(Mike Bloomfield, far left, and Bob Dylan rehearse onstage for Newport Folk Festival 1965. Photo by Daniel Kramer)

WHY LES WAS MORE: How Two Electric Guitarists (and One Songwriter) from the Midwest Saw to the Changin’ Times.

By Kevin Lynch

(Originally posted on NoDepression.com here:  http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/why-les-was-more-how-two)

On the New York Times production layout desk, it may have been too late to pull the tiny ad for the Friday Arts section.
“Subbing for Les Paul who will be back soon, Bucky Pizzarelli, with the Les Paul Trio”
Comfort for the worry warts. How strange and ghostly, in truth. Les Paul had died Thursday, August 13.
For those who saw it, the Iridium Jazz Club’s ad compounded the sense of loss for anyone who ever responded to the sound of Paul’s famous invention, the solid body electric guitar.

Paul’s death has become profoundly relevant in light of another far more ballyhooed death and the recent effort, reported by The Guardian, of a coalition of managers and label bosses to forge what they call the “Michael Jackson Clause” to allow labels to legally suspend – and stop paying – any artist who gets too drugged to do the job.
But it’s shortsighted and foolhardy in the sense that numerous artists have created much of their best work while “whacked out.” This only applies to truly gifted artists. Blogger Luke Lewis notes that Fleetwood Mac “burned through so much coke while recording 'Rumours', that drummer Mick Fleetwood wanted to credit his dealer on the liner notes – and would've done, had said dealer not been executed before the album came out. And yet it's an utterly, unarguably fantastic record.”

If anything, labels ought to help artists to clean up and stay healthy by financing drug rehabilitation programs, counseling and what AA calls a sponsor. .Given addiction’s inherent insidiousness, it may be impossible to keep hooked artists perfectly clean. And if they do conjur powerful and timeless art while whacked out, then why not help them stay as healthy, productive and lucid as possible, given their altered states.
In this context, I would suggest the term “whacked in,” by which I mean the effect of how truly gifted artists seem able to tap into creative wellsprings and, in effect, turn themselves phantasmagorically inside out.
The sad story of a still-under-recognized genius suggests that one might distill the term to “The Michael Clause” while making it a more enlightened, enabling policy. Only if an artist dies or is incapable of touring and performing, should it provide an escape for the company.

The crux of this the music’s modern history reaches from the begloved Michael back to guitarist Michael Bloomfield who, in historical terms, is the pivotal case in point.
The story surely could be written with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Doors’ singer-songwriter Jim Morrison as the lead. But Bloomfield, the brilliant Chicago guitarist- pianist- composer and blues musicologist, was perhaps Les Paul’s closest and most significant offspring and he is also a statistical archetype.
A recent survey determined that many musicians of that generation died prematurely, at about the same age Bloomfield did, an average age of 36.9 years. He was 37.1.

To appreciate Bloomfield’s artistic significance we must rewind the story back to the early 1940s, when the wizardly man from Waukesha, Wisconsin, Lester Polsfuss, streamlined his name for show business and became a pop star in a dreamy duo with his singing spouse Mary Ford. Les Paul would soon streamline the electric guitar into a beauty with a drop-dead, tear-drop figure. It became the favorite plaything of a very different generation, who were enchanted by its musical and magical noises. Electricity engendered expression and exploration and the times changed irrevocably.
This happened by accident, of necessity, the ageless mother of invention.
In 1948, Paul’s car slid off an icy road in Oklahoma. He reached out to protect Mary and decimated his left arm on the windshield. After healing, Paul needed a compact and manageable guitar. The instrument needed a sonic makeover as well. Since the 1930s, fat, hollow-bodied electric guitars had emitted rude feedback when pushed to compete with louder instruments.

Paul struck on the idea of a slender solid-wood instrument directly wired to an amplifier and speaker. First, he assembled a two-inch slab of railroad tie with steel strings and a magnetic sound pickup, which he called “The Log.” He presented the contraption to the Gibson Guitar company, which rejected it. But company president Ted McCarty heard something coming on that railroad track. He called Paul back in and the company went to work on the idea. In 1952 they dubbed it the Les Paul Gold Top, for its inventor and for its lustrous surface.
Guitarists were smitten. “It allowed them to control feedback which was huge,” says musician, producer and music scholar Ben Sidran. “Even the Fender guitar was based on Les Paul’s design.”
By 1957 Gibson had developed a new flat pick-up (designed by Seth Lover) that radiated the thicker, more sustaining tone of Gibson's “humbucker” pickups.

America’s wandering troubadours would soon begin plugging in, which felt just right to young rebels recoiling against gray-flannel suit squares and phonies. Yet Paul was never a protester, a punk or a hip hopper. He was a jovial romantic who spun musical gold with spouse Ford, starting with their historic hit "How High the Moon".
Paul’s creative moon-beaming had led him to an even more amazing invention, the multi-track recording unit, with which The Beatles would conjur “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and the head-tripping rest of “Sgt. Pepper.” He did that without any magnetic tape, much less computers. He used recordable acetate discs and laboriously layered tracks in real time, from start to finish.

“Dubbing and multi-tracking made the record industry as we know it possible,” says Sidran. “Before that you just brought somebody into a room and recorded, and after that you manufactured it.”
But Paul’s solid-body guitar innovation had iconic staying power, as an extension of the musician’s physical body.
Guitarists tend to hold their instruments very personally. Under hunched shoulders, Bloomfield cradled his guitar like a wailing new born babe. Something was born within Bloomfield’s obsessive embrace and the music world flourished because of it. But what would have happened if Paul hadn’t smashed his arm in 1948 and Bloomfield hadn’t been hired by a genius from Hibbing, Minnesota who wrote long, abstract songs that even he didn’t seem to understand? Paul’s guitar appears to have helped Bloomfield to stretch music to encompass previously unimagined connections of east and west poles.

Truth is often stranger than fiction. Bloomfield created something extraordinary called "East-West" in 1966, the year after Bob Dylan plugged in, and seemed to change everything at the Newport Folk Festival, after recording the era’s anthem, “Like a Rolling Stone,” on the album Highway 61 Revisited. Bloomfield’s playing added a shambling, rusty jangle to the six plus-minute epic. Dylan had hired him after deciding he was the best guitarist he’d ever heard. Jimi Hendrix, the only guitarist of that generation whose talent clearly surpassed all others, nevertheless stole Bloomfield’s recorded licks from “Like a Rolling Stone” when he played the song at the endlessly resonant Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. And it remains surely the anthem of a generation and an era. Rolling Stone magazine determined it was the greatest song of all time, according to 172 musician, critics and industry figures.

Twice the length of a conventional radio hit, it nevertheless reached Number 2 in the astonishingly imposing competition of the summer of 1965, alongside The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” The Beach Boys’ “California Girls”and Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” each arguably the greatest songs of those artists’ careers. Dylan’s song fostered an entire book devoted to its recording by Greil Marcus, the era’s Samuel Johnson.

In a photograph of the two musicians (reproduced in the soundtrack liner notes of Martin Scorcese’s Dylan documentary, No Direction Home) they rehearse for the pivotal set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan’s face bursts in delight at Bloomfield, who grins back warmly. Surely no other musician commanded such attention or consideration from Dylan during the most crucial period of his career. Bloomfield’s guitar spit out saucy blues retorts while Dylan sneered “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more!” Bloomfield then played the flat-bottomed Fender Telecaster, which resembles an oversized, lopsided snow shovel. That guitar’s prickly edge and somber moan fit the hard-charging electric blues that Bloomfield played with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band on their first album.

