Music Notes

I’ve just returned from Eugene, where I was visiting my dad. Now, when I am visiting Eugene, I don’t often get to see a show because it’s such an isolated small city for touring acts, but over the last several years, I have seen a few, including T. Bone Burnett, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Tish Hinojosa. Maybe things are improving, though I’m not sure I’d see any of those shows if I was at home where I can see anything in Boston. What you can see in Eugene is jam bands. A lot. It’s nuts. Although I have laid out a partial defense of the Grateful Dead, it’s partial for sure. And the Dead are the best of the jam bands, since they actually gave a shit about lyrics. These other bands who just fuck around and jam for 35 minutes are execrable.

I say this because I went to see The Third Mind last week at Wow Hall in Eugene, the hippie music haven. Why? Because Dave Alvin is in the band and Dave Alvin’s guitar brings me life. Plus Jesse Sykes handles the vocals and although she’s an odd vocalist, she’s certianly a unique one. So basically, it’s them, Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker bassist Victor Krummenacher, Michael Jerome on drums, and David Immergluck on guitar. A good band for sure. So I thought, OK, I will check this out. What does these people doing a jam band thing look like? What it really looks like is a loose blues cover band. The songs mercifully don’t go on forever. Do they do a Dead song? Yes, they do “Morning Dew,” before which Sykes talked about the 60s and Eugene and I rolled my eyes a bit. But they do a bunch of blues numbers and Dave talks about some of this history and also, despite the fact that he’s old and not totally healthy, his guitar still is absolute fire. Did I love it? No. But it was interesting enough for being in Eugene and Dave rocks.

One more thing about this show and this venue. I went down to the basement while some Eugene jam band was going on endlessly with its bullshit, including a cover of Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” that made David Byrne sound like George Jones. The basement is where the bar is. I showed my ID to the guy down there. He looks at it is says “Wow, 1974! That was a great year for the Dead!!!” OH COME ON EUGENE!

Other News:

I suppose someone around here should something about the death of Country Joe McDonald. What I will say is that I don’t know any of his songs but that people who went to Woodstock seem to have liked him. He was a relic last relevant in 1971, but whatever. Lots of people you could say that about. And what musicians do still live from Woodstock?

One fact that says plenty about LGM Music Discourse, which is that I am the second person here to discuss the death of the great Sir Douglas Quintet and Texas Tornadoes keyboardist and accordionist Augie Meyers, one of the true all time legends of American music. SDQ was such a great band. At a moment when American bands were delving into the various musical pasts and lots of kids embraced the blues and some embraced mountain music, Meyers and Doug Sahm and friends were like, we are in Texas and we do our own thing thanks to the Mexicans and the Germans and the Czechs PLUS the blues and country. And thus a fantastic band was born, even if they were marketed as British invasion for 5 minutes and thus the silly name. That SDQ Live in Austin album that is a Austin City Limits episode recording is to me maybe their peak recording, even if it is after their popular prime, such as it was. But my god is Meyers brilliant on that recording. And Augie helping Dylan to make his first good album after 20 years of dreck is important too, though less important than anything he did with Sahm. RIP you legend.

I was catching up on some New Yorkers and very much enjoyed this December profile of Willie Nelson, then 92 and now 93, and how he keeps on keeping on. Check it out if you can. There wasn’t a ton of info on the Red Headed Stranger I didn’t know, but you might not know and the comments from family and friends are great. Plus there’s a picture of him still smoking cigarettes. You go Willie. Hell, they even got Dylan to comment and that ain’t easy to do.

Call 867-5309 and get a cancer hotline

High Country News is generally an environmental paper about the West, but it’s moved more into social/cultural issues in the last several years, causing a lot of anger among its old white environmentalist readership for a time. It’s also reinvigorated the paper. This article about the history of Portland’s black music scene and the archive developing to remember it is fantastic, especially given the context of the gentrification of Portland’s black neighborhood.

OK now. Friends–I need your help. This week is Big Ears, OMG I am so excited!!! I have a good agenda lined up. But forget about that. What would you see? Give me advice!!!!!!

One more thing–great piece by our friend Burning Ambulance on why he doesn’t like Sun Ra. Now, I in fact do like Sun Ra’s music. Sure, the philosophy was bullshit and he was running an outright cult, but most of his better albums at least (and there is so music even connoisseurs are talking generally here). I actually appreciate the weird synth noises replicating his vision of space. And the music swings so much! But the larger point I want to make here is this–we are in a culture where to say you don’t like something that is popular or critically acclaimed leads to people getting unduly snarky or even outright upset (see the endless comments “It’s Loomistown” every time I give something less than a B+ around here). That’s dumb. If we can’t disagree on art than we are living a pathetic life. I want to hear while BA doesn’t like Sun Ra. I want to hear why you don’t like anyone, so long as it’s informed and smart and this essay certainly is.

