February

His most notable work came as a session player at FAME Studios [Muscle Shoals, Alabama] and with the band he founded, the Allman Brothers Band. His big break as a session player came when he recorded Hey Jude with Wilson Pickett. His guitar solo at the end of the song got the attention of Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler. After the Wilson Pickett session, Duane got more and more session work to include the likes of Aretha Franklin, saxophone legend King Curtis, flautist Herbie Mann, Delaney & Bonnie, Clarence Carter, John Hammond, Boz Scaggs, and Johnny Jenkins. His five-minute solo at the end of Boz Scaggs’ Loan Me a Dime is mesmerizing. His work with Johnny Jenkins started out as a solo album for himself, but he didn’t finish the album because he formed the Allman Brothers Band instead. This album [Ton-Ton Macoute!] features Dr. John’s Walk on Gilded Splinters, a song the Allman Brothers play in the live sets today as one of many tributes to Duane.

Hey Jude – Wilson Pickett

Loan Me a Dime – Boz Scaggs

Walk on Gilded Splinters – Johnny Jenkins

Accounts vary about how Duane Allman became such a devotee to playing the electric slide guitar. Whether it was because of seeing a show of Taj Mahal and his band, or brother Gregg giving him a copy of Taj Mahal’s first album, this much is clear – Statesboro Blues [as played by Taj Mahal with Jessie Ed Davis on slide] was Duane’s revelation. Such was the reverence for the song and the way it was played, the Allman Brothers Band still plays Statesboro Blues the same way Taj Mahal did in the mid-1960s. Duane’s axe of choice for playing slide was a 1961 Gibson SG that was given to him by Dickey Betts (sometimes he played slide on a Les Paul). Rather than play the same guitar throughout a live show, Duane had his SG tuned to open E [EBEG#BE] so when he didn’t have to play slide, he could play his Les Paul in standard tuning [EADGBE]. His slide of choice was a glass Coricidin bottle that he wore on the ring finger of his fretting hand. Such was his mastery of the slide that once he had the likes of Elmore James down, he began to emulate the blues harp of such guys as Little Walter and Junior Wells. A great example of this is his playing on Clarence Carter’s The Road of Love, which can be found on Duane Allman: An Anthology.

The Road of Love – Clarence Carter

Duane had jammed with an acquaintance from the band The Second Coming. His name: Berry Oakley. Duane intended to form a trio with him, Berry and drummer Jai Johanny Johanson. Berry didn’t want to abandon his guitar player, Dickey Betts. Duane was open-minded. He’d jammed with Second Coming before and liked Dickey’s playing. When it was time for a jam, there were those four guys, then Butch Trucks showed up. Berry and Dickey brought their keyboard player from Second Coming, Reese Wynans. Then there were six. The band needed a singer. Duane knew just the guy – little brother Gregg. Duane made the call to California, Gregg showed up, and Reese Wynans was out. The line-up of the Allman Brothers Band was set. After they finished a four-hour jam, Duane is reputed to have said that if anyone wanted out of his band, they’d have to fight their way out. Nobody threw any punches that day.

The Allman Brothers Band, the band’s debut album, was released in November 1969. It has the blueprint of what the Allman Brothers “sound” would be [but not always used] - the twin lead guitars, two drummers who complement each other, a thunderous bass player who plays like a third lead guitarist, excellent songwriting, and Gregg Allman proving he is one of the finest blues singers alive, if not of all time. The opening track is an instrumental (?!?) take of the Spencer Davis song Don’t Want You No More. It was something Dickey Betts brought from his previous band The Second Coming. Who starts their debut album with an instrumental? This announced to the world right out of the box that the Brothers would be a different kind of band playing a different kind of music. It grabs your attention immediately, then after two and a half minutes segues into the Gregg Allman original, It’s Not My Cross to Bear. The segue from a 4/4-time instrumental into a ¾-time blues is effortless. It’s a five-minute slow blues executed perfectly. Both guitarists know when to play and when to leave space. They don’t try to break the world land speed record in notes per second in their playing. Black Hearted Woman is another Gregg original that shows off the harmony attack of Duane and Dickey on the songs main riff. Duane plays some snarling licks while Dickey plays the funky rhythm in the back while Gregg sings. Duane introduces the slide on the album’s first cover, Muddy Waters’ Trouble No More. The album ends with duo Dreams and Whipping Post. Dreams is a seven-minute slow blues played in ¾ time. It’s one of those songs that doesn’t feel like it’s as long as it really is. Words to describe Dreams: slow, ethereal, hypnotic, hazy. Its length is due to Duane’s extended soloing. He starts off playing it straight, but then you can hear the exact moment when Duane starts to play the slide. It’s at the 3:12 mark. This is one of the few times Duane plays slide in standard tuning [the other time would be Mountain Jam]. Where Dreams is a fairly easy-going piece of music, Whipping Post is furious. Thanks to Berry Oakley, the song has an 11/4 time signature, what some would call a modified ¾-time. Duane and Dickey dual with their guitars, and then they harmonize the shrieking guitar climax. In the studio the Brothers kept it to 5:20, but live it morphed into a monster that left plenty of room for exploration [see At Fillmore East].

Dreams – Allman Brothers Band

Idlewild South saw the light of day in September 1970. Like its predecessor it contained only seven songs. It’s not as gloomy or dark as the debut. With one exception [the instrumental In Memory of Elizabeth Reed] the songs are shorter, more radio-friendly. Revival is a spirited, gospel-like number written by Dickey Betts that shows the interplay of Duane’s and Dickey’s guitars. This is what Keith Richards often describes an “an ancient form of weaving.” They each get to play their own thing without getting in each others’ way. One thing that is on Idlewild South that isn’t on the debut album [except for Trouble No More] is the acoustic guitar. The first notes from Revival come from Duane strumming an acoustic. Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’ is one of Gregg’s better blues songs. Duane’s slide trades licks with Thom Doucette’s harp. Duane’s playing on this song can best be described as “blistering.” It’s even more intense on the version found on the deluxe edition of At Fillmore East. Midnight Rider is another acoustic-driven song, but there are electrics mixed in. They produce an effect that sounds like a pedal steel guitar. Gregg Allman wasn’t much of a country music fan, but he referred to this song as a country song, and it sounds like one. In Memory of Elizabeth Reed is the first of many Dickey Betts-written instrumentals that takes its name from the tombstone of Elizabeth Reed Napier, who is buried at Macon’s Rose Hill Cemetery. She’s buried near the train tracks that run along the Ocmulgee River. Dickey named it after her because he had written the song for a lady whom he was seeing but didn’t want to reveal her identity. The Brothers often sought musical and chemical [and sometimes carnal] inspiration from the cemetery, which wasn’t far from their original “Hippie Crash Pad.” Elizabeth Reed had been in the works for a long time. Dickey once said he had Miles Davis in mind when he wrote the song. One can hear it played by the band at the Fillmore East in February 1970. It’s a dynamic track that has lots of different movements. Rock bands aren’t supposed to play music this complex, but the band pulls it off with ease. Clocking in at just less than seven minutes, Elizabeth Reed is the longest song on Idlewild South. There’s a lot of room to stretch out and jam, as demonstrated on At Fillmore East. Berry Oakley [whom Duane once referred to as “our bad sex symbol”] contributes his one and only lead vocal to the Allman Brothers catalog with Hoochie Coochie Man. This sounds nothing like the Muddy Waters original. It’s ominous, brooding, and almost scary. Duane and Dickey push each other to incredible heights, propelled by Berry’s booming bass and Jaimoe and Butch’s drumming. Please Call Home is the slow blues of Idlewild South. Here Duane is at his most sympathetic. He provides an acoustic guitar that he strums along with Gregg’s piano. Dickey provides all the electric work. The album closes with Leave My Blues at Home. This is the Allman Brothers at their most funky. In that regard it’s similar to Black Hearted Woman from the first album. I don’t know what it is about this song, but it’s one of my Top 10 ABB cuts. It’s a great example of the twin harmonies of Duane and Dickey. It’s very loose, with the guitarists doing a wonderful call-and-response at the very end as the song fades.

His most famous contribution as a “session” player came during the making of Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. More than just a session player, Duane was a featured special guest on the album that is Eric Clapton’s greatest musical achievement. The musical marriage made in heaven came about by accident. When Clapton and company began work with producer Tom Dowd on what became the Layla album, Tom Dowd received a call from Duane to let him know the Brothers were going to be in town to play a concert. When he told Clapton of the phone call, Clapton said “you mean that guy who plays on the back of Hey Jude? I want to see him play!” Clapton and the band showed up and watched the Brothers play. During a solo, Duane looked down and saw Clapton at his feet and froze, probably for the only time in his career. When Dickey Betts heard Duane stopped playing he picked up the solo where Duane left off. When Dickey saw Clapton he turned his back so he wouldn’t freeze up as well. After the show, Duane asked Clapton if he could watch him and his band record their album. Clapton told him to bring his guitar – they had to play! When asked how one can tell the difference between his and Clapton’s playing, Whenever you hear the introduction to the song Layla, think of Duane Allman. Those first seven notes was something Duane came up with off the top of his head. Think about that – the defining riff of Eric Clapton’s career is a Duane Allman throwaway. That screeching slide? Yup, that’s Duane too. Clapton invited Duane to join Derek and the Dominos, but Duane politely declined because he couldn’t leave the Brothers. The Layla album isn’t a Duane Allman album or an Allman Brothers album, but it is quite important in Duane Allman’s story. He lit a fire under Eric Clapton, and each guitarist drove the other to soaring musical heights. Duane didn’t come into the picture until the 4^th song, Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out, and you can tell the band dials up the intensity with Duane’s presence from that point on [the album is sequenced in the order the songs were recorded, or so it’s been said]. When asked how one could tell his playing apart from Clapton’s he said the Stratocaster played by Clapton has a “sparklier sound” while his own Gibsons produced a “full-tilt screech.” That’s playing it just a little coy, but when Layla was first remastered you could really tell the difference. For those who don’t know the difference, Clapton is mixed to the right; Duane is mixed to the left. In his autobiography Clapton referred to Duane as “the musical brother I’d never had but wished I did.”

Layla – Derek & the Dominos

At Fillmore East is Duane Allman’s [and the Allman Brothers Band’s] masterpiece. Recorded over two days and four shows at New York’s Fillmore East, At Fillmore Eat [there is no “Live” in the title] captures the Allman Brothers at their best, mixing jazz, rock and blues effortlessly. The album is a master’s class on playing the electric slide guitar. The original album was seven songs over four sides. The first four songs are blues [Statesboro Blues, Done Somebody Wrong, Stormy Monday, and You Don’t Love Me]. The first two are short blues number, and then they stretch out on T-Bone Walker’s Stormy Monday. Stormy Monday is more of a showcase for Gregg Allman’s vocals, but there is soling aplenty between Dickey, Gregg and Duane. You Don’t Love Me takes up all of side two. The Brothers take the Buddy Guy/Junior Wells version from 1965’s Hoodoo Man Blues and stretches it out for 19 minutes. Duane would incorporate other songs into it, either King Curtis’ Soul Serenade or Joy to the World. This version has Joy to the World. After the Brothers dispense with the blues they take on the instrumentals, Hot ‘Lanta and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed. Hot ‘Lanta evolved from a jam, hence the songwriting credit to everyone in the band. Compared to most of the album, it’s a short five minutes. There is no studio version of this song – this is it. Elizabeth Reed is a Dickey Betts jazz-influenced tour de force original that debuted on the Brothers’ second studio album Idlewild South. It clocks in just less than seven minutes. But on At Fillmore East the band stretches out to thirteen minutes, and not a single note is wasted. It opens with Dickey paying volume swells on his guitar, soon to be joined by Duane to play a double-lead melody. Dickey takes the first solo, Gregg plays an organ solo, and then Duane plays his solo that launches the band into the stratosphere. He starts out quietly, builds to one climax, cools off a bit, and then launches again into a furious peak. This is Duane Allman channeling John Coltrane and Miles Davis from Kind of Blue. If I was to pick one Allman Brothers song that captures their essence, this cut from At Fillmore East would be it. Where other bands would play songs to extraordinary lengths [like Cream or the Grateful Dead], the Allman Brothers’ excursions into otherworldly improvisation were not exercises in self-indulgent solos for the sake of soloing. These guys would play with the skill of jazz musicians with the aggression of rockers. These guys wouldn’t repeat anything. Just when you thought they’ve said everything they’ve got to say on Elizabeth Reed, they follow that with a 23-minute version of Whipping Post. Like on Elizabeth Reed, nothing is wasted on Whipping Post. After the song reaches its apocalyptic conclusion you can hear the faints strains of what comes next during the fade out, the monolithic Mountain Jam [to be released on the next album, Eat a Peach]. At Fillmore East is one of my “desert island discs.”

In Memory of Elizabeth Reed – Allman Brothers Band

Eat a Peach was the album the Brothers were working on when Duane died. Three sides contain music recorded with Duane, including some material left off At Fillmore East. Mountain Jam, the beginnings of which you can hear at the end of Whipping Post on At Fillmore East, takes up two whole sides of Eat a Peach. The fourth side is three songs by the remaining Brothers after Duane’s death. The Elmore James/Sonny Boy Williamson blues One Way Out is the song that got me hooked on the Allman Brothers in the first place. Dickey starts the song with the main riff, and then Duane joins on slide playing an octave above Dickey. When it comes to the solos, Dickey takes the first solo and is absolutely smokin’! After the drum break Dickey and Duane do a call-and-response, followed by Duane launching himself into the stratosphere once more. Trouble No More, the first song the Allman Brothers Band ever played together, follows One Way Out. On Stand Back Duane shows his ability to make his slide guitar sound like a horn section. Blue Sky is Dickey Betts’ first lead vocal on an Allman Brothers album. This song is almost straight-up country, a departure from the hard blues, rock and jazz sounds favored on earlier albums. But this direction is no problem for Duane. At the 2:38 mark Dickey takes the lead from Duane. It never ceases to amaze me the ease with which Duane and Dickey could switch roles from lead to rhythm. Their transitions from one role to the other were always flawlessly executed. Little Martha closes out Eat a Peach. It shows the rarely-seen soft acoustic side of Duane Allman. An ode to his girlfriend Dixie, it is the only song credited to Duane Allman as the only songwriter. It came to him in a dream. In the dream Jimi Hendrix showed him how to play it on a bathroom faucet. It’s just Duane and Dickey playing acoustic guitars as if they were sitting on your front porch. For those who play guitar, Duane’s guitar is tuned to E. If you try to play it in standard tuning it will drive you crazy. It is a short but beautiful song. Every Allman Brothers performance ends with Little Martha playing on the PA. When you hear that song, you know the show is over.

