(L-R) Larry Campbell, Anderson East, Bob Weir, Lucinda Williams, Buddy Miller and Teddy Thompson perform as part of ‘The Last Waltz’ 40th Anniversary Celebration in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center in New York City on August 6, 2016. Photo by Ebet Rogers/Elmore Magazine
This Thanksgiving, when we sit down for our turkey or tofu dinner, those of us who care about such things might take a moment to mark the 40th anniversary of The Band’s farewell concert. It was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released two years later as The Last Waltz, and remains not only a superb documentary, but also one of the seminal events in American roots music.
Earlier this year, Warren Haynes assembled a tribute show in New Orleans during JazzFest, and this past weekend it was New York’s turn, with a different cast of characters. In a collaboration with the folks at Lincoln Center and the Americana Music Association, several thousand souls squeezed into the mostly concrete Damrosch Park to enjoy a free concert with Larry Campbell and the Midnight Ramble Band, featuring special guests Bob Weir, Lucinda Williams, Dr. John, Buddy Miller, Patty Griffin, Howard Johnson, Teddy Thompson, and Anderson East.
I’m sure my editor would prefer that I earn my keep by turning in a proper and concise review, but I just read Scott Bernstein’s post over at JamBase and, to be honest, he pretty much captured the night. I completely agree with his observation that it was an “all-killer, no-filler version of The Last Waltz” and that “no one is better suited to play the music of The Band in 2016 than the Midnight Ramble Band.”
Having Larry Campbell as the evening’s music director, badass guitar-slinger, vocalist, fiddler, mandolinist, host, and emcee further solidified his standing in representing Levon Helm’s spirit and legacy. Vocals from his wife Teresa Williams and keyboardist Brian Mitchell cut through the summer humidity like a sharp knife. The horn section included Jay Collins, Erik Lawrence, Steven Bernstein, and Clark Gayton. Jacob Silver played bass, Shawn Pelton drove percussion, and 1980s Band member Jimmy Weider smoked and soared on guitar.
At the beginning of the show, each member of The Band was mentioned, and each received loud applause. The last name spoken was Levon Helm, and the roar of the crowd at the mention of his name was so charged it almost lifted me off my seat. I don’t mean to stir up the pot here, but if there is any question as to who the leader of The Band was, I know a few thousand people who would testify.
A large contingent of the crowd seemed to be there for Bob Weir, but Lucinda and Dr. John were greeted loudly and all three received standing ovations. Maybe I’ve been hanging out at No Depression too long, but I was really surprised at how many people sitting around me had no idea who Buddy Miller, Patty Griffin, or Teddy Thompson were. Perhaps just a reminder that in this great, big world of music, we’re still just a subgenre.
On the morning after, before I even got out of bed, I checked You Tube to see if any videos had been uploaded yet, and discovered Front Row Dave. A professional music videographer in the Hudson Valley, Dave Beesmer has a channel on You Tube with lots of concert videos and he’s closing in on almost four million views. He shot the show along with Joey Calderone, and I appreciate that he’s allowed me to share them with you here.
This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside at No Depression dot com.
The photo at the top of the article was originally published by Elmore Magazine and the photographer is Ebet Rogers.
On a high-temp Sunday in Manhattan, after a train ride on an excruciating slow-moving local that stopped at every single station, I took a 36-block stroll downtown with music in my head. It’s not unusual to occasionally find Steve Earle walking the western grid between Houston Street and 14th Street, so I began to look for him as I cut across Washington Square looking for shade.
Forty-five minutes earlier, somewhere between Fordham and Harlem, I had made the decision to hand him a 20 dollar bill. Had I checked to see where he and Shawn Colvin were appearing, on whatThe Guardian has tagged the “nine divorces, two addictions, one perfect mix” tour, I’d have known they were down in Virginia.
What prompted me to seek Earle out was that I’d listened to the complete digitized bootleg Magnetised Motherf**kers along with the second shorter edition More MMs. Together there’s over 75 live tracks, B-sides, promo-only songs, collaborations, duets, tribute albums, and compilation appearances which are not so easy to find in this post-pirate world of online streaming. Both are essentials in my Earle collection, and I felt the need to make amends.
