Category Archives: My Back Pages

Will Supermarkets Stop the Vinyl Album Revolution?

vinyl-factory-tesco-edited1-copy-665x400 I knew it was over when Britain’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, announced that they would begin selling vinyl in their stores. Not raincoats or reclining chairs or shiny boots or garden hoses, but actual record albums. What has been a shining light for many independent record stores and labels, and a nice revenue stream for musicians selling them at their concerts, has caught the attention of big box retail. Here’s what Tesco music buyer Michael Mulligan told The Guardian last December:

“Vinyl is definitely coming back with demand, growing stronger year by year, and we think there will be a big demand in the UK this Christmas as music fans look for trendy gifting options.”

Hold on … did he really say that? Trendy gifting options?

Before Tesco got into the music business, last summer, they tested the viability with a new Iron Maiden record. They followed that up with adding 12 models of phonograph players and, right before Christmas, added 20 classic titles that included Springsteen, the Stones, Prince, Nirvana, and Coldplay, among others. In other words, trendy gifting options.

Here in the United States you’ll find a plentiful assortment of vinyl at your local shopping malls in “lifestyle stores” such as Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters, in large strip centers where bookseller Barnes and Noble and electronics behemoth Best Buy reside, and in-between the cosmetics and pet food departments at Target.

The reason for this renewed interest in plastic music delivery is probably obvious, especially given the selection of titles that Tesco decided to stock. Baby boomers love trendy gifting options, and they have demonstrated a willingness, if not some primal desire or need, to continue to buy the same stuff over and over and over again.

With streaming rapidly growing to become the number one way we consume music, and despite the fact that vinyl sales still account for a tiny fraction of overall revenue, the percentage of sales keeps growing year after year. In other words, somebody has to make money from albums, so why not us? Or rather, them.

Back in the late ’80s, when I was working as sales manager in Los Angeles for the distribution arm of Capitol-EMI Music, I got marching orders to put The Beatles’ compact discs into the large Ralph’s supermarket chain. Since they wouldn’t fit neatly alongside cans of beans, and the artwork contrasted with the cellophane-wrapped chicken parts, we had to provide a free-standing floor rack, custom packaging with price stickers and security tags, very expensive signage and posters, and television advertising. It cost us a fortune.

I learned a lesson: When people come to a supermarket to buy food and diapers, they’ll stand in the checkout line where they are easily lured to drop another buck or two on chewing gum and candy. But when it came to a $15 Beatles CD, yeah yeah yeah turned into no no no. We took back almost 90 percent of what we shipped.

Last week, I noticed a Facebook post from a musician who was traveling to Folk Alliance, and they apologized for not being able to bring their new vinyl release because the pressing plant couldn’t fill their order. Made me wonder … do we have an international vinyl deficiency? Turns out, we do.

About a year ago, there was an article written by indie record label owner Thaddeus Herrmann, published on his German website Das Filter, which spoke to the problem confronting a rise in vinyl production. (If you’re interested, it was translated by Britain’s Fact Magazine and can be found here.) I’ll skip the details about electroplating, lacquers, and plant facility degradation, and skip right to consumption.

The hype surrounding the reissues, which appear to be responsible for a large part of the current situation, doesn’t have a long tail. What the collateral damage will be on the labels and artists who don’t view vinyl as a status symbol or as a machine to print money, but as the best format for their music, is hard to determine. One of the steps in the production process will fail eventually. If this happens because an entire industry is busy manufacturing the flea market records of the future, it wouldn’t be an adequate end for the vinyl record.

If all that is not enough to ponder, consider last week’s Salon interview with music critic Jim Fusilli that comes with this bombastic headline/quote: Stop buying old Bob Dylan albums. “Every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians.”

While the interview doesn’t specifically focus on vinyl, it addresses this notion of creating packages of old music that siphons money that could and should go to support new artists. As someone who recently tried to navigate the recent Dylan box set with multiple sessions of the same old stuff, I came away better understanding why the producer’s job is to choose the best of the litter for us to enjoy. And I have a new realization of why old tapes are kept “in the can.”

Here’s one thing of note that Fusilli says about reissues, which ties into this new push for vinyl sales:

The industry keeps people in the prison that they put them in 30 years ago. You go down a dead end with some people, who say to you, Where’s the new Bob Dylan? Where’s the new Beatles? Well, there is no new Bob Dylan. There is no new Beatles. There is no new Thelonious Monk. There’s no new Duke Ellington. These people and their achievements are beyond the reach of anyone, so maybe it is interesting to empty the vaults and study how they got to be who they are. But for most artists, they had something to say in their own times, and that’s really where it belongs.