Playlist for the last two weeks:

1. Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse
2. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy
3. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
4. Chris Stapleton, Traveller
5. Neil Young, On the Beach
6. Sunny Sweeney, Heartbreakers Hall of Fame
7. George Jones, The Essential, disc 2
8. Lucinda Williams, Sweet Old World
9. Lucinda Williams, self-titled
10. Black Saint Quartet, self-titled
11. Merle Haggard, Portrait of Merle Haggard
12. X, Wild Gift
13. Wussy, Left for Dead
14. Jerry Lee Lewis, The Knox Phillips Sessions
15. Chris Gaffney, Loser’s Paradise
16. The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital Of The West 1940-1974, disc 2
17. John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
18. Richard and Linda Thompson, Pour Down Like Silver
19. Miles Davis, Live Europe 1967, disc 2
20. Eliza Carthy, Angels and Cigarettes
21. Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Dancer with Bruised Knees
22. Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left
23. Irving Fields, Bagels and Bongos
24. Father John Misty, Fear Fun
25. Jesca Hoop, Stonechild
26. Beyonce, Renaissance
27. CLAMM, Care
28. St. Vincent, Daddy’s Home
29. Charles Mingus, Mingus at the Bohemia
30. Jenny Owen Youngs, Avalanche
31. H.C. McEntire, Eno Axis
32. Margo Cilker, Pohorylle
33. George Jones, Live Texas 1965
34. Mount Moriah, How to Dance
35. Robert Earl Keen, Picnic
36. Sonic Youth, Dirty
37. La Luz, Brainwash
38. Jess Williamson, Time Ain’t Accidental
39. Spider John Koerner, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Been
40. Ana Tijoux, 1977
41. Neil Young, Harvest
42. Kris Kristofferson, The Essential, disc 1
43. Bonnie Prince Billy, I See a Darkness
44. Townes Van Zandt, High, Low, and In Between
45. Laura Veirs, Found Light
46. Torres, Silver Tongue
47. Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain
48. Robert Earl Keen, Gringo Honeymoon
49. Elizabeth Cook, Aftermath
50. Noname, Sundial
51. Watchhouse, Tides of a Teardrop
52. Amanda Shires, Take It Like a Man
53. Billy Bang, Vietnam: The Aftermath
54. James McMurtry, Where’d You Hide the Body
55. Cat Power, You Are Free
56. Marissa Nadler, For My Crimes
57. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Dynamic Maximum Tension
58. Fiona Apple, When the Pawn Hits….
59. Melody’s Echo Chamber, Emotional Eternal
60. Matthew Bourne/Emil Karlsen, The Embalmer
61. Jane Weaver, Love in Constant Spectacle
62. Gerald Cleaver & Violet Hour, Live at Firehouse 12
63. Wayne Horvitz Gravitas Quartet, One Dance Alone
64. Sonny Rollins, G-Man
65. Tom Zé, Canções Eróticas de Ninar
66. Mount Moriah, Miracle Temple
67. Norman Blake, Fields of November
68. The Paranoid Style, The Purposes of Music in General
69. George Jones & Melba Montgomery, Singing What’s In Our Hearts
70. Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor
71. Drive By Truckers, The Unraveling
72. Blood Lemon, self-titled
73. MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks
74. The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field
75. Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Corporal
76. Robbie Fulks, Gone Away Backwards
77. Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music
78. Dolly Parton, Coat of Many Colors
79. Drive By Truckers, Decoration Day
80. Edip Akbayram, self-titled, disc 1
81. Iris Dement, Sing the Delta
82. Don Rigsby, The Midnight Call
83. The Postal Service, Give Up
84. Ralph Stanley, Hills of Home
85. Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, Turntable Matinee
86. Junior Brown, Semi-Crazy
87. TJ Kirk, self-titled
88. Jason Isbell, Something More than Free
89. Jason Isbell, Here We Rest
90. Anderson.Paak, Malibu
91. James McMurtry, Just Us Kids
92. Leonard Cohen, Live in London
93. Susan Alcorn Quintet, Pedernal
94. Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
95. Marika Hackman, I’m Not Your Man

Album Reviews:

