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Monterey Pop Festival: The Fifty Year Anniversary

Paul Kantner/Jefferson Airplane by Elaine Mayes

It happened in June of 1967, before the Woodstock music festival and Altamont concert. The Beatles were still a band that had four singles in the top ten. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits was released and it landed on the charts behind the Monkees,  Doors, Stones, Aretha Franklin and Velvet Underground with Nico. Johnny Cash had yet to record at Folsom Prison and Gram Parsons was neither a Byrd nor a Burrito Brother. Townes Van Zandt was still playing at a club in Houston, Steve Earle was only 12, Jay Farrar turned seven months old, and Jeff Tweedy was yet to be born. There was no radio format called Americana, and it would be 28 years until Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden would publish the first issue of No Depression.

On the first day of the Monterey International Pop Music Festival I had just finished up tenth grade, and was living 3,000 miles away in Philadelphia. Throughout the spring and summer I was hanging out at the Guitar Workshop, downtown near Rittenhouse Square, where I’d dust off the Martins and run errands. It was around the corner from The 2nd Fret, a coffeehouse where you’d see old blues men, young folkies and local bands. On July 23, my friend Carol Drucker asked if I wanted to go with her to see the Mamas and the Papas at Convention Hall. On the bill were the Blues Magoos, Moby Grape, and a guy named Scott McKenzie. That night was the first time we heard news about this festival they had in California.

The three days and nights of the Monterey Pop Festival were put together in just seven weeks as a nonprofit event. It has been written that the idea first came out of a discussion at Cass Elliot’s house with Paul McCartney, John and Michelle Phillips, and producer Lou Adler. Alan Pariser and promoter Ben Shapiro approached John and Lou about staging it in Monterey and a number of people jumped onboard, including Peter Pilaflan, Chip Monck, Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Tom Wilkes, and David Wheeler.

It’s that Canned Heat performance from Saturday afternoon that was on my mind this week and prompted me to troll YouTube. I was researching ’60s “white boy” blues bands and remembered seeing it years ago. What I had forgotten about was how much of the festival was caught on film by D.A. Pennbacker. Although it was released the following year as a 79-minute film, in 2002 a three-disc high definition DVD set with a super clean 5.1 mix was brought out and is still available from The Criterion Collection.

The performances that are most known from the original release included The Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Big Brother and The Holding Company with Janis Joplin, the Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, and Jefferson Airplane. The full collection also has the “outtakes,” with the Blues Project, the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, the Electric Flag, Al Kooper, Laura Nyro, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Simon & Garfunkel, and more.

Here’s Pennbacker on how the film was shot:

The music performances would be recorded on eight track recorders, which had only recently been invented and were quite rare. The real complication was getting the film we shot to sync with the sound. The cameras we were going to use weighed heavily on my mind as we had made them ourselves. There were no commercial cameras we could handhold that would run the film in real time and sync to the sound. And the syncing was not always perfect.

We knew that there was going to be much more music than we could fit into a ninety minute film, so Bobby Neuwirth tended a red light at the edge of the stage which would be on for the songs we had chosen so all the cameras would know what to shoot. But when Jimi Hendrix or Otis Redding or The Who got going, the red light never went off.

That’s Booker T. and The M.G.’s with the Mar-Keys’ horn section backing Otis Redding, who six months later would die in a plane crash. He was the closing act on Saturday night and up until then he had performed mainly for black audiences. According to Booker T. Jones, “I think we did one of our best shows, Otis and the M.G.’s. That we were included in that was also something of a phenomenon. That we were there? With those people? They were accepting us and that was one of the things that really moved Otis. He was happy to be included and it brought him a new audience. It was greatly expanded in Monterey.”

The festival was indeed a nonprofit event, with every artist playing for free, with the exception of Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000. Country Joe and The Fish earned $5,000 from the film but all other funds went to The Foundation, which describes itself as “a nonprofit charitable and educational foundation empowering music-related personal development, creativity, and mental and physical health. In the spirit of the Monterey International Pop Festival, and on behalf of the artists who took part, the Foundation awards grants to qualified organizations and individuals with identifiable needs in those areas.”

Brian Wilson, who was on the board of directors for the festival, and the Beach Boys were scheduled to headline one night but cancelled. The Kinks, Donovan, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards couldn’t secure visas into the country. Brian Jones attended and introduced Hendrix. Invited but declining to appear were the Beatles, Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Dionne Warwick, and several Motown artists. Moby Grape’s film and audio remain unreleased as their manager Matthew Katz demanded $1,000,000 for the rights. (Of course, this being 2017, the audio has been found and posted on You Tube…hail hail rock n’ roll.)

