Thursday, April 19, 2012

Levon Helm

Nothing to add really. In the two speaking clips below he shows some of the southern charm that made him perfect for a handful of movie roles. In both cases he's being interviewed by the somewhat-too-urban-to-really-understand-all-this Martin Scorsese.



In the "no embed allowed" (just click) clip below one youtube user comments on how he lights Robbie Robertson's cigarette first.

Most news reports of his death focus on "Up On Cripple Creek" or "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down", but I always thought this version of "Ophelia" was most distictive - perhaps without a difference. I always wondered if he turned his head while singing to keep it from bouncing around so much from the drumming.



There are endless clips including a few movies.



Almost anything by The Band before 1978 is worthwhile. The Last Waltz is essential - full stop.

RIP

Monday, April 16, 2012

It Was Five Years Ago Today…

... my Outlook calendar confirms it. I was puttering toward northwest Houston looking for a video equipment rental place to pick up a screen and digital projector for an attorney client (if he wanted to pay legal rates for that, fine) so we could make a presentation on a particular job. I turned on KTRU (Rice Radio) and some insouciant collegiate announcer was speaking charmingly about the end of the semester and the joy he had found playing music all year, and here were some of his favorites, and blah, blah.

A few songs in, I hear ringing acoustic guitar chords and a snot-nosed sounding count-off “two,…one, two, three, four…" and then an explosion of fuzz-toned bass, thundering distorted drums, a two-chord acoustic guitar progression and a passionate and loud-as-a-freight-train singer almost shouting his lyrics.

Since I was driving, looking for an address, and fumbling to turn up the volume, I couldn’t catch all the lyrics; just a snatch of, “but then they buried her alive, one evening 1945, with just her sister at her side”. I remember thinking, “Anne Frank?” More speaker rattling fuzz, but now a rather sharp horn section and, “so sad to see, the world agree, that they’d rather see their faces filled with flies”. Yep, Anne Frank. What the hell was that?

College radio loves to keep you hanging for half an hour before telling you what they played, so at the break I’m scrawling artist and song names on a sheet while still driving. Then I hear “Holland 1945” and something about “neutral”. Ah – must be it.

I’ve lived in Houston traffic for lo, these 25 years, and the few musical epiphanies I’ve experienced have occurred while in cars. “What a Difference a Day Made” – Dinah Washington – KNTH AM, about 1986, driving up US 59 at sunrise to a job I loathed. “Freak Scene” – Dinosaur Jr. – KPFT FM, summer 1988, Friday afternoon, sitting on the Pierce Elevated with my voice pager going off on the un-air conditioned passenger seat. Others, of course.

But never had I experienced the transcendent rush of undiluted dynamic quality that was “Holland, 1945” on that April 16, 2007. Maybe it was the air conditioning and the billing rate. This is the best sounding youtube upload. There are dozens - some with a million views. Not exactly a fresh topic.


Less than 24 hours later I owned “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, by Neutral Milk Hotel. SoundWaves on Montrose Blvd didn’t have it. Best Buy in The Woodlands did. Go figure. Corporate rock suks!!!

And then for about 3 months I was 19 years-old again. A CD released in 1998, when I was 38, and discovered (by me, anyway) when I was almost 47, turned me into a 19 year-old, at least while I was in the car. Every commute, every morning, every afternoon, was devoted to this disconcerting opus from a loose aggregation of high school friends originally from, of all places, Ruston, Louisiana.

The song that hooked me isn’t all that representative of the entire CD. Much of it is acoustic or uses unlikely combinations of singing saw, calliope organ (think circus organ – sometimes called a Wandering Genie organ), horns (including a zanzithophone which was a toy synthesized horn from Casio that I think provides the ear-splitting squall at the end of Holland, 1945), and little if any electric guitar. There are reportedly three singing saw parts on the masterful title song (played by a guy named Julian Koster) and the saw is somehow used to cataclysmic effect at the end (about 3:12) of “Ghost”. I think you can even hear it woogling away in the background of Holland 1945. The CD has been aptly described as sounding “like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier”. I know nothing of producer Robert Schneider other than he plays several instruments and is generally given a good deal of credit for the sound.