For the record, a peach truck did not kill Duane Allman. On the evening of October 29, 1971, he was riding his motorcycle down Hillcrest Dr in Macon when a flatbed truck that was hauling lumber [coming from the opposite direction] turned in front of him and stopped. He swerved to go around the truck, but he struck the back of the truck. He came off the bike, the bike flipped in the air and landed on him. This caused massive internal injuries. He lived for three hours but died on the operating table as doctors worked to save him. The name for the Eat a Peach album came from a quip Duane made in a magazine shortly before his death. When the interviewer asked him what he does for “the revolution,” he responded "There ain't no revolution, it's evolution, but every time I'm in Georgia I eat a peach for peace." In a cruel twist, the success Duane had worked hard to achieve was just within his grasp. The week he died At Fillmore East was certified Gold.

Duane penned his own epitaph. Inscribed on his grave, it says: I love being alive and I will be the best man I possibly can. I will take love wherever I find it and offer it to everyone who will take it…Seek knowledge from those wiser…and teach those who wish to learn from me…. In my travels I have often been to Duane’s gravesite. It’s at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia. Bassist Berry Oakley is buried beside him. One used to be able to leave things…a guitar pick, a rose, whatever one wanted to leave there. Unfortunately the graves were open to vandals as well. There were times when I saw someone had drawn graffiti on the graves, so Berry Oakley’s sister Candace had an iron fence built around them. You can still look but you can no longer touch.

It is a testament to Duane Allman’s stature as the leader of the band and as an iconic guitarist that the Brothers chose not to replace him. In the aftermath of his death, the remaining Allman Brothers Band members recorded and toured as a five-piece. Dickey Betts carried all the guitar weight himself. Gregg and bassist Berry Oakley stepped up to fill the sonic hole left by Duane’s absence. The five-man band continued for a year until they decided to go an entirely different instrumental direction. They added pianist Chuck Leavell, who had been working on Gregg’s album Laid Back. The Allman Brothers would not add another guitarist to the band until 1978, when they made the album Enlightened Rogues.

In 2009 was the 40^th anniversary of the founding of the Allman Brothers Band, and they dedicated their annual Beacon Theatre run [and the entire 2009 tour] to the life and music of Duane Allman. The band invited everybody who played with Duane or wanted to pay tribute to Duane, and almost everybody [except Dickey Betts] showed up and played. The guests are a who’s who of rock and blues: Taj Mahal and Levon Helm [3/9/09]; Johnny Winter [3/10/09]; Buddy Guy [3/12/09]; Boz Scaggs [3/13/09]; John Hammond [3/16/09]; Tommy Talton & Scott Boyer (Cowboy) [3/17/09]; Eric Clapton [3/19/09 & 3/20/09]; Bruce Hornsby [3/21/09]; King Curtis’ Kingpins [Jerry Jemmott - bass, Bernard Purdie - drums and Jimmy Smith – keys – 3/23/09]; Billy Gibbons & Thom Doucette [3/24/09]; Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, & Chuck Leavell [3/28/09]. Several of the shows began with Duane’s Little Martha, whether it’s a Warren Haynes/Derek Trucks duet, or an Oteil Burbridge bass solo.

At the funeral, Jerry Wexler eulogized Duane by saying, “Those of us who were privileged to know Duane will remember him from all the studios, backstage dressing rooms, the Downtowners, the Holiday Inns, the Sheratons, the late nights, relaxing after the sessions, the whisky and the music talk, playing back cassettes until night gave way to dawn, the meals and the pool games, and fishing in Miami and Long Island, this young beautiful man, who we love so dearly but who is not lost to us, because we have his music, and the music is imperishable."

Indeed. Wherever I am, Duane Allman’s music travels with me.

Selected discography:

The Allman Brothers Band

Idlewild South

At Fillmore East [Deluxe Version]

Eat a Peach

Live at the Atlanta International Pop Festival

Live at Ludlow Garage

Fillmore East Feb 70

American University, Washington DC 12/13/70

S.U.N.Y. at Stonybrook 9/19/71

Duane Allman: An Anthology

Duane Allman: An Anthology Vol. 2

Derek & the Dominos - Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

John Hammond – Southern Fried

Boz Scaggs – Boz Scaggs

Johnny Jenkins – Ton-Ton Macoute!

Delaney & Bonnie – To Bonnie From Delaney

Delaney & Bonnie – Motel Shot

Wilson Pickett – Hey Jude

King Curtis – Instant Groove

Gregg Allman & Friends - Jan 10, 2012, Pensacola, Fla

2012-01-15T22:44:00.001-06:00

Of all the people I’ve seen in concert, I’ve seen Gregg Allman the most. I saw him six times in the 1990s with the Allman Brothers Band, and now four times with Gregg Allman & Friends. Carol and I first saw him in Pueblo, Colorado the day after we got married in 1987. He was on tour promoting his then-new album, I’m No Angel. He opened for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. This is the first time I took my kids to a concert. My oldest son Greg has actually heard Gregg Allman before. Carol was six-months pregnant with him when we saw Gregg at The Boathouse in Norfolk, Virginia in late 1995. And now fifteen years later Greg got to actually see him in person. Since both Greg and Mark were little kids they’ve been exposed to the Allman Brothers Band, and unlike other kids they actually like the music their parents listen to. I thought this would be the time for them to go to their first concert. They liked what they saw, liked what they heard and had a good time. It wasn’t too loud and didn’t destroy their hearing. It’s good to see Gregg in a setting that doesn’t demand high-volume guitar heroics

The venue for the evening’s festivities was the Saenger Theatre in Pensacola. It’s an old Spanish Baroque/Rococo style theater that first opened its doors in 1925. It hosted Vaudeville-type road shows, Broadway plays, and silent screen classics. During World War II it stayed open constantly to show news reels from the war. Later years saw use as a movie house until 1975 when age caught up with it. It fell into disrepair and closed. That same year the theater was donated to the city of Pensacola as a cultural arts center. Both the city of Pensacola and the University of West Florida restored the theater in a joint effort. The restoration took four years and $15 million dollars, and the theater reopened in 1981. Today it’s on the National Registry of Historical Sites. I have but one complaint. The seating isn’t meant for tall people or large people. One gets the feeling of sitting in coach on a cross-country flight. But that is a minor complaint. With a capacity of 2,250, it’s a cozy little place to see concerts. We saw Peter Frampton there last October. It’s a little smaller than New York’s Beacon Theatre, where the Allman Brothers play a multi-night stand every March [the real “March Madness” if you ask me and other Peacheads].

Jaimoe’s Jassz Band opened the show with a pretty good set. They played selections from their new CD Renaissance Man. I recognized all of two songs: Leaving Trunk and Rainy Night in Georgia. I wasn’t sure what to expect except to hear jazz. I’m not a jazz person. The closest I get to liking jazz is the improvisational music played by the Allman Brothers Band. But when I see a band that says they play jazz, I thought that’s all I would hear. I was pleasantly surprised when the music Jaimoe and his band ranged from jazz to R&B, blues and soul. Another pleasant surprise was Junior Mack. He played guitar and sang. I’d heard of Junior Mack but I’d never heard any of his music. I know he’s sat in from time to time with the Allman Brothers Band, but that’s the only connection I had with him. After his performance in Pensacola I’d like to find anything else that bears his name. He’s a very good guitarist and an even better singer. A note of humor – after Jaimoe introduced the members of his band, someone in the audience shouted out “who are you?” Jaimoe smiled and said “I’m Johanny Johanson from Gulfport, Mississippi.

Jaimoe's Jassz Band (Picture courtesy of Slyckyr, Allman Brothers Band web forum)

After a fifteen minute break to get the instruments in place, Gregg Allman & Friends took the stage. The big surprise of the evening for me was hearing Please Call Home. In all the times I’ve seen Gregg Allman, this was the first time I heard that song live. It was the Laid Back version, not the Idlewild South version. I’d seen from setlists of previous shows from this tour and I noticed the show we saw was one of the very few where he played it. In other shows on this tour he played Just Another Rider. We didn’t hear that, nor did we hear Midnight Rider. Midnight Rider wasn’t missed since I’ve heard it live many times before, but I was looking forward to hearing Just Another Rider. I think he’s past the stage of promoting his latest album, Low Country Blues. He’s digging deeper into his back catalog. But I got to hear Please Call Home, so that made up for it. Another surprise was the number of Allman Brothers songs in his set. About half the songs his set was ABB songs. Dreams and Wasted Words were especially good. It was good to hear Dreams without a screaming guitar. Scott Sharrard is a fine player, and he didn’t feel the need to go balls-to-the-wall like Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes or Dickey Betts would in an ABB setting. Hearing Wasted Words live during this show was another first for me. I’d always wanted to hear These Days and Melissa in the same show, and I finally got my wish. We got to hear Jay Collins play the flute on Melissa. I wasn’t sure how a flute would work with Gregg Allman’s music, but it di and very well. When the band played Ridin’ Thumb, I didn’t recognize it. I pride myself in knowing Gregg’s music inside and out, but this one stumped me. I had to look it up when I got home. It’s a song written by Jimmy Seals [of Seals and Crofts fame] that had been covered by the likes of Ray Charles, King Curtis, and Three Dog Night. When I found that Ray Charles had done it, it’s inclusion in Gregg’s set made perfect sense. I would love to have heard Queen of Hearts from Laid Back, but on this night it was not to be. Gregg’s rendition of Whipping Post was the Searching for Simplicity arrangement, not the jam monolith from the first ABB album.

Gregg was in very fine voice. He reaffirmed why he is my favorite singer. Considering that he had liver cancer and had a liver transplant two years ago, he’s holding up very well. When I first saw him he was 39 years old. Now he’s 64 (!). He spent most of the evening behind his Hammond B-3 organ, but he’d play the acoustic guitar on some songs [These Days, Melissa, Floating Bridge], a Fender Stratocaster on others [I Can’t Be Satisfied, Whipping Post, One Way Out]. It must be hell to be talented.

The setlist:

I’m No Angel / Statesboro Blues / Please Call Home / I Can’t Be Satisfied / Ridin’ Thumb / You Must Be Crazy [Floyd Miles] / These Days / Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’ / Dreams / Wasted Words / Melissa / Going Back To Daytona [Floyd Miles] / Just Before the Bullets Fly / Whipping Post

Encore:

Floating Bridge / One Way Out

The band:

Gregg Allman – vocals, Hammond B-3, acoustic and electric guitar

Floyd Miles – vocals, percussion

Scott Sharrard – guitars

Bruce Katz – keyboards

Jay Collins – saxophones, flute

Jerry Jemmott – bass

Steve Potts - drums

Gregg Allman & Friends (Picture courtesy of Slyckyr, Allman Brothers Band web forum)

Not all of the entertainment came from the stage. We sat up in the balcony, about six rows back. There’s a small half-wall between the first three rows and the rest of the balcony seats. A guy who sat three rows in front of us and had way too much to drink, and during one of the songs he jumped over the wall and stating to pretend to play piano on the half-wall. In his mind he was Jerry Lee Lewis. He was fun to watch. Too bad the light wasn’t good enough for me to film him. Otherwise I’d post it here. I was highly amused. There weren’t any twirlers though…I guess they only go to Allman Brothers shows.

All things considered [to borrow a phrase], it was an excellent show. I’m especially glad my boys went with us. They got to see real musicians play real music that means so much to many people. Gregg Allman has a knack for taking old songs, re-arranging them and making them sound fresh. I hope that someday soon Gregg will see fit to record another album and that he will stop by Pensacola again.

Thanks to Slyckyr, a "Peach Pro" from the Allman Brothers Band website forum for allowing me to use his pictures. He was at the same show but took better pictures than I did.

Tony's Guitarist Picks - Tony Iommi

2011-12-28T23:07:00.004-06:00

I cannot write a blog about guitarists that I like without writing about Tony Iommi. If I did such a thing, all of my friends on the Tony Iommi message board [some of whom are also on Facebook] would not only give me a well-deserved rash, they would disown me. For the uninitiated, who is this Tony Iommi guy? He is the guiding light of Black Sabbath. He’s the one guy who has been in every incarnation of the band since their debut album saw the light of day on Friday the 13^th, February 1970. In short, he’s the guy who invented heavy metal. He is a king among men.

What sets Tony Iommi apart from other guitarists? Let me count the ways…

Reason #1 - the riff. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the riff this way: Riff Pronunciation: /rɪf/ [noun] a short repeated phrase in popular music and jazz, frequently played over changing chords or harmonies or used as a background to a solo improvisation. Tony’s greatness lies in the almighty riff. Regardless of whoever else happened to be in Black Sabbath, the bedrock of every Black Sabbath song is the riff. I can’t think of many memorable Sabbath solos, but there are many memorable Sabbath riffs. There are so many great Black Sabbath songs that were it not for the riff, there wouldn’t be much of a song. Standout riffs: Symptom of the Universe, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Into the Void, Snowblind, Killing Yourself to Live, Heaven and Hell, War Pigs, Sweat Leaf, Children of the Grave, Children of the Sea, Mob Rules, Paranoid, Black Sabbath… No one has created more, or better metal riffs than Tony.

Reason #2 – the tone. The last day of the last time Tony Iommi worked a “day job” he lost parts of the fingertips on two fingers of his fretting [right] hand in an accident on the job. He fabricated prosthetic fingertips so he could play without pain. He used the lightest strings he could find [banjo strings at first]. He also detuned his strings to ease the tension on his fingers. Detuning gave Sabbath a heavier sound. He couldn’t get that effect with standard tuning and heavy gauge strings. Tony’s amp of choice is Laney. Always in search of the “perfect” sound he’s used Orange, Fender, Marshall, Hiwatt, and Engl. But he’s a Laney guy. His axe of choice is the Gibson SG. He doesn’t play a stock SG much. He’s had SGs custom-built for him, either by John Birch, John Diggins [JayDee], or even the Gibson Company itself. He wants 24 frets instead of the usual 22. He has his own line of very high output humbucking pickups. He used to use a Dallas Rangemaster to give his sound a boost. He uses a lot of wah in his solos, courtesy of the nearly-impossible to find Tycobrahe Parapedal. Take all of these variables together – the type of amps, type of guitar, type of pickups, the lighter strings, the detuning, the effects [such as they are] – put them all in the hands of Tony Iommi and Voila! Heavy metal is born.

Reason #3 – the acoustic guitar. Tony Iommi is not known for his acoustic guitar playing. Sometimes he’d use it to introduce the song – Children of the Sea [Heaven and Hell], The Sign of the Southern Cross [The Mob Rules], Bible Black [The Devil You Know], and Too Late [Dehumanizer]. Sometimes he’d play it as part of the song – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath [Sabbath Bloody Sabbath], Supernaut [Vol. 4], Glory Ride [The Eternal Idol], I Go Insane [Fused]. Sometimes he’d play it at the end of a song – Heaven and Hell [Heaven and Hell], Symptom of the Universe [Sabotage]. On occasion he’d play a short acoustic piece – Laguna Sunrise [Vol. 4], Fluff [Sabbath Bloody Sabbath], Orchid [Master of Reality], and Scarlet Pimpernel [The Eternal Idol]. Some bands, and I’m thinking of the hair metal bands from the eighties, would use acoustics to show their “sensitive” sides. These would be the “power ballads” that afflicted music during that time. I’ve heard Iommi play something resembling a power ballad only twice – Changes [Vol. 4 – he doesn’t play guitar] and No Stranger to Love [Seventh Star]. Iommi doesn’t use acoustics to show any sensitivity. It’s a matter of dynamics, to change up the sound a little bit just to make things just a bit more interesting. I wish I knew what kind of acoustic guitar he uses because I love the bell-sounding tones he gets out of it [or them].