The electric guitars notoriously shocked some of Newport’s folk-purist fans who booed and prompted banjo-playing pacifist and folk traditionalist Pete Seeger to try cutting Dylan’s power cable with an axe. Earlier, Butterfield band manager Albert Grossman scuffled with Alan Lomax after the folklorist introduced them by publicly doubting “these white boys from Chicago” could play the blues.
“I was screaming, ‘Kick his ass Albert! Stomp ‘im! There was bad blood rising,’” Bloomfield told biographer Ed Ward. “It was like [Bloomfield] to zero in on the element of hypocrisy, on the way folkies recast American music in their image.” 2

Bloomfield, a brilliant kid from a wealthy Jewish family was 22 and an insomniac intensely attuned to the musical Zeitgeist. In the days following an all-night acid trip (in Cambridge in late 1965) “Mike sequestered himself in the wee hours of the night,” recalls Butterfield’s keyboardist Mark Naftalin. “When he emerged at dawn he said he’d had a revelation into the workings of Eastern music.” 3.
He had sketched out an ambitious composition that unlocked the doors to what soon became “psychedelic” instrumental music. By shifting from Western harmony to Eastern modality East-West seemed to slip into a parallel sonic reality, traversing time and space to touch those poles of east and west with a palpable arc of energy.

Does Bloomfield’s leap across a cultural abyss matter today, when IPod and Twitter are turning culture into digestible tweets?
Like much worthwhile art, the brooding yet exultant 13-minute East-West compels us to expand rather than compartmentalize our consciousness, and it still echoes like a signpost for direction and connection.
Rock guitarists flipped over it. “We were all just awestruck,” recalled Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, when the Butterfield band hit San Francisco in 1965.
Upon hearing Bloomfield, Carlos Santana avowed, “This is what I want to do and be for the rest of my life.” 4. And the legendary Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham began hiring black blues bands after Bloomfield explained their profound influence on the Butterfield band.
Blues brethren had embraced the white boys who surely inspired the cinematic Blues Brothers. In April of 1969, Waters, Bloomfield, Butterfield, pianist Otis Spann, drummer Buddy Miles and others recorded a landmark blues album, Fathers and Sons, with rollicking live tracks from the Super-Cosmic Joyscout Jamboree in Chicago.

A skeptic might dismiss all this as “the madness of the 60s.” Yet self-styled “white Negro” and New Journalism chronicler Norman Mailer wrote of that time with a precise sense of how we process it. “We often think of it as a collective remembrance that others will share with us. We even speak of it as our time. In fact, it is only one’s personal time.” Yet most of us “are forever revising our personal history of the past until it includes everyone toward whom we reacted over our years…the ones who helped to change our lives.”
Tuned-in black and white youth felt the changing time. At the ‘65 Newport Festival a family of Mississippi R&B musicians, The Chambers Brothers, added a white rock drummer and a theme song, “Time Has Come Today.” The first album by a Bloomfield-led band would be called A Long Time Comin’.

The autumnal Mailer felt “blessed” for being able to write about time as he did. He titled his personal anthology of his work, The Time of Our Time. He suggested that life demands a creative response to those who change us, whether we understand the time, or the change, as individual or collective.
“Because if there is one fell rule in art, it is that repetition kills the soul.”...5.
Bloomfield understood that his music fed his lifeblood. After the first Butterfield band album he changed guitars as his musical mind raced ahead.
When the band’s 1965 tour reached Boston, he traded one of his Telecasters to guitarist John Nuese for a Les Paul Gold Top. Blues and R&B guitarists Chuck Berry, Freddie King, John Lee Hooker and Bloomfield’s mentor, Muddy Waters, all played Gold Tops.

So, as LSD gave way to inspiration and clarity, Bloomfield sat hunched over his new instrument, privately composing, and turning feedback into resonance.*
“The Gold Top has a lot of sustain with those patent-applied-for pickups, which people still covet,” says Milwaukee guitarist Roger Brotherhood, who played the same model. “The way they were wound, the waxing process, it all came together to make a pick-up that was really sweet, that broke up just right. And compared to the Telecaster, the Les Paul had a shorter scale length, so the strings are looser and more conducive to bending, and a lot more forgiving.”

More sustain allowed for a raga like drone and electric guitars could be tuned for sympathetic resonances between the strings. The Gold Top rang clean, allowing a listener to hear Bloomfield’s driving momentum and wrenching moans with gripping clarity. On the East West album, amid an array of meaty blues songs, a hard-swinging cover of Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” asserts a muscular, chain-gang contraction that releases magnificently in the title tune. East-West conveys both the weight of a questing spirit and a gravity-defying breathlessness. Drummer Billy Davenport’s suspenseful samba tempo sets up a tough, bracing solo by Bishop, who then recedes into a tamboura- like drone.
Butterfield and Bloomfield then stoke the heat, melding steely John Coltrane-ish “sheets of sound” with gritty blues pentatonics until Bloomfield opens it all up to air and space, riding a slow sequence of harmonically radiant whole notes, like a sonic hang-glider-- a passage of Zen-like grace. The guitarists curve back onto a fresh raga-blues melody , and then fire away at each other like World War I dogfighters, until the raptor-cry of Butterfield’s harp virtually swallows the opus whole.

Now, with the death of this story’s father finally shedding light on the tragic demise of the son, the significance of East West emerges. With the Butterfield Blues Band’s titular instrumental we hear the convergence of East and West, of polar histories, cultures and dynamisms which echo evolution’s biological convergence.
“Convergence is ubiquitous and the constraints of life make the emergence of the various biological properties very probable, if not inevitable,” wrote paleontologist Simon Conway Morris. 6.
So even if such cultural convergence seemed only a matter of time – as mass media began to bring the world closer together -- it took Bloomfield leaning precipitously over the abyss to accelerate time and convergence. The culture -- tearing at the seams with the Vietnam war, the murder of four black Alabama girls and the ensuing Civil Rights turmoil and race riots – foreshadow a global convergence as cataclysmic as it was harmonic.
So here music searches far beyond words, a man edging along a cliff, then trusting in his creative will and vision.

One begins to understand why these were perfect Paul moments, when musicians and audiences realized how those six-string babies could sing sweet and cry stung. And then they conquered the guitar world.
I was listening to a lot of stupendous jazz in 1966, including Miles, Monk, Mingus and Coltrane. And yet, the album East-West deconstructed my head as much as any other, partly because this was a blues-rock band -- my generation’s electric eagle cry -- breaking into the deep, expansive realm of modal jazz and beyond. On the cover, six black and white men stood shoulder-to-shoulder outside Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, between giant stone goddesses who seemed to embody the mother lodes of Eastern and Western wisdom. An Irish Catholic -- leading a Jew, a Scottish American, an Anglo-Oklahoman and two African Americans -- asserted a musical identity from a collective interpretation of the blues. This truly American band made “world music” before that term was coined.

At 16, I felt transfixed, transported and slightly shaken by this long blast of harsh beauty. I had to find meaning. I drew a large charcoal picture of a solitary man standing amid looming skyscrapers in the middle of the crossroads of a noirish nightmare, struck by the enormous uncertainty of an existential moment. Teenage angst for sure, but years later Robert Palmer would write that the solid-body electric guitar could even be made to resonate with the “underlying sixty-cycle hum of the city’s electrical grid, forming massive sound textures that already exist in nature.”7. I think the drawing, for me, also touched Bloomfield’s own demons and dreams, akin to those of bedeviled young blues legend Robert Johnson.
“I know (Robert) as this mythic creature, terror-stricken, trying to run away from whatever is trying to get him,” Bloomfield said, shortly before he died at 37. 8.

After a grueling East-West repertoire tour Bloomfield quit Butterfield’s band, an early sign of his insomnia and psychological problems regarding monetary success. In 1968, a year of touring again drove him to quit the brilliantly promising dream band he had formed, The Electric Flag, just as they began lighting up the musical firmament. The pattern recurred in 1975 when he slipped out of the clutches of MCA, and its corporate-contrived supergroup KGB. The suits had hit upon the ultimate co-op job of monikering, by inserting the acronym of the notorious Communist espionage agency as a capitalist marketing tool for an American rock band, but with little artistic justification, according to Bloomfield.