I’m going to let Thaddeus Herrmann have the last word, and extrapolate a bit on the theory that the major corporations are tilting the playing field.

A look at the vinyl section of a large Berlin store proves the shelves are full of reissues of old titles, mostly from major labels. Record players can be purchased right at the checkout. There’s nothing wrong with that – music should be sold in the formats that meet customer demand. But there are indicators that the majors are actively trying to secure substantial vinyl production capacity at the remaining pressing plants.

If this is the case – and the pressing plants are denying it – it would mean that the majors are attempting to buy their way into an industry that they played a significant role in destroying. And they are attempting once again to starve the indie labels, the very labels that never gave up on vinyl.

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 and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com .

Folk Alliance International 2016: The Video Sneak Peek

1952tv Wedged between two holidays that celebrate heart and history, this year’s Folk Alliance International conference will be convening in Kansas City with over 2,500 attendees that include those who make the music, those who write about it, those who bring it to you either onstage or through your speakers, and those who simply are fans.

The roots of this organization began 27 years ago in Malibu, when Clark and Elaine Weissman from the California Traditional Music Society hosted 125 people to see if they could unify other regional groups with common interests in music and dance. In attendance were representatives from the Philadelphia Folksong Society, Sing Out!, the Vancouver Folk Festival, Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, Charlotte’s Fiddle and Bow Society, International Bluegrass Music Association, Augusta Heritage Center, Woods Music and Dance Camp, and more. A year later, the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance was officially born, and in 2008 the name was changed to Folk Alliance International.

While I’ve never made it to any of the annual gatherings, I watch with much interest every year from afar. Through the eyes and ears of friends who attend, as well as both traditional and social media, I’ve come to learn it’s a great week to discover new music and artists. And for the musicians who perform at the private and public showcases, its an opportunity to break out and create a buzz literally around the world.

Looking through this year’s official program, I can tell you that the talent traveling to Kansas City is staggering. As I’ve done in the past, below are a handful of videos I put together of musicians I think you’ll likely be hearing a lot more about in the coming year. If you’re going to KC, catch ’em if you can.

Caitlin Canty
This past year, Canty has been touring almost nonstop in support of her Reckless Skyline album. You may have seen her open for the album’s producer Jeffrey Foucault either as solo, with his band, or as a duo with pedal steel wizard Eric Heywood. Here’s the song that has earned her an FAI Song of the Year nomination, and I chose this intimate version where she collaborates with Jefferson Hamer, one of my favorite guitarists.

Darlingside
The Massachusetts-based Darlingside are longtime college friends of Canty, and they’ve all toured and played together for years. Their new album Birds Say really showcases superb four-part harmony and interesting instrumentation, and the production quality expands their acoustic roots to a new level.

Joe Crookston

Crookston is this year’s Artist in Residence. He’s been making music and touring extensively in the US, Canada, and Ireland since 2004. Born in Ohio and based in Ithaca, New York, Crookston’s official bio offers this description of his work: “Songwriter, singer, guitarist, painter, fiddler, banjo player, eco-village member and believer in all things possible.”

Applewood Road

This is a band of three songwriters with their own solo careers who met a year and a half ago at a cafe in East Nashville and the next day recorded one song that got a lot of attention. Emily Barker, Amber Rubarth, and Amy Speace have now finished and released a complete album and it’s a special collaboration. (Note: Amy had trouble with her voice at FAI and their showcase was postponed, along with solo dates she had planned soon after.)

The Small Glories

Out of Canada comes this new project from Wailin’ Jennys co-founder Cara Luft and singer-songwriter JD Edwards, who has fronted his own band for ten years. Each are certified road warriors who bring two very distinctive vibes that somehow mesh together like tea and honey.

Dori Freeman

It seems that everybody has been talkin’ about Dori Freeman’s new self-titled album and how it came about. This 24-year-old woman from Galax, Virginia, sent a message to Teddy Thompson via social media and it led to him signing up as producer and a release on Free Dirt Records. Her Facebook page features a whole bunch of covers from artists as different as Selena Gomez and the Police, which are a blast to watch.