Reason #4 – volume. Tony Iommi’s music is not for the faint of heart. It MUST be played at a high volume. Of all the concerts I’ve seen since 1982, only four of them left me with crickets chirping in my ears…for days! Of those four, two were Black Sabbath – once with Ronnie James Dio [Washington, DC - 1992], the other time with Ozzy Osbourne [San Jose, CA – 1999]. I suffered happily each time.

Reason #5 – solos. Tony Iommi is a riffmaster’s riffmaster. The solo is not his strong suit like it is for other guitarists [Duane Allman, David Gilmour, Ritchie Blackmore all come to mind]. But he is very, very good. He’s best when soloing slowly [Shadow of the Wind], or Warp Factor Eight [Symptom of the Universe]. In between those two speeds, Tony is a mere mortal. His contemporaries Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page were good at playing things off the top of their heads in concert, but Tony Iommi is a different soloist. Whichever solo he’d record for a specific song, he’d stick pretty close to it when playing live. The exception to this rule is Heaven and Hell. He can solo his brains out for days on that one. But a mere mortal Tony Iommi is better than almost everyone else. If I had to pick a standout Tony Iommi solo, it would be his first solo from Lonely Is The Word [Heaven and Hell]. I can only describe it as being unlike any other solo in his catalog.

Reason #6 - Diabolus in Musica. Tony Iommi stumbled upon the tritone, known in medieval times as “The Devil in Music.” It was explained to me this way – “Nearly everything with that evil, doomy feel to it shares that interval relationship. It causes a sense of unease, anxiety or evil because it doesn't fall where the ear expects it to. The final note in the three-note/chord riff to Black Sabbath is the best obvious example.” The music itself isn’t evil, it just sounds that way. Is there a more scary song than Black Sabbath, the first song from the first album? What a way to kick off a career!

I asked my friends from the Iommi message board the following: What one song, in your opinion, captures Tony Iommi's essence, and why? For me, it’s War Pigs. I think it’s the best metal song ever done. So sure of this I originally thought I would put this out as something that was absolute, something that is so self-evident that none would dare argue the point. But like Magnum PI, the little voice in my head told me “ask the Iommi board guys.” So I did that and I’m glad I did. Black Sabbath, and Tony Iommi in particular, are for these guys what the Beatles are to me. These are the guys who eat, sleep and breathe Black Sabbath. As for the answer to the question, a trend emerged – most favored Sabbath’s music from the years 1970-75, which means their first six albums with Ozzy Osbourne. Four songs in particular stood out among the rest – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Symptom of the Universe, Black Sabbath, and Wheels of Confusion. Why did these tunes in particular get so much love from these guys?

Black Sabbath – This is the “big bang” for heavy metal – where it all started. This is the very first song from the very first Black Sabbath album. When Geezer Butler noticed people paid lots of money to have the crap scared out of them, Tony came up with this. Leave it to him to use a kind of music once banned by the Catholic Church. It wasn’t intentional to sound evil, just to sound cool. It starts with the gloomy sounds of rain and thunder, the peal of a distant church bell, then the Riff of Doom. If you played this combination of notes in the Middle Ages you’d probably have various instruments of mayhem [most of them HOT] applied to your testicles. If you want to know how to make vibrato work in your guitar playing, listen to the third note of the tritone – perfect vibrato. There’s a tempo change from the doom crawl to very fast at the 4:35 mark, wah-wah drenched guitar and a scary Iommi solo that builds to a stop-start climax. If you want to put a sound to the word “ominous” this song will do the trick.

Wheels of Confusion/ The Straightener – This one from Vol. 4 has probably the rawest sounding guitar in the entire Black Sabbath catalog [maybe Supernaut too]. His tone is brutal, with plenty of crunch. The Straightener is two and a half minutes of Iommi solos. In addition you hear the acoustic and what sounds like another guitar played through a Leslie speaker. The Straightener is for Wheels of Confusion what Luke’s Wall is for War Pigs, a good instrumental conclusion to one of Black Sabbath’s more structurally inventive songs.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath – it has a little of everything. Tony had writer’s block when Black Sabbath started work on the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album. Luckily this song came to him – not one great riff, not two, but three [the main, opening riff, the bridge, and the final, very heavy, detuned part]. Between the riffs are the acoustic interludes. So you have the heaviness, the light and shade, the tempo changes. A lot of stuff is happening on this song. I still have no idea what “Bog blast all of you” means…

Symptom of the Universe – Tony shows thrashers how it’s done. The riff sounds a lot like Zeppelin’s Communication Breakdown, only evil. He slashes and burns for four and a half minutes and then does a head-spinning 180 and plays a very cool jazzy acoustic guitar for the next two. He makes the transition from hard thrash to acoustic bliss look effortless. One of his fastest solos helps with the transition.

One of my fellow board members put it this way when asked the “name one song” question – “I don't think I can do that. I like so much of what he’s done that no one song can do that. Each one says something different.” That’s fair enough – I see his point. Depending on my mood at any given moment, any of these songs [and many of the others] could be “the one.” But if someone put a gun to my head and said “choose one now!” I’d pick Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, even though War Pigs is my favorite.

There were some other interesting choices to the "name one song" question from the Iommi board crowd. The most interesting choice was Meat from Tony's first "proper" solo album. It's good stuff - I think it has the distinction of being the only Iommi song with a lead female vocalist. It has a sufficiently high doom quotient. From the same Iommi album, my favorites are Black Oblivion, Flame On, and Just Say No To Love [Peter Steele (RIP) even namechecks Tony Iommi and Jon Lord in this one]. Another interesting choice was Heart like a Wheel from Seventh Star. That one sparked a bit of discussion since Seventh Star is probably the most "un-Sababth" album in Tony's catalog. Seventh Star was supposed to be Tony's first solo album, but the record company had other ideas and wanted a "Black Sabbath" album, even though Tony was the only original member left in the band. Interestingly enough, the person who suggested Heart like a Wheel thought he was suggesting heresey, but the reaction to his suggestion was uniformly positive. This song is as close to 12-bar blues as Tony Iommi will get. He's got a very visceral, razor-sharp guitar tone all over Seventh Star. For Heart Like a Wheel, Tony puts his best solo chops on display. Other suggestions from something besides the Ozzy era included Heaven and Hell, Children of the Sea and Die Young. One can conclude there is much affection for the Heaven and Hell album as a whole. The Tony Martin era got no love whatsoever from these guys.

For the most part I am partial to the sounds Tony Iommi made in the later years, most especially the albums he made with the Iommi-Butler-Dio-Appice lineup. Not just for the guitar playing, but also for the better production, song structure and Dio’s singing. When Dio came on board for the Heaven and Hell album, Bill Ward was still the drummer, and Sabbath still had a loose feel to them. He wasn’t as much a timekeeper as he was a percussionist who just went where the songs took him. They were “Black Sabbath with a new singer.” But when Vinny Appice came along after Bill Ward left in 1980, the character of the band changed. Vinny is more of a time keeper [think “Ringo Starr” in a heavy metal band]. And since he played a straight beat, Black Sabbath morphed into more of a skull-crushing juggernaut. Tony Iommi [and occasionally Geezer Butler] came up with more up-tempo riffs.

The sludge from the likes of Master of Reality was gone, replaced by the punishing Mob Rules, Dehumanizer, and The Devil You Know. The riffs aren’t sinister – they’re brutal, mean, crushing. Follow the Tears and Bible Black [The Devil You Know], I [Dehumanizer], Turn Up the Night and The Mob Rules [Mob Rules] easily come to mind. The same can be said for Tony’s album with Glenn Hughes, Fused. So many riffs, so little time… I Go Insane [from Fused] is one of the most musically complex things Tony has done. A nine-minute epic, it has four distinctive parts – the first 3:23 is slow, bluesy. Then the tempo picks up – at first the music has an almost ethereal quality, but then the guitars build up to the 5:46 mark, where it’s massive, brutal, face-melting, pile-driving riffage. At seven minutes begins the only proper solo, a minute-long affair that eases into the same theme heard in the first section. Brilliant! Computer God [Dehumanizer] is a different beast. A song about technological tyranny, this one has three parts – a start-stop beginning, a slow arpeggio’d part in the middle [the part I can actually play], and the aggressive finish. Tony flows from one part to another with ease while Geezer Butler’s bass bobs and weaves throughout. It’s an impressive piece of arranging. This is how men play heavy metal.

I Go Insane

Computer God

With 2012 almost upon us, we have the promise of a new Black Sabbath album and tour from the original four [Tony, Geezer, Ozzy and Bill Ward]. These men are in their 60s now, but I have no doubt they have one more great work in them. Psycho Man from Reunion was merely "ok" - I think they can do better. Tony Iommi’s skills as a player haven’t diminished. Judging from his last two studio works [Fused and The Devil You Know], I don’t think his ability to create classic riffs has diminished either. Tony has no need to prove he can produce great work in his later years – he’s already done that.

Tony's Guitarist Picks - Buddy Guy

2011-12-15T02:06:00.000-06:00

“He was for me what Elvis probably was for most other people. My course was set and he was my pilot.” – Eric Clapton, on the occasion of Buddy Guy’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 2005

Here it is another blog about another blues guitar legend. Today’s subject – Buddy Guy. Eric Clapton once called him the best guitar player alive. Jimi Hendrix once said "Heaven is sitting at Buddy Guy's feet while listening to him play guitar." When he was 13 he made his own guitar and taught himself how to play. Buddy Guy moved to Chicago from Louisiana in the late 1950s. Chess Records used him as a session guitarist for the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and many others. For those blues icons he played the way those guys and his employers [Chess Records] wanted him to play. But on his own his playing took on a different character. His guitar playing is loud and aggressive. He uses feedback and distortion. He’d play guitar behind his back or with his teeth. He would solo with total abandon. His live shows were [and still are] incendiary. Jimi Hendrix saw that and wanted to be Buddy Guy. When he became known to the American rock listening public, the assumption was that Buddy Guy was copying Hendrix when it was really the other way around. Eric Clapton got the idea for a blues-rock trio after seeing Buddy Guy’s trio perform in London in 1965. He wanted to be like Buddy Guy with a singing, composing bass player. That trio that Clapton wanted turned out to be Cream. Buddy Guy has also influenced the likes of the Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Stevie Ray Vaughan [RIP]. Without a doubt he is the bridge between blues and rock and roll.

As much as he has been revered by rock and blues musicians, for a long time after the 1960s Buddy Guy couldn’t get arrested. He’d play his live shows with the same fury and abandon, but he couldn’t get a recording contract to save his life. In the early 1990s he finally got a deal with Silvertone Records. He’s recorded some fine albums with Silvertone. His first three, Damn Right, I Got the Blues [1991], Feels Like Rain [1993] and Slippin’ In [1995] each earned him critical acclaim [Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Blues Album each time]. Heavy Love [1998] has more of a rock than a blues feel. For the most part Buddy Guy’s output follows a formula – his albums are slickly-produced, feature guest appearances [Clapton, Beck, BB King, Bonnie Raitt, Jonny Lang, Mark Knopfler, Carlos Santana, Tracy Chapman, John Mayer, etc], and his on-stage intensity is dialed-down quite a bit.

Sweet Tea [2001] is not slick, not overproduced, and features no guest stars. There’s no blatant attempt to win a cross-over audience. This is Buddy’s homage to the hypnotic drone blues played by the likes of Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford, CeDell Davis, and R.L. Burnside. That’s the sound of the North Mississippi hill country. That’s the sound of Fat Possum Records. Recorded in Oxford, Mississippi, it’s “back to basics” for Buddy Guy. For those wanting to hear Buddy Guy finally cut loose on an album, this is the one for you. Unlike most of his studio output, Buddy dials up the intensity. Buddy followed his most electrifying album with another atypical album, a completely acoustic folk blues album, Blues Singer [recorded in the same studio as Sweet Tea]. Blues Singer is an excellent counterpoint to Sweet Tea.

Buddy Guy is an assassin. Just ask the Rolling Stones. He played Muddy Waters’ Champagne & Reefer with them for their Shine a Light documentary. He didn’t pay any deference to them as others who shared the stage with them [Jack White and Christina Aguilera (?!?)] - he slayed them! Keith smiled the whole time. I could almost hear him thinking “thank you sir, may I have another?” The Rolling Stones, despite all their pop success, is a blues band at heart, so they don’t mind it one bit when one of their musical heroes smacks them around on-stage.

Buddy has been around a very long time. The work he did with Junior Wells [using the pseudonym “Friendly Chap”], most especially Hoodoo Man Blues [1965] and Play The Blues [1972], has been acclaimed by many as some of the finest Chicago-style blues you’ll ever hear. His 1968 album A Man and the Blues is essential. Buddy’s most recent work [2008’s Skin Deep and 2010’s Living Proof] finds Buddy back in his comfort zone of Chicago blues. These albums aren’t as intense as Sweet Tea, but they have more grit to them that his well-acclaimed 1990s output. At 74 years old, they show Buddy Guy isn’t going away quietly anytime soon. And because of that, the music world is a better place. Buddy Guy is one of only a few blues giants left. I hope he’s around quite a bit longer.

Tony's Guitarist Picks - Hubert Sumlin

2011-12-06T23:52:00.001-06:00

I’ve been thinking of writing blogs about guitarists I like for quite awhile. I just hadn’t made up my mind who to start with. Sadly, current events made up my mind for me when I heard that blues great Hubert Sumlin passed away. Born Nov 16, 1931 in Mississippi, he was the youngest of thirteen children. He started with harp player James Cotton, then joined with Howlin’ Wolf in 1954. After playing with the Wolf for two years, Muddy Waters hired him away for awhile in 1956. Muddy paid better but he toured more than Howlin’ Wolf. After that stint with Muddy Waters he rejoined the Wolf and stayed with him until the Wolf’s death in 1976. He was a guitar hero’s guitar hero. His guitar playing has been described as “angular,” “jagged.” After hearing all the songs he did with Howlin’ Wolf, I could hear why these guys were so enamored with Hubert. Without Killing Floor, Led Zeppelin’s The Lemon Song would exist. Other songs in Howlin’ Wolf’s repertoire – Smokestack Lightning, Spoonful, The Red Rooster, Commit a Crime, Shake For Me, Down in the Bottom – would be hard to imagine with Hubert’s guitar. I heard those songs and got hooked on not only Howlin’ Wolf, but Hubert Sumlin as well.

