Russ Never Sleeps: Sharing Memories of Tower Records

Russ Solomon at the original Tower Records store in Sacramento in 1987. Credit: Terrence McCarthy

On Sunday night, March 4, 2018, as he sat in front of his television sipping whiskey and watching the Academy Awards, Russ Solomon passed away at age 92. He will be forever known as the man who opened up a record store in Sacramento, California that through the years expanded to over 200 locations in 15 countries. Forty-six years later, the last store closed its doors. In July 2010 I published an article for No Depressionabout my own connection to Tower Records, and I’m sharing it here again.

Tower Records founder Russ Solomon finally decided to retire at age 84. After the chain he founded in 1960 was liquidated back in late 2006, he’d been running the R5 record shop in Sacramento at one of his former locations. In May 2010 he decided to throw in the towel and sold it off to Dimples Records, whose owners threw Russ a retirement party on July 17. The story of how Tower grew from one store in California’s capital to an international iconic retailer of music and lifestyle products, and then ultimately imploded under the confluence of financial, technological, and cultural change was hardly unique to them.

Almost every music fan of a certain age was touched in some way by Tower Records, either as a consumer, musician, employee, or business partner. I’d venture to say that most of us still long for the opportunity and experience of visiting one of their stores for browsing, listening, learning, people-watching, and knowing that you were in a space surrounded with other people like yourself, who loved, valued, collected, and supported music. Before Tower spread its wings and flew beyond the Golden State, there were few regional stores that also offered their size and selection.

During the ’60s in New York and other eastern cities in the US, we had the original Sam Goody chain (not the latter mall version), which was similar to Tower in that it offered a wide product selection in all categories and knowledgable customer service from mostly male employees wearing white shirts and ties. In the ’70s down in Atlanta, Peaches was a store noted for a more organic feel, with its unpainted wood shelves and crates and a much more laid back staff. And while there were others that were smaller in scale, as time passed Tower Records survived as a stand-alone, privately held company of large magnitude, and it resisted becoming a cookie-cutter, rubber-stamped retailer – simultaneously their greatest asset and ultimate liability.

Russ has often been called a “Music Man,” which implies that he cared more about the music that sat on the shelves, his employees, and his customers than he did about making a buck. But that’s a partial truth that diminishes his incredible business acumen. His strength and legacy will likely be as a visionary who was honest, fair, and passionate. And unlike many other music executives I’ve dealt with, Russ was a patron of all art forms, and given the chance he’d prefer to talk jazz or contemporary art rather than numbers on spreadsheets. Had you found yourself showing up to his office wearing a tie, his signature move would be to get up, take a pair of scissors, and cut the damn thing off. It became a rite of passage to have yours hung up on the wall like a dead carcass along the others.

Most of my memories of Tower were as a business partner. For many years I called on dozens of their stores as a salesperson representing independent labels, and later moved into a corporate position that often took me to their headquarters in Sacramento. More than any other client, the Tower folks were just plain fun to deal with. There were days where I felt blessed to actually get paid for having such a good time. I travelled extensively and visited almost every one of their domestic retail locations, got to hang out with music people who spoke my language and we broke bread, smoked dope, shared laughs, and discovered new music. And I’d almost always come home with a bright yellow bag filled with new tunes.

Today, as a consumer, I’m fortunate to be only 90 minutes from Amoeba Records in Hollywood if I need that non-online experience. [Note: In 2012 I moved to New York.] And when I’m down there it’s great to see so many former Tower employees still in the game, as well as folks who had worked at stores such as Virgin, Aron’s, Rhino, Music Plus, Wherehouse, and all of the other retail dinosaurs. Amoeba, Waterloo in Austin, Music Millennium in Portland, Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, and all the rest of the today’s survivors would agree that they owe a debt of gratitude to that very first Tower store that Russ opened back in 1960 in Sacramento that set it all in motion.

I still miss them. And so it seems like a good time to say “Thanks Russ; enjoy that retirement.”

Postscript: In his New York Times obituary, they detail both the rise and fall of Tower Records. For those who may never have had the opportunity to visit a Tower store, here’s an excerpt:

“With marketing instincts that even rivals and critics called ingenious, Mr. Solomon built megastores, some bigger than football fields, and stocked them with as many as 125,000 titles, virtually all of the popular and classical recordings on the market.

Yet many patrons said there was a clublike intimacy about the stores, where, as Bruce Springsteen once put it, ‘everyone is your friend for 20 minutes.’

Open all year from 9 a.m. to midnight, staffed by hip salespeople who could answer almost any question about recordings, the stores became the haunts of music aficionados scouring endless racks for rock, heavy metal, jazz, blues, standards, classicals, country-westerns and myriad other offerings. Sometimes popular bands and singers performed in the stores.

‘When you walked into the Tower Records store in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood back in the day, you just didn’t go in there to buy an album and then rush off to leave,’ journalist David Chiu wrote in Cuepoint, an online publication, in 2016. ‘To me, going into Tower was like visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art or attending a baseball game — it required a certain investment of time.’

Mr. Solomon sold and closed stores and converted others to franchises. At the same time, the music business went into a slump. Tower declared bankruptcy in 2004, and in 2006 it was forced to liquidate and close.

Mr. Solomon acknowledged that he had underestimated the internet’s threat to store retailing. Pirates downloaded music without paying for it, and paying customers turned to online vendors and price-cutters like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. The owner blamed himself.

A nostalgic documentary, ‘All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records,’ directed by the actor Colin Hanks, was released in 2015. It featured Mr. Solomon and many of his former employees and patrons, including Elton John, who called the shuttering of Tower Records ‘one of the great tragedies of my life.’

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

Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’: An Unintended Eulogy to Murder in Parkland

Daily Mail UK

There are weeks I want to read and write about music, and weeks that I couldn’t care less about who is going on tour or what new albums are being released. Like many of you, I was deeply upset hearing the news of another school shooting, along with the subsequent expected finger-pointing and politicization. We are a divided nation with a serious gun fetish, led predominantly by older white men of wealth and power who are committed to using fear and manipulation to maintain a status quo that not only allows murder but encourages extreme violence by virtue of doing nothing to stop it. While I don’t know if the voices of the young survivors will rise loud enough to make a difference, even if it’s simply a series of incremental hollow victories it is encouraging.

I should note that I wasn’t able to reach Bob to ask if he minded if I used his lyrics. They were originally published in 1973 by Ram’s Horn Music, and have likely been transferred to another company over the years. Written as a lullaby to his baby son Jakob, and covered by