Lowell “Banana” Levinger

Levinger played guitar and keyboards with the Youngbloods, one of the finest “early Americana” bands to come out of the 1960s. His musical career spans both performing and songwriting, and he’s a vintage musical instrument collector. This past year, he released an album of new arrangements of Youngbloods’ tunes that reunited him with Jesse Colin Young and also featured the late Dan Hicks, Ry Cooder, Maria Muldaur, David Grisman, Darol Anger, Peter Stampfel, Duke Robillard, and Nina Gerber.

This video isn’t from that album. In true folk tradition, I’ve decided to share his arrangement of Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” instead, because it simply knocks me out.

Image credit: Photo from the John Atherton Collection. CC2.0

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

When Kelly Pardekooper Ditched His Day Job

Camera: DCS520C Serial #: K520C-06536 Width: 1728 Height: 1152 Date: 7/8/02 Time: 20:29:17 DCS5XX Image FW Ver: 3.2.3 TIFF Image Look: Product Antialiasing Filter: Removed Counter: [77774] ISO Speed: 800 Aperture: f3.5 Shutter: 1/125 Max Aperture: f2.8 Min Aperture: f22 Exposure Mode: Manual (M) Compensation: +0.0 Flash Compensation: +0.0 Meter Mode: Evaluative Flash Mode: No flash Drive Mode: Continuous Focus Mode: Manual Focus Point: --o-- Focal Length (mm): 24 White balance: Preset (Daylight) Time: 20:29:17.659

Kelly Pardekooper in Iowa

Update January 2018: Kelly Pardekooper has released his ninth album 50-Weight, marking a 20-year bookend to his lo-fi debut release 30-Weight. Going back to his home state roots, 50-Weight was recorded in a rural Iowa barn studio June 1-4, 2018. Producer and guitar wizard hats are again worn by Iowa City friend Bo Ramsey. This article was originally published January 2016.

If you’re an indie musician and not living full-time in a van that takes you from city to city for gigs – gigs that can be as glorious as a packed club with respectful fans, or as humbling as a house concert with a dozen folks your parents’ age who’ve put together a potluck dinner – you probably have a day job. It’s a way of life for many, and although most choose not to bring it up publicly, we all probably know a tale or two of those that are now rich and/or famous. Jay-Z sold dope, Kanye West worked at the Gap, Kurt Cobain was a janitor, Tom Waits tossed pizzas, and Debbie Harry was a Playboy bunny.

Record labels have long ago stopped handing out advances and financing tours. So these days you’ll be more likely to find musicians playing weekend gigs within a few hundred miles of their home base while maintaining a steady income and doing the same type of day labor that we all do: retail, the food service industry, education, health care, technology, art, or construction. If it pays the bills and gives you the time and flexibility to both create and perform, its a win-win … especially if you’ve got a family situation to tend to.

The other day I got an email from the music editor at NUVO, the Indianapolis-based weekly magazine that bills itself as “Indiana’s Alternative Voice.” Kat Coplen wrote to me that one of their former employees had recently left his marketing gig with them to focus more on his music, and they are working up a cover story on him. Since its someone I’ve written about here at No Depression on a few occasions, she chose to pose this question to me: “In a world with a lot of roots rockers, what makes Kelly Pardekooper’s music and songwriting special?”

While you might not recognize Pardekooper’s name, you most likely have been among the millions of people who have heard his songs, thanks to shows like True Blood, Sons of Anarchy, and Justified. To recycle my own words from a previous article, he is a roots musician who writes some of the sweetest blues-infused, countryfied, American rock music of our time.

I first became aware of Pardekooper not from his music, per se, but because he was featured in my friend Sandy Dyas’ photographic book that documented the music scene in Iowa City, where he used to live. It’s a great community for all sorts of American roots music artists who build their sound on folk, blues, and country traditions and who mostly make their way by playing music in bars. Differentiating itself from your standard fare of quiet coffeehouse confessional noodlings, Iowa City music can sometimes tend toward a louder rock-based beat.

If you’d like to know what really sets Pardekooper far apart from the herd, though, it’s his business acumen and good fortune. Those two things have allowed him to figure out he can reach a much larger audience by placing his songs in film and television rather than spending 300 days a year living in a minivan and playing in front of a couple dozen people each night for table scraps.

While that upside allows for his music to be heard by millions, the downside is that it’s part of an audio-visual experience for which he doesn’t quite receive full credit, which it makes it more challenging to establish his own brand. And so it came to be that, a few months ago, Pardekooper decided to ditch the day job and devote more time to his craft. Here’s what he wrote in his journal and posted on his website:

Lots of changes for me to end 2015. A few months ago I left my alt-weekly newspaper gig at NUVO in Indy. Anyone who has followed me the past 15 years knows I love alt-weekly newspapers and they’re very connected to my University of Iowa education/background. And other than music, weekly press has always been my main gig having worked at three alt-newspapers over the years.