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression dot com.

The Supersonic Guitars of Billy Mure

The history of session musicians goes back to the 1920s and ’30s, when the major record labels each had their own “studio bands” that could quickly crank out the latest pop hits. Many of the musicians were in working bands that played at clubs late into the night, but they would show up at recording studios or radio stations during the day. Most were uncredited, and many went on to have successful careers in big bands and jazz combos.

As the decades rolled on, and specifically since the 2008 release of the film The Wrecking Crew, which documents the Los Angeles-based group of musicians who played on almost every major release from Phil Spector’s productions to the Beach Boys and Byrds’ albums along with literally hundreds of hit singles from the ’60s and ’70s, there’s been a renewed interest and spotlight on these unsung heroes.

While other books and films have come out in the past few years covering the studios and players in places like Muscle Shoals, Memphis, Detroit, and Nashville, it’s interesting that there hasn’t been much written about New York’s long historical recording tradition. The writing on Manhattan’s music industry has mostly been focused on the songwriting tradition from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building and the business acumen of the hundreds of record labels and radio and TV shows that were based there. But back in the day, there were probably more session musicians per square foot on the island than anyplace else in the world.

About three and half years ago, I wrote an article for No Depression on a New York-based singer-songwriter named Emily Mure who had just released her first album, and in our exchange of information and conversational emails, I learned she was the granddaughter of Billy Mure, a musician, producer, and arranger who has a cult following among “retro-billy” guitarists and was one of those people who had a quietly successful career lending his incredible talent to a long string of hits by other artists.

The first record he played on that made it to number one was “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers in 1950, a cover version of a song written by Bob Wills’ younger brother Johnnie Lee and Deacon Anderson. While the latter’s version was driven by a smokin’ pedal steel guitar riff, the Ames Brothers’ pop cover with Billy Mure comes riding along with a short classic solo 49 seconds in. That precedes by a year “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner, which some consider the first rock record. Billy may have beat that clock.

https://youtu.be/Zi6KKoshmi4

Born in 1915 in New York, Mure was playing violin by the time he turned five and moved to guitar in his late teens. Prior to World War II he played with several society orchestras on the high-end club and resort circuits. He learned arranging while in the military, working with the Air Force Band playing both string bass and tuba, and he lived in North Carolina for a spell before heading back to New York. He worked in the studio orchestra for radio station WNEW for 10 years while also doing a number of other gigs around town. By the late ’50s, he came up with the concept of Supersonic Guitars, which led to a string of albums for RCA and MGM. Jazz legend Bucky Pizzarelli picks up the story for Vintage Guitar:

“Billy was so busy. He was on WNEW, doing 15-minute radio shows all day long, and between those shows he was doing three record dates a day. I don’t know how he squeezed it all in, but he was a workhorse. There were a lot of dates where Billy was the arranger, and it would be Billy, George Barnes, and me. On the Supersonic stuff, he had more like five guitars – including me on (Danelectro six-string) bass guitar, Al Caiola, Tony Mottola, Al Casimenti, Don Arnone, and himself. Billy had his own style, and he wrote things out for the other guitars; sometimes George was the soloist.”

In that same article, retro-billy Deke Dickerson adds this:

“Undoubtedly, Billy Mure could lead an orchestra, read charts, and play a jazz gig, but just give a listen to ‘Tiger Guitars’ and tell me he’s not one of the great unsung rock and roll electric guitarists of the 1950s.”

I’ll get back to the Supersonic Guitars, but just to give you you a taste of Billy’s contribution to so many classic pop songs of the ‘50s and ‘60s, here’s just a few songs he played on that hit number one on the charts:

Paul Anka – “Diana”
Frankie Laine – “Rawhide”
Eddie Fisher – “Oh My Papa”
Marty Robbins – “White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation”
Bobby Darin – “Splish Splash”
Rosemary Clooney – “Come on-a My House”
Guy Mitchell – “Heartaches By The Numbers”
Perez Prado – “Patricia”
Tony Bennett – “Because of You” and “Cold Cold Heart”
Johnny Mathis – “Chances Are”
Patti Page – “How Much Is That Doggy In The Window”
Bryan Hyland – “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”
Johnny Ray – “Cry”

As a producer, Mure also had top ten success with Marcie Blaine and “Bobby’s Girl,” Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her,” and this one by a 17-year-old Bobbie Freeman:

Back to the aforementioned Supersonic Guitar series, Mure came up with that concept in 1957 and it was a hard-rockin’ offshoot to the short-lived craze of space-age pop that included exotica, bachelor pad, jet-set pop, cocktail, outsider, and other incredible strange music. Once again ahead of the curve, I would describe it as post-rockabilly and pre-surf.