The voice, guitar, some bass, bone-jarring “floor tom” and primary pair of bright baby eyes gazing into the pit of doom belong to one Jeff Mangum (one of the streets on my route that fateful day was Mangum Rd. – Whoa…).

It is pointless to try to describe the themes of the entire CD. Anne Frank is there. So is her ghost. So is a two-headed boy floating in a glass jar filled with formalin for whom our singer appears to have an unhealthy attraction, so is the King of Carrot Flowers, so is the face of a friend blown apart by shotgun suicide –
And you left with your head filled with flames,
And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth.
Push the pieces in place.
Make your smile sweet to see.
You get the picture.

And then there is “Oh Comely”. 8 minutes 15 seconds that begin with what sounds like a strumming and chord pattern practice book topped off with disturbing vocals along the lines of “your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park”. At about 5:20 the voice fantasizes about saving Anne Frank in “some sort of time machine” cautions the listener to "know all your enemies" and then swings wildly up without lyrics while a trombone follows along in almost perfect unision. It is a singular moment.

It is stupid to try to characterize one bit of music by relating it to another, but I will do it anyway. For some reason, Love’s “Forever Changes” comes to mind. That album is far more delicate and maybe more traditionally accomplished than “Aeroplane”, but I can think of no other in which a unique voice cracks open a disturbed noggin and all the scary toys fall out. Arthur Lee of Love has said, roughly, that he thought it was his swan song, and one gets a similar feeling from “Aeroplane”. There was also something so disarming, I guess, about NMH’s wide-eyed, low-fi approach that this CD just burrowed in and got all the worms to sit up and pay attention. I hadn’t experienced this for decades. Probably won’t again.

Mangum is endlessly written about in fanzines as the dude responsible for maybe the most beloved indie CD of all time; who toured a little, released a field recording of Bulgarian folk songs, and then walked away. Pffffft. A nice overview, and the source of the mariachi circus line is here.

The other musicians soldier on in various loose amalgamations.

Annual rumors and hoaxes would tell of Mangum’s return to touring or recording, only to evaporate. It is generally agreed that he is married to a documentary filmmaker in New York and played a few songs at the Occupy Wall Street rape and rob-fest protests.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYb-Q8LxCI4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E4Y-BJH6zc
Well, nobody’s perfect. Maybe it wasn’t him. It was dark. But the voice sounds right and the sweater looks like one of his.

Most of you dear readers will click on one link, listen for a few seconds and, “meh…sucks”. That is the nature of music. I understand. I hope your own epiphany finds you.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Richard Dawkins, granite-jawed....agnostic?

What a little punk.

After years of boldly leading the religion of atheism, Richard Dawkins gets all weak-kneed in the presence of....Rowan Williams?....and acknowledges that he calls himself an agnostic, "The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Prof Dawkins answered that he did."

Talk about damaging your brand. That a mind as flaccid as Rowan William's could cause this public retreat is almost laughable. I hate to think how far Dawkins would have retreated if my friend Pastor Bill had brought out the brass knuckles and jumper cables of Love.

I wish Hitchens were alive to see this.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

One Year Anniversary at Movies Eat the Soul

The Virg celebrates one year of blogging over at Movies Eat the Soul. It was high time to review the blog's name-sake, "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul".

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Happy Valentines Day

Movies Eat the Soul celebrates martyrdoms and beheadings with a review of a much favored romance, Crossing Delancey.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Buddy Holly

3 years late or 7 years early, let's commemorate 53 years since Buddy Holly's death in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 3, 1959, at 22 years old. At the time he had been relatively famous for 18 months. His widow and others blame producer/manager Norman Petty for witholding about 100 grand in royalties which forced Holly onto a miserable winter tour to pay the bills. But that's another story.