Hubert Sumlin was not a household name. But for blues enthusiasts, the word “legend” barely scratches the surface when describing Hubert Sumlin. The music Hubert Sumlin created with Howlin’ Wolf is a landmark (one of several) in the development of electric Chicago blues. He never achieved the fame that Wolf did, but without Sumlin, Wolf’s greatest, most influential records wouldn’t have been the same. One look at old Stones and Hendrix concerts and Sumlin’s influence is easily seen. The Rolling Stones imitated the Wolf’s recording of The Red Rooster. When Hendrix wanted to play the blues in his live shows, his supercharged version of Killing Floor fit the bill. But don’t take my word for it – check out Hendrix’s BBC Sessions and hear his vicious take on the Howlin’ Wolf classic. The list of guitar players influenced by Hubert Sumlin is a pantheon of rock guitar gods: Clapton, Beck, Page, Richards, Hendrix, Vaughan, Zappa. His importance cannot be overstated.

Bob Margolin: “When Hubert plays guitar, he takes you to his world of Blues Feeling, from despair to ecstasy, from delicate grace to raw power, from lost to found. His style is original and personal and instantly recognizable. What kind of man can make or break your heart with his guitar?”

Jimmy Page: “I love Hubert. He always played the right thing at the right time.”

Stevie Ray Vaughan: "Hubert's the heaviest, most original guitar player I've ever heard...and that's the truth!"

Ronnie Earl: "Hubert's one of the guys who sat down and taught me stuff.”

His preferred axe was a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. He was known to play a Fender Stratocaster from time to time though. Early influences that affected Hubert Sumlin's style of play at a young age, included Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and of course Howlin’ Wolf. It was at Howlin’ Wolf’s urging that Hubert stopped playing with a pick and used only his fingers. Once Hubert found his “sound” he became [or his sound became – he was very unassuming] as iconic as Howlin’ Wolf himself.

When Chess Records wanted Howlin’ Wolf to make a record in England [with Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts], they (Chess) originally didn’t want Hubert playing the sessions with them. Clapton told Chess that if Hubert wasn’t involved then neither was he. Chess changed their minds, Hubert played on the album. Such was Clapton’s respect for Hubert Sumlin.

Awhile back I saw a celebration of blues music called Lightning in a Bottle, which was filmed at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 2004. I wanted to watch it because Gregg Allman and Warren Haynes were going to play [they played The Sky Is Crying]. But before they played, there was Hubert Sumlin with David Johansen. They played Killing Floor and they smoked! An amazing thing about Hubert was that not too long before he played RCMH, he had a lung removed due to lung cancer. Here’s the clip:

He’s done an album with Pinetop Perkins [Legends], A Tribute to Howlin’ Wolf (1998) with other former members of the Wolf’s band, and he cut a couple of tunes with Muddy Waters guitarist Bob Margolin on his All-Star Blues Jam (1999). Someday I’ll get his own CD I Know You. On the last CD of Hubert Sumlin’s that I bought [About Them Shoes, 2004], Hubert is joined by Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Levon Helm, Bob Margolin, and David Johansen to play tributes to Muddy Waters. Particularly noteworthy are I’m Ready [with Eric Clapton] and Still a Fool [with Keith Richards]. Both are always on my iPod. If you can find About Them Shoes, get it!

Hubert passed away from heart failure on December 4^th. He had just celebrated his 80^th birthday two weeks ago. As Jimmie Vaughan so eloquently put it in song after the passing of his brother Stevie Ray, “Heaven done called … another blues stringer back home.”

Tony's Picks - U2

2011-11-09T23:05:00.001-06:00

There weren’t too many bands from the 1980s that I like, but the ones I do like were pretty good – The Police, The Pretenders, and U2. The Pretenders started out great but after James Honeyman Scott and Pete Farndon died they became Chrissie Hynde and a bunch of guys. The Police left behind a small recorded legacy - too small for my taste. U2 on the other hand has hung around for over thirty years. They’ve done some great work, and they’ve had some duds along the way as well. Here are the songs that I could hear anytime. I purposely left off some of the more popular songs, namely Pride [In the Name of Love], I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, With Or Without You, and Two Hearts Beat as One, and Beautiful Day to name a few. Good songs yes, but they’re overplayed. If I’m stranded on a deserted island, those songs don’t make the cut. Here are the ones that do:

Sunday Bloody Sunday [War, 1983] – this one is the first U2 song I ever heard on KILO-94, a radio station in Colorado Springs that used to be great. This song was the hook for me - New Year’s Day sealed the deal.

October [October, 1981] – I bought this album after I bought War. No guitar, just piano from The Edge. At the Red Rocks show [yes, that show] this song served as a very effective intro to…

New Year’s Day [War, 1983] – this one’s a song for Poland’s Solidarity [or so I have read]. It has the driest, most angry Fender Stratocaster tone that one will ever hear on a U2 recording. Truly a great song…my favorite from this band.

Seconds [War, 1983] – The Edge sings! This is the song that is sandwiched between Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year’s Day. Getting blown up by atomic weapons was a big worry back then, especially for Europeans caught between Soviet SS-20 and American cruise missiles and Pershings. It takes a second to say goodbye…

Drowning Man [War, 1983] – U2 goes acoustic, except for an electric violin. It’s the most haunting song in the U2 catalog courtesy of said electric violin.

A Sort of Homecoming [The Unforgettable Fire, 1984] – The clean guitar tones from War are nowhere to be found here, but that’s ok. This was my first exposure to Daniel Lanois’ production style where everything kind of smears together. Larry Mullen Jr’s drums are very different as well – polyrhythmic instead of just keeping time.

The Unforgettable Fire [The Unforgettable Fire, 1984] – Bono’s vision of a nuclear apocalypse. George Martin used to tell the Beatles to “think symphonically.” I think U2 does that on this song.

Bad [The Unforgettable Fire, 1984] – Heroin addiction. This song is almost like a trance. Maybe that’s what it’s like to be strung out…

The Three Sunrises [The Unforgettable Fire Deluxe Edition] – I have no idea what this one is about. I just like hearing The Edge abuse his Stratocaster with a slide.

Where the Streets Have No Name [The Joshua Tree, 1987] – I hadn’t heard the song until I saw the video on MTV. The first time I saw their video was the day I arrived at Officer Training School in 1987, of all places. When I saw it I thought “Beatles. Let It Be. Rooftop.”

Bullet the Blue Sky [The Joshua Tree, 1987] – Bono wanted The Edge to play like there’s a war coming through his amps. I think he got it right. Outside it’s America…

Running to Stand Still [The Joshua Tree, 1987] – Bad, Part II. Bono wrote about Dublin’s heroin problem. The “seven towers” in the song are high-rises in Dublin where lots of drug addicts live. The piano and acoustic slide guitar are courtesy of The Edge. Instead of the haze of Bad, this one is an uncluttered, unplugged number with some very good singing from Bono.

Silver and Gold [The Joshua Tree Deluxe Edition] – There are two versions. One is an electric, all-band B-side. The other is a bluesy, all-acoustic thing with Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Steve Jordan done for the anti-apartheid Sun City thing. I like both versions, but I prefer the unplugged one.

Mothers of the Disappeared [The Joshua Tree, 1987] – The closing track from The Joshua Tree sounds nothing like anything U2 had done up until this time. In retrospect, it sounds like the coming direction of what became Achtung Baby. This song would fit right in on that album. As for subject matter, it’s for those mothers in Chile whose children disappeared at the hands of the Pinochet regime. Sting covered the same ground on They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo).

Desire [Rattle and Hum, 1988] – When I first heard this song, my first thought was ‘Bo Diddley.’ This was my first hint that Bono was turning away from matters in his environment to matters of the heart.

When Love Comes to Town [Rattle and Hum, 1988] – BB King. ‘Nuff said.

All I Want Is You [Rattle and Hum, 1988] – Carol and I saw the movie when it was in theatrical release at the State Theater in Marysville, California. That was the only time we saw a movie there. The place is closed now. This song was at the very end of the movie. It played over the credits. We stuck around to hear the whole song. An extremely moving song, it has stuck with me ever since. Van Dyke Parks provided the haunting string arrangement. It’s almost perfect, right behind New Year’s Day. I never tire of it.

Zoo Station, One, So Cruel, The Fly, Mysterious Ways, Acrobat, Love Is Blindness – I already wrote a blog on the Achtung Baby songs.

The First Time and Dirty Day [Zooropa, 1993] – These both sound like leftovers from Achtung Baby, which is OK with me.

The Wanderer [Zooropa, 1993] – Johnny Cash walking under an atomic sky. This song is so strange one can’t help but like it.

Discothèque, Do You Feel Loved, and Gone [Pop, 1997] – I just like how they sound. They might just have that dance-club thing down here. What about the rest of Pop? Meh…

Vertigo [How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, 2004] – One, Two, Three, Fourteen?

Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own [How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, 2004] – I think Bono wrote this for his dying father. It reminds me somewhat of One.

All Because of You [How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, 2004] - The beginning sounds like a sonar ping, and you’re on the submarine about to get depth-charged. Good guitar song.

Elevation [All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2000], Magnificent [No Line on the Horizon, 2009], and Electrical Storm [The Best of 1990-2000, 2002] – these songs just sound cool.

Get On Your Boots [No Line on the Horizon, 2009] – Just like Where the Streets Have No Name, I saw U2 play this on a rooftop before I heard the record. This time the rooftop was the BBC in London.

Steve Bartman - Catching Hell

2011-10-18T22:22:00.002-05:00

At the end of the 2011 regular Major League Baseball season, two teams who had been a cinch to make the playoffs at the beginning of September [the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves] choked miserably and failed to make the playoffs. There are two ways to handle such a collapse. One way is to just own up to your collapse, regroup quietly and wait until next year. The other is to find scapegoats for your team’s collapse and try to ruin that scapegoat’s reputation. Atlanta is following the first route. There’s no bitching, moaning and complaining. They just owned the fact they choked and didn’t get it done. Boston is choosing the latter path. Manager Terry Francona is Boston’s scapegoat. In the eyes of those who run the Boston Red Sox, their September collapse is his fault. The players who did the actual choking aren’t being faulted, with the exception of three Boston pitchers [Jon Lester, Josh Beckett and John Lackey]. The other night I watched one of those “30 for 30” documentaries on ESPN. This documentary was entitled Catching Hell. This is filmmaker Alex Gibney’s look at the Steve Bartman incident. Like what is happening today with Terry Francona, this is a case study in the art of scapegoating.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this occurred during Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Florida Marlins. They were playing for the right to represent the National League in the 2003 World Series. The venue: the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. The situation: the Cubs had a 3 games to 2 advantage on the Marlins. The Cubs were leading the game 3-0 in the top of the eighth inning. There was one out, Florida had a man on second, Cubs ace Mark Prior was pitching, Luis Castillo was batting for Florida. Chicago was five outs away from advancing to the World Series for the first time since 1945. Castillo hit a pop foul toward the stands on the left side of the field. Left fielder Moises Alou ran over to catch the ball. It was playable, but Alou couldn’t make the catch. A fan interfered with Alou. Alou was furious and shouted at the fans. The Cubs wanted Castillo called out because of the interference. Umpire Mike Everitt said the ball broke the plane of the wall between the stands and the playing field. Since the umpire ruled the ball was in the stands there was no fan interference. Castillo’s at bat continued. This is where the fun REALLY began.

Castillo continued his at-bat and drew a walk. Ball four was a wild pitch, so the man on second [Juan Pierre] advanced to third. Ivan Rodriguez came up next and singled, driving in Pierre to make the score 3-1. Miguel Cabrera was up next, hit a ball to Cub shortstop Alex Gonzalez. Normally a sure-handed infielder, Gonzalez booted the ball. Instead of turning an inning-ending double play, the bases were loaded. Derek Lee was up next, hit a double and tied the game at 3-3. This was Mark Prior’s 119^th and final pitch. Cubs manager Dusty Baker left him in the game while he was running out of gas. Kyle Farnsworth relieved Prior. He issued an intentional walk to Mike Lowell, then gave up a sacrifice fly to Jeff Conine, which gave the Marlins a 4-3 lead. Sammy Sosa missed the cutoff man, and Lowell was able to advance to second. Farnsworth issued another intentional walk to Todd Hollandsworth, again loading the bases. Mike Mordecai then hit a double, clearing the bases and breaking the game open 7-3. Juan Pierre came up for the second time in the inning, hit a single and drove in Mordecai with the Marlins’ eighth run. Before the Cubs realized what hit them, it was game over, Florida won 8-3. There was a Game 7 at Wrigley Field the following night. The Cubs had a 5-3 lead in Game 7, but they blew that one too. The Marlins won Game 7, won the National League pennant, and won the 2003 World Series beating the New York Yankees 4 games to 2.

The Cubs’ meltdown in the League Championship Series would be labeled as an “epic failure” today. Any way you look at it, they choked. How did such a team of highly-paid professionals unravel so badly and so quickly after one call that didn’t go their way? Did Cubs fans blame their team for their mental meltdown in Game 6? Did they blame their team for blowing another lead and not winning Game 7? Did they blame their pitchers for not being able to get anybody out? Did they blame Alex Gonzalez for botching a routine ground ball that extended the eighth inning? Did they blame manager Dusty Baker for leaving Mark Prior in the game too long? The answer to all those questions is a resounding “NO.” Instead, they blamed the guy who got in Moises Alou’s way – Steve Bartman.

What happened to Steve Bartman after his collision with destiny? After the game, one could see a sign outside Wrigley Field. "Kill that fan! He lost it for us!" There was an interview clip with Rod Blagojevich – “If someone ever convicts that guy of a crime he'll never get a pardon outta this governor.” [How’s THAT for irony?] Meanwhile, the Wrigley Field security staff had to figure out how to get Bartman home from the “friendly confines”without him getting killed. Gibney interviewed Wrigley Field security guard Erika Amundsen, who gave a compassionate account of how she got Bartman out of the neighborhood. Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser [idiots, both of them] blamed Bartman for the Cubs meltdown on their show ‘Pardon the Interruption.” The Chicago press didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory. They found out who Bartman was, where he worked and where he lived – then told everybody. There was a lynch mob mentality. Dave Kaplan, host of WGN’s “Sports Central,” was much more rational. He was on the air after the Cubs lost the pennant, and one fan called in and said “we know where he lives, we’re gonna kill him.” Kaplan was trying to “talk people away from the edge” and convince his listeners that the Cubs meltdown wasn’t Bartman’s fault. Fox baseball analyst Steve Lyons knew. He played back the Bartman incident, froze the replay and circled six other fans who were trying to do the same thing Steve Bartman did.