I’ll be spending more time working on new songs/recordings in 2016. I’ve been lucky to have a very patient and active music publisher who has always been supportive of my songs. Life is funny. When I left East Nashville over a decade ago to follow my wife’s medical career, I never thought it would eventually lead me to Los Angeles and a whole new life for my song catalog. I guess the moral would be follow your heart ya’ll.

And in recent music news, I just got word that my song “Just Shoot Me” is going to be used in an upcoming film called All We Had. Releasing sometime in 2016, the film stars Katie Holmes and Luke Wilson. So there’s that little news nugget from the universe nudging me along to keep plugging away at the songs. My music career pretty much equals slow turtle.

That song comes off of Kelly’s Haymaker Heart album, released back in 2004. Twelve years ago. When he talks about the slow turtle, he is referencing his spirit animal, providing a definition written by Elena Harris. For those in a rush to succeed, you might want to take a moment to read these words:

The turtle totem wisdom teaches us about walking our path in peace and sticking to it with determination and serenity. Slow moving on earth, yet also incredibly fast and agile in water, those who have the turtle as totem or spirit animal may be encouraged to take a break in their busy lives and look around or within themselves for more grounded, long-lasting solutions. Traditionally, the turtle is symbolic of the way of peace, whether it’s inviting us to cultivate peace of mind or a peaceful relationship with our environment.

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 and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Carter Family Documentary That Was Kicked and Started

While it’s a little hard to admit that every now and then I can lose my focus and get sidetracked, there are those occasions when I take on a particular subject only to end up somewhere else. For example, about a month ago I sat down to write a short essay about the Carter Family, and by the time I got to the second paragraph I had shifted the focus to the African-American influence in roots music, featuring videos from Uncle John Scruggs to Grandmaster Flash. But after spending several months of researching and reading books about Sara, Maybelle and A.P. Carter, listening to hours of audio recordings and radio transcriptions, and watching an excellent documentary titled The Winding Stream you’d think I would be prepared this time around not to stray from the path. Wrong.

As much as I’d love to retell the story of the Carter Family for those who may not know how they’ve left an everlasting imprint on American music, it is the journey of award-winning independent producer, director and writer Beth Harrington and the way she brought the Carter’s story to the screen that has currently captured my interest. It’s too good of a tale to not be told. And better still, most of it will be in her own words. God bless digital footprints.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22R5IgxP_pg

On November 15, 2010 a Kickstarter campaign was created to help fund a feature-length documentary. At the top of the page it’s described as an “epic story of the dynasty at the heart of American roots music – The Carter and Cash families.” Here is an excerpt of the introduction:

My name is Beth Harrington, and I’ve been a documentary filmmaker for more than 30 years. I’m also a former musician – a singer in the band Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers. So there you have it, my two loves – music and documentary film.

A few years ago, I successfully combined these loves on a film called Welcome to the Club – The Woman of Rockabilly. It was really well-received, so much so that it got nominated for a Grammy Award. Needless to say, this encouraged me to move ahead on my next music documentary, The Winding Stream which has the subtitle “The Carters, the Cashes and the Course of Country Music.”

I’d been aware of the Original Carter Family – the biggest “old-timey” music act of their day – and their musical legacy for a long time. But working on Welcome to the Club and meeting Rosanne Cash (who narrated that film) made me think it was time to do a film about this music dynasty that stretched from the 1920s to the present. I wanted to explore how the Carters practically “invented” country music and how legions of musicians – from Woody Guthrie to Elvis to Johnny Cash to Joan Baez to Jeff Tweedy, to name a few – all feel a debt of gratitude to them. And, as a result, how the tradition instituted by the Original Carters has carried on in their family and in the culture at large.

And I realized that, even though small parts of this family’s epic story had been told before, no one had presented this big picture. No one had shown the connection to the Carter Sisters, to Johnny Cash, to the folk movement and to the Americana movement. And no one had told the story using both original recordings AND contemporary roots music artists performing (and discussing) the music.

I started shooting The Winding Stream in 2003 and, with Rosanne Cash’s help, one of the first interviews I did was with her dad, Johnny Cash. Sadly, it was to be one of his last interviews; he passed away only three weeks after we’d spoken with him. This forced the realization that I needed to step up production because we were losing some of the key players in this story. I felt a real urgency to get these interviews on tape. I spent a lot of my own money doing so. And I’m very glad I did. But I knew I would need more.