Loosely calculating that if these albums were ever released Steve might actually see 20 bucks after performance and publishing fees, it seemed like a good gesture on my part. And since we didn’t connect, I’ve taken a bill, folded it into thirds, and tucked it into my wallet behind my driver’s license. Next time I see him on the street, it’s his.
Anyway, to my point. Guitar Town, the first full-length album from Earle and his band the Dukes, was released on March 5, 1986. It topped the Billboard country album charts and the title song reached number seven on the country singles charts. There were two Grammy nominations. The album is turning 30 years old this year, so it seems too important an anniversary to skim over.
Ten years after the release of Guitar Town, a new magazine called No Depression put Earle on the cover of their third issue, and Peter Blackstock wrote an excellent profile that was part interview, part history. Earle had already crashed, burned, and risen again. Blackstock wrote:
Guitar Town, which presented the most definitive synthesis of country and rock ‘n’ roll during the 1980s, is generally considered Earle’s debut, but in fact he had released a rockabilly EP titled Pink & Black in the early ’80s. Furthermore, he had been a fixture on the Nashville scene for more than a decade before Guitar Town came out, ever since he had moved there from his boyhood home of San Antonio to play bass for Guy Clark.
In the late seventies Earle left Clark’s band and began to get work as a songwriter. He told Blackstock:
People [publishers] would keep signing me because they knew I could write, but nobody got a lot of cuts on me, so they’d usually drop me eventually, and then somebody else would sign me. I had the odd cut here and there.The first record I ever had that made any money was a Johnny Lee single in about 1980 that I co-wrote.
You can find Lee’s “When You Fall In Love” here on You Tube, and it was co-written with John Sherrill and produced by Jim Ed Norman. Released in 1982, it made it to just the middle of the charts and peaked at number 14.
Of more interest to me is a song that came out almost exactly one year before Guitar Town was released. Connie Smith was planning to come out of semi-retirement, and “A Far Cry from You” was written solely by Earle. Released as a single and never on an official album, it was dead on arrival. Reaching number 71 on the Hot Country Singles chart, it was anything but. Yet to my ears, it’s the first song of his that I hear written in the “Earle-style.” This past year, it was re-recorded beautifully and released by Marsha Thornton, a label-mate of Earle back in the early ’90s, at MCA.
To mark the anniversary of Guitar Town, Universal announced that they would do what they usually do these days: remaster and reissue it on black 180-gram heavyweight vinyl, and sell it for 17 bucks. That’s some brilliant marketing. Checking on Amazon, it’s ranked today at #39,430. In a press release from back in March, there’s also a two-disc set and a digital download (who does that anymore?) deluxe edition coming before Christmas. Huh.
Does anything else really need to be added to the 34 minute and 35 seconds ten-track original? I think not.
In an article titled Albums of Our Lives written by Lucy Shiller in 2013 and posted on The Rumpus, Shiller nails the essence of what makes Guitar Town so special. In her youth, this disc became the soundtrack for family road trips. She wrote:
Here was a harder-edged voice than I was used to, yelping and sneering about having a “two-pack habit and a motel tan.” I barely knew what a two-pack habit might be, and I had no idea about a motel tan. But I wanted both. My father and I screamed the lyrics as we entered the dreaded hour five of a day’s drive—just about the time when you feel you should almost be there but know you’re only halfway, and with each passing hour, you become, in the parlance of my family, increasingly “rumpsprung.”
Steve’s guitar was rambunctiously cheery, bolstered by swift pickings on the mandolin. The instrumentation belied gloriously bitter lyrics. Singing them, singing them loudly, was being full, suddenly, of a rightful rage about a discovered outsider status. “Hillbilly Highway,” the album’s third track, was an epic: a young man leaving his country home for a job, years later, his son leaving for college, and then, finally, the grandson — Steve Earle — picking up his guitar and hitting the road. He’d had enough.’