In early August of 1959, MGM Records’ sales and promotion team traveled down to the Bahamas for their annual convention, led by my cousin Arnold Maxin, who at the time was president of the label. I can imagine that there was plenty of hard drinking, chasing women, playing golf or poker, and the occasional meeting and speeches. Billboard magazine reported that they dubbed their convention “The Profitonic Plan” and noted that Mure’s Supersonic Guitars album would be one of their strong sales leaders.

Two weeks later, Billboard gave it a four-star review, noting the five guitar players and three drummers, the danceable tunes, fine sound reproduction with interesting tone effects, and a cover that was an “eye-catcher” showing a jet breaking the sound barrier would be a sales winner. MGM also got similar reviews for two other artists in the release cycle: orchestra leader David Rose and Maurice Chevalier’s tribute to Al Jolson.

Unfortunately, none of these three albums made much noise on the charts, but a new girl singer named Connie Francis was the breakout, and Mure played on those sessions. MGM’s Supersonic Guitars (SE 3780) album was the last in the series that was ever released, yet through the years Mure found a number of projects to work on that ranged from instrumentals, novelty albums, budget product, children’s music, and many other session and production gigs. He was also a guitarist on TV shows by Jimmy Dean, Perry Como, and Barbra Streisand.

On September 25, 2013, Billy Mure passed away at the age of 97. As reported in Vintage Guitar, when he turned 64 he relocated to Florida. His son Gary reported that “he started playing solo guitar in a lounge, and that resurrected his career. In New York, he’d gotten replaced by the younger guys, but he was playing all over the restaurant circuit in Florida – sometimes two or three times a week, every week, up until his death.”

It was shortly after his passing that I came across Emily Mure’s Odyssey album and I reached out to her. In our correspondence I was very touched by how proud she was of her grandfather, and it has stayed with me over the years. When we recently had the chance to meet and stood together talking and catching up, I promised her that I was going to write the story of Billy Mure. And I’m going to let her own words close it out.

“My grandfather started playing music at 5 years old and played gigs regularly up until a couple of weeks before he passed. He came down for my release show in July and gifted me his banjo that Arthur Godfrey gave to him.

One week before he passed, we went to visit him down in Florida. I was fortunate enough to play some of my songs for him at his bedside. The man was almost completely deaf at that point, but he asked for my song “This Place,” one of his favorites from my new album, Odyssey, and he sang along with me on some of the “oooo’s” in the song.

He sang some of his own songs and we sang with him, and he asked to play my guitar, which he did from his bed. He passed peacefully at 97 years old, just a month and a half shy of his 98th birthday, with loved ones by his side.”

This one’s for Billy.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column, posted on No Depression dot com.

The Alternative Fact of “Buffalo Gals”

In 1844 a blackface minstrel named John Hodges, who performed under the name “Cool White,” wrote and published a song titled “Lubly Fan.” Over the years it became quite popular throughout the country, and touring minstrels would often switch up the lyrics to appeal to wherever they were playing. Now considered a traditional American folk song, almost everybody knows the chorus.

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight?
Come out tonight, Come out tonight?
Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,
And dance by the light of the moon.

According to an article from the Library of Congress, the Ethiopian Serenaders, a white band who also performed in blackface, published sheet music for “Philadelphia Gals” with similar lyrics and no attribution for a composer in 1845, and then again in 1848 for “Buffalo Gals,” presumably for Buffalo, N.Y.

 

That’s a 1929 recording from The Pickard Family, which sounds pretty authentic to the times, but here’s a more homogenized version by Gene Autry that was used for the 1950 film Cow Town. It should be noted that Hollywood used “Buffalo Gals” quite often: It was featured prominently in High Noon, Texas, and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

 

Pete Seeger learned the song when he was recruited by Alan Lomax in 1939 to work on cataloging field recordings at the Library of Congress in Washington. This version was recorded for Moses Asch years later, and is still available on the Smithsonian Folkways set titled American Favorite Ballads.

 

In true folk tradition, the tune was appropriated and lyrics changed for rockabilly singer Ray Smith’s version, and he sold over a million copies in 1960 for Judd Records.