YouTube is full of rough but entertaining video, some of it live, some of it overdubbed. If you're a fan, you've already been through them. First we must say hats off to those who work so hard at these. I don't have the patience. Some start with commercials - sorry.

On Holly's influence, from Wikipedia:
Ian Whitcomb said "Buddy Holly and the Crickets had the most influence on the Beatles."[26] Lennon and McCartney later cited Holly as a primary influence.[27] (Their bug-themed band's name, The Beatles, was chosen partly in homage to Holly's Crickets.)[26] The Beatles did a cover version of "Words of Love" that was a close reproduction of Holly's version, released on late 1964's Beatles for Sale (in the U.S., in June 1965 on Beatles VI). During the January 1969 sessions for the Let It Be album, the Beatles played a slow impromptu version of "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues" — although not written by Holly, it was popularized by him — with Lennon mimicking Holly's vocal style;[citation needed] the recording was eventually released in the mid-1990s on Anthology 3. In addition, John Lennon recorded a cover version of "Peggy Sue" on his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll. McCartney owns the publishing rights to Holly's song catalogue.
A 17-year-old Bob Dylan attended the January 31, 1959, show, two nights before Holly's death. Dylan referred to this in his 1998 Grammy acceptance speech for his Time out of Mind being named Album of the Year:
"And I just want to say that when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him...and he LOOKED at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don't know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way." 
Keith Richards attended one of Holly's performances, where he heard "Not Fade Away" for the first time. The Rolling Stones had an early hit covering the song.
In my unstudied opinion there is no more notable piece of music from the 50s than "Well All Right". Recorded in 1958 with perfect sound, one percussion instrument, played by the somewhat overlooked drummer and frequent songwriting collaborator Jerry Allison, a bass, and, I assume, Holly's acoustic guitar. Holly sings it straight with no trademark hiccups or exaggerated phrasing. Yes, the lyrics are about young love, but never has it sounded more quietly self assured. The first verse is unusually eloquent. This is years ahead of it's time, again, in my opinion. No one in country, rock, gospel, R&B, or even folk, sounded like this. The apotheosis of Americana.



For "True Love Ways" the compiler also provides notes on the musicians who played on the recording. Whatever you think of the strings and saxophone and syrupy sentiments, this is just good. It is also reportedly exactly what Holly wanted. More than most of his contemporaries he had a hand in the sound and production and, in this case, none of the strings were added after his death.



Like all the rapacious manager/producers of the era, Norman Petty slapped his name into the songwriting credits whenever he could. A fine old tradition that relieved performers of royalties. Perhaps a more disciplined student could investigate how much he actually contributed.

Fans of alternative histories usually fantasize about the big things like the South winning the Civil War, or Americans losing the war of independence. Me, I wonder where Buddy Holly would have been on February 3, 1969. Would he have cared that the Beatles had lifted their name from his Crickets? What would he have thought of the Hollies?  Would he have followed his disturbing interest in strings, and what would later be called soft rock, and been playing 8 shows a week in Vegas, or maybe getting ready for some stupid outdoor festival in Woodstock, New York? He would have only been 32, or two years older than counterculture high priestess Grace Slick. Wire-rim glasses, bad afro and sideburns all seem likely.

This clip doesn't really need the subtitles, and they get in the way of watching his chord changes, and he didn't write this song anyway, but...



This is a shockingly good clip of "Peggy Sue". The camera loses Holly right as he begins one of the most distinctive solos ever, but still, it's great. One itty-bitty amp. The patronizing tone of the hostess was standard.



All before he was 23.
No going back.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Blinker Nodder Sleepy Guy

The Virg leaves the house long enough to review a first run movie from this decade. He finds it somewhat moody, mournful and somber. Over at Movies Eat the Soul.