While Earle’s ten songs alone would be cause for tribute, it’s the entire package of collaboration between songwriter, band, and producers that makes it work as well as it does. The Dukes, or more accurately this version of the band, breaks down like this:
Bucky Baxter-Pedal Steel Guitar
Richard Bennett-Guitar, the infamous Danelectro 6-string bass, slap bass and associate producer
Ken Moore-Organ and synth
Emory Gordon, Jr. -Bass, mandolin and producer
Harry Stinson-Drums and vocals
Paul Franklin-Pedal Steel Guitar (‘Fearless Heart’ and ‘Someday’)
John Barlow Jarvis- Synth and piano
Steve Nathan-Synth
Tony Brown-Producer
Steve Earle-Guitar and vocals
The album was recorded in late 1985 and early 1986 in Nashville at Sound Stage Studio. Overdubs were later recorded at Emerald Studios. It was one of the first country music albums to be recorded digitally, utilizing the state-of-the-art Mitsubishi X-800. Each of the album’s ten tracks was either written or co-written by Earle.
Thirteen years after it’s release, Guitar Town was certified gold by the RIAA in 1999. Reno Kling on bass and Mike McAdams on guitar joined Baxter, Moore, and Stinson as the touring Dukes.
This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on No Depression dot com.
On the Friday night before the long July Fourth holiday weekend, I drove alone in my car beneath a dark, threatening sky. As I approached the turnoff to the hamlet of Chappaqua, New York, home of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the rain began to fall but I decided to move forward. A few miles north on the twisty turns of Route 22, the sheets of water — along with the snap, crackle, and pop of the thunder and lightening — forced me to pull off the main road to wait it out.
An outdoor summer concert is always a spin of the wheel when weather chooses to roll in, and I knew Richard Thompson had easily sold out the venue to which I was headed, the intimate Spanish Courtyard at Caramoor, which holds no more than five hundred souls, if that. On the grounds of what once was the summer estate of a prominent and wealthy New York family, the arts and music center is now a seasonal destination for fans of classical, opera, pop, jazz, and American roots music.
Fortunately there are several venues on the sprawling grounds of gardens and trails, and so the show was moved to the larger, tented Venetian Theater. The upside was twofold: more tickets could be sold to those who had previously been denied a seat and whose names sat on a waiting list, and we all kept dry.
I’ve seen Thompson on quite a few occasions over the years, so I was unsurprized when he dazzled and delighted the crowd this night with his usual mix of guitar wizardry, song selections from Fairport Convention and the repertoire he recorded with ex-wife Linda, and titles pulled from his voluminous solo work. With an always comical and interesting stage patter, he was both engaging and sentimental. Acknowledging the recent passing of fellow musician and friend Dave Swarbrick, Thompson spoke of the upcoming 50-year anniversary of Fairport, which he co-founded in 1967. To mark the occasion, he delivered a moving version of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” which has become a standard at many of his concerts.
So the “hit single” thing…
Last year, as a bonus-trackon Thompson’s Jeff Tweedy-produced album Still, he introduced a song called “Fergus Laing,” which is about a wealthy developer who buys property and builds golf courses in Scotland. Sound familiar? It didn’t take much persuasion to get the Caramoor crowd to sing along with glee to the chorus:
Fergus he builds and builds
Yet small is his erection
Fergus has a fine head of hair
When the wind’s in the right direction
With the protest song movement of the 1960s merely a faint memory, it fascinates me that it takes a man from England who lives in Los Angeles to write a song that eviscerates with sarcasm and humor the man whom the Huffington Post describes daily in ways such as this:
I imagine it’s simply my little dream, but it would be quite the coup if “Fergus Laing” got picked up by social media and terrestrial radio only to spread as fast as the Pokemon Go app. Since nothing else seems able to stop the blonde-haired beast, maybe a song can.
With very few artists as of yet willing to stand up to the Trump Train (I do love the Dixie Chicks), many people might enjoy having an anthem to raise their voices to. Perhaps with just a little promotional push, “Fergus Laing” can stand beside “Eve of Destruction” and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.”
Here’s the lyrics, and at the bottom is Thompson performing it. (Yes, You Tube’s spelling is incorrect. Let that not deter you. Raise your voice.)