Biographer Ed Ward suggests that Bloomfield’s career long pattern of retreat from success involved a recoiling from the lifestyle of his cold, taskmaster father, who wanted him to be a businessman. Harold Bloomfield became wealthy creating and manufacturing various food service items, including the iconic fluted glass and metal sugar dispenser with the neat little metal flip top. His company has since evolved into industry giant Beatrice Foods.

Despite his son’s musical talent and sleepless creativity, the pressures of an uncompromising musician’s life consistently derailed Michael. It certainly wasn’t the incongruity of him being a kid from a wealthy Jewish family. Black blues musicians grew to love his authentic passion and knowledge and soulful gift and stunning technique which in Bloomfield came across as exuberance rather than hotdog display. He worked and recorded with Sleepy John Estes and toured with Big Joe Williams who immortalized his buddy with the Jewish “fro” in a song about The Pickle, a blues club Bloomfield managed at the time: "Pick A Pickle" included the line: "You know Mike Bloomfield ... will always treat you right...come to the Pickle, every Tuesday night." Bloomfield documented his relationship with Williams in a peculiarly touching story “Me and Big Joe," detailing their adventures on the road.

As a child Bloomfield met Polish and Irish kids from the working class neighborhood a few blocks west, newly-arrived Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, and rural whites from the Ozarks and the south. He fell hard for African-American culture, the blues and soul music bubbling up from street corners and shops. The black maids at the Bloomfield home served as soul mamas. Michael loved the city and his masterpiece East-West radiated that urban complexity like an airborne taxi ride, a la Blade Runner. His imagination, passion and fat-tired Schwinn carried young Michael around Chicago's North Side. Another ofay blues scene haunter and lead singer of the Electric Flag, Nick “The Greek” Gravenites, says the best he ever heard Bloomfield play was “just casually after rehearsal. It had nothing to do with show business or selling records or being onstage…He was a pure musician.” There’s also a striving of the self in a Coltrane or a Bloomfield, for both connection and transcendence through pure musicianship.


The guitarist sang ardently, sometimes effectively, but too often like a lovesick bull bemoaning his lost Elsie. His inner geek charmed his own recordings but just as often sabotaged them. That fact, along with his Joe Blow looks and jocular affability suggested a kinship with the like mannered Paul but assured that neither would be pinup music stars - unlike a curly-tressed, Les-playing Jane Blow named Peter Frampton, whose singing-through-a-rubber-tube gimmick made him a star and marked him as perhaps Paul’s tinkering inventor offspring.

In 1967, Bloomfield moved to the Bay area during San Francisco’s idyllic Summer of Love, a social experiment of cooperative living and loving among 100,000 people. Down Highway One from the Bay, the First International Monterey Pop Festival became the era’s second crucial festival, with the emergence of Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar and the debut of Bloomfield’s new group, The Electric Flag.
His sense of an American band had become self conscious. Short-lived and under-recognized, The Flag included horns and an unprecedented hybrid of many root American styles. The band’s performance wasn’t used in the ensuing documentary Monterey Pop. Perhaps their politically irreverent overtones scared promoters, amid the obscene turmoil of the Vietnam War.
The Flag’s debut album A Long Time Comin’, a pensive welding of all the soul-baring black music genres, replete with sound collages, sounded like a ‘60s version of a festooned campaign locomotive blowing off steam.

It opens with the Lyndon Johnson’s voice droning “I speak tonight for the dignity of man,” which succumbs to crowd laughter as the band charges into “Killing Floor,” a Howlin’ Wolf blues that would acquire grisly overtones in March of the next year in My Lai, Vietnam.
Murray Lerner did include the beginning of the Flag’s Monterey performance in his film Festival! Perhaps intimidated, Bloomfield simply gushed at the crowd.
“We’re really nervous,” he said. “But we love you all man, because this is very groovy. Monterey is very groovy. This is something, man. This is our generation, all you people. We’re all together. Dig yourselves.”9.
What he does is seriously dig Ravi Shankar, the great Indian sitarist, that Sunday afternoon. On the left side of the stage you see Bloomfield’s fuzzy “fro” mop and mouth agape. Shankar’s breathtaking “Raga Bhimpalasi” provided stirring affirmation of the Chicago kid’s effort to connect East and West with sympathetic strings and percussion.

Meanwhile Paul’s invention became the guitar de jour. I remember both Eric Clapton (with Blind Faith) and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin playing Les Pauls at the Midwest Rock Fest at the Wisconsin State Fair Park in West Allis, while fliers floated around the grandstand whispering of “An Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace and Music” in Woodstock, New York, three weeks later. Page unveiled his violin-bow-to-guitar-string gambit, producing operatic Zeppelin emissions (Page still brandishes his Les in the acclaimed new documentary guitar movie “It Might Get Loud.”) The next year, virtuoso Georgia pickers Duane Allman and Dickey Betts played dueling Les Pauls at The Scene, in Milwaukee’s Third Ward. I walked in just as they began “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” an eloquently wordless elegy in lyrical strains worthy of Bloomfield’s unbound best.

The boy from a “hillbilly-Jewish” Chicago neighborhood would attain fleeting “superstardom” on the 1968 album Super Session, with its jazz jam-style spontaneity, and set a new bar for rock instrumentalists. It amounted to a barefoot Bloomfield wringing the blues out of his Les like a juke-jointer knee deep in Mississippi mud, with Al Kooper’s grease-spittin’ organ and a few horns added later, via Paul’s now-standard multi-tracking. However, Bloomfield’s growing drug problem left him unreliable, so guitarist Stephen Stills filled in for the album’s second side. He had never done more than pot and some acid. But heedless new members of the Flag gave him heroin for the first time, upon which he soon became dependent as an antidote to his chronic insomnia.
Bloomfield eventually lost his most famous “Super Session” guitar, a luminous, mahogany-grained 1959 Les Paul “Sunburst” which he had traded his “East-West” Gold Top and $100 for in 1967. He never got it back from a club owner who kept it as collateral for money owed him. So he dusted off his old acoustics to play and record in classic blues styles, including the delightfully fascinating Grammy-nominated 1976 survey of various blues stylists, described and performed by Bloomfield, “If You Love These Blues Play Them as You Please.”
His fiancée, a modern dancer named Christy Svane, remembers that Bloomfield died on Valentine’s Day of 1981 in San Francisco. His body lay slumped, in his dilapidated 1971 Mercury, poisoned by methamphetamine and cocaine -- after months of apparently being clean, sober and about to marry. His producer Norman Dayron believes that a “lowlife” snared Bloomfield with “some kind of designer drug that asphyxiated him,”10. Then, when cocaine failed to revive him, the dealer fled.

“Mike was a lot smarter than most people knew but maybe he wasn’t the strongest personality,” says guitarist-composer Jim Schwall, who had played harmonica on Bloomfield’s first home recording in 1958. “So he’d get around guys who were doing stuff, and he’d go along with it, like Grams Parsons did.”
As for old Les Paul, he survived one of the nation’s first quintuple bypass surgeries, and played on. “Monday (at the Iridium) is the greatest therapy for me. It gives me a reason to get out of bed,” Paul told Crawdaddy magazine. 11. He knew the music’s healing power flowed in as well as out. Bloomfield, a man of exceedingly generous spirit, sometimes actually lent his guitar to fans to play on. But he “saw too much too soon, for he was looking through his heart more often than his eyes or mind,” says his brother Allen Bloomfield. 12.
This musical son of Les Paul and Muddy Waters felt American music as a presence -“not necessarily music directly from America,” Mike Bloomfield said of the Electric Flag. “I think of it as the music you hear in the air, on the air, in the streets; blues, soul, country, rock, religious music, traffic, crowds, street sounds and field sounds, the sound of people and silence.” 13.