What stuck out for me when I first read those words was the year that Beth noted she first started to shoot this film: 2003. Seven years later she was seeking money to complete editing, sound design, music and footage rights, animation, graphics and titles. That right there is the definition of vision, focus and tenacity.

For those of you who’ve either started or contributed to a Kickstarter or any other crowdsourcing project, it’s a leap of faith that you’ll get to your goal. Sometimes there’s just not enough money donated to keep it going, and there are other times that the original idea turns out to be either flawed, abandoned or simply unable to be completed for any infinite number of reasons.

But there was something I noticed about The Winding Stream campaign that was different than most, aside from the fact that the picture was actually completed and released: in five years Beth has published forty-two updates to her supporters. What follows is a look into what it took to get this film to the finish line. I’ll share a few of her updates with a little selective editing, and dispense with quotation marks since y’all know it’s Beth’s writing.

Update #4, December 8 2010: Hi everyone. Well, as you may know by now, we’ve reached our Kickstarter goal! I’m moved and grateful to all of you who contributed to this campaign. And you did it in three weeks. Thank you so very much!

Update #15, March 21, 2011: Just a quick note to let you all know that we’ve been putting the funds we raised with your help to very good use. Just back from Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia (yup, it’s a city in two states) and we got five critical interviews done, plus a musical performance with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Wildly successful trip. Probably a Nashville shoot still in our future and one in California and we’ll be close to done shooting.

Update #17, February 28, 2012: I realize it’s been a while since I’ve updated you on things connected to The Winding Stream so here’s a little update. We’re well into post-production now which means there is a glimmer at the end of the tunnel (not exactly a light yet, but soon). Since last I wrote we’ve received two grants – one from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Roy W. Dean Foundation which have helped us considerably and are big honors, needless to say. We’re in the running again for funding from the Independent Television Service and should know in a while if we get that. We’ve started to show excerpts from the film now – once at a fundraiser here in Washington State and more recently at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, MT. Both times the reactions have been very positive which has buoyed our spirits a lot as we move along.

Update #18, April 29, 2012: We’re writing to let you know about some new developments with The Winding Stream. We’re moving into full post-production soon with our pal, editor Greg Snider at the helm. And we’ve found a wonderful animator to do cool photo-animations for us, Mike Olson. I’m at work on the companion book to the film, and we’ve had interest from cable channels, film festivals and theatrical and DVD distributors for when the film is done. Our hope is to wrap it all up by the end of the year.

May 3, 2012: A second round of Kickstarter funding begins.

Update #25, June 21, 2012: In the last 9 years I have amassed a treasure trove of what I consider to be important interviews with people who were witness to some of our most important shared cultural history. The early days of radio, the infancy of the record industry, the growth of interest in what would later be called “country” and “folk” music. People like Johnny Cash, Janette and Joe Carter, Mike Seeger, Charles Wolfe and others knew the Original Carter Family and were among the last living witnesses to the Carters’ role in all this. The people I just named have all passed away in the time we’ve been working on this film. I started to view completion of this film as a sacred trust. These folks had taken the time to share this with me.

This material couldn’t just languish on a shelf. It had to be made into the film I’d promised. So we stuck with it. Through years when everyone turned us down. Through times when we scraped by with tiny amounts of money that would get us one more interview. Through lots and lots of days of colleagues and friends — er, actually, that’s redundant; my colleagues on The Winding Stream are my steadfast friends –donating their time and talent and energy to this. Through many sleepless nights when I did think that I was – indeed – plum crazy to persist.

June 27, 2012: Funding for the second Kickstarter campaign is met.

Update #28: January 7, 2013: Hi everybody! Wanted to let you all know how much progress we’ve made on The Winding Stream! We have a final cut of the film and are now clearing rights for the music and archival images. If all goes well, we should have a completed film very soon. Thanks again for helping us get this far!

Update #29, February 1, 2014: Stopping by to let you know that great things are happening for The Winding Stream. We just recently learned that this labor of love- that’s taken more than a decade and the efforts of numerous talented people to complete – has been chosen for this year’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin.

Update #33, August 7, 2014: Monday’s NYC premiere of The Winding Stream at Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center was a big hit. We had a full-house and the New York audience embraced the film. We’d also like to announce that The Winding Stream won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Woods Hole Film Festival. This is our fourth festival award and we’re very grateful to be recognized this way. Thanks to all of our Kickstarter backers! You helped make this possible.