Fergus Laing is a beast of a man
He stitches up and fleeces
He wants to manicure the world
And sell it off in pieces
He likes to build his towers high
He blocks the sun out from the sky
In the penthouse the champagne’s dry
And slightly gassy
Fergus Laing, he works so hard
As busy as a bee is
Fergus Laing has 17 friends
All as dull as he is
His 17 friends has 17 wives
All the perfect shape and size
They wag their tails and bat their eyes
Just like Lassie
Fergus he builds and builds
Yet small is his erection
Fergus has a fine head of hair
When the wind’s in the right direction
Fergus Laing and his 17 friends
They live inside a bubble
There they withdraw and shut the door
At any sign of trouble
Should the peasants wail and vent
And ask him where the money went
He’ll simply say, it’s all been spent
On being classy
Fergus’ buildings reach the sky
Until you cannot see ‘um
He thinks the old stuff he pulls down
Belongs in a museum
His fits are famous on the scene
The shortest fuse, so cruel, so mean
But don’t call him a drama queen
Like Shirley Bassey
Fergus Laing he flaunts the law
But one day he’ll be wired
And as they drag him off to jail
We’ll all shout, “You’re fired!”
This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.
They may not smoke marijuana in Muskogee, but they sure do love country music in places like Vinstra, Gulsrud, and Seljord. Last weekend, just a couple of days before the Austin-based group High Plains Jamboree took off for a few weeks of concerts throughout Switzerland and into Norway, I got a chance to see them perform at the American Roots Music Festival on the grounds of Caramoor Center for Music and The Arts, a short ride north of Manhattan.
Aristotle is credited with saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” To his point, while the four musicians in HPJ are each outstanding and successful on their own, together they create a sound very different and unique. While guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, upright bass, and close harmony vocals screams “bluegrass,” HPJ’s vibe is a modern country-western style, where song composition, lyrics, and virtuoso performance take them to a different plane (pun intended) than other stringbands out on the road today.
Last April, I stumbled upon a late-2015 album titled Brennen Leigh Sings Lefty Frizzell, and it immediately became one of my favorite song collections that I still can’t stop listening to. Not being familiar with her previous work, I discovered that Leigh was a founding member of HPJ, that she often writes and tours with her partner Noel McKay as a duo, has had songs recorded by Sunny Sweeney, the Carper Family, and Lee Ann Womack, and, as I discovered when I saw the band perform, is a smokin’ hot mandolin player.
Noel McKay is a songwriter from Texas who met Guy Clark back in 1993, and together they wrote “El Coyote,” which appears on Clark’s Grammy-winning My Favorite Picture of You album. Performing as the McKay Brothers with sibling Hollin, Gurf Morlix produced their 2003 album and said, “Noel was just starting to become a really good songwriter. I saw it coming. Then he hooked up with Brennen, who is fantastically talented. They became a couple and everybody was so pleased about that.”
Morlix also produced the Leigh-McKay duet release Before the World Was Made in 2013 and adds, “On top of being extremely fine human beings who can both play guitar and sing really well, it’s the writing. These songs are really sophisticated.”
Born in Kentucky and raised in Alaska, fiddler Beth Chrisman moved to Austin back in 2006 and is a member of the Carper Family. Their debut studio album Back When was named Best Country Album by the 2012 Independent Music Awards. The band has performed on Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion. Chrisman has recorded and toured with Alice Gerrard, John C. Reilly, Hjames Hand, and the Heartless Bastards. In addition to really tasty fiddlin’, she has an incredible voice that soars as much in harmony as when she takes a solo.
Bassist and oldtime banjo player Simon Flory is an interesting dude from Indiana who has played throughout the Midsouth with bluegrass legend Donny Catron (Tennessee Gentlemen, Jesse McReynolds, Doyle Lawson). He also studied and taught at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and after working in the bass boat industry, scrapping metal, logging cedar trees, hauling hay and working cows on ranches, he sold his truck and his pistol to record a solo album, Unholy Town.