Yet Bloomfield, only 24 at the time, already felt pain and loss in the same experience. A Long Time Comin’ climaxes with a montage-like ode to exile, “Another Country.”: If I could lose all my troubles/ by running away, no, no, I wouldn’t stay/…This whole year has been a blunder/Yes, I’ve lost my sense of wonder/There are no sweet lovebirds to turn to/I have no one to call brother…” In a marvelous samba-blues guitar break, Bloomfield’s juicy notes gleam with sweat and sorrow. I’ve been all over this country and it’s the same old thing everywhere I go. /Don’t you think there might be a place where I might rest my weary head? 14.
“Another Country” ends with an off-key fife tooting “America,” followed by a final tag, “Easy Rider,” a soft blues guitar shuffle amid the sound of rain, like a guy whistling through the graveyard.

During Bloomfield’s decline, even Dylan reached out, inviting him to his concert at San Francisco's Warfield Theater in 1980. Before Dylan left Bloomfield's Mill Valley home, the ailing guitarist unexpectedly gave him the Bloomfield family Bible. But he showed up at Dylan’s gig in bedroom slippers and played beautifully on “Like a Rolling Stone.” America’s time, our time, was regained, but not as nostalgia.
“When you see a really great artist, all time stops,” the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor has said. 15. Time becomes our time in the moment.

Yet as the times change, human life ticks away too quickly. Allen Ginsberg’s famous, ranting utterance now feels more like prophecy. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”16.
Paul Butterfield’s heart attack in 1984 at 44 resulted from drug addiction and alcoholism. Considering the many musicians who died before their time, has that generation, still in considerable political and cultural power, grown weary, lost their “sense of wonder” and possibility?

Has America learned from their mistakes - and vision? If the nation had better drug rehabilitation services in 1981, Bloomfield might still be making great music at 66 - 18 years younger than B.B. King and two years older than Eric Clapton, perhaps his closest living peers. I take hope in President Obama’s initiative for a public option alternative to for-profit health insurance, as well as broader heath care reform. America must take better care of its own. The wasteful early deaths of artists like Bloomfield leaves their music, to stir us to greater humanity, and sanity, as a nation.

Kevin Lynch is a Pulitzer-nominated writer who has covered the arts for many publications for 30 years and is the author of the forthcoming book “Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy.”

* The lovingly-tended-to and authoratitive fan website produced by David Dann, “Mike Bloomfield: an American Guitarist" rep0rts: “Bloomfield used the Gold top as his primary instrument but kept the new Telecaster handy during gigs, probably for slide work. These were his guitars throughout his tenure with Butterfield. It was the Gold Top paired with a Gibson Falcon amplifier that Michael used to record the landmark Butterfield album East-West."
1. Google cached link www.av1611.org/rockdead.html as of Sept. 3, 2009. This is apparently a religiously motivated survey, accompanied with biblical quotes, which is unrelated to my intention in noting the statistic. (I simply googled “drug-related deaths of rock musicians.” The site makes this disclaimer to objectivity: “This is not a “rigged” list to produced false numbers, but an honest observation.” My sense of the issue would be sociological, cultural and perhaps generational rather than religious.
2. Ed Ward, Michael Bloomfield, the Rise and fall of an American Guitar Hero. 43-44
3. Dave Marsh, liner notes, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band East-West Live
4.
Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom. Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues, An Oral History vii (Santana), 130 (Weir)
5. Norman Mailer, The Time of Our Time,-x-xi
6. Simon Conway Morris, in Thank God for Evolution by Michael Dowd 39
7. Robert Palmer, Rock & Roll: An Unruly History 194
8. Ward, 9
9. Joel Selvin, Monterey Pop 48
10. . Wolkin/Keenom, 234
11. Max Moran, “Saint Paul the Electric,” Crawdaddy www.crawdaddy.wolfgangsvault.com, online edition, Aug.19, 2009.
12. Ward, 120 (The fan website “Mike Bloomfield: An American Guitarist” includes a deep discography by David Dann. Despite Bloomfield’s vast influence his historical stature still suffers. Historian-critic Francis Davis correctly demarcates the first Butterfield Blues Band set at Newport in 1965 as the start of the “second blues revival,” but he doesn’t assess the innovative role of "East West" in his largely excellent 1995 History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, The People." “100 Albums that Changed Music” editor Sean Egan props Bloomfield’s ingenious strokes in “the beautiful sound paintings” behind Dylan on Highway 61 but the book whiffs on the first two Butterfield albums and the Flag’s first album. Meanwhile, John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones awarded Bloomfield’s raga-esque “East-West” five stars in a 1966 Down Beat blindfold test.
The current Rolling Stone online Website of artists contains no bio on The Flag, only song samples. Neither Bloomfield nor The Flag were listed as individual artists in the last print edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide. In the more comprehensive All Music Guide, critic Richie Unterburger writes of The Flag: “The ambitious concept didn’t come off, despite some interesting moments; perhaps it was too ambitious to carry that weight.”
Bloomfield also wrote a number of movie scores, including The Trip with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, the acclaimed Medium Cool, Andy Warhol’s Bad and the under-rated Steelyard Blues. There’s currently one Bloomfield CD in Columbia/Legacy’s discography catalog, the all-too-aptly titled “Don’t Say That I Ain’t Not Your Man.” That good but inadequate career survey includes classic Butterfield material from Elektra Records. A multi-label spanning box-set retrospective -perhaps of Butterfield, Bloomfield and Bishop - is sorely needed.
Among the recent important Les Paul recordings are two Grammy winners: Lester and Chester with country guitar giant Chet Atkins and Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played, his first rock album at age 90, with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, R&B singer Sam Cooke and others. Paul’s tortoise-like career eventually secured his unique place in history even as critical assessment is obscured by his role as a classic American do-it-yourselfer whose creations younger designers, businessmen and musicians took and ran with.)
13. Jeff Tamarkin, liner notes to A Long Time Comin’ The Electric Flag
14. Ron Polte, lyrics “Another Country” A Long Time Comin’ The Electric Flag
15. Howard Mandel, Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz 230
16. Allen Ginsburg, Howl and Other Poems 9

(Originally posted by Lincoln Barr on NoDepression.com - http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/show-review-chuck-prophet-amp)

By Lincoln Barr

When Chuck Prophet took the Tractor stage with his longtime band The Mission Express Thursday night, he did so with the cocksure swagger of a rock lifer who knows he's just made the album of his career (thus far). After a prerecorded snippet of "Beautiful Dreamer," Prophet & co. kicked into ¡Let Freedom Ring!'s London Calling-esque opener, "Sonny Liston's Blues," with a muscularity worthy of its namesake. At that moment, it was apparent that the sizable weeknight crowd had come to the right place.

Chuck was jovial throughout, lecturing on border crossing, social networking ("How many of your Facebook friends would pick you up at the airport?"), and condescension ("You know, like when I talk down to you..."), hilariously. I'm even willing to forgive the polka-dot neck kerchief he was sporting...but just this once.

The band was on fire, tearing into "Always a Friend" (co-penned with Alejandro Escovedo, and featured on his Real Animal album) with a ferocity that bested the original, to these ears. And the ballads were no less sublime. Buoyed by James DePrato's slide guitar, the instrumental coda of "Would You Love Me?" (one of my all-time favorites) built to a conclusion of Layla-like grandeur (minus the bird chirping, mercifully).

Messrs. Prophet and DePrato have honed their guitar interplay considerably since the last time they played the Tractor, working in anthemic twin-guitar overtures (think "All the Young Dudes") to enterprising effect throughout. To that end, the Mission Express' reading of Bruce Springsteen's "For You" adds up to nearly *the* perfect cover tune, in my estimation: eliciting catcalls of recognition from the audience members 'of a certain age', yet seamlessly of a piece with his own material. The insertion of a tasty, Gorham/Robertson-worthy harmony lead cast the Springsteen/Thin Lizzy lineage in sharp relief and made it one of the evening's highlights, for me. (Video here, courtesy of Mr. David Helton. )

As always, the onstage chemistry between Mr. Prophet and Ms. Stephanie Finch (his wife of many years) was palpable. After a lovely duet on Waylon Jennings' "We Had It All," Chuck happily assumed the role of sideman for Ms. Finch's solitary lead vocal showcase, "Don't Back Out Now" (from her forthcoming album, Cry Tomorrow*). His guitar solo didn't quite scale the lofty, Richard Thompson-joins-Television heights it has on some nights of this tour, but still called to mind some of Tom Verlaine's ecstatic Blow-Up explorations.