 

In 1958 a group called The Olympics had a top-ten single with “Western Movies,” which was written by Fred Smith and Cliff Goldsmith. Two years later, those two composers adapted “Buffalo Gals” in a completely different way:

 

Skipping ahead about 15 years, Malcolm McLaren was a British visual artist, performer, musician, clothing designer, and boutique owner. He supplied stage costumes to the New York Dolls and eventually became well known as the manager of the Sex Pistols. After they self-destructed he was involved with Adam and the Ants, Bow Wow Wow, The Slits, and Jimmy the Hoover.

In the early ’80s I managed a record store in Santa Monica, and an unlikely album captured my attention. McLaren had teamed up with producer Trevor Horn and a duo of radio disc jockeys – The World’s Famous Supreme Team – from New York City who hosted a hip-hop and classic R&B show on WHBI 105.9 FM and were among the first DJs to introduce the art of scratching to the world. Duck Rock was on my turntable almost every night in 1983, and it was this version of “Buffalo Gals” that is my hands-down favorite.

 

Somewhere along the way I lost the album, but 20 years later I found a used CD reissue at Amoeba Records. It always traveled with me in the car along with the twang stuff I listen to, and my kids – who were about ten and seven at the time – learned all the lyrics. Together we could all recite the spoken word interludes that were ripped from the radio shows of Sedivine the Mastermind and Just Allah the Superstar.

A few weeks ago my oldest son and I got to talking about that album, and he reminded me he wrote a paper in college about the evolution of “Buffalo Gals.” I asked him to send it to me, and while he might be disappointed that I strayed from his original narrative and main topic, I have to give him credit for prompting me to write this column. It’s just a great song and the perfect example of how a folk song will twist and turn, with each version presenting an “alternative fact” of the original.

Alright kids, I’ll leave you with my second-favorite version of the song. Play it through and play it loud. And thanks for the catchphrase, Kellyanne.

 

This was originally was published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression dot com.

Bruce Langhorne: For the Benefit of Mr. Tambourine Man

Bruce Langhorne, Carolyn Hester, Bob Dylan and Bill Lee. September 29, 1961

To those of us who were around the folk music scene of the sixties and to either academic or armchair ethnomusicologists, guitarists both old and young of the past and present, Bruce Langhorne is not unfamiliar. And should you not know the name, you know the man.

Born in Harlem in 1938, Langhorne was a regular at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, where he accompanied many of the musicians who would perform at the hootenannies. He developed a unique style of fingerpicking and would sometimes attach a soundhole pickup to his 1923 Martin 1-21 and run it through Sandy Bull’s Fender Twin reverb.

By 1961, he was in the recording studio as a hired gun, first with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, followed by Carolyn Hester, and then he contributed to several tracks on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. He’s likely the guitarist on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Corrina, Corrina,” though in the deep dark world of the Dylan defenders of mythology, that’s been disputed.

Occasionally at performances or recording sessions, Langhorne would play a large Turkish frame drum that had small bells attached to the interior. He used it mostly on the Vanguard albums by Richard and Mimi Fariña that he is featured on, and it inspired a young Bob Dylan to write a song about him. Recorded by The Byrds and serving as an introduction to a wider audience, “Mr. Tambourine Man” has undoubtedly kept the Nobel Prize winner swimming in a steady stream of royalties.

“He had this gigantic tambourine,” wrote Dylan in the liner notes to his anthology Biograph,  identifying Langhorne as the inspiration for “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was, like, really big. It was as big as a wagon wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind.”

On Jan. 14, 1965, Langhorne was called to Columbia’s Studio B along with a full electric band to back Bob Dylan for his fifth album. With no rehearsal, they worked on eight songs and in three and a half hours and came away with master takes on five of them. The next day, most of the same musicians were back to knock out the rest of Bringing It All Back Home. Although the album was originally recorded with a full electric band, Dylan decided to use only half the songs from those sessions and re-recorded the other half acoustically, with Langhorne playing countermelody on his amplified Martin. You can hear his lead guitar featured along with the full band on this iconic video of  “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

I found a profile of Langhorne published in August 2016 on the Acoustic Guitar website, written by Kenny Berkowitz. I’ll let him pick up the story:

“For years, it seemed as though Langhorne had played with everyone. Before and after those Dylan sessions, he recorded with Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, the Chad Mitchell Trio, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Richard and Mimi Fariña, Hugh Masekela, Odetta, Babatunde Olatunji, Tom Rush, and John Sebastian. He was at the epicenter of change in the folk world, back at a time when session guitarists simply showed up ready to improvise, and an album could be recorded in a single day, or even in a few hours.