What really worked for me when I saw their set was how they each took turns at vocals. The harmonies came at you in various combinations, instruments were switched around, their staging and positions shifted. I’ve got to tell you: I love this band.
You can see them in Norway this month, and then Leigh and McKay will do dates in the UK before the band comes together again for August dates in Alaska. Check out their website for more shows (Brooklyn 9/25), pick up or stream their EP, and fly off into the depths of the interwebs in search of their various projects and videos.
While the whole is great, the parts are as equally satisfying. Good stuff.
This post was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.
Over the last month, I’ve streamed or downloaded somewhere around 40-50 albums, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve found that the vast majority of them are the aural equivalent of suffering from a Sominex overdose. Since the birth of the iPod, most of my musical joy comes from hitting the shuffle button and letting the unexpected be just that, but these words from No Depression co-founder Grant Alden from seven years ago still echo in my mind:
Really Ed? You don’t listen to albums anymore? What kind of fun is that?
With Grant on my mind — I recently watched him get interviewed in an old BBC4 television special called Beyond Nashville — I decided to go full-album crazy for the past two weeks, beginning to end, in several four- to five-hour blocks. I tried my best to let the artist’s vision and concept sweep me off my feet, and discovered that either my attention span has gotten shorter or the full-length album has run its course.
Has it become simply a commercial vehicle to sell concert tickets and merchandise? Looking at the sales and streaming charts these days, the latter theory seems to hold more water. People like songs.
As most kids from my generation, I got into music by listening to radio and scooping up 45 rpm vinyl singles. The picture I used here is a replica of the player that my sister and I shared, and it wasn’t until February 22, 1964, that I began to collect and listen to full-length albums. I remember that date because of these details:
Meet the Beatles.
Ninety-nine cents.
George Washington Birthday Sale.
Korvettes Department Store.
Roosevelt Boulevard.
Philadelphia.
That was the first album for me. Twenty-six years later the collection was close to 20,000 albums, when I sold most of them off in order to get a down payment for a house. Heresy, I know.
While I might be regressing back to the days of my youth and boss-jock radio, today, as I scanned my playlist of (mostly) newer albums, it came to mind that my favorite tracks are the shorter ones — three minutes or less. So, with that, here’s my Top 5 Pick-To-Click Fantastic Faves of the Week.
See you at the hop.
This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.
Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.
Both a Tribute and Compilation, The National Gives Us A Day of The Dead.
In my previous life as a sales exec for music distributors and record labels which ended in 2007, among my responsibilities during the last eleven years of a thirty-five year career was representing several record labels that specialized in ‘tribute’ albums. I put quotations around the word because in reality they were nothing of the sort. The premise for a majority of the releases were simply a quick money grab of getting record stores to take just one or two copies and drop it into the artist’s bin to target the completist…those fans that would buy anything.
It was a formula that worked pretty well as long as there were enough stores with enough space to add them into their inventory, and each label had their own specialty. One would try to find at least one living member of a defunct band, throw them into a studio with session players and crank out new versions of old songs. Another did straight, cheap soundalikes that sold at bargain prices especially in places like military PX’s and onboard ships. Yet another took a different path, by bringing out a series of well-produced bluegrass recordings, and later adding string quartets and infant-ized lullabies to the concept.
In today’s world of streaming, most music is consumed not as a complete album but individually as a song, as well as being programmed for the listener as part of someone’s curated playlist. So unless you’re Drake or Taylor Swift or Adele, you’re not going to sell six digits of albums anymore, and judging from looking through last week’s charts, you’re a success if you make it to just a thousand albums.
Against that backdrop, along comes an overly-ambitious real, honest-to-God Grateful Dead tribute release that targets not only a very specific buyer of a band that still has a rabid following, but also is tied to a charity known for doing such projects to raise money for HIV and AIDS awareness and research…the Red Hot Organization. Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National curated the set and there is also a performance scheduled at the second annual Eaux Claires Festival on August 12-13.
Being a retired Deadhead who grew weary of the scene back in the early eighties, yet each month still rotates a few dozen tracks in and out of my core iPhone playlist, this set was one that called my name and I’ve been navigating my way through the five-plus hours of music. What I wish I could tell you is that I loved each and every note, but after two weeks of daily listening it has driven me back to my vast digital Dead library in search of the real deal.