Updare #37, December 12, 2014: We have a big, exciting challenge! As you may know, we need to finish paying for music and archival footage and rights before we can open the film theatrically, air it on public television, or make it available on platforms like iTunes and cable on demand. We want to make all this happen as soon as possible to build off our festival momentum. We once needed $85,000. But incredibly we have recently received a grant from the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation for half that!

Update #39, September 2, 2015: Hi Friends – I wanted to let you all know that we’ve entered the next phase of the life of The Winding Stream! Theatrical! Thanks to the efforts of our partners at Argot Pictures, we are now taking the film to art houses across the country. We are also thrilled to say that the good folks at Omnivore Recordings are releasing a soundtrack album from the film! That drops on October 16.

Alright…so as you can tell, I’ve been completely swept away by Beth, her team and this unbelievably enchanting film. On a musical highway that’s ninety years long and still stretches out before us, there are unlimited on and off ramps that this filmmaker could have chosen. With a subtitle that reads ‘The Carters, The Cashes and The Course of Country Music’, she brings to life a family tree with endless branches. By using the voices of those still living and the ones who’ve passed on, and enhancing that experience with film, video, photographs and animation, the music and stories are presented with the delicacy and historical context one could have only hoped for.

There is a tendency to receive and process information in bite-sized pieces in this technologically supercharged world we live in. And I’m sure Beth would agree that it would be a mistake to believe that the tales of this great musical family can be told in a mere ninety-two minutes, despite over a decade in the making. (I’d love to see what didn’t make the final cut.) I think of The Winding Stream as a doorway to discovery, and hope that people will be inspired to seek out not only the music which has endured over the years and is readily available, but also take the time to learn more about the folks who absolutely define any such notion of what you might think the term Americana means. This is a story for the ages.

For those of you in the New York area, I plan to attend a screening at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville (the most appropriately named town ever) on February 11, and there’ll be some fine live music from the Shovel Ready String Band. Buy your tickets before they sell out and if you happen to see me, please say hi.

When Lemmy Kilmister Met Wanda Jackson

The last time I saw Lemmy Kilmister, we were sitting in a small room just off the side of the stage at Amoeba Records on Sunset Boulevard. He was holding a bottle of Jack Daniels with one hand while a too-young blonde, who was trying awfully hard to look older, sat on his lap. He was dressed as he usually dressed — black denim and a cowboy hat. Across from us on the couch was Wanda Jackson and her husband, Wendell.

It was January 2006 I think, and Jackson had just released I Remember Elvis. She was known back in the late 1950s as the Queen of Rockabilly, and had toured with — and briefly dated — Presley. He encouraged her to add a rock beat to her traditional country repertoire, and for the next 10 years she scored with a number of hit singles. By 1965, Jackson had transitioned back to country music, toured all over the world, had a TV show, did the Vegas thing, and eventually began to release gospel albums. By the ’80s, she’d returned to rockabilly once again, and toured extensively in England and throughout Europe, including Scandinavia.

On this particular day at Amoeba I was there representing the label and Wanda was going to perform a few songs and sign some albums. Danny B. Harvey (on the right) produced the album, and put together a backing band for her. He and Slim Jim Phantom, along with Lemmy, also had a rockabilly band called Head Cat.

I admit I initially felt a bit protective of Wanda and Wendell, who looked and talked like they stepped out of central casting in the role of Everybody’s Grandparents. I’d first met Lemmy a dozen years earlier and knew he could be a bit rough around the edges, but he spoke softly and clearly had respect and a deep knowledge of Jackson’s work. She seemed utterly charmed and fascinated by him as well, although she admitted to never having heard of Motörhead.

It was a very gentle conversation, and during her set she got cheers and laughter from the audience when she mentioned meeting “Mr. Lemmy,” noting what a lovely young man he was. I remember looking over and seeing him laugh as well and while he was still holding onto the blonde, the bottle was nowhere in sight. Just another day in Hollywood.

Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister died on December 28, 2015, in Los Angeles at age 70.

Wanda Jackson turned 78 last October and resides in Oklahoma City with Wendell. She continues to tour.

Photo Above: Uncredited. Lemmy Kilmister, Wanda Jackson and Danny B. Harvey. Amoeba Records. 2003.