He recorded a few songs on his own, but they never materialized into an album, and as folk-rock turned into rock, Langhorne went on to score soundtracks for Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand(1971), Idaho Transfer (1973), and Outlaw Blues (1977); Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry (1976); and Jonathan Demme’s Fighting Mad (1976), Melvin and Howard (1980), and Swing Shift (1984).

But despite a long list of accomplishments, Langhorne has largely been forgotten, living out his days in Venice, California, too ill to walk along the beach. He hasn’t played guitar since having a stroke in 2006.”

This Gordon Lightfoot song was covered by Peter, Paul and Mary back in 1964, and it prominently features Langhorne’s guitar work. I was a little too young to know who he was at the time, but I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times.

It was a message from my oldest son that prompted me to write this column. He works for an organization promoting concerts of experimental music in New York and through guitarist Loren Connors he learned of a new album being released in February titled The Hired Hands: A Tribute to Bruce Langhorne.

Dylan Golden Aycock, with Connors and his partner and collaborator Suzanne Langille, compiled the project, which pays homage to Langhorne’s work and specifically to the soundtrack he composed for Fonda’s film. Here’s how they explain the concept:

“The goal here was to ask artists to cover or reinterpret a song of their choice from the soundtrack. No rules on whether the music should be derivative of a certain song, if the soundtrack inspires a mood, then the artists use their intuition.

Bruce has come on hard times in recent years, having suffered a stroke that prevents him from playing the guitar. He’s currently in hospice care awaiting his final curtain call. A large percentage of profit go to Bruce and his family.”

I linked it above, but if you click here you can preorder this handcrafted set of music from some of todays finest players, some you may know and others you don’t. It’s available both as a double CD with extensive liner notes from Byron Coley (reprinted on the Bandcamp page), and a digital download. There are also nine tracks you can stream for free right now.

Bruce was placed in hospice care in late 2015. Friends, as well as people who only knew of Bruce by reputation, came from near and far to pay their respects and, often, play some music for him. The huge outpouring of love boosted his spirit (and his body), and he was upgraded to palliative care. (Several months after this story was published,  Bruce passed away on April 14, 2017)

“Yeah, he was a wizard. My part is pretty basic on ‘Urge for Going,’ but he was the one who did those triple pull-off things, the diddey-bump kinda lines. He’s in California. He had a stroke, and he can’t play much anymore which is really a shame. He was such a good player. Actually as a kid he had blown off most of his thumb and first two fingers on his right hand with fireworks, which got him out of the draft because they figured if he didn’t have a trigger finger, he couldn’t fire a rifle. So, of course, he became a guitar player, and then decided he was going to be a piano player later in life. Since his stroke he doesn’t play much at all. He’s supposedly the guy who inspired ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ Dylan’s song, ’cause he also played tambourine and just about anything you can imagine.” Tom Rush, April 2015

Postscript: For another look at Bruce’s story, check out The Perlich Post‘s article.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Welcome Back: A Spoonful of John Sebastian

John Sebastian (left), with Happy Traum. March 2016. Photo by Jane Traum.

At about ten after ten on Christmas Eve, I was sitting on the couch across from my oldest son, each of us engrossed in our own digital universes. Mindlessly killing time by scrolling through Facebook on my phone, an image posted by Woodstock-based musician Happy Traum caught my eye. Painted by his mother back in 1929, I saw that some mutual friends of ours had already hit the “like” button and I read a personal holiday memory of Happy’s mom that was left by Catherine Sebastian.

Although we’ve never met, I knew Catherine was both John’s wife and a photographer whose work I’ve seen and admired. You can read about her work here.. But it was at that very moment, as if Santa himself had just slid down the chimney carrying an autoharp and harmonica, that I heard the following song blast through the speakers of my son’s computer.

Recognizing the opening notes of one of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s most famous songs, my head shot up quickly as I looked at him with bewilderment and asked how he knew what I was reading. He looked over and asked what I was talking about. C’mon dude … how would you know to play this and what the hell is it? He shrugged and looked away. Does that a lot.

Susan, sometimes spelled Suzan if directly taken from the Japanese katakana transliteration of her name, is a pop singer and model who began recording in the early eighties, and often collaborated with members of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Her records were never released in America. That my twenty-two year old NYU music major graduate would actually know of this obscure recording would not be surprising if you knew him. That he chose to play it at this particular moment was the absolute f*cking Miracle on 34th Street.

When I woke up on Christmas morning, I had a song in my head, one written by John Sebastian and the late Lowell George. Still laying in bed, it took only a minute to locate it in my digital library.