Cubs 2003 first baseman Eric Karros had the right idea, He didn’t think about Bartman in the crucial Game 7, just how the Cubs were going to win. Conversely, left fielder Moises Alou says after missing the foul ball, he knew something bad was going to happen — to the extent that he and teammate Aramis Ramirez booked flights home to the Dominican Republic. Why did Alou book a flight home after Game 6? And why did he admit doing it? Alou was a six-time All-Star, won the Silver Slugger award twice, had over 300 career home runs, a lifetime batting average of .303, and won a World Series ring with the Marlins in 1997. He was not a slug – he was a pretty good player. So how come a well-paid professional such as Alou just gives up on Game 7 before it’s even played? The Marlins came back from being down 3 games to 1. The Cubs had a huge series lead, almost insurmountable. All they had to do was win one more game. They didn’t get it done. Cubs fans wanted to blame someone besides their beloved Cubs for not getting it done. Steve Bartman was an easy target for them. Two years later, ESPN.com writer Wayne Drehs had been assigned to interview Steve Bartman. His boss told him his assignment was two words – “find Bartman.” Drehs staked out Bartman’s home and followed him to work. He waited in the parking garage for seven hours. He surprised Bartman when Drehs seemed to appear from nowhere to ask him for an interview. Taken aback, Bartman said ‘thank you, I appreciate it. I’m going to talk to my legal team and we’ll get back to you.”

The thing that most interested me was the interview with Ohio minister Kathleen Rolenz. She worked the Bartman incident into a sermon she delivered to her congregation. She paralleled Bartman as a scapegoat with the Biblical 16th chapter of Leviticus, where a goat carries the sins of the people. The way she described the story of the scapegoat fit exactly they way Bartman was treated as he was leaving Wrigley Field. As people threw trash and other things at the goat as it was leaving the village as depicted in Leviticus, fans threw all kinds of things at Bartman as he was being escorted from Wrigley Field.

Bartman didn’t make a dime off the controversy. He was offered $25,000 to sign autographs. He was given offers to appear in commercials. Bartman refused those offers too. The guy who did get the infamous ‘Bartman ball’ sold it to Harry Carey’s Restaurant for thousands of dollars. The guy who sold the ball was interviewed on camera but his identity concealed. He profited from the ‘Bartman ball,’ yet Bartman, who hasn’t taken a dime from anyone, is the asshole.

Gibney compares the ‘Bartman incident’ to Bill Buckner. When he played first base for the Boston Red Sox, he allowed a routine ground ball go through his legs during Game 6 of the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets. Many [not all] in Red Sox Nation blamed Buckner for costing the Red Sox the chance to win their first World Series since 1918. My opinion? Pitcher Calvin Schiraldi is the goat in that series, not Buckner. But Gibney allows Bill Buckner to tell his story and how he wouldn’t go near Fenway Park for many years after his brush with infamy. The Red Sox have won two World Series since Buckner’s error. The Red Sox brought him back to throw out the game ball on Opening Day 2008. The Boston fans greeted Buckner warmly. In a postgame press conference, Buckner said it was most difficult for him to forgive the media “for what they put me and my family through.”

Buckner has forgiven his critics. But will Steve Bartman forgive his?

Why I Like Black Sabbath

2011-10-13T23:06:00.000-05:00

In the late 1960s, four lads from the industrial heartland of England, Birmingham, made their entrance onto the music scene. These gentlemen – Tony Iommi, Terry “Geezer” Butler, John “Ozzy” Osbourne, and Bill Ward created a sound unlike any other. They were heavier, harder and darker [and probably louder] than anything that preceded them. First they were the Polka Tuck Blues Band, then they were Earth. They had to change their name when they found another band named Earth. A movie theater across the street from where they rehearsed would provide inspiration for a new name. The movie playing there: Boris Karloff’s Black Sabbath. Geezer Butler took note that people would pay money to have the crap scared out of them. Geezer and Ozzy wrote the words to Black Sabbath. Tony Iommi stumbled upon the tritone, known in medieval times as “The Devil in Music.” The music itself isn’t evil, it just sounds that way. Tony Iommi wasn’t setting out to write Satanic music – he just thought it sounded cool. Sabbath’s music evolved from the loud heavy blues of the late 1960s. There wasn’t anything about “wearing flowers in your hair” from this bunch. If anybody was singing about the occult during that time, they are unknown to me. These guys weren’t like anything else at the time. For better or worse [depending on who you talk to], Black Sabbath invented heavy metal. \m/ What are some of the things that endears me to Black Sabbath?

The Riffs – With all due respect to “the human riff” Keith Richards, he doesn’t have anything on Tony Iommi. Iommi has a million riffs, and they’re all cool. Standout riffs: Symptom of the Universe, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Into the Void, Snowblind, Killing Yourself to Live, Heaven and Hell, War Pigs [of course!].

Doom! – If you want peace and love and hippie shit, you’ve come to the wrong place. You’ve got death [Behind the Wall of Sleep], drugs [Sweet Leaf, Snowblind, Hand of Doom], nuclear war [Electric Funeral], anti-war [War Pigs], the dangers of messing with the occult [Black Sabbath], hookers [Dirty Women], fleeting fame [Looking For Today], getting ripped off by managers [The Writ], environmental destruction [Into the Void], and even God [After Forever]. So many songs, so many subjects, most of them are unhappy. There are few love songs, if any.

Tony Iommi – The man had two of his fingertips chopped off [not by choice], detuned his guitars and invented heavy metal. Black Sabbath has had 37 different people in the band at one time or another [ok, I exaggerate, but only a little bit], but Tony Iommi has been the one constant. Listen to everything Sabbath has put out and you too will subscribe to the “Iommi = Sabbath Theory.” Players come and players go, but the records with Tony Iommi still sound like Black Sabbath. Some lineups have been better than others, but Iommi’s guitar tones from below Hell are always there.

Geezer Butler – Tony Iommi may have come up with all the riffs, but it was Geezer Butler’s thunderous bass that made Iommi’s riffs the skullcrushers that they are. Other bassist have played with Sabbath [Dave Spitz, Bob Dailey, Neil Larsen], but none of them had that heaviness that made Black Sabbath what it was. Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler were made for each other. I wish I could play bass like him, but that isn’t very likely to happen.

Ronnie James Dio – Simply the best heavy metal vocalist that ever walked this Earth. I discovered him in Black Sabbath after he was without a job when he parted ways with Ritchie Blackmore and Rainbow. I’ve written at length about RJD in these spaces before, so there’s no need to bore you with a rehash.

Antidote to Crappy Music – Black Sabbath is an antidote to crappy music. Have you ever been in a dentist office waiting room, and they play this God-awful chick music while you’re waiting? Have you seen commercials that feature the worst Sheryl Crow song imaginable [and let’s face it, they’re ALL really shitty]? Or do you just hear a random song anywhere that annoys the crap out of you? Black Sabbath is your antidote. I guarantee if you have suffered from crappy music, one play of War Pigs will wipe that crap out of your mind.

Christians – Black Sabbath scares the hell out of hard-core Christians. These people seem to think that the guys in Black Sabbath are Satanists. While it’s true that Satan got name-checked every now and then, that doesn’t make them Satan worshippers. But the mere mention of the word Satan gives these people hissy fits. It shows how small-minded and clueless they really are, which is fine with me. There’s one song about Satan – Lord of This World.

Finally, they’re dinosaurs, just like me!

Homeland

2011-10-09T22:53:00.002-05:00

Today I watched the first episode of a new series on Showtime. It’s called Homeland. It’s a psychological thriller that is based on the Israeli TV series Prisoners of War. The story is this – Carrie Mathison is an American CIA officer [played by Claire Danes] who thinks an American POW, Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody [played by Damian Lewis (Band of Brothers)] has been turned into an al-Qaeda operative who poses great risk to national security. Think The Manchurian Candidate… The tagline for this series is “Someone is lying, but who?”

The series follows Carrie from the time when she conducted an unauthorized operation in Iraq. During this operation she was told by an “asset” that there was an American POW who had been turned by al-Qaeda. Carrie’s operation got her into much trouble with her superiors so she was reassigned to desk duty at CIA Headquarters. The only person at Langley that Carrie trusts is Saul Berenson [Mandy Patinkin], the CIA’s Middle East Division Chief and Carrie’s old boss and mentor. When Carrie found out during a briefing that Sgt. Brody was alive, her thoughts immediately went back to what that Iraqi “asset” told her in that Baghdad jail about the American POW being “turned.” She confided to Berenson to try to get surveillance on Brody, but he wouldn’t go for it because she didn’t have any proof. Not to be deterred, she hired some “experts” at the surveillance game and bugged Brody’s house. She’s not the kind to take “no” for an answer. Besides being on probation and tied to a desk instead of working in the field, Carrie has other problems to deal with. She has a guilt complex about not connecting the dots before 9-11. She takes anti-psychotic drugs without the CIA’s knowledge. She could lose her clearance and her job if they find out. Plus, Berenson found out about her extra-curricular surveillance of Brody’s home, for which he promises her jail time.

Sgt. Nicholas Brody was part of a two-man sniper team when he and his partner went missing. His partner died while in captivity. His wife Jessica [Morena Baccarin- V] had given him up for dead and started a relationship with Marine Capt. Mike Faber, who was Brody’s best friend. Jessica and Faber had just finished doing the wild thing when Jessica got the phone call from Brody to tell her he was still alive. Carrie asked to be part of Sgt. Brody’s debriefing. During the debriefing Carrie tried asked Brody if he recognized a certain individual, an al-Qaeda bigwig named Abu Nazir. Brody looked at the picture, recognized Abu Nazir, and then lied about it to his debriefers. Carrie asked him why he was held captive for eight years. Brody said he didn’t know. When the Deputy Director of the CIA asked her why she’s asking this of Brody, she replied that actionable intelligence obtained by a captured POW would be good for only 72 hours, so al-Qaeda keeping him for eight years wouldn’t make any sense. The Deputy Director got pissed, and so Carrie is at the top of his “shit list.”

Brody was supposed to go home and have a barbeque with buddies from his unit. He called Jessica to tell him he would be late because his debriefing went longer than expected. He lied. The rent-a-spook hired by Carrie told called her and told her. Carrie thought Brody was going to make his first contact. Carrie and her rent-a-spooks followed Brody, who didn’t meet with a contact. He met with the widow of his partner. She asked him how her late husband died. He told her he was beaten to death and that he didn’t see it happen. In one of his flashbacks we see that not only was Brody present when his partner died, Brody was the one who beat him to death. After he did the deed he broke down sobbing while he leaned on Abu Nazir’s shoulder. Such was the effectiveness of his brainwashing. This is very much like when Raymond Shaw shot one of his fellow prisoners in The Manchurian Candidate.

Carrie figured she is toast. Her career is shot and she figured she was going to jail. But while she was on a date she realized something. Something clicked in her mind between music and behavior that Brody exhibited while being filmed during his homecoming. She noticed twitches in his hands that follow a pattern. These twitches weren’t spastic or random, but of a pattern that might mean that he’s trying to contact somebody via television. She told Berenson what she thought, showed him the video and he believed her – for the time being. The last scene cuts to Brody going for a jog in DC. While he ran past the Tidal Basin had had those flashbacks [again] of him beating his partner to death. He stopped his jog on The Mall, looking at the Capitol Building. This makes one wonder “will this be his target?”

Since Homeland is based on an Israeli TV series, I have to wonder this - why does all the good stuff have to be based on something that was created overseas first? But I digress…Claire Danes is very good playing a CIA agent who is on the verge of coming unhinged. Even though the story has the look and feel of The Manchurian Candidate, this show still makes for TV viewing that gets my attention and holds my interest. Damian Lewis is equally good as Sgt. Brody. Mandy Patinkin had limited screen time, but I like his character [as long as he doesn’t sing]. So far, I really like the show. My only hope is that this show will be allowed to run its course and won’t get canceled prematurely [HBO’s Deadwood, anyone?].

Queen - A Night at the Opera/A Day at the Races

2011-09-14T21:56:00.001-05:00

Freddie Mercury would have been 65 years old on September 5^th. With that in mind I thought it appropriate to look at what many critics dub as Queen’s best album, A Night at the Opera. There are a lot of different kinds of music to choose from on this album. There’s hard rock, Vaudeville jazz, acoustic folk, and English pop. A Night at the Opera is a good album, but not a great album. I’d put it between “good” and “great” [“near great” perhaps?]. I’m not sure why they chose to use titles from Marx Brothers movies for this and their next album A Day at the Races. My theory is they wanted to convey to their listening public that they were entertainers who weren’t to be taken too seriously. Freddie Mercury’s life, from all appearances, was all about fun, and so were the Marx Brothers. So, what about the songs?

Death on Two Legs (Dedicated To…) – Queen rocks! An angry Freddie Mercury at his most venomous. The object of his displeasure was a former manager. This is reminiscent of John Lennon’s How Do You Sleep in that the object of Freddie’s displeasure is never named, and that the listener is drawn in to share Freddie’s anger. I like it!

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon – this is a mercifully brief excursion into Vaudeville territory, but after the bile from Death on Two Legs its nice comic relief. I like how Freddie’s vocals sound like they’re being sung through a megaphone.

I’m in Love With My Car – Roger Taylor sings! Every car cliché imaginable is here, but I like it anyway because it rocks.

You’re My Best Friend – Bassist John Deacon’s only song on A Night at the Opera. He wrote it for his wife while he was learning to play the piano. The Wurlitzer piano carries the tune, and there’s very little guitar. I’ve always liked it anyway.

’39 – Brian May sings! This one’s an acoustic gem about space travel that sounds like Led Zeppelin’s Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp from LZ III, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For all I know Page could have lifted his tune from someone else [like he’s never done THAT before…].

Sweet Lady – Hard-rock Queen the likes of which I will never tire.

Seaside Rendezvous – more Vaudeville, but Roger and Freddie use their voices to mimic woodwind/brass instruments, so that in itself makes this song interesting.

The Prophet’s Song – This is a sprawling 8:21 epic which would probably work better if it was 2 ½ minutes shorter. Coincidentally there’s a 2 ½ minute a capella section that gets a bit tedious after the first ten seconds. The rest of the song is ok. It was inspired by a dream Brian May had about the Great Flood.

Love of My Life – one of Freddie Mercury’s most beloved songs. This version is a piano ballad with bits of harp, but I prefer the live, acoustic guitar version. Brian May sings it live now, with much audience participation.

Good Company – A Brian May-sung ditty played on ukulele. This wouldn’t show up on any “mix CD” I would make, but it isn’t crap either. It’s just “there.”

Bohemian Rhapsody – THE Freddie Mercury masterpiece. You’ve all heard it – nothing more needs to be said.

God Save the Queen – the Brian May guitar orchestra. I always picture Freddie with his regal robe and his crown at the end of a Queen show whenever I hear this. I remember seeing Brian May play this on the roof of Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. How cool is that?

Queen - God Save the Queen [Live at Wembley '86]

Brian May - God Save the Queen Buckingham Palace 2002

By borrowing another album title from a Marx Brothers movie, and with similar artwork on the cover, one can’t help but think that A Day at the Races is a flip-side to A Night at the Opera. Perhaps that is intentional, but I can’t confirm that. A Day at the Races, the merely “good” follow-up to A Night at the Opera, is a bit of a letdown. A Night at the Opera was a hard act to follow. There are two standout songs surrounded many ordinary ones.

