Category Archives: music

Musical detours: Some fave sounds

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When Erin and I traveled to Hawai’i last September, we spent several days at the home of my cousin Laura McHugh and her husband John, in Mililani, northwest of Honolulu. I didn’t write abut it at the time, but one of the coolest things about our stay was that John is a music fan who shares a lot of the same interests as me and my rock-critic friends. I found a stash of CDs I promptly had to put on my iPod, including a bunch of John Hiatt, and some gems I hadn’t even thought of in decades, like Green on Red, a late ’80s alt-rock group I had seen at the Mercury Cafe that I had once compared to Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

Anyway, it’s taken me months to pay John back, but I’ve burned him some of my favorite music. These CDs contain sounds that sustain me, surprises me and makes me smile when it comes up in my iPod, which is always set to shuffle through all my music.

bleeckerstreet.jpgVarious Artists
Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village In The 60’s
To a fan of folk and folk-rock music like me, this is a rare, and little-known, treasure. It came out a few years ago and I came across it at a Borders bookstore. It’s a compilation of ‘60s urban folk-era remade by contemporary singer-songwriters, and though some of the covers are reverential and dry, some are really fresh takes on these songs, all of which I’ve known for decades. My favorites include Jonatha Brookes’ crystalline, haunting take of Paul Simon’s haunting “Bleecker Street,” the tribute to the first folk era’s ground zero in Greenwich Village, from Simon and Garfunkel’s debut album. Another favorite is Loudon Wainwright III and Iris DeMent’s rollicking “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” which led me back to Richard and Mimi Farina’s greatest hits album, where the original still glows, and Cry Cry Cry’s beautiful version of Tom Paxton’s deeply moving “Last Thing on My Mind.” Droll baritone folkie John Gorka tackles Eric Andersen’s “Thirsty Boots,” John Cale and Suzanne Vega (!) wrap themselves around Leonard Cohen’s ”So Log Marianne” and Larry Kirwan of the NYC Irish rockers Black 47 revs up Phil Och’s still-relevant anti-war rant, “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.” Yeah, I like everything on the disc, and I’ve turned many souls onto this disc. Continue reading →

Echoes of FM Radio in the Summer of Love

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Interesting exercise in nostalgia with irony:

KCUV-FM in Denver is celebrating the official kickoff of summer by recreating the sound of Denver’s FM radio from 1967, complete with news items, radio commercials from back then, and typical playlsists, all presented by the airstaff of progressive radio from the time, including guys like Bill Clarke (who’s on Channel 7 now but came to Denver in the ’60s as an early Top 40 and progrock radio jock), and Thom Trunnell (wow, that’s a name I hadn’t heard in 25 years, from KFML days).

It’s very strange hearing Clarke, who’s on now through 10 am, talking as if the news is happening now, and griping about the cold rainy weather for July 21, 1967 (it’s hot in reality today, and reporting about the Monterey Pop festival as if it just ended the previous week.

It’s going on all day. Kinda weird, but interesting. I’ll tune in all day just to hear strangeness they pull out of the hat.

http://kcuv.com

Tune in, turn on and drop out.

Joe Ely continues the tradition of great Texas music

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The old cliché holds true in Texas, where there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And a lot of it is good.

Not only has the state been a hotbed for great talent for decades, but something about the dust and sun and the cross-cultural pollination of being so close to Mexico has made it possible for artists to ignore lines between genres.

So blues pioneer T-Bone Walker laid the groundwork for Chuck Berry’s later quintessential rock-and-roll guitar licks. Freddy Fender warbled about being lovesick and letting his teardrops fall in both Spanish and English, his music infused with the galloping conjunto rhythms and accordion melodies, and hit both the Country and Pop charts. Clarence Gatemouth Brown played killer blues, stone country and toe-tapping swing. Lyle Lovett could veer from his James Taylor folkie-isms to his big-band (er, “Large Band”) forays into swingy rhythm and blues.

Doug Sahm, about whom an entire encyclopedia of music could be written, started as a country guitar prodigy but quickly absorbed blues and rock and played music like the British Invasion until he met marijuana, and scooted to San Francisco to become a psychedelicized hippie before returning to Texas to play country again. His shows could run the gamut from conjunto music to rich R&B to killer blues and rock.

Jerry Jeff Walker’s a folkie and a country legend but he’s just as remembered for sloppy, drunken rock and roll about sangria wine and a killer pop song, “Mr. Bojangles.” Another signature tune, “London Homesick Blues,” written by yet another Texas songwriter, is the theme song for “Austin City Limits,” the PBS show that brings all these wonderful Texas sounds to a genteel, yuppified national audience. Genre-busting is a sport in Texas.

There are so many stories to tell about music from Texas, that some get lost in the flood. One that deserves telling is the tale of Joe Ely, a singer-songwriter who’s always had one foot in stone country and the other in rowdy rock and roll, and a hand in R&B and the other in folk music. Continue reading →

Welcome back, Prince

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I dunno about you, but I find it fascinating that Prince played the Super Bowl halftime show tonight. It’s good to see him again, and damn, he looks good and he’s hot, ripping up the guitar like a diminutive, modern-day Hendrix.

It’s sort of weird to see him playing music so centered around his “Purple Rain” period, but cool to see the marching band playing along, though I can’t really hear them at all.

Just in the past few years during the Super Bowl halftime show we’ve seen Janet Jackson (with her “costume malfunction”) along with Justin Timberlake, P. Diddy, Kid Rock and Nelly; the Rolling Stones ad last year, Paul McCartney.

But Prince? Continue reading →

Meet the Beatles again… sort of

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Although a small label had unsuccessfully released some singles in 1963, most American rock and roll fans were introduced to a new band from England via Capitol Records’ 1964 album, “Meet the Beatles.”

That album, and the subsequent visits by the mop-topped Liverpudlians to the U.S., sparked by appearances on TV including historic performances on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” re-set an entire generation’s emotional gyroscope. Beatlemania brought with it a different kind of music, pop that popped with surging harmonies and was driven by hard, clangy rhythms, shot through with the soul and R&B of rock’s roots but also energized with a new kind of electricity.

The Beatles were the prototype for power pop, a genre that generations of bands, fans and rock critics have been seduced by ever since “Meet the Beatles.”

The list of power-pop artists that have been critically heralded is long even though few have hit the charts and become rich and famous: the Byrds (as much power pop as folk-rock and later, country); Alex Chilton and Big Star, Marshall Crenshaw, Windbreakers, Bram Tchaikovsky, the Records, Flamin’ Groovies, Let’s Active, Bangles, Nick Lowe, Matthew Sweet, Rubinoos, the Shoes… the list goes on and on.

One power pop band that actually has hit songs to its credit, the Smithereens, has gone full circle with its latest recording, “Meet the Smithereens.” It’s a song-by-song replica of “Meet the Beatles,” only done as the Smithereens. Continue reading →