Tom Russell, Mount Olive

Tom Russell had disappeared so completely over the past 7 or 8 years that I figured he had either given up music or his health had declined. And it’s true, most of his albums since 2010 or so had been either bad or mixed but not getting much attention. Lo and behold, he released a short album last year. It’s 8 tracks, but only 24 minutes, which is itself different for him since his songs had gotten so long over his career. Even though he’s well into his 70s now, his voice still sounds pretty great. This tighter format also leads to a surprisingly strong set of tunes for a once great songwriter. Unfortunately, this was released to absolutely zero publicity, not even reviews from somewhere like No Depression. I just happened to google him and ran across one rando talking about it online. “Salt on the Rim” is a good old-fashioned drinking song that compares the contrasting tastes of the margaria to the contrasts of a relationship, one of the kind of songs he’s always been good at and “We live inside of God’s cocktail shaker” is a really good line. For a guy whose albums I would rate between an A and a D- over a very long and incredibly inconsistent career, this is a pretty nice work that’s not a bad entry into his better type of work. It’s short and OK, it’s not Borderland or The Man from God Knows Where, but it’s pretty good.

B+

Bill Callahan, My Days of 58

Bill Callahan is the perfect guy for thinking about getting older. His evolution as a man has been in his evolution as a songwriter, from a pretty misogynist weird young guy recording as Smog to an individual able to express an incredible sense of empathy and beauty. And speaking of that former word, while “Empathy” is not one of the most played tracks off his new album, being a 58 year old man thinking both about the problems he had with his now dead father and the relationship he has with his two beloved young kids (he married the woman who shot a documentary about him in the early 2010s) is an astoundingly beautiful song about life and generations. In “Why Do Men Sing,” he asks why men sing and has something interesting things to say about that. In “Pathol O.G.” he considers why he himself started singing and what that did for him–it didn’t save his life but it gave him a life, as he states. And in “Highway Born,” he writes a classic song about why he loves the road, though he doesn’t really tour that much.

Maybe not every song is quite up to these gems, and that’s been the case for his recent albums as he combines incredible tracks with some OK ones. But the highs here are really high and his almost-zen like approach to music now makes him become something of a sage about becoming an old man. Yet, when really thinking about this, I did tick it down a bit because for the non-fanatic like myself, I do feel like there’s a bit too much filler and this hour long album could easily be 45 minutes. Is a B too harsh for an album I like by an artist I love? Maybe, but while there’s nothing like “objectivity” in the world, you do what you can.

B

Tryp Tych Tryo, Warsaw Conjunction

I’m not always super moved by European jazz and its frequent emphasis on prettiness and its obvious basis in the classical tradition as much as the blues, which actually impacts its free jazz too in terms of the latter issue. But this British/Polish project is a nice exception, a pretty moving set of tunes that transition from the soft and quiet to the slightly atonal in this trio that is bass/drums/sax & flute. Most certainly that classical tradition is here, but there’s so much else going on, perhaps led by drummer Natcyet Wakili, who is the best known of this trio for working with Shabaka Hutchings in Sons of Kemet. It can get arch sometimes, but also stays in what I would hope would be a listenable range for most jazz fans, as it can also be very swingy.

B+

Parnepar, Dobar Dan, Izvolite

Croatian post-punk, heavy on the bass and rhythmic spoken word vocals. OK, I don’t speak the language but it sounds pretty good in that post-punk groove, which is really good enough for fans of this kind of stuff. Catchy in the way that you expect, which somehow makes it matter less that you don’t speak Croatian.

B

Willie Nelson, A Beautiful Time

As stated in the notes above, Willie is now 93 years old and he just keeps on truckin. Good for him. Well, this album was released back in 2022, on the day he turned 89. I’ve said this before, but it’s super interesting to me that his late life albums are actually much better than the albums were in the 80s and 90s. He’s got his writing partner in Buddy Cannon, who gets him working on good songs. He has a good sense of covers. He sings great songs about being old and his dead friends (“I Don’t Go to Funerals” is a gem). His voice was better at 89 than it is at 93 and so he sounds pretty good. There are a couple of songs that I probably didn’t need to be covered. Do we need to hear Willie do “With a Little Help From My Friends”? Maybe not. The “Tower of Song” cover is OK I guess, but I’d rather hear the original or Marianne Faithfull’s cover. Whatever. And hey, he’s not even at the point where’s he struggling to knock out 30 minutes of music. This is a full 50 minutes! And this isn’t just a good late life Willie album. This is a good album period. Oh, also–this was his 72nd official album. That number is presently at 78.

A-

As always, this is a thread for all things music and art and none things politics.