(*Incidentally, keep an eye out for Stephanie's album when it's released (on Chuck's own ((bellesound)) label) next year. I managed to score an advance copy at the merch table, and it's as terrific as you'd expect from 'the brains behind Pa,' as Chuck has affectionately dubbed her. Call me crazy, but I can see this album finding an audience with the masses who gobbled up the She & Him album last year, although Stephanie's album is vastly superior - always a stumbling block to mass appeal.)

After a raucous ('like God's balls...') rendition of Brother Aldo's "Look Both Ways," the band left the stage for approximately one minute and returned with a spot-on cover of Alex Chilton's immortal, educational "Bangkok," right down to the impressively-replicated tape echo effects and Eddie Cochran vocal hijinx. They followed "You Did (Bomp Shooby Dooby Bomp)," which featured Chuck's only extended guitar workout of the night, and closed the first encore with a romp through the Yardbirds' classic rave-up, "I'm Not Talking."

After another short break, the band returned to the stage for one final encore. Instead of going out with a bang (they've closed at least one show on this tour with Iggy's "I'm Bored"), they opted for the ethereal, haunting ballad "No Other Love," from 2002's album of the same name. Although it seemed an odd closer at first, in retrospect, it fit the early-morning, closing-time vibe perfectly. The perfect come-down after the previous hour's exhilaration.

The band split up to hawk merchandise and schmooze with the faithful, and after exchanging a few words with Mr. Prophet (and passing along a Red Jacket Mine CD), and I stumbled onto Ballard Avenue, slightly dazed, but satisfied.

To borrow his phrase, we'll see you around campus, Chuck. Soon, I hope.

Setlist:
'Beautiful Dreamer' / Intro
Sonny Liston's Blues
I Bow Down and Pray to Every Woman I See
Always a Friend (Alejandro Escovedo)
Just to See You Smile
Hot Talk
Would You Love Me?
Doubter Out of Jesus
For You (Bruce Springsteen)
You and Me Baby (Holdin' On)
Let Freedom Ring
Summertime Thing (solo acoustic)
We Had It All (Waylon Jennings)
Don't Back Out Now (Stephanie on lead vocals)
Automatic Blues
Look Both Ways / improv
---
Bangkok (Alex Chilton)
You Did
I'm Not Talking (Yardbirds)
---
No Other Love

(Photo courtesy of Michael O'Neill)

By Grant Alden 

...and I hadn't even noticed, until Kyla wrote a couple days back to ask if I'd post a year-end list, or maybe a best-of-the-decade list, or something. It does not seem possible to me that we are about to summit another decade, and seems, indeed, only yesterday that we saluted the arrival of the new millennium with frothy glasses of Fine du Monde and hoped our computers would still work.

In other decades I have had a stronger sense of history, a more rounded sense of what really was important musically. Not so much. I couldn't come up with a best-of-2009 list if you held a gun to my head, because I probably listened to a dozen new releases this year. I'm better positioned to tell you what will be good in 2010 because I've been listening to a goodly handful of advance releases, in consequence of having been asked to write a series of press bios. Work I used to decline. Work, now.

So, without apologies and in the order they came to me, here are the ten albums that, today, I think will help me best to remember this last decade. In many cases I wrote about these records, which may occasion my prejudice toward them; or else I argued strongly that they should be written about at length in our pages. Which means either that my memory is unaccountably lazy, or that I'm internally consistent. Or both.

1. Gillian Welch, Time (The Revelator) (Acony, 2001). Peter and I concurred, when this came out, that it would take one monster album to convince us this wasn't the best album of the decade. He may have changed his mind. I haven't. It's a powerful, brave, ambitious album. I wish only that Gillian and Dave would make more of 'em, and faster, especially as they own their own studio. But it's their choice, their muse, and so I shall wait with some degree of patience.

2. Buddy Miller, Universal United House Of Prayer (New West, 2004). I shall hope no explanation is necessary. The right album at the right time.

3. Jon Dee Graham, Full (Freedom, 2006). Pain and release. More pain than release, I fear, and I continue to hope for Jon to come to some kind of peace with himself.

4. Various Artists, Como Now (Daptone, 2008). Having come to the end of many musical explorations, I find myself dabbling more and more in gospel, another thing to look back upon that I've not begun to master. This is gospel looking forward, still alive in its tradition.

5. Patty Griffin, Children Running Through (ATO/Red, 2007). You will love Patty's next album, and I will write about it at some point, even though I was paid to write about it for the label. But, for the moment, this is her best set of vocals, and -- despite years of people telling me to attend -- my final entry point into her special gifts.

6. Crooked Still, Shaken By A Low Sound (Signature Sounds, 2006). To an extent this is on my list as an exemplar of a burgeoning and fertile explosion of string sounds. But it's also here for the special, compact magic of this particular ensemble at this particular time: A spectacular cellist, a spectacular vocalist. And then the cellist was gone.

7. Lyle Lovett, It's Not Big, It's Large (Lost Highway, 2007). I think Lyle may have slid off the radar too far, and I've not heard his latest release. This is the first album in a long while in which I felt the power of his wit, and of his vocals. And his maturation, his full grasp of his years.

8. Lizz Wright, The Orchard (Verve, 2005). Just listen.

9. Billy Joe Shaver, The Earth Rolls On (New West, 2001). I've already written everything I have to say about this brave, sad record.

10. Otis Taylor, Double V (Telarc, 2004). Smart and enigmatic, my perhaps token nod at the blues. And rather more than that.

When I return, at some point, I have another list: Of songs, since we enter the new era of the single, or whatever the hell this is to be.

(Originally posted by Grant Alden on NoDepression.com - http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/its-the-end-of-the-decade-as)

(Originally posted by Kim Ruehl on NoDepression.com - http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/moondoggies-jesse-sykes-star)

By Kim Ruehl

I could say there's something about Seattle which breeds broodiness. Could claim it's the winter-long cravings for sun breaks balanced by many-month stretches of summertime charm, when one forgets there ever was such a thing as darkness; the dysfunctional love affair one has with their sense of "home" when they make up their mind to stay here for the long haul. I could claim such a thing is what inspires so many dark, layered, emotional songs to emerge from the local well-read, emotion-focused, classic country-infused music scene. That could almost be a convincing argument for how stirring a night of music went down this weekend at the Showbox in Seattle when three local bands converged for a packed night of roots music.

Almost.

But then there's Star Anna, who grew up and is still based in Ellensburg, Wash., where the sun shines at least as frequently as it doesn't in Seattle, if not moreso. Maybe it's the desert. Maybe it's something else altogether. Does it even really matter what it is? The propensity and desire to understand what drives such complicated passion flies out the window when Star and her band, the Laughing Dogs, take the stage.

They have, after all, been working relentlessly over the past few years to claw their way up and through the din of local and regional roots artists - those who might leap at naming artists like Lucinda Williams, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and the Eagles as chief influences - and it's working. This spring, with the release of their sophomore full-length, the band pulled the reins back from the indie label which had released their debut, releasing the disc on their own accord. The result was a collection of songs which were simply and honestly stated. There's little missing from the album which can't be adequately communicated in their live show, and vice versa. And yet, there's hardly a moment onstage when the band doesn't deliver beyond the means of what they were capable of in the studio.