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

The Elvis Costello Immersion

I’ll admit I’m a bit late to the game as I just recently sat down and watched Mark Kidel’s documentary Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance that was first broadcasted on the BBC television network back in November 2013 and is currently running on America’s Showtime network. Along with all of the press and publicity surrounding Elvis’ autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (published Oct. 13, 2015, by Blue Rider Press), and its companion “soundtrack” of the same name, it’s been hard to keep from bobbing and weaving this man. Considering Costello is pretty close in age to me, and was a nine-year-old member of the Beatles’ fan club, his story offers an interesting and compelling, comparative and conflicting musical genealogy chart. I have yet to read the book, but if Mystery Dance is any indication, it will be an exercise in delight and wonder. For all the things Costello is or isn’t, has or hasn’t been … he has lived up to Stephen Thomas Erlwine’s description of him on AllMusic.com as an utterly fascinating “pop encyclopedia.”

There is little need for me to regurgitate Costello’s entire biography and discography since we all know how to leap over to his Wikipedia page with the click of a mouse, trackpad, or finger. But an interesting place to start is with his father, Ross MacManus — a musician and bandleader back in the 1950s. In 1970, he recorded a version of the Beatles’ “Long and Winding Road” under the pseudonym of Day Costello. That’s where that half of Elvis’ name comes from.

While I’m not from England, it seems that if you are, you know the theme song to a commercial for R. White’s Lemonade called “Secret Lemonade Drinker,” in which Ross plays drums and sings background vocals. This is a remake of the ad from 1993, in which Ross plays the starring role in two versions.

https://youtu.be/DnxLjbwmJjM

My own dad was a mechanical engineer who liked big bands, Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza, and Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass. Our house was always filled with music from either his Dumont high fidelity system, the older sister’s phonograph with Elvis — that would be Presley — 45s spinning around and around, or my own transistor radio pulling in Jerry “The Geator with the Heater” Blavat on WHAT-AM as he played “songs from the heart, not a playlist.” I’ll tell you, my childhood simply could not have been anywhere near as cool as that Costello house: having a performing musician for a dad. To that point, as Gerard O’Donovan wrote in The Telegraph with regards to Mystery Dance:

Mark Kidel’s film was a deftly constructed trip through a restless, shape-shifting career, allowing Costello to revisit significant moments of his past. But it couldn’t be called a full biography as it only ever touched on the personal in order to shed light on the musical journey. Even so, it was particularly good at bringing out the extent to which Costello was drenched in music from birth, and the enormous influence his musician father Ross (a stalwart of the Joe Loss Orchestra) had not only on his tastes but also his rebellious determination not to sing “other people’s songs” but to write and perform his own.

Forgive me for the diversion, as I’ve just taken four paragraphs to get to this memory chip from 1977, when My Aim is True was released. A few months later, Costello performed it at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey — which my spellcheck poetically prefers to spell out as “Prosaic, New Jersey.”

At first I really hated that Costello used the name Elvis and that he wore glasses, a sport jacket, and tie to evoke those Buddy Holly publicity shots. Or perhaps he was trying to evoke Peter and Gordon or Chad and Jeremy?

But I laughed at the joke that he was marketed and hyped as punk rock, a now-and-then laughable, antiquated term, right along with the Sex Pistols, Ramones, Clash, Television, Jam, and any other safety pin of the week. Unlike the others, he was pure pop. And although time has shown that he has an incredibly enormous songwriting and performance vocabulary, at the end of the ’70s, Costello was cranking out the cheesiest and most embarrassing videos for TV.

For the next two decades, I think I bought every single Costello album he released, even if I only listened to them once. I never fell in love with any of them at the time, which was my mistake. Most were brilliant, or at least had something on them that was uniquely different from anything else at the time. But the song below is what finally tipped me. It comes from the series of concerts that were later released as The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited.

Now, I know you aren’t going to spend 13 minutes watching something amazing; this is the damn internet and nobody has the time. So please just go with me to 9:14 (you’ll foolishly miss Kate and Anna McGarrigle at 5:36, but that’ll be your cross to bear) and behold the first revelation of how I finally “got” Elvis Costello.

In the past two weeks I have loaded onto my iPhone 25 Elvis Costello albums (with the exception of The Juliet Letters, which is an altogether different story). They are squished into a playlist with over 100 original Carter Family songs taken from an XERA border radio transcription as well as some Hank Snow, Patsy Montana, Charlie Louvin, Rose and the Maddox Brothers, Ernest Tubb, Charlie Poole, Skillet Lickers, Norman Blake, Suzie Glaze, Bob Dylan, and Iris DeMent. Costello is a bloke among the folks.