Tie Your Mother Down – Hard rock greatness written by Brian May. Everything you want in a hard rock song, and more. This one opened many Queen shows and for good reason.

You Take My Breath Away – After the hard rock bombast of Tie Your Mother Down comes this snoozy piano ballad from Freddie Mercury.

Long Away – Brian May sings. Instead of using his own Red Special he plays a Burns Double Six 12-string electric guitar. The song is ordinary, but I like the sound.

The Millionaire Waltz – this starts out as a piano/bass between Freddie and John Deacon. Halfway through it gets heavy very quickly, but after only about twenty seconds it’s back to the waltz, but with some guitar over the top. This song is a bit strange, but that makes it interesting.

You and I – a John Deacon song that does absolutely nothing for me. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t dazzle me with brilliance either.

Somebody to Love – one word: brilliant! It has the same trademark multi-tracked voices of Freddie, Brian and Roger as with Bohemian Rhapsody. IMHO, George Michael stole the Freddie Mercury tribute in 1992 with his rendition of this song. Anyone who watched that performance and wasn’t touched isn’t human. One of Freddie Mercury’s finest moments.

White Man – a rarity for a Queen song – it’s a political song from Brian May about American Indian mistreatment at the hands of white European immigrants. It starts out quietly, then gets loud and heavy at the one-minute mark and stays that way until the last 40 seconds, where the song ends the same way it begins.

Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy – I’m sorry, I never liked this one, never will.

Drowse – Roger Taylor sings here. While not a hard rocker like I’m in Love With My Car, Brian May plays slide throughout. It’s a good-sounding track, even if it’s a bit sleepy [hence the title].

Teo Torriate (Let Us Cling Together) – This one is another piano ballad from Freddie with Japanese lyrics thrown in. Zzzzzz…

Between A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, I can make a pretty decent mix CD. Now that I think about it…

Glen Campbell - Meet Glen Campbell/Ghost On The Canvas

2011-09-05T01:21:00.003-05:00

I have a confession to make. When I was a little kid in the 1960s, Glen Campbell and Herb Alpert were my babysitters. Not in the literal sense though. They never got a dime for their services and they didn’t even know they were babysitting me. Whenever my mom wanted to sit and watch her soap operas uninterrupted [there were lots of them, and this was an everyday thing], she’d plop me in front of the stereo, get out the Glen Campbell records, get out the Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass records, and left me to my own devices. The back of my head got somewhat flattened from me banging it on the wall to the beat of the music [I grew out of it – physically anyway, maybe not so much mentally]. I even got to see Glen Campbell in person when I was five years old. I don’t remember a damn thing about it, except that it was in San Antonio during Hemisfair ’68 and it was Glen Campbell. Later in life I found out that Bob Newhart was also on the bill that evening. I don’t remember what Glen Campbell played that night [I was 5, ok?], but in going back and looking at which of his records was popular at the time, I can make a pretty good guess. Gentle on My Mind, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, and Wichita Lineman were all monster hits at the time. I’m pretty sure I heard those songs that night. When I was a teenager and I got first eight-track tape player [now I’m dating myself], my mom bought me the Greatest Hits tape. It had those songs and it had Rhinestone Cowboy, Houston [I’m Coming to See You] and County Boy [You ‘Got Your Feet in LA]. I wore the tape out but never got a new one. My point [and I do have one] is that Glen Campbell’s music is part of my DNA [at least his early famous stuff, anyway].

I lost track of Glen Campbell after Southern Nights, and I REALLY didn’t care after he had the fling with Tanya Tucker. Then his cocaine debauchery set in. It was the early 1980s and it wasn’t cool to like Glen Campbell. I saw him sing in Clint Eastwood’s movie Any Which Way You Can, but after that, who cared? Country music was what my dad liked, and I didn’t want anything to do with it especially if my dad liked it, just like any teenager. This was during the time of Urban Cowboy, and I was discovering other things at the time, namely the Allman Brothers Band, Pink Floyd, and Bob Marley. During this time Glen found Jesus, and then I REALLY didn’t care. And so Glen Campbell was out of my musical consciousness until a couple of years ago when I heard he was going to make his first record with Capitol Records in fifteen years. It was said that it would sound like Glen in his late 60s/early 70s prime. I heard some samples of this new record on Amazon, liked what I heard and bought the album. That album was Meet Glen Campbell. I thought that was an odd title because I’d already known him for forty years. The point was that Glen Campbell was going to introduce himself to a new, younger audience, and to do that he would sing the songs of contemporary artists. That didn’t bother me because Glen was never a prolific songwriter to begin with. He had Jimmy Webb writing songs for him, so why bother writing your own stuff?

Some of the people whose songs Glen covered kind of threw me for a loop. Green Day, U2, Lou Reed, Foo Fighters. At first I wondered if Glen was back to snorting coke, but my fears were allayed when I heard the album. Some of the song choices didn’t work out as well as the others. One of those that didn’t was Lou Reed’s Jesus. It wasn’t done badly, but there were others done so much better. For instance Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) and Foo Fighters’ Times Like These were done so differently from the originals that I think of the originals as inferior to what Glen put down. It helps that Glen Campbell can sings circles around Dave Grohl and Billy Joe Armstrong. It’s like what Johnny Cash did with Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt. You just can’t listen to the originals and can’t help but think of how these old masters have taken new songs and staked their claim to them. Glen’s treatment of Tom Petty’s Walls and Angel Dream are two more cases of Glen taking ownership of songs written by others. There a couple of songs that sound pretty close to the originals. Those would be John Lennon’s Grow Old With Me and U2’s All I Want Is You. They stuck to the original arrangements. There’s nothing wrong with that. Again, they aren’t done badly. They’re done very well in fact, but they didn’t sound radically different like the Green Day, Foo Fighters and Tom Petty songs did. Glen recorded Jackson Browne's These Days. It's an excellent version. The one thing I can ask Glen Campell is this - what took you so long to record this fine song? On balance, Meet Glen Campbell is a solid piece of work. I don’t know how many new fans he won with it, but at least it re-ignited my interest in his music. That’s good enough for me, and hopefully it will be good enough for Glen. Meet Glen Campbell sounds like his records from the 1960s and early 1970s. Producer Julian Raymond did that on purpose – he wanted to play to the strengths that made Glen Campbell a star in the first place – a fine interpretive singer and a superior instrumentalist. Given an exceptional set of songs to work with a sympathetic producer, Meet Glen Campbell works. Forty-one years after his take on Gentle On My Mind, Glen Campbell still has a fine voice that hasn’t been ravaged by the sands of time.

Times Like These

Good Riddance [Time Of Your Life]

Walls

Angel Dream

All I Want Is You

Last week saw the release of what Glen Campbell calls the final album he intends to make – Ghost On The Canvas. He executed the same formula he followed on Meet Glen Campbell – same producer, same musicians, good songs from contemporary songwriters. Paul Westerberg provides two outstanding songs [Ghost On The Canvas, Any Trouble]. He is Glen Campbell’s latter-day Jimmy Webb. There is one twist – Glen Campbell and producer Julian Raymond wrote about half the songs themselves. Glen Campbell isn't known for his songwriting, but it's all top-notch here. Again Glen, what took you so long? I’ve read in many on-line publications that Ghost On The Canvas was meant to be a companion piece to Meet Glen Campbell. But instead of it being just a collection of songs like Meet Glen Campbell, Ghost On The Canvas has a narrative that tells the story of Glen Campbell’s life. The fact that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's lends more poignancy to this song cycle. From the very first song [A Better Place] Glen sings "Some days I'm so confused, Lord," you know not all is right in Denmark but Glen doesn’t ask for your pity. He just lays it out matter-of-fact style that his mind isn’t what it was. In the title track he knows he’s on the “doorstep of eternity.” In other songs he tells us a little about his past and his upbringing, about his triumphs and his failures, and that on balance he’s been fortunate in life ["The one thing I know/The world's been good to me"]. Jakob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, Robert Pollard, and Teddy Thompson have captured Glen Campbell’s essence perfectly. The most stark, and perhaps chilling line of the entire album was one he wrote himself for his wife - "This is not the road I want for us/But now that it's here/All I want to be for you is strong." One thing is perfectly clear – the look back on a life lived, good and bad, is unflinching in its honesty.

There are some instrumental surprises on the album. Listen closely to In My Arms and you hear Glen tearing it up with surf guitar god Dick Dale. On the closing There Is No Me...Without You Glen lets his guitar do the talking with other players like Rick Nielsen, Billy Corgan, and Brian Setzer. Some of the songs have the sweeping orchestral arrangements one expects from Glen Campbell albums, but in other songs the strings add just a little bit of color and lets the musicians carry the tune. There are some modern production touches to the album, but they still fit in the Glen Campbell framework. There’s a good balance between the grandiose and the intimate. Some songs remind on of Wichita Lineman, but Any Trouble reminds me of Everybody’s Talkin’ from Midnight Cowboy [I know, that’s a Harry Nilsson song, but that’s what my ears tell me]. There are some brief instrumental interludes written by Robert Joseph Manning that would not be out of place on Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds. I think that’s an intentional nod to Glen Campbell’s time spent with the Beach Boys before he became a star in his own right. The album is sentimental without being syrupy. For those who purchase the MP3s on Amazon or iTunes, you’re treated to the bonus of a song from Jimmy Webb called Wish You Were Here. Would a Glen Campbell album be complete without something from Jimmy Webb? I don’t think so.

Ghost On The Canvas is that rarest of albums in my collection – I like every single song. I can’t even say that about Abbey Road. Ghost On The Canvas is an appropriate way for the Rhinestone Cowboy to ride off into the sunset. Ghost On The Canvas bears no resemblance to the albums Johnny Cash recorded with Rick Rubin. As those albums progressed, you could hear a man who was dying. Glen Campbell isn’t dying yet – he’s just slowly fading away. His voice and his instrumental prowess were captured here as strong as ever. This album is part of Glen Campbell’s long goodbye to his fans and to the music business. And he got to do it his way. Does it get any better than being able to pick and chose when to get off the horse?

Goodbye Glen, and thank you.

A Better Place

Ghost On The Canvas

Any Trouble

Strong

It's Your Amazing Grace

A Thousand Lifetimes

Gregg Allman - Low Country Blues

2011-08-29T22:14:00.000-05:00

In my short lifetime I’ve liked some pretty good singers – Paul Rodgers, John Lennon, David Gilmour and Ronnie James Dio just to name a few. But by far my favorite vocalist of all-time is Gregg Allman. Between the Allman Brothers Band and his own Gregg Allman & Friends, I’ve seen him in concert nine times. The first time I had the pleasure of seeing him live was the day after Carol and I got married in 1987. We saw him open for Stevie Ray Vaughan [RIP] & Double Trouble. I first got hooked on Gregg Allman’s voice when I first heard the Allman Brothers’ version of One Way Out. I’m usually pretty skeptical about white guys trying to sing the blues, but Gregg Allman has earned that right. He’s had his share of trials and tribulations, some of them of his own doing [five or six wives, drugs, booze], some of them not [brother Duane killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971, his own father murdered by a hitchhiker when he was two]. He recently had a liver transplant [due to liver cancer and Hepatitis C], from which he is slowly recovering. He’s been sober since 1996, but he still has a feel for the blues. For proof, listen to him on the Allman Brothers’ Hittin’the Note. That album found Gregg Allman in perhaps the finest voice of his career. Since that release we Allman Brothers fans have been craving another release of any kind from Gregg Allman. Our hopes were answered with Low Country Blues.

Low Country Blues finds Gregg in as fine a voice as he was with Hittin’ the Note. The big difference is he doesn’t have the big seven-piece band on Low Country Blues. The music of the Allman Brothers is firmly in the blues-rock category, with the soul, R&B and jazz influences to the fore. In the Allman Brothers, the guitar is king. How could it not since the likes of Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks have all passed through its ranks? What has made the Allman Brothers stand out is their inventive blend of traditional formats (Chicago, Delta, Country, Swamp, Appalachian) that reinvented the contours of the blues song. Low Country Blues is pure blues. Doyle Bramhall and T-Bone Burnett provide the sympathetic guitar work, but they don’t overpower the arrangements like Warren Haynes or Dickey Betts could. Gregg’s Hammond B-3 is mixed just high enough to let you know it’s there. Colin Linden’s Dobro adds just enough coloring to make the arrangements that much more exotic. The production emphasis is where it should be on a Gregg Allman solo release – that voice. He is sounding better now than in the Allman Brothers’ Fillmore East/Eat a Peach heyday. After those two seminal albums, you could hear how the drugs and booze affected Gregg’s voice. His voice was good then – it’s great now. It rasps, it sweeps, it snarls, it bites, and it does it even more effectively today than back in his younger days. T-Bone Burnett did an excellent job in capturing the rawness of Gregg Allman’s voice. He let Gregg do only one or two vocal takes of each song. That’s another endearing quality of Low Country Blues – a slickly-produced album it is not.

I haven’t heard the Sleepy John Estes original Floating Bridge. I heard Eric Clapton cover it on Another Ticket. Gregg’s version sounds nothing like that. With his own acoustic guitar, Dr John’s piano, a few electric guitars wailing in the background and a rubbery upright bass, the song is “bouncy.” Of the twelve songs on the album, there is one Gregg Allman original. He wrote Just Another Rider with Allman Brothers/Gov’t Mule guitarist Warren Haynes. Just Another Rider fits snugly amongst the other songs created by blues legends. Am I implying Gregg Allman is also a blues legend? Yes! When he sings I feel like snappin’ my pistol in your face/the stone cold graveyard gonna be your restin’ place on Muddy Waters’ I Can’t Be Satisfied, you get the feeling he means it. I’ve heard Muddy’s original, and I’ve also heard BB King’s Please Accept My Love. Gregg does both songs justice. Otis Rush’s Checking On My Baby reminds one of Gregg’s performance of Stormy Monday from the Fillmore East album. The traditional Rolling Stone is transformed by Gregg, T-Bone Burnett and Dr John into a 7-minute trance blues with a hypnotic percussion, a piano that doubles the upright bass lines, a dobro that gives the song a swampy feel, and a stark vocal. It just oozes atmosphere. This is the one that always makes me reach for the “repeat” button on my iPod. I won’t go so far as to mimic Paula Abdul [her oft-repeated “you took the song and made it your own” cliché], but Gregg sings all of these blues nuggets very well.

T-Bone Burnett, the producer of choice these days, produced this disc as he did for BB King’s latest, One Kind Favor [2008]. I mention One Kind Favor because both it and Low Country Blues have the same sound. It’s almost like T-Bone Burnett cuts records and saves a place to “insert vocalist here.” Both albums were made the same way. Both were cut without the artists’ own bands. Dr John’s piano and Jay Bellrose’s calf-skin drums grace both records, as does the acoustic upright bass. The horns on both are arranged by Darrell Leonard, he of several albums from Taj Mahal. Both albums have that 1950s throwback feel. T-Bone Burnett gathered hundreds of songs for Gregg Allman and BB King to listen to, from which they chose which songs they were going to record. And both singers got to chose from songs from the early blues era. In BB King’s case it was the likes Blind Lemon Jefferson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lonnie Johnson, T-Bone Walker and Big Bill Broonzy. With Gregg Allman it was Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, Bobby Blue Bland, Skip James, Junior Wells, and [ironically] BB King. Both men covered the “Who’s Who” of American blues.