On this night, in front of a fairly packed Showbox, the Laughing Dogs shared reliably flooring versions of songs from both of their full-length albums. But it was the new songs which piqued the most interest, and which indicated that, whenever the third album gets recorded, it will only continue the ascent of the band's tightness and creativity. Star has that rare gift for writing songs that are at once transcendent of style and genre (which is to say, probably palatable to the mainstream), while retaining their integrity and honest ties to her "roots," whatever that is. That songs can be universal without trying is always a remarkable thing, especially for a writer still solidly in the first half of their 20s. It was a solid set, from old standards like "Space Beneath the Door" to more recent mainstays like "Through the Winter." The band was tight - rhythm section at full throttle and guitarist Justin Davis' tasteful and artful guitar solos at peak form. They set a fitting bar for what became quite a night for local roots music.


Next up was Jesse Sykes. Stylistically, Sykes was a tremendous departure. The words "psychadelic" and "country" get thrown around in Sykes' general direction, but there's something greater than that going on. It's been some time since they released their last album, and there's been quite a bit of buzz around the project which lies ahead. As local media begins to speculate on the album Sykes refers to on her website, which has no release date as of yet, she brought many of the new songs onto the Showbox stage. As I alluded to in the intro, there was quite a bit of moodiness - multi-faceted arrangements, driven in no small part by the Hammond B3 organ, distorted guitar, and her own poetic, rhythmic lyricism. The songs were complicated and emotional, pulling the audience further than a typical Saturday night might require. But few seemed to mind. The remarkable response she drew from the crowd was topped only by the night's headliner.


I'm just going to say it. Moondoggies are the next Seattle band you folks not living in Seattle will come to know and love. They're a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. They represent well the remarkable fusion of styles pervading all music in this town right now. (See other soon-to-be-breakouts like Grand Hallway, Maldives, and Widower - all of whom, it's no small coincidence, share members.) It's that CSN&Y/The Band/Eagles thing. Throw in a little Elton John, a little Radiohead, a little mashup of random other things. They are more proof that there's some magical something happening - a convergence of people whose influences and interests lie in the same places, who have come to the same place at the same time to do the same thing.

Powered by all these things, the quartet unleashed a 90-minute set which quite literally, and physically, moved the packed house. There was a sense leading into this night that the local music community was proud and excited for the Moondoggies. After all, many of this audience watched the band grow from their early days at the Blue Moon - the diviest dive in town. Recent months in Moondoggie emergence have seen the band ascending quickly and evenly past so many of their roots-influenced peers.

Perhaps it's the band's insistence on drawing from beyond the darkness and moodiness of Seattle weather and impulse. After all, they spent a time developing in Bellingham and the boondocks of Alaska, before returning to Seattle and pushing full force. It kind of cramps the claim that Seattle's weather breeds the best creativity. Whatever it is, the Moondoggies brought it. On the Showbox stage - a venue whose 1100-person capacity far outdoes the tiny dive bar atmosphere of the Blue Moon, from whence they started - the Moondoggies played with a level of confidence and intimacy which belied that Seattle-ish, rainy thing.

Whatever it is which drives these folks - the weather, the dark moodiness, or some other thing, some unnameable truth - this single Saturday night was full of great music, simple as that.

(Originally posted September 15, 2009 by Easy Ed on NoDepression.com)

This past weekend found me working at the Temecula Valley Film and Music Festival with my oldest kid. When you live in a small town where the horses and cows graze next to the subdivisions left empty by greed and failed economic policies, and where culture is defined in the space between Costco and the multiplex sitting across the mall parking lot...anyway, you get the idea that this is something we look forward to every year because sometimes its not so easy to fight the traffic and pay the emotional toll to drive the ninety-odd miles to Hollywood. And so the film people come to us.
If you were born sometime prior to 1956 or so, you probably know what most folks don't. Lots of what we think or remember that happened in the Sixties really took place in that ten year period after the Summer of Love and before Saturday Night Fever. While we think of the Seventies as happy faces and cocaine, velvet ropes and disco...it was really a special time where music was experienced and enjoyed outside of a strict business-first paradigm, and where the notes, beats and lyrics served as a moving aural wall against the political and cultural-social shifts that were occurring at lightning speed.

Cowtown Ballroom...Sweet Jesus! is billed as a documentary by Joe Heyen and Anthony Ladesich about the legendary concert venue in Kansas City, Missouri that opened in the summer of 1971, and over the next thirty-eight months it established an incredible musical heritage. That's more or less the official description you'll find on the website and in the festival program but it doesn't come close to being accurate so here's my attempt: Cowtown Ballroom...Sweet Jesus! is probably one of the finest oral histories of my generation that has ever been produced. The stories told here by the people who owned, managed, worked, performed, experienced and patronized the Ballroom are our stories. The visual and audio components are a bonus to the words they speak and the memories they share which are less about the venue and more about the life and times and the coming of age of the post-WW2 generation.
The Cowtown Ballroom was one of many music venues that sprang up around the country in the wake of the Avalon Ballroom, Family Dog concerts, the Trips Festival and Fillmore in San Francisco. Where I grew up in Philadelphia, it was the Trauma and Electric Factory. In your hometown it was probably something similar with just a different name. When the bands came to town it wasn't a calculated pre-planned business transaction to secure a ticket and buy a t-shirt...it was a gathering of the tribes to experience the unplanned, unexpected and uncharted. As someone who ambled occasionally both in front of and behind the stage, sometimes the musicians were just as surprised at what occurred each night as the audience was.

While most outside Kansas City won't necessarily know many of the folks in the movie, you're apt to recall or know the musicians who are interviewed. John McEun, Jeff Hanna and Jimmy Fadden from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Brewer and Shipley, Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas, B.B. King, Charlie Daniels, the guy from Foghat (whose name I just forgot), Steve Miller, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and a few more that escape me. If you're like me and wake up some days feeling a little old, trust me that watching some of these interviews will make you feel that your sixties survival outcome may have been better than most.

As I always note when I write something that some might look upon as a review, I'm not a very good reviewer. I don't follow the format, I forget stuff and couldn't get a job as a writer if there were still ones to get. But you can trust my instincts that if you're of a certain age, enjoy tripping back to a simpler time in popular culture, come from Kansas City or nearby, or you're a musicologist in search of the lost chord...track this one down.

By the way, when the lights came on after the screening I turned to my fifteen year old kid and said “You just saw my life...you just heard my story”. Thanks to Joe and Anthony and all the other folks who took the time and effort to contribute to this. And since this isn't a magazine where I have to worry about space or the lack of it, I thought it might be interesting for you to take a look at the list of who performed at the Cowtown...or at least the best that they were able to recall or recreate.

1971
The Flying Burrito Brothers w White Eyes 7/16 and 7/17
Ewing Street, Chet Nichols, Sound Farm 7/23 and 7/24
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w Ted Anderson 8/1 and 8/2
It's A Beautiful Day & Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee 9/26
Leo Kottke w Joy of Cooking w Joyful Noise 10/10
Steve Miller Blues Band w Grits 10/8
Frank Zappa (Flo and Eddie) w Rich Hill (2 Shows) 10/23
Brewer and Shipley w Tide 11/13
Savoy Brown w Pot Liquour w Chicken Shack 11/24
Poco w Jerry Riopelle 12/4
Alice Cooper w P G & E 12/16 two shows
Freddie King 12/31

In addition, the following bands played Cowtown in the first year, but we don't have the dates at this time:
Wilderness Road
Catfish
Clyde N'Em & Her

If any of you can help out on these dates, it would be greatly appreciated.