“Face of Appalachia” is from Sebastian’s fourth solo album, Tarzana Kid. It was produced by Erik Jacobsen, who I believe did most if not all of the Spoonful’s records. The list of musicians and backup singers who played on the album, in addition to Lowell George’s guitar and vocals, include the Pointer Sisters, Emmylou Harris, David Grisman, Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Phil Everly, Jim Gordon, Buddy Emmons, Amos Garrett, Kelly Shanahan, and Ron Koss.

The album originally came out in 1974 but was never really promoted by the label. In 2006, Collector’s Choice Music reissued it along with the other four of Sebastian’s Reprise Records solo albums. In the new liner notes for Tarzana Kid, music journalist and author of Music USA Richie Unterberger wrote:

“With so many skilled singers and instrumentalists pitching in, it’s unsurprising that Tarzana Kid travels across a considerable range of rock and folk combinations, though this eclecticism had been a constant feature in Sebastian’s work. The singer-songwriter had a rather overlooked eye for ethnic styles that were not widely known in the US in the early 1970s, using a steel band from Trinidad on his 1971 LP The Four of Us, which also included a cover of a tune by then-obscure zydeco giant Clifton Chenier.

Tarzana Kid‘s opening track, a cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo” (featured in the classic 1972 movie The Harder They Come), was a pretty adventurous move at a time when reggae was just starting to make inroads into the American consciousness. Certainly one of the most noted tracks on Tarzana Kid was “Dixie Chicken,” which guest guitarist Lowell George had previously recorded as part of Little Feat on the 1973 album of the same name.”

If I had time to write 50,000 words instead of 500, I’d love to share my love, respect, and admiration for the music that John Sebastian has created and collaborated on. His Wikipedia page is a damn good place to start if you’d like to learn more. From jug band music to film and television work, doing classic sessions with the Doors to CSNY, playing with NRBQ and his own J-band, appearance in the film documentary Chasin’ Gus’ Ghost, he’s a great storyteller, performer, music instructor, and activist.

I’ll close this out exactly how I got here, through Happy Traum. On his website bio, it notes that he studied guitar with the blues master Brownie McGhee. Coincidentally, the Lovin’ Spoonful recorded McGhee’s “Sportin’ Life” on their album Do You Believe in Magic?, and Sebastian revived it on Tarzana Kid, although it seems he chose to skip this verse:

Now, I’m goin’ to change my ways
I’m gettin’ older each and every day
When I was young and foolish
I was easy, easy let astray.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed Broadside column, at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Easy Ed’s Favorite Un-Americana Albums of 2016

Last week the Americana Music Association released its year-end list of songs that got the most airplay on Americana radio, and in the next few weeks No Depression and other like-minded music websites and mags will publish their own music polls. If I were a betting man, I’d lay down a few hundred dollar bills that there’ll be little variation or surprises between them. Ever since the term roots music has morphed into a more definable mainstream “Americana” tagline, diversity has seemed to have left the building. While you won’t get much disagreement from me on the quality of music on AMA’s list since virtually all of the artists are located somewhere in my digital jukebox, it seems that lately I find myself taking the road less traveled.

Every year I designate much of my listening time on studying music from the past, and this year I dipped deeply into the catalogs of Norman Blake, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Delmore Brothers, Doc Watson, and a lot of jazz: Lucky Millinder, Chick Webb, and several anthologies from the 1920s and ‘30s culled from lost and found 78s. For a few weeks this summer I blasted through the box set This is Reggae Music: Golden Era, which covers only 15 years beginning with 1960, and breaks it down into mento, rocksteady, ska, R&B, early reggae and the birth of roots. Good stuff.

As for albums released in 2016, I’ve come up with a short list of my own favorites that somehow have failed to make the “official” Americana chart, and consequently may be missed in this endless parade of polls and lists that’ll stalk the internet with killer click bait titles. I’m choosing to call it Un-Americana … and that’s a name and a genre descriptor that just might stick.