Not to say that this set isn’t worthy of a spot on your shelf, because the high spots far exceed the not-so-high ones, and hearing younger artists who were not even born when the Dead first came together re-invent these songs with different instrumentation and arrangements is like digesting a handful of ear candy. And the thirty or forty bucks it’ll cost you goes to an important cause, so there’s that too.
In addition to some of tunes I’ve placed here, there’s already aWiki page that lists all the songs and artists. Check it out and then head over to the Day of The Deadsite for more information.
Every Picture Tells A Story.
The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit herwebsite hereand check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.
The Last Words On Guy Clark.
Guy Clark’s biographer and documentarian, Tamara Saviano, posted this letter on her Facebook page May 28th, just over a week after Guy’s passing. It’s a rare public sharing of something very personal to her, his family and friends, and it is so touching I’m going to reprint it here.
Dear Everyone,
It’s been a wild couple of weeks, months really, with Guy’s decline and death. I’ve spent almost every minute of the last 10 days coordinating and planning. Now, finally, I have some downtime on this long and appropriate Memorial Day weekend to spend some time alone to grieve.
Guy had suffered from a long list of health problems—lymphoma, heart disease, diabetes, and bladder cancer among them—and we were lucky to have him years longer than we’d expected. The last three months of his life were especially brutal; he spent most of them in a nursing home. By the end, Guy’s only goal was to go home to die—to be in the place he loved, surrounded by his art, books, and music. With the help of friends and hospice workers, he made it.
It didn’t become real to me until I saw Guy’s body at the funeral home two days after his death. In the last months, he had become thin and frail. Yet, plumped up with embalming fluid, he looked like Guy Clark again. How weird is that? Because he was going to be cremated, he was laid out in a simple box just for a short time so a few of us could see him. The funny thing is, Guy is so dang tall they had to take his boots off to fit him in the box. The top of his head was pressed against one end of the box and his feet pressed against the other. Guy Clark does not fit in a box.
Guy’s last wishes were clear. At some point in his waning years, his lyrical request —“Susanna, oh Susanna, when it comes my time, won’t you bury me south of that Red River line” —changed to instructions to be cremated, with his cremains sent to Terry Allen to be incorporated into a sculpture. “I think that would be so fucking cool,” Guy said at the time. “Sure, leave me with a job to do,” Terry joked.
But it’s no joke now. In the days after his death, Guy’s closest friends pulled together a plan to honor his wishes. Jim McGuire hosted a wake—a typical Guy Clark picking party, one of many that took place at McGuire’s studio over the years. Guy’s family and Nashville friends gathered around an altar on which we’d placed his ashes, his old boots, and our favorite picture of him, and we took turns playing Guy Clark songs. At the end of the night, Verlon led a chorus of “Old Friends” that knocked the wind out of the room.
At midnight, Verlon, Shawn, McGuire, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Guy’s son, Travis, his caregiver, Joy, and I boarded a tour bus in Nashville that would take us—and Guy—to Santa Fe and Terry Allen. Guy’s last road trip. We slept little during the 18-hour drive; we all had too many Guy stories we wanted to tell. Grief shared is grief diminished.
We arrived in Santa Fe in time for dinner on Wednesday, May 25. Terry, his wife, Jo Harvey, and their son, Bukka, hosted another wake. Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, his partner, April Kimble, Robert Earl and Kathleen Keen, Joe and Sharon Ely, their daughter, Marie, Jack Ingram, and painter Paul Milosevich flew in from all parts to be there. We set up another altar, gathered around and told more Guy stories.