1972
Kansas City Philharmonic Jorge Mester cond. w Chet Nichols 1/9
Westport Free Clinic Benefit 1/30
KC Philharmonic w Mike Quatro and the Jam Band 2/13
Poco w John David Souther 2/11
Brewer and Shipley w Danny Cox w White Eyes 2/15
Detroit with Mitch Ryder w Tide 2/18 & 2/19
Five Man Electrical Band w Tide 2/26
Mason Proffit w Morningstar w Commonground 3/12
KC Philharmonic w Ted Anderson 3/19
Badfinger w Ashton, Gardner and Dyke 4/7
Ravi Shankar 4/8
Up Against The Wall Ball w Pilgrimage, Nation w J. C. Storyteller 4/18
Linda Ronstadt (Backup band Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon, Randy Meisner, Don Henley) w The Raspberries w Danny Cox 4/22
Savoy Brown w Malo w Long John Baldry 4/26
Benefit Westport Free Clinic KC Grits, Nation, Bulbous Creation,
and Shock 4/30
Hot Tuna (Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Papa John Creach,
Sam Piazza) w Chet Nichols (2 shows) 5/6
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w Hope 5/21
The Peter Yarrow Band w Lazarus 5/20
It’s A Beautiful Day w Stoneface 6/1 & 6/2 & 6/3
Black Oak Arkansas w White Eyes 6/9
Dan Hicks 9/21
Poco w Chet Nichols w Danny Cox w Chet Nichols 9/29
Benefit for Westport Free Health Clinic KC Grits, Morningstar,
Chessman Square 10/8
Steve Miller w Wishbone Ash 10/31
Robin Trower w White Eyes 11/10
Hot Tuna w Ozark Mt. Daredevils 11/22
Jorge Mester and KC Philharmonic w Danny Cox 11/26
Seals and Croft w Lawrence and Roselle 12/1
Frank Zappa (Petit Wazoo) w Steely Dan Two Shows 12/2
Black Oak Arkansas w Tranquility 12/15
Brewer and Shipley w Ozark Mt. Daredevils w Chet Nichols
w Ted Anderson w KC Grits 12/31

1973
The Byrds w Flash 1/21
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w Danny Cox w Steve Martin 2/2 & 2/3
Ozark Mountain Daredevils 2/8
Logins and Messina w Leo Kottke w Casey Kelly (2 Shows) 2/10
B. B. King w Chet Nichols w KC Grits (2 shows) 2/19
Brewer and Shipley w Louden Wainwright III w
Ozark Mountain Daredevils 3/9 and 3/10
Paul Butterfield w Foghat w Ted Anderson w Mark Almond 3/15
B. B. King w Malo 3/19
Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show w Hookfat w Tide 3/31
It’s A Beautiful Day w Bloodrock w Sylvester and the Hot Band 4/7
Wishbone Ash w Finnegan and Wood w Vinegar Joe 4/13
King Crimson w Gentle Giant w Charles Lloyd 4/22
Fanny w Sanctuary w Backwods Memory 4/27
Poco w John David Souther 5/11
Canned Heat w Hookfoot 5/13
Commander Cody w Earl Scruggs 5/26
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w Steve Martin 6/16 & 6/17
Charlie Daniels w Garland Jeffries w Hot Ice 7/3
Dan Hicks &the Hot Licks w Billy Spears Band 9/21
John Mayall w the Ozark Mountain Daredevils 9/29
Arlo Guthrie 10/21
Mike Quatro Jam Band w Bryan Bowers 10/31
Mott The Hoople w Kinky Friedman & His Texas Jewboys 11/2
Robin Trower 11/10
Ozark Mt. Daredevils w Danny Cox 11/16
Foghat w John Martyn 12/5
Jesse Colin Young w Leo Kottke 12/9
Blue Oyster Cult w Charlie Daniels 12/28
Sugarloaf w Pilgrimage w Stone Wall w One Thing At A Time 12/31

1974
Climax Blues Band w Speakeasy 1/9
Van Morrison*& Caledonia Soul Orchestra 1/17
*Crazy Little Thing, Ballerina, Friday’s Child, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Don’t Look Back, These Dreams of You, Heathrow Shuffle, Into the Mystic, Ain’t Nothing You Can Do, I’ve Been Working, Take Your Hand Out Of My Pocket, Warm Love, Mystic Eyes, Brown Eyed Girl, Domino, Gloria, Cyprus Avenue, Caravan
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w Steve Martin 2/2 & 2/3
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen
w Ozark Mt. Daredevils 2/8
The Strawbs 2/23
Bachman-Turner Overdrive w Pilgrimage w NRBQ 2/27
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w Steve Martin 3/1
Harry Chapin 3/11
Redbone w Pilgrimage 3/16
Rory Gallagher w Tide 3/24
Bill Quateman w Hoyt Axton 4/6
Fanny 4/11
Captain Beefheart w Kansas 4/22
Firesign Theater 4/25
The Electric Light Orchestra w Suzi Quatro Band 4/26
Climax Blues Band w Black Sheep 5/10
Jesse Colin Young w Royal Scanlon 5/29
Golden Earring 6/13
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w Brewer and Shipley w Larry Knight and
Friends (Steve Baker, Steve Starr, Gary Signor) w Country Heir 9/16

(Originally posted by Paul Cantin on NoDepression.com - http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/wendy-bird-hatches-a-small)

By Paul Cantin

I try to cling tenaciously, perhaps naively, to the belief that in music, quality will always win the day; that the good stuff will bubble to the surface and find an audience. It isn’t always easy to hold firm to that notion.

























The recent release of Wendy Bird’s new album, Natural Wonder (available online via indie Beaumont Classic Records), gives me some hope. Bird, a Vancouver-based singer, has recorded an album of songs drawn from the catalogue of Jeffrey Hatcher, who has for more than 30 years flirted with broad recognition (if not commercial success) through a variety of musical outlets. Bird’s album, an immensely accomplished countrypolitan take on Hatcher’s diverse Americana songbook, features Elvis Costello, Canadian blues guitar-slinger Colin James, Adam Levy (of Norah Jones’ band) and producer Craig Northey (The Odds) – all of them essentially volunteering to perform in service to Bird’s project and Hatcher’s songs.

In the Spring, 2009 No Depression bookazine, I wrote at length about Hatcher’s story. Growing up in Winnipeg, Hatcher was already a well-established local hero when I was in my teens; Hatcher’s proto-punk/new wave band Dark Horse performed at my high school dance in 1977. By the 80s, Hatcher and his brothers (drummer Paul, multi-instrumentalist Don) had relocated to Toronto and enjoyed a modest hit as Jeffrey Hatcher & The Big Beat with an album entitled Cross Our Hearts. When I was studying journalism in the 80s, my honors thesis was an account of the Big Beat’s efforts to get Cross Our Hearts made, released and heard. Later, Hatcher would move west to Vancouver, where he connected with 60s bubblegum teen heartthrob Billy Cowsill to form The Blue Shadows, truly one of the essential (but criminally ignored) alt-country acts.



The Blue Shadows' "Don't Expect A Reply"

All along the way, Hatcher made some exceptional music but never managed to attain significant commercial success, despite a scattered band of fans who have cherished the music and championed his fortunes. These days, he works as a music therapist back in Winnipeg, helping troubled young people overcome personal challenges through songwriting.

Bird sang and played with Hatcher in his short-lived post-Blue Shadows outfit The Reachers (also known as The Sugar Beats). For Natural Wonder, she plucked some gems from all over Hatcher’s back pages and delivers them in a rich voice swathed in expertly conceived arrangements (mostly recorded live-off-the-floor). It sounds like one of the best albums of both 2009 and 1970; had it been released that year it would have easily slid into playlists alongside, say, Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden.”

Hatcher has quietly been chipping at a new album alongside his brothers and longtime collaborator Dave Briggs. Until that’s ready to be formally unleashed upon the world, Hatcher could not have asked for a more sympathetic interpreter than Wendy Bird, and listeners could not ask for a more fulfilling introduction to his songwriting.

Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #74 March-April 2008

By Allison Stewart

http://archives.nodepression.com/2008/03/palaces-o...

(Originally posted by NoDepression.com member J. Hayes - music writer on the No Depression community site:  http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/bill-withers-desperation-gets)

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," muses music legend Bill Withers in the new documentary; Still Bill. "I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder."
 