The Handsome Family – Unseen

“Unseen finds Brett and Rennie Sparks two years after an unexpected spike in popularity due to True Detective fame, while simultaneously finding the duo displaying an outward reverence for the genre and subsequent fan base that has bolstered them to alt-folk antiheroes … one would be hard-pressed to find more true-blue progenitors of the darker side of American music who are still working hard to get you to question a bump in the night.” Jake Tully/Elmore Magazine

Jack and Amanda Palmer – You Got Me Singing

“Amanda Palmer has long been divisive – dedicating poems to bombing suspects, dressing up like a conjoined twin, doing things that make outraged thinkpiece writers jiggle with glee. Her latest album, however, a collection of folk, blues, country, and contemporary covers with her once-estranged 72-year-old dad, Jack, strikes the right chord.” Kate Hutchinson/The Guardian

Marissa Nadler – Strangers

“Marissa Nadler, the galaxy-gazer of American somni-folk, is not of this world. She is an extraterrestrial unloved, a wanderer nonplussed, an inhabitant of a realm that aligns dissonance with wonderment. She is ethereal, moody, and dark like early morning, and with Strangers, Nadler’s seventh full-length album, our indelicate eyes are able to adjust to her clear, clairvoyant lens.” Cassidy McCranney/Slug Magazine

Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms – Innocent Road

“On their new album Innocent Road, Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms stake a claim as two of the finest traditional musicians in America. Their sound is a throwback to the heyday of rural American dance-hall music.” Jerad Walker, NPR Music

Tom Brosseau – North Dakota Impressions

“Tom Brosseau’s unique tenor is instantly recognizable, and it imbues his songs with a palpable feeling of loss, regret and nostalgia. His phrasing, the emotional quiver in his voice and the bare-bones production evoke the feeling of a late-night, working-class living room with friends sharing their most intimate secrets.” j. poet/Magnet 

Kaia Kater – Nine Pin

“The banjo’s recent return to favor has seen the likes of Otis Taylor and Rhiannon Giddens reclaim the instrument as part of African America’s musical roots. Twenty-three-year-old Kaia Kater from Québec studied mountain music in West Virginia and writes songs from the here and now. Her second album manages to triangulate bluegrass, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison.”  Neil Spencer/The Guardian

Dori Freeman – Self-titled

“For the love of God just let the songs speak out and choose their own path, and that’s what happens in this self-titled release. The sentiments are so naked and pure, and as potent to stirring the spirit as the smell of a baby’s head that it awakens more than just an appreciation for music, it awakens an appreciation for life.” Trigger Coroneos/Saving Country Music

Freakwater – Scheherazade

“The darkly austere alt-country group Freakwater has kept their simple, gothic sound consistent through the years, but on their eighth album they overhaul it almost completely. It’s their most cinematic album yet, with the music functioning almost as a soundtrack to their short, violent songs.” Stephen M. Deusner/Pitchfork

 

Finding Peace and Serenity With The McGarrigle Sisters

While some fans of The McGarrigle Sisters know only of Kate and Anna, older sibling Jane was a collaborator in both songwriting and the occasional performance. She also managed their career from the mid-seventies through the nineties. That would be Jane standing in the middle of this photo taken by Michel Gravel, from the archives of La Presse. I published this article on the No Depression dot com website the week after the American presidential elections, and the original title was ‘Hiding Under The McGarrigle Sisters’ Blanket’. I am currently out of bed, taking long walks outdoors, going to work, visiting with friends and family, and living in mortal fear of what is yet to come. 

Hour by hour as the polling places of each state closed across the country from east to west, the speakers of my television seemed to grow larger and louder as fanfares of trumpets and timpani reported the results and announced the arrival of a new world order. For millions of us who chose to cast our vote earlier in the day, it was not simply a resounding political defeat, but a fist-smashing, gut-wrenching challenge and rejection of our core beliefs and values. It wasn’t supposed to end this way, but it did, and that old familiar feeling of flight or fight came over me.

Where to go, where to hide, what to do. The initial thought of having a good stiff drink or filling a pipe, neither of which I’ve done for over 20 years, came strong and left quickly. Chocolate seemed a likely alternative, but there’s none of that in my cupboards. So I turned off the sound of one tube and searched through another, looking for a specific musical tranquilizer.

The song I wanted to hear is not very hard to find, but it was this particular video performance that I sought out. It always touches a space in my heart and never fails to prompt tears at the opening shot of Anna’s fingers on the piano keys, Rufus’ first lines of lyric, and watching Martha in the background clutching her arms close to her body until she finally moves to the microphone and raises her voice in harmony, about a minute or so into the song.