The algorithm of the shuffle feature allows for one in three to be an Elvis Costello track, and each one is like reaching into a bowl of candy and pulling out a dark chocolate covered almond with sea salt and caramel. Delicious. It’s an infused immersion I can hardly get enough of.

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

Photo by James O’Mara

Bringing Mountain Music to the City

Let me tell you about the night my fingers snapped off and fell onto a beer-stained wood floor.

A tremendous rainstorm had its way with the sky as I moved across the Hudson River. I pulled up to a roadhouse about ten miles north of Manhattan. Juggling my guitar case and an umbrella, I brushed past the determined smokers huddled outside by the front door, walked down the length of the bar to a small alcove in the back, and nodded to a couple of folks I recognized. For a few months I’d heard talk about a bluegrass jam in the neighborhood, and this was my first chance to check it out.

Despite having been a finger-style player for over 50 years, with an interest in all sorts of old-time and roots music, I’d never attempted to do any serious flatpickin’ before. Still, I figured it couldn’t be all that hard. Three or four chords, a good capo, and a Fender 451 medium pick would do the trick, right? And after all, this is New York, not the hills of Kentucky. I’d step up, dazzle, and shred.

Right. Can you see where this train wreck is headed?

Tara Linhardt is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist from rural Taylorstown, Virginia, who moved here less than a year ago and has already earned recognition in the relatively small but highly talented New York bluegrass scene. In addition to organizing the monthly jam that attracts a large and talented group of musicians, she also teaches mandolin and guitar, plays in several bands, is an excellent photographer, and has put together a number of festivals and events. She organized and broke the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s largest mandolin group. Tara & The Galax Fiddler’s Convention Mandolin Ensemble featured 389 mandolins that performed four tunes. Including this one:

She’s also a founding and managing member of The Mountain Music Project, which works to preserve, promote, and educate folks about traditional music throughout the world. That project focuses mostly on the Appalachian region of the United States and the traditional music of the Nepali Himalaya.

There’s a film documentary about the project that’s been released on DVD, and a collaborative album that, along with Linhardt, features other American musicians like Sammy Shelor, Tim O’Brien, Curtis Burch, Mark Schatz, Abigail Washburn, Danny Knicely, and Tony Trischka.

That rainy night jam, which I thought would be a piece of cake, ended up serving me a big slice of humble pie.

The 15 musicians who stood in the circle were by and large regulars on the festival and jam circuit, professional performers, parking lot pickers, and other assorted but exceptional players. From the opening notes, which seemed to be going at about 220 beats per minute, it took every ounce of energy in my body to keep up.

I kept my eyes glued to the left hand of singer/guitarist Christian Apuzzo, whom I had met previously when his band opened for Billy Strings and Don Julin. I could strum the chords but felt like I was on a roller coaster with no brakes. My mouth was hanging open most of the time in awe of the musicianship. I thought I did pretty well until about an hour and 45 minutes into it, when Linhardt looked over at me and yelled, “You’re behind the beat … step to the back.” Now I didn’t take that as being mean spiritied at all, but instructive. This jam is a welcoming and friendly place for all players.

Nevertheless, given how easy I expected this to be…cue instant exhalation and deflation.

Two songs later, I called it quits. My fingers were as crispy as fried clams.

I wasn’t quite finished foolin’ around with this bluegrass excursion yet, though. I showed up two weeks later for another shot. This time I swapped the jumbo cutaway for my more traditional dreadnought, put on heavier strings, and grabbed a handful of Dunlop 1.14 mm picks.

I still couldn’t last more than a couple of hours. I apparently, desperately need to lock myself in a room with Tony Rice videos, but as long as Lindhart keeps the door open I’m going to try to walk through it again. Because while it’s great to write about music, it’s even better to make it.

Matheus Verardino, who played harmonica in that first video, and the aforementioned Christian Apuzzo are members of Cole Quest and the City Pickers. They have a new album that’s currently being mixed. And it might be of interest to know that Cole ‘Quest’ Rotante sings and plays Dobro. His mom’s name is Nora and his uncle is Arlo. You can figure out that lineage. I like this band.

Linhardt has been touring this year with Shyam Nepali of the Mountain Music Project. At this year’s Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, they played with percussionist Raj Kapoor, Apuzzo (this dude is everywhere), and violinist extraordinaire and fellow jammer Mary Simpson, who was a founding member of Whiskey Rebellion and now tours with Yanni.

Photo of Lunchmeat Larry by Tara.

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