The thing with both records is that both harken back to an earlier and simpler blues era. If you like Low Country Blues, do yourself and pick up a copy of One Kind Favor while you’re at it. Gregg Allman has said he can’t wait to do another record with T-Bone Burnett. As much as I like Low Country Blues, I hope Gregg has more of his own tunes to offer the next time around.

Recommended songs: Just Another Rider, Rolling Stone, Devil Got My Woman, I Can't Be Satisfied, Floating Bridge

Just Another Rider

Floating Bridge

I Can't Be Satisfied

Rolling Stone

Devil Got My Woman

The Conspirator

2011-08-18T21:57:00.001-05:00

We saw The Conspirator a couple of nights ago on Pay Per View. The story looked promising – the telling of the story of Mary Surratt. She was the first woman executed by the US government. Her crime – being part of the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. The story was a courtroom drama, much like another such movie that is one of my favorites, Breaker Morant. But where Breaker Morant has passionate and firey performances from Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson, one gets the feeling the life has been sucked out of The Conspirator, at least in the courtroom anyway. Despite this being a courtroom drama, it’s what happens outside the courtroom that things get interesting.

For students of history, and especially those who want to know more about the Lincoln assassination up until Mary Surratt’s trial, this movie gets it right. If you didn’t already know the facts surrounding the conspiracy to decapitate the US government, this movie gives you a fairly good primer. There was indeed a conspiracy to kill Lincoln and the others, and the place these conspirators often met was Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse in Washington.

Most of the characters in this movie are not very sympathetic or very likeable. Senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) at first starts out as a noble character, insisting on defending Mary Surratt in the face of public outrage at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He talked a great game about Constitutional rights, but he didn’t “walk the walk.” When the going got tough, he pawned the case off to a novice attorney in his employ, Capt. Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy). His excuse was that Mary Surratt might get a more fair trial if she was represented by a Yankee. For awhile that excuse held water, but when Aiken needed Johnson’s help Johnson conveniently needed to attend to some business in Baltimore. Aiken himself felt his client was guilty when he took the case – at least he was honest. Aiken redeemed himself later when he saw the trial in which he was participating was a sham. He started his own investigation and realized it wasn’t Mary Surratt the feds were after, but her son John Jr., who had fled the country to Montreal before the assassination. The trial was a kangaroo court, rules were made up as they went along, evidence was tampered with, and witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense lied to save their own skins. Aiken evolved from being a skeptic about Mary Surratt’s innocence to Surratt’s fiercest defender. He showed his own resolve when people started to shun him for being Surratt’s lawyer. The social club he belonged to expelled him for “conduct unbecoming a member.” His girlfriend Sarah dumped him [bitch!] because of his devotion to principle, for trying to ensure Mary Surratt got a fair trial. Even his closest friends began to doubt him, but at least they stuck with him.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton [Kevin Kline] is consistent – he’s loathsome throughout the movie. He wants Mary Surratt to be executed – period. He even told Aiken if either Mary Surratt or her son, John Jr. was executed, that would be fine with him – he wasn’t particular. When a majority of the tribunal found Mary Surratt guilty but opted to spare her the death penalty, Stanton wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and got the tribunal to reconsider. When Aiken filed a Writ of Habeus Corpus to get a civilian trial for Mary Surratt, Stanton got Andrew Johnson to suspend the writ. Kline’s Stanton cared not for the law, but vengeance. Kline played Stanton very well.

Mary Surratt [Robin Wright] doesn’t generate a whole lot of sympathy. She betrayed her Confederate sympathies when she referred to Abraham Lincoln as “your president” when talking with Aiken. She isn’t very helpful to Aiken because her only thought was to protect her son. Perhaps she knew that since her son was not in custody to be tried, that she was as good as dead and didn’t put up a fight to save herself. She didn’t really deny that she knew nothing of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. She did admit she knew of a plot to kidnap [but not kill] Lincoln. While she doesn’t generate any sympathy, Wright’s Surratt generates respect. She is no clichéd “helpless female” – she’s a widow who’s had a hard life and has a steely resolve to get her through that hard life. There are three times when you see any emotion from Mary Surratt – when her daughter testifies on her behalf, when Aiken tried to make the trial about her son, and right before she was led to the gallows. But when she got to the gallows, she was recomposed. You get to see the last thing Mary Surratt sees as the execution hood is placed over her head. She went to her death clutching a rosary bead. She exhibited more resolve and composure than the males who were being executed with her.

There is one poignant moment at the very end of the movie. John Surratt Jr. had surrendered himself to the authorities after his mother’s execution. Aiken [who by this time no longer practiced law] visited the younger Surratt in his prison cell to deliver to him the rosary his mother held onto when she died. John Jr. looked at the rosary, but handed it back to Aiken. He said “this is yours – you were more of a son to my mother than I was.”

At the end of the movie there’s a blurb about how the Supreme Court upheld the right for citizens to be tried by a jury of their peers, even in wartime. The implication is clear – trying civilians with military tribunals is wrong. Another blurb told of the government’s inability to convict John Surratt Jr. of anything relating to the Lincoln assassination, thus implying that Mary Surratt was wrongly convicted. Was she guilty or not? The movie lets you draw your own conclusions. Many historians think she was guilty as charged. Some historians aren’t so sure.

Here’s what this movie was really about – this was a thought piece about how a country struggles uphold its ideals for the rule of law in times of crisis. One cannot help but juxtapose the post-Civil War period with the post-9/11 world we live in today. If that was Robert Redford’s intent, he succeeded. As I set out to write this little blurb, I so wanted to bash Robert Redford over the head because I initially thought his movie about Mary Surratt’s “trial” [and I use that term loosely] was a propaganda piece for the Left. Mary Surratt’s conspirators were led into the courtroom with hoods over their heads [Abu Grahib anyone?]. Mary Surratt herself wasn’t let out of her cell until Aiken intervened. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought this could happen at any time, not just after 9/11. American citizens of Japanese descent were deprived of their civil liberties during World War II. People who opposed World War I were jailed for sedition [Eugene V. Debs comes to mind]. "In times of war, the law falls silent," goes Cicero's maxim, quoted in the film by Surratt's prosecutor, Joseph Holt (Danny Huston). And so it seems, no matter the times.

The Conspirator is a good movie that could have been great, but watch it anyway. :-)

Leaves of Grass

2011-08-18T20:52:00.000-05:00

There we were in our usual place, in front of the TV surfing for something to watch after dinner. I wasn’t in the mood to watch any news on any station (all the news is bad these days). Deadliest Catch is done for the season. True Blood isn’t on until Sunday [yeah, it’s a guilty pleasure]. None of the baseball games interested me. Then I found a movie in progress on Showtime called Leaves of Grass. I saw it had Edward Norton so I stopped surfing. Ever since I saw him in Primal Fear and American History X I’ve been a fan, so I left the TV on that station. Tim Blake Nelson [the guy in O Brother Where Art Thou who said “we thought you was a toad”] wrote and directed the movie, and he has a supporting part. It's a down-home kind of story set in Oklahoma about two brothers and their family.

Edward Norton plays the two brothers. The first is Bill Kincaid, a professor of classics at Brown University. He’s an accomplished guy – he has a reputation as a true scholar who is dedicated to his work of philosophical exploration. He’s a published author and is about to get offered his own department at Harvard. He wanted to get as far away from Oklahoma as he could, and worked very hard at losing his Southern accent. His twin brother Brady is a stoner who grows some wicked good weed. As one would expect of a guy in his profession, Brady is in trouble with others who are in his line of work, but mainly his chief customer, drug kingpin Pug Rothbaum [Richard Dreyfus]. One day while visiting his drug-addled mother [Susan Sarandon] in a rest home, she asks Brady if Bill will ever come back to see them. Brady replies that it’ll probably take either him or his mom dying to make that happen [foreshadowing!].

Bill gets a phone call telling him his brother was killed by an errant crossbow. So Bill hops on a plane to Tulsa. While en route he has a conversation with a Jewish orthodontist who is relocating to Oklahoma to start an orthodontist practice. He’s met at the airport by Brady’s partner-in-crime and best friend, Bolger [Tim Blake Nelson]. On the way back to Brady’s house they stop at a local convenience store, where they’re met by some of the area’s other drug dealers who mistake Bill for Brady. A fight ensues, Bill gets the crap kicked out of him and gets knocked out. When he comes to, there’s Brady to greet him. Bill realizes he’s been had. The reason Brady wanted to get Bill back to Oklahoma was to use him in a scheme to get out of all of his debts so he can marry his pregnant girlfriend [Melanie Lynskey]. What is very fun to watch is how these two brothers interact with each other – the learned scholar and the pot head. Norton does such a great job playing both characters it’s easy to forget he’s the same guy.

Brady is every bit as smart as Bill [their mom implies he’s even smarter than Bill], but he chose to remain in Oklahoma. Each is extremely articulate in his own way. As Bill expresses his disdain for Brady’s chosen “career path,” he can’t help but be impressed by Brady’s hydroponic system for marijuana cultivation. Brady, on the other hand, tells Bill that he reads everything Bill publishes, even though he has to use the “fuckin’ OED” to get through them all. Meanwhile, while Bill is in town for the Brady funeral that doesn’t happen, he meets a pretty English teacher [Keri Russell] who likes to quote Walt Whitman [hence the Leaves of Grass title] and fish for catfish by hand.

After the characters are fleshed out, the movie gets to Brady’s last big caper, which doesn’t end well. There are some weird twists along the way to keep you interested. The dialog amongst all the characters is priceless. As the movie progresses you find that you can’t walk away from it for fear of missing something witty. The script doesn’t insult your intelligence. It’s like watching a Coen Brothers movie. Just when I thought American filmmakers had run out ideas, Tim Blake Nelson proved me wrong. This is definitely not your average Hollywood fare. It’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel, and it’s not an American adaptation of a foreign film. Despite the use of a tried-and-true concept [twins who are polar opposites], it’s an original film that’s well-acted and fairly well-written. I loved it!

The Beatles - Tony's "Perfect" White Album(s)

2011-08-08T21:22:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I actually got a request from a friend to write a blog about the “perfect” White Album. Ever since its release in November 1968, Beatlemaniacs have debated what the album should have contained. Should it have been a double album? Should it have been two separate albums – the “White” Album and a “Whiter” Album [as Ringo Starr once suggested]? Or should the Beatles heeded producer George Martin’s advice and distill all the songs down to a single album with all the best songs? I’m going to play record executive and come up with a single LP White Album, then I’ll create a two-LP White Album that looks a little different from what came out in 1968.

First of all, the Beatles recorded two singles in 1968. The first, Lady Madonna, was recorded in February 1968 and released while they were trying to find themselves in India. The second single, Hey Jude [A-side]/Revolution [B-side], was recorded during sessions for the White Album but not included on the album in accordance with standard English record company practice of the day. I never liked that practice. Sgt Pepper would have been much better if Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane stayed on the album for which they were intended. Standard practice was also 12-14 songs per album. The Beatles themselves had a couple of rules – two of George’s songs, and one for Ringo. I’ll stick with that rule. I’m going with the three single songs and keeping ten others from the original White Album. So here’s my running order for the single LP:

Side 1:

Back in the USSR / Dear Prudence / Glass Onion / Lady Madonna / Revolution / While My Guitar Gently Weeps / Helter Skelter - 23 min. 50 sec.

Side 2:

Hey Jude / Birthday / Yer Blues / Savoy Truffle / Julia / Good Night - 22 min. 58 sec.

Now for the double LP:

Side 1:

Back in the USSR / Dear Prudence / Glass Onion / Lady Madonna / Revolution / While My Guitar Gently Weeps / Helter Skelter - 23 min. 50 sec.

Side 2:

Birthday / Yer Blues / I’m So Tired / Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey / Sexy Sadie / Blackbird / Piggies / Julia – 21 min. 43 sec.

Side 3:

Hey Jude / Revolution 1 / Savoy Truffle / Cry Baby Cry / Good Night – 21 min. 34 sec.

Side 4:

Helter Skelter [Take 2 – Anthology 3] / Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da [Anthology 3 version] / Across the Universe [Anthology 3 version] / While My Guitar Gently Weeps [Take 1 – Anthology 3] / Not Guilty [Anthology 3] / What’s the New Mary Jane [Anthology 3] – 24 min. 2 sec.

For my single LP I kept the first three songs [Back in the USSR, Dear Prudence, Glass Onion] as is. I like them just the way they are. I like hearing Revolution [the single], While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Helter Skelter in that order. Plus I don’t have too many “John” or “Paul” songs bunched together. I slipped Lady Madonna between Glass Onion and Revolution for that reason – and John name checks Lady Madonna on Glass Onion anyway. I have Hey Jude to kick off Side 2 because I can. I can follow Hey Jude with anything, so why not Birthday and Yer Blues? Savoy Truffle is here because it’s another “George” song. It fits better in this running order than Long Long Long or Piggies. I wanted to keep one acoustic song – I chose John’s Julia. The “Ringo” song is Good Night, a lullaby written by John. It was a good closer for the original White Album, and it reprises its roll here.

I carved out most [but not all] of the acoustic songs because I wanted something more hard-edged. That way I cut the songs to three sides with one side left over for “extras” like what you would find on “deluxe editions” of re-released albums today. That’s what takes up Side 4. The Anthology 3 version of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da is a complete take. IMHO it’s much better than what came out. This one’s a perfectly good take. It’s no wonder the rest of the group couldn’t stand the song and Paul’s “perfectionism.” Across the Universe was first done before the Beatles went to India. Take 1 of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is an acoustic demo, but it’s good enough for release. It even includes an extra verse that didn’t make the final version. George’s Not Guilty took over 100 takes and just missed the final running order. It didn’t see the light of day until George recorded it for his self-titled album release in 1979. John’s What’s the New Mary Jane was an experimental “song” kind of like Revolution #9, only much more listenable. Since Revolution #9 was already on the album, they wouldn’t have two “songs” like that, so What’s the New Mary Jane stayed unreleased until 1996. Take 2 of Helter Skelter is included to show how the song progressed from beginning to release. What a pity they didn’t release the 22-minute version.

So there they are, my perfect White Albums.

Tony's Picks - Grateful Dead

2011-08-07T00:40:00.001-05:00

As the anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death approaches it’s time to do the annual ritual of immersing myself in the music of the Grateful Dead. These guys were together for a long time [1965-95] and produced a lot of music. They weren’t overly fond of recording studios, so they produced only 13 studio albums in that thirty-year span. Their place was the live stage, and the recordings of those performances take up miles of storage shelf space. They played over 2,000 shows and have recordings of almost every one of them. Included below are my favorites from my collection of Grateful Dead and Dead-related albums. Still on my “to get” list are Wake of the Flood, Europe ’72, and Aoxomoxoa. Maybe the next time I go TDY I’ll fix that. There are a few glaring omissions from my list – no Casey Jones [too repetitive for me], Alabama Getaway [never really like it], and no Touch of Grey [it’s an average song at best].