Inexplicably, and despite the sadness of knowing that composer, sister, and mother Kate has passed on in the most horrible way, this single performance provides me comfort when none is at easy reach. For someone who often doesn’t pay close enough attention to lyrics, these words shine like gold in a sea of rust:

I bid farewell to the state of old New York
My home away from home
In the state of New York I came of age
When first I started roamin’

And the trees grow high in New York state
And they shine like gold in the autumn
Never had the blues from whence I came
But in New York state, I caught ’em

Talk to me of Mendocino
Closing my eyes I hear the sea
Must I wait, must I follow
Won’t you say, “Come with me”

And it’s on to South Bend, Indiana
Flat out on the western plain
Rise up over the Rockies and down on into California
Out to where but the rocks remain

And let the sun set on the ocean
I will watch it from the shore
Let the sun rise over the redwoods
I’ll rise with it till I rise no more

Talk to me of Mendocino
Closing my eyes I hear the sea
Must I wait, must I follow
Won’t you say “Come with me”

In November of 2015, when Anna and Jane published their book Mountain City Girls (Amazon USA and Amazon Canada), which is subtitled The McGarrigle Family Album, I decided to take a trip into the city so I could buy it at The Strand bookstore on Broadway. The act seemed more meaningful than choosing the simple method of opening an app on my phone, clicking the “buy” button and having it delivered the next day to my front door. (Yet…I’ve added the Amazon links to make it easier for you not to put off buying this wonderful book. Surrender to the technology I suppose.) When I got home, I placed it on the table next to my bed and it has remained closed and gathering dust. Sometimes when you already know the ending is painful, reliving the journey takes time and courage.

The music of Kate and Anna has not always been prominent in my listening circle, but that changed in October of 1998 with the release of The McGarrigle Hour. A family and friends compilation of sorts, it was an aural scrubbing of whatever else was occupying my musical interests at that moment, and the most perfect introduction to their work. It also introduced me to sister Jane and her daughter Lily Lankin, the Wainwright kids, collaborators Chaim Tannenbaum, Joel Zifken, and Phillipe Tatartcheff, and old friends like Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt.

On the day after the election I began to read Mountain City Girls. I suppose that my expectation that this book was going to follow some standard shallow “musical career memoir” format had likely kept me away for a year, and that was a mistake. It is a rich and dense family history, with personal stories that bring the characters into close focus, and freely shares intimacy. On the back flap of the cover, Emmylou Harris describes it best:

“From the moment I met the Mountain City Girls, Kate, Anna and Jane, I wanted to be a part of that magical McGarrigle circle – the songs, the suppers, the families and fellow travellers, and they blessed me with it all. This book is a charming history, written with affection and wit by Anna and Jane, and now everyone can share in the story of their lives and lineage. It is a love story really, of a time, a place and a remarkable sisterhood that has given the world some of it’s most unique and stunningly beautiful music.”

I told a friend the other day that this is a book I only care to read two or three pages at a sitting, because I want it to last forever. But I have begun to pick up the pace now that I know the story doesn’t end with Kate’s death, but rather in the mid-seventies when she and Loudon split up and Anna goes to New York to bring her and the kids back to Montreal. Anna soon after wrote “Kitty Come Home”:

The birds in the trees call your name,
Nothing’s changed, all the same
Home, come home, home, Kitty come home. 

I’ve told those people who I’m closest to that I fear there will be dark days ahead. Many are scared, as am I. Perhaps I’m finding peace in the pages of this book because history brings context to the momentary fears and sorrows we experience through life. There is a grounding when you can stand back in tragedy or loss … something like that phrase that one “can’t see the forest for the trees.”

I think of this time of the year as “McGarrigle Season,” because it’s when I often listen to their music, and I know that January is the month that Kate passed. My father also died from cancer in that month many years before, and perhaps that’s a connection I subconsciously make. This year brings a new album from Martha Wainwright that I’m enjoying immensely, and I hope to attend her aunt Sloane’s annual Christmas “whiz-bang” concert at the church in Bedford Falls, just down the road from me. (It was wonderful!)

For now, in the aftermath and while awaiting what’s ahead, I’m quite content in hiding underneath this blanket of McGarrigle. And you know what? There’s plenty of room for you too.

Postscript: The videos I shared here were posted on YouTube in 2012,  from the Up Close session at CBC’s Studio 211. For a special holiday treat, if you haven’t seen it or even if you have, I highly recommend watching the film  Sing Me The Songs That Say I Love You” A Concert for Kate McGarrigle, which is currently available in the US from Amazon. There is also a soundtrack album that was released by Nonesuch Records that features highlights from the three tribute concerts honoring Kate in London, Toronto, and New York and it is one of my most prized possessions. Net proceeds from the sale are donated to the Kate McGarrigle Foundation—a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising money in the fight against sarcoma and also to preserving her legacy through the arts. For further information, visit katemcgarriglefoundation.org. I’ll close this column out with a clip from the film. Fare thee well.

Discography (Wikipedia)