After a feast of green chili enchiladas, tamales, guacamole, and homemade salsa, we huddled around a fire pit on the stone and adobe patio. Hanging wisteria perfumed the air as old friends toasted Guy, clinking glasses of wine against bottles of Topo Chico and cans of Robert Earl Keen beer. Under a night sky blanketed with stars, a guitar came out. This time there was a rule, and it was simple. “Play a song Guy would have made you play,” Steve said. Three among this group had written songs about Guy. Shawn sang “This Guy, Guy,” written with Gary Nicholson. (They got to play it for Guy shortly before his death. When they’d finished, he deadpanned, “Well, isn’t that cute.”) Next, Verlon played his ode, “Sideman’s Dream.” Then Vince shared the song he wrote, “There Ain’t Nothing Like a Guy Clark Song,” one that provides a perfect benediction to the master songwriter’s life. Through these songs—and many more of his own—there’s no doubt Guy Clark will live forever.
Guy Clark doing his song “Magnolia Wind” with Shawn Camp and David “Ferg” Ferguson as a birthday party for Cowboy Jack Clement winds down one Nashville night around 10 years ago.
Record Store Memories Revisited.
My Broadside column over at No Depression last week was about those wonderful places of my youth back in Philadelphia where I spent much time and money pursuing new music that eventually turned into a job.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs but if you’d like to read the whole thing, click here.
I literally stumbled into a career the last day of college — the job description was “go to record stores.” My new boss gave me the keys to a 1972 VW Beetle, a list of about five hundred stores from DC to New York, three-ring binders of catalogs, and boxes of promos, and he sent me off to sell.
I started with King James and Bruce Webb’s in the city, moved out to Bryn Mawr near the Main Point, to visit Plastic Fantastic, and Keller’s House of Music in Upper Darby. Al’s Record Spot and Levin’s Furniture in Kensington. Mel’s in South Philly. There was Speedy’s and Phantasmagoria in Allentown, the Renaissance in Bethlehem, Spruce Records in Scranton, and Central Music in Williamsport. There was Waxie Maxie, Kemp Mill, Discount Records, and Music Den. There was Eynon Drug Store, Gallery of Sound, and H. Royer Smith’s classical shop, where I scored Skip Spence’s Oar album, which they’d had sitting in the basement.
Ska, A Jamaican Contribution to World Music.
Last February on the Black Girl Nerds website I found this article written by Kevin Wayne Williams. While it focuses on ska, it is a vast survey of music from the island that also touches on mento and reggae. It is absolutely worth your time to check out and includes a ton of links.
When you go back in history, ska was an exclusively black musical genre, an offshoot of mento. Mento, a Caribbean music style noted for its syncopated rhythm (essentially a series of off-beat triplets), was usually played by small groups: typically a vocalist, a tongue-drum, a banjo, and a guitar. It’s a cousin to calypso music, and, despite being rhythmically distinct, the two forms were generally marketed as calypso in the US: most Harry Belafonte songs were actually mento, not calypso.
In the late 1950’s, Jamaican musicians began to incorporate American R&B sounds into mento, and the hybrid form stabilized on using the same syncopated structure with an even stronger off-beat chord known as the skank (bonus info for music theorists: the skank in ska is nearly always a major chord, while in reggae it’s generally a minor chord). Typical instrumentation was a guitar, a bass (sometimes a bass guitar, but just as often a concert bass), drum, saxophone, trumpet, and trombone: still the core ska band today, although some bands have much larger horn sections. Many of the musicians of this era are familiar today as reggae and rocksteady musicians: Bob Marley probably being the most famous to American audiences, with names such as Toots Hibbert (reputed to have actually invented reggae) and Desmond Dekker still having some familiarity.
Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.
It’s the night before my column’s deadline, and instead of thinking about music and coming up with some snappy subject matter, I’m sitting in front of the television watching CNN for what’s become the daily Trump outrage. Today he called out the press after they caught him in another bucket of lies. There were more details about the fraud case for his make-believe “university,” he insulted Native Americans, a US Senator, women, and Mexican-Americans. So in other words, it was a pretty slow news day. Yawn.
The last time I got sidetracked by life and told my editor I had nothing for her, she yelled “No!” and suggested that at the very least I could always go back into my archives, find something of inspiration, and maybe rework it. So that’s where I went hunting, back to over seven years ago, when the hot topic on this site was the (still raging) argument of digital versus physical albums.