Disclaimer #1: In my own mind I don’t see myself as a Deadhead. I feel that distinction goes to those who have seen the Grateful Dead in the flesh. A friend told me that Deadheads define whether or not they are in fact Deaheads and that status is not conferred by people outside the world of the Grateful Dead. For me to claim “Deadhead” status would be dishonest since I never saw them live. Carol saw them once – she’s a Deadhead. I approach my picks as a fan of the music, not as a hardcore Deadhead. Some would argue just being a fan of the music qualifies you as a Deadhead. I’m not so sure…

Disclaimer #2: The Grateful Dead have released many live albums. There is the four-part View From the Vault series, the 36-volume Dick’s Picks series, the 16-part Road Trips series, and over 30 other live recordings. True hardcore Deadheads will have all of them – I own but a few. For any live versions of Dead songs that I like, I’m sure there are many other better versions that exist on archive recordings that I do not own. So at the risk of insulting the intelligence and tastes of Deadheads everywhere, I apologize ahead of time if your favorite version of a particular song isn’t on my list. I can only rate what I’ve heard.

Disclaimer #3: Although Jerry Garcia is no longer with us, surviving members of the Grateful Dead keep his music alive in different groups – The Other Ones, Phil Lesh & Friends, Bob Weir & Ratdog, and Further. I will include some of that music on my list – I think it’s appropriate since those groups are keeping the spirit of the Dead alive and well.

Box of Rain [Grateful Dead, American Beauty - 1970] – Phil Lesh sings to his dying father. He wasn’t the only member of the Dead to have a dying parent during the recording of American Beauty. Jerry Garcia’s mom was hit by a car [or was it a bus? I’m not sure…] and lingered for awhile before she too passed on.

Uncle John’s Band [Grateful Dead, Workingman’s Dead – 1970] – Goddamn well I declare, have you seen the light? This one is fun to play, maybe because it’s so easy to play.

New Speedway Boogie [Grateful Dead, Workingman’s Dead – 1970] – the story of Altamont from the Dead’s point of view. The phrase “please don’t dominate the rap Jack if you’ve got nothing new to say” could be applied to any politician anywhere.

Friend of the Devil [Grateful Dead, American Beauty - 1970]

Ripple [Grateful Dead, American Beauty - 1970] – David Grisman on mandolin.

Black Peter [Grateful Dead, Workingman’s Dead – 1970]

Sugar Magnolia [Grateful Dead, American Beauty - 1970]

Truckin’ [Grateful Dead, American Beauty - 1970]– there’s some classic lines I never forget in this – “livin’ on reds, Vitamin C and cocaine/all a friend can say is ‘ain’t it a shame…’” “what a long strange trip it’s been…” and many more.

Bertha [Grateful Dead, Skulls & Roses – 1971] – Los Lobos does a fabulous version of this song. But this one is pretty good. Hundred Year Hall also has a pretty good version even though the recording is average.

Playing in the Band [Bob Weir, Ace – 1972] – This is from a Bob Weir solo album in name only. Ace featured all the Grateful Dead minus Pigpen. This version far surpasses what appeared on the Dead’s Skull & Roses album a few months earlier.

Loser [Jerry Garcia, Garcia – 1972] – this, along with others from Garcia, became semi-permanent fixtures in Dead setlists. Jerry played all the instruments on Garcia except Bill Kreutzmann, who played drums.

Deal [Jerry Garcia, Garcia – 1972]

To Lay Me Down [Jerry Garcia, Garcia – 1972]

The Wheel [Jerry Garcia, Garcia – 1972] – Interesting story – I was just in Fort Collins last month. While I was at IHOP I heard this song over the sound system. Only in Colorado… If you ever want to hear spaced-out steel guitar from Jerry, this is your song.

Cassidy [Bob Weir, Ace – 1972] – Donna Jean sings great harmony with Bob here.

Sugaree [Jerry Garcia, Garcia – 1972] – How could one not like Sugaree?

Franklin’s Tower [Grateful Dead, One From the Vault – 1991] – Originally appears on Blues for Allah [1975] – The show this was taken from was supposed to be the last show the Dead would play before they retired from the road. We all know the retirement didn’t work out too well. An interesting note – Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts loved Jerry and after his death always played a little bit of Franklin’s Tower to introduce Blue Sky.

U.S. Blues [Grateful Dead, One From the Vault – 1991] – Originally appears on From the Mars Hotel [1974] – Wave that flag… I have to play it every 4^th of July. It just wouldn’t be right if I didn’t.

Unbroken Chain [Phil Lesh & Friends, Instant Live: Darien Center, NY 7/8/06 – 2006] – Originally appears on From the Mars Hotel [1974], I don’t think the Dead ever did this song any justice. Phil Lesh & Friends didn’t have any problems.

Hell in a Bucket [Grateful Dead, In The Dark – 1987] – an unusually up-tempo song from the Dead, maybe because it came from Bob Weir and not jerry Garcia.

When Push Comes to Shove [Grateful Dead, In The Dark – 1987]

West LA Fadeaway [Grateful Dead, In The Dark – 1987] – I heard this one a lot while I was in San Antonio for Air Force Office Training School. Los Lobos covers this on their latest, Tin Can Trust.

Throwing Stones [Grateful Dead, In The Dark – 1987] – Ashes ashes, all fall down…

Foolish Heart [Grateful Dead, Built to Last – 1989]

Standing on the Moon [Grateful Dead, Built to Last – 1989] – By this late stage in the game, Jerry was getting very good at the very slow ballads. This has what I think is one of the best lines in a love song - A lovely view of heaven/But I'd rather be with you.

Eyes of the World [Grateful Dead, Without a Net – 1990] – originally appears on Wake of the Flood [1973] – This is over 16 minutes of improvisational bliss. Branford Marsalis sat in on this one. He’d never played with the Dead before, had never heard the song either, but being the outstanding jazz musician that he is, he followed along quite well.

Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo [Grateful Dead, Without a Net – 1990] – Originally appears on Wake of the Flood [1973]. “Come on baby I’m gone goodbye/Have a bottle of rock ‘n rye…”

Dupree’s Diamond Blues [Grateful Dead, Dozin’ at the Knick – 1996] – Originally appears on Aoxomoxoa. Both this one and Mississippi Half-Step sound very similar.

Althea [Grateful Dead, Without a Net – 1990] – Originally appears on Go To Heaven [1980]

Stella Blue [Grateful Dead, Dozin’ at the Knick – 1996] – Originally appears on Wake of the Flood [1973]. Warren Haynes covered this song on his Live at Bonnaroo CD.

Row Jimmy [Grateful Dead, Dozin’ at the Knick – 1996] – Originally appears on Wake of the Flood [1973]

Patchwork Quilt [Phil Lesh & Friends, There and Back Again, 2002] – I include this because it is about Jerry Garcia. This is Warren Haynes’ elegy to Jerry. Warren was with the Allman Brothers at the time, and the line We were at Jones Beach when we got the word… is true. The blood of his music runs through the veins of our guitars/Bright lights, Dark Star…

Tennessee Jed [Phil Lesh & Friends w/ Bob Weir, Live from Bonnaroo Music Festival 2002 – 2002] – Originally appears on Europe ’72 [1972] – an outstanding version of Tennessee Jed by Phil Lesh & Friends with special guest Bob Weir.

St Stephen/The Eleven – I have three versions of this combo that deserve inclusion here. The Dead played this at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1968. That version appears on Two From the Vault. This version was Jerry at his mind-bending best. The next version is from The Other Ones’ The Strange Remain. Recorded three years after Jerry’s death, The Other Ones got two guitarists to “replace” Jerry. The interplay between the two is a wonder to behold. Then there is a version from Phil Lesh & Friends There and Back Again. Again there are two guitarists to “replace” Jerry – Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring. Their interplay gives the song a different character with a little harder edge. Regardless of the version I’ve always loved how the music goes from 4/4 time to 11/2 time. This is always fun to listen to.

This list is more than a bit slanted to the songs Jerry Garcia wrote with Robert Hunter. I don’t intend to slam Bob Weir. I never tire of Playing in the Band and others. I just like Jerry’s songs a whole lot better.

Tony's Picks - The Band

2011-08-05T00:30:00.001-05:00

“Back in 1967 or ’68, I heard a record called Music From Big Pink and it changed my life. It changed the course of American music. Please welcome The Band!” – Eric Clapton, 1992.

So said Eric Clapton when he introduced The Band at the Bob Dylan 30^th Anniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden. They came out and played When I Paint My Masterpiece, a Dylan song they recorded in 1971 for their Cahoots album. Indeed, Music From Big Pink changed Eric Clapton’s life. It’s because of what he heard on that album, he immediately felt that what he was doing with Cream was irrelevant. So he broke up Cream and began a musical journey that took him into some dark places before he settled on a musical path. My first exposure to The Band came when I first saw The Last Waltz. I took three things away from that movie – I love to hear Levon Helm sing [his 1970s voice reminded me a lot of Gregg Allman], who is that crazy guy with the cowboy hat [it was Ronnie Hawkins], and could Martin Scorcese possibly get any more shots of Robbie Robertson in the movie?

In 2000 Capitol Records issued a “greatest hits” CD. It’s not bad, they put some pretty good songs on it. The band’s music is such that you can’t possibly summarize it all in one CD. Here is my list of my favorite Band performances. Note that I listed a few things they did with Bob Dylan as he figures large in their history as a group.

The Shape I’m In [The Last Waltz, 1978] – there’s something missing from the studio version that makes this song come alive, and that “something” is the horns you hear on this version from The Last Waltz. Levon Helm is my vocalist of choice in The Band, but Richard Manuel is outstanding on Robbie Robertson’s song about…Richard Manuel.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down [The Last Waltz, 1978] – here is why Levon Helm is my Band vocalist of choice. Who else but a Southerner could sing this song?

Mystery Train w/ Paul Butterfield [The Last Waltz, 1978] – “Play a little blues? Paul Butterfield?” The Band originally recorded this song for their Moondog Matinee album. This live version smokes! Paul Butterfield’s harp playing is incredible.

The Weight [Music From Big Pink, 1968] – how could I compile a list of Band favorites without this song? "Half past dead" must be pretty damn tired...

Long Black Veil [Music From Big Pink, 1968] – I’d always associated this song with Johnny Cash until I heard this version. I love how Rick Danko sings this one.

Chest Fever [Music From Big Pink, 1968] – Garth Hudson’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor introduction is the hook. That’s enough for me…

Tears of Rage w/ Bob Dylan [The Basement Tapes, 1975] – The version from Music From Big Pink is ok – this one is better.

This Wheel’s On Fire w/ Bob Dylan [The Basement Tapes, 1975] – see my comments on Tears of Rage.

Up On Cripple Creek [The Band, 1969] – see my comments on The Weight above. The Last Waltz version is awesome. Levon Helm didn’t want to do The Last Waltz, but you couldn’t tell by listening to that version. See my comments about The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Rag Mama Rag [The Band, 1969] – I think if any Band song captures that vibe of old timey Americana, this one is it.

The Unfaithful Servant [The Band, 1969] – This is a quiet acoustic song from Robbie Robertson. wonderful singing from Rick Danko.

Whispering Pines [The Band, 1969] – what Rick Danko did for The Unfaithful Servant, Richard Manuel does for Whispering Pines. It’s another quiet acoustic tune from Robbie that could be the mirror image of The Unfaithful Servant.

King Harvest (Has Surely Come) [The Band, 1969] – I’d hate to be the guy in this song. The barn burned down, his horse went insane, bad weather, no crops, can’t pay union dues, and ends up on skid row. There’s some tasty guitar playing from Robbie at the end of the song.

The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show [Stage Fright, 1970] – Another Southern-flavored song, only it addresses the minstrel shows that Levon Helm saw in his childhood.

Stage Fright [Stage Fright, 1970] – who among The Band had stage fright? Was it Robbie?

Daniel and the Sacred Harp [Stage Fright, 1970] – I can’t put my finger on it. I just like this one a lot. Richard Manuel sings the “Daniel” part, Levon is the humble narrator. This has a good “old timey” vibe.

When I Paint My Masterpiece [Cahoots, 1971] - Levon's mandolin and Garth's accordion lent the song a European feel. They played this at the Bobfest in 1992.

4% Pantomime w/ Van Morrison [Cahoots, 1971] – Van Morrison, the “Belfast Cowboy.” A good duet with Richard Manuel and Van Morrison – they sound like they had fun doing it. Too bad most of Cahoots sounds like they’re exhausted [they probably were]. But I never thought I would use the words "fun" and "Van Morrison" in the same sentence.

Endless Highway [Cahoots, 1971] – a bonus track on the remastered Cahoots, it’s better than most of the songs that came out on the original release.

Forever Young (Continued) w/ Bob Dylan [Planet Waves, 1974] – this is a sped-up, more funky version of the slower, more familiar overplayed Dylan song. This version makes me like Forever Young.

Ophelia [Northern Lights-Southern Cross, 1975] – this one feels like New Orleans. There’s no downside to that.

Acadian Driftwood [Northern Lights-Southern Cross, 1975] – Robbie Robertson tells the story of the Acadians who were exiled from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1750s. All three Band vocalists sing and there are no synthesizers. Garth’s accordion and Byron Berline’s fiddle provide the proper Cajun feel. The French lyrics at the end of the song are a nice touch. Very impressive.

It Makes No Difference [Northern Lights-Southern Cross, 1975] – can anyone sound as sad as Rick Danko does on this tale of heartbreak? Robbie didn’t write many love songs, but this one is a keeper.

Evangeline w/ Emmylou Harris [The Last Waltz, 1978] – Levon, Rick and Emmylou Harris sing otherworldly harmonies to die for. What’s not to like? Does it get any better than this?

Don’t Do It [Rock of Ages, 1972] – the last song these five musicians would play together at The Last Waltz. I don’t have a copy of that particular performance, but this one from Rock of Ages will do just as well. Robbie Robertson finally gets to show off what a good lead guitarist he is. I love Allen Toussaint’s horn arrangement.

Tell Me Momma w/ Bob Dylan [The Bootleg Series, Vol 4: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert, 1998] – This is from Dylan’s 1966 concert in Manchester – the infamous “Judas!” show. This is the opening salvo from Dylan’s electric set that pissed off so many people. The crowd of dyed-in-the-wool folkies didn’t know what hit it.

I purposely did not include anything they did without Robbie Robertson. While some of the music they did without Robbie is noteworthy [their covers of Atlantic City and Blind Willie McTell and Rick Danko’s Book Faded Brown come to mind], most of it lacks the magic they had as a quintet.