The 70 year old master songwriter can casually quote Thoreau and sound like a complete rock star in the same breath. The documentary, whose name is taken from the title of the subject's classic 1972 sophmore album, chronicles an amazing artist at a turning point in his life and creativity. Filmmakers Damani Baker and Alex Vlack gained access to the life of the unlikely superstar who turned his back on the music industry in 1985. Together, they have created a touching and empowering portrait of a man most know little about, but whose music has been a part of all our lives.

Withers' honest lyrics and hummable melodies are easily as fundamental to American music (and by extension popular music of the world) as that of The Beatles or Bob Dylan, with a deep soulfulness that reaches the listeners heart in a way unmatched by either. In Still Bill, the filmmakers have captured the feel of many Bill Withers' songs; heart-warming and down to earth with just a touch of sadness. Classic performance footage from the 1970s and 80s is interspersed with brand new interviews, current footage of Withers with his family and performances from a 2008 tribute show featuring Cornell Dupree and Corey Glover, among others.

Withers himself is a fascinating subject. A uniquely gifted vocalist, musician and songwriter, Withers did not enter the music business until his early 30s. In an excerpt from a 1970s television interview, he even suggests that he hadn't owned a guitar until shortly before recording his first record. Instead he honed his craft, weaving tales and humming melodies while installing toilets on 747s. When he did become interested in pursuing music as a career, he was determined to do things on his own terms. Shying away from conventional Rhythm and Blues formula with horns and female backing vocalists, Withers wanted to make a "quiet" record. His conviction (and persistence) paid off and he eventually recorded Just As I Am, produced by Stax legend Booker T. Jones. Trials and tribulations in the music industry eventually persuaded Withers to leave the music business all together and simply "do something else."

Still Bill is loaded with rarely seen performances and photography from the 70s and 80s, but it's not the archival footage or even the live performances from the 2008 Tribute show (remarkable as they are) that make this film so moving and inspiring. It's the current material following Withers in his daily life that is sure to surprise and rivet audiences. Witnessing Withers return to his hometown of Slabfork, West Virginia for the first time in decades, searching a disgracefully overgrown cemetery for his brother and father's graves, waxing poetic on the subject of "selling out" (leaving both Cornel West and Tavis Smiley at a loss for words) or being brought to tears while recording his daughter Kori's original composition 'Blue Blues'; these are the moments will have the viewer spellbound.

The unassuming highlight of the film (in your humble writer's opinion) finds Withers and daughter Kori (an extraordinary vocalist and songstress in her own right) in a hotel lobby singing through a previously unheard song, 'A Telephone Call Away.' Withers' pensive piano work and perfectly unpretentious lyrics resonate in the acoustics of the rooms vaulted ceiling. The song reaches it's climax when Kori Withers joins in for a down right, gut-bucket yet effortlessly beautiful bridge. This song has recently seen release on George Benson's latest Songs and Stories as a duet with the deep and dulcet-toned Lalah Hathaway. While the song's beauty is still undeniable, for me, you can't beat Bill and Kori Withers in a hotel lobby on a quiet afternoon.

Still Bill is as much about the future as it is the past. As Withers suggests when expounding on Thoreau, he has been itching to make more music. We get just enough of a glimpse of what this might sound like in the film to set us on the edge of our seats.

Bill Withers is a man who can sing a line with a simple poignance only matched, perhaps, by a B.B. King guitar solo. He has made beautiful records that could not have been made by anyone else or at any other time and his absence has left a gap in the music world. As the entertainment industry changes and audiences are craving honest music more and more over flash and production, Withers could be the perfect artist to emerge once again, on his own terms. For my money, he could cut a whole album in that hotel lobby with one mic and only his daughter to back him up.

Find Still Bill when it comes to a theater near you and be on the look out for new music from Bill Withers in some fashion. Until then...

Live Well and Listen Closely,

J. Hayes


Required Listening: Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall

Upcoming Screenings of Still Bill:

London, October 17,18 and 19

NYC, October 20

Toronto, October 23

For more info: www.stillbillthemovie.com www.billwithersmusic.com


 

Originally posted by Peter Blackstock on NoDepression.com - http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/on-amy-farris

A note yesterday from an old Austin friend, whose daughter was among many violin students taught by the late Amy Farris, reminded me that I'd meant to write a little bit about Amy in yesterday's "Austin Afterthoughts" entry. As it happens, Austin's Continental Club has a show tonight in memory of Farris, with some pretty significant names paying their respects, including Dave Alvin, Kelly Willis, Exene Cervenka, Jon Dee Graham, and Jesse Dayton.

Amy's recent passing came up repeatedly last week in conversations with friends I ran into during my visit to Austin. It was clear that, although she'd moved to Los Angeles a few years back (so that Dave Alvin could produce her first record), she was still a valued member of the local community. That her death (at age 40) appears to have been a suicide after a lifelong struggle with manic depression seems out-of-sync with the Amy I knew, but then I really only knew her just a little bit, on the surface.

When we ran a Town & Country piece on Farris in our May-June 2004 issue (upon the Yep Roc release of her Alvin-produced disc Anyway), I wrote it myself; I'd been impressed with Amy's music over a few years of seeing her play violin with the likes of Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison and Alejandro Escovedo. (She also had a fair stint with country legend Ray Price.) On the couple of occasions when we'd conversed in Austin or Los Angeles, we'd bonded a little bit over having been among the increasingly rare Austin-music folks who'd actually grown up in Austin.

I went back over my 2004 interview with her this morning, wondering if there might have been some sort of hint at the sadder side of Amy I'd never been aware of. Mostly, there were lots of back-and-forth exchanges between us that just seemed to underscore how much she loved music, and being part of the community of musicians she had gotten to know. We talked about how we both played violin in junior-high orchestra (unlike me, she continued into high school, and excelled), and how we both had parents who were inclined toward classical rather than pop music. We mulled over the irony of growing up in Austin at the height of the outlaw-country boom, and neither of us being quite old enough to have any clue about it: "I know, I know. We missed the Armadillo!", Amy lamented.

Kind of hidden in the midst of our discussions about her time writing and recording with Dave Alvin for her solo debut, there's maybe a small sign of the inner despair that was part of who she was. "We were sitting in Dave’s backyard, and we were working on some songs, and I was thinking about recording one of his songs. I was thinking about recording 'Blue Boulevard', because for some reason, songs about streets, and songs about emptiness and things, were hitting me really hard. And some of my own songs have those themes."

Not to read too much into that; pretty much any singer-songwriter worth a lick has songs about darker feelings and emotions. But probably there was something more to those words than I realized at the time of our interview. She came back to that theme when we discussed her cover of Scott Walker's "Big Louise", the next-to-last track on Anyway:

“Well, that was a song that I had been in love with for a long time. That song, to me, first of all, it deals with emptiness, a lot, as well. It hits me on a lot of levels. First, it terrifies me. It’s the future that no one wants. And, it also makes me think of Holly Golightly, in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, if things didn’t go right for her. You know, there’s a line -- 'You can hear her hum softly from a fire escape in the sky' -- and there’s that scene in the movie with Audrey Hepburn on the fire escape. And the thing is, Audrey Hepburn was gonna get old, you know, and what would happen then?"

It's the song's chorus that hits the hardest, looking back now: "Didn't time sound sweet yesterday? In a world filled with friends, you lose your way."

Although Farris didn't end up recording Alvin's "Blue Boulevard", the consideration of it led them to an old X tune which became a highlight of Anyway. "We were working on that ('Blue Boulevard'), and we were playing it, and then Dave goes, 'Do you know "Poor Girl"?' And I’m like, (laughs) 'Yeah. Every word!' And I sang the whole thing for him. And so we recorded that."

A few of its lyrics, perhaps, speak to where Amy traveled -- and to the notion that perhaps we should seek to remember her most for the good she brought to those around her, in the time that she had:

Life turned and wandered
Never to come back again
Take what she gives you
And don't feel sorry for her....



(Amy with Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women in Connecticut in July 2009,
joining Christy McWilson on Christy's song "Potter's Field")