Since vinyl was still in the dead zone and streaming wasn’t yet happening, it was really a case of people defending the dreadful-sounding compact discs versus compressed downloads. I was one of a few who loved the ease of stuffing the equivalent of two thousand albums inside a little box that could fit into my shirt pocket, but I was also in mourning over the loss of not only record stores, but what became both a lifestyle and how I earned my living.
I grew up in Philadelphia, which was considered a “music town” due to its many musicians, clubs, radio stations, studios, record labels, and stores. My older sister and I watched American Bandstand every day after school, since it was broadcast live from 46th and Market Street. When I turned 12, I was caught up in the first wave of the British Invasion.
Living far out in the suburbs, I’d shop at places like Sears, Korvettes, and Woolworths after school. Every weekend, I traveled downtown and hit Jerry’s on Market (“All Albums $2.99”), Sam Goody’s, and Record Mart on Chestnut. And, between the adult bookstores and peep shows near 13th and Arch Streets, there was a store that sold “mystery bags,” which held five promo singles for a buck. I still have a few hundred of them stashed in the closet.
My strongest memory of those stores was standing happily, shoulder-to-shoulder, with other kids, flipping albums, and being enchanted by the artwork as the music blasted from huge speakers. I always came home carrying bags of new records, many of which I’d never heard of — I had been tipped over by the covers and liner notes. When I look back, these were the happiest times for a kid like me.
I literally stumbled into a career the last day of college — the job description was “go to record stores.” My new boss gave me the keys to a 1972 VW Beetle, a list of about five hundred stores from DC to New York, three-ring binders of catalogs, and boxes of promos, and he sent me off to sell.
I started with King James and Bruce Webb’s in the city, moved out to Bryn Mawr near the Main Point, to visit Plastic Fantastic, and Keller’s House of Music in Upper Darby. Al’s Record Spot and Levin’s Furniture in Kensington. Mel’s in South Philly. There was Speedy’s and Phantasmagoria in Allentown, the Renaissance in Bethlehem, Spruce Records in Scranton, and Central Music in Williamsport. There was Waxie Maxie, Kemp Mill, Discount Records, and Music Den. There was Eynon Drug Store, Gallery of Sound, and H. Royer Smith’s classical shop, where I scored Skip Spence’s Oar album, which they’d had sitting in the basement.
In the early 1980s, I got to run a store in Santa Monica that specialized in rare vinyl and I thought it was a dream job. But after a couple years, I went back out on the road. I got to visit hundreds and hundreds of record stores all over the country. It was not a bad life at all, but one that ended nine years ago with the recession. And despite some record shops that still are holding tight, the whole thing is pretty much becoming just a memory. A couple weeks ago, I walked by Other Music in lower Manhattan as they were getting ready to turn out the lights for good. Last week came news that a Chicago store that’s been around for 50 years simply gave all of their inventory away for free.
For those stores that still have a heartbeat, I hope you can hang on as long as you can.
Last week over 39,000,000 songs were streamed in America. No flipping.
This post was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.
On a high-temp Sunday in Manhattan, after a train ride on an excruciating slow-moving local that stopped at every single station, I took a 36-block stroll downtown with music in my head. It’s not unusual to occasionally find Steve Earle walking the western grid between Houston Street and 14th Street, so I began to look for him as I cut across Washington Square looking for shade.
They may not smoke
Over the last month,
In my previous life as a sales exec for music distributors and record labels which ended in 2007, among my responsibilities during the last eleven years of a thirty-five year career was representing several record labels that specialized in ‘tribute’ albums. I put quotations around the word because in reality they were nothing of the sort. The premise for a majority of the releases were simply a quick money grab of getting record stores to take just one or two copies and drop it into the artist’s bin to target the completist…those fans that would buy anything. 
Against that backdrop, along comes an overly-ambitious real, honest-to-God Grateful Dead tribute release that targets not only a very specific buyer of a band that still has a rabid following, but also is tied to a charity known for doing such projects to raise money for HIV and AIDS awareness and research…the Red Hot Organization. Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National curated the set and there is also a performance scheduled at the second annual Eaux Claires Festival on August 12-13. 
The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her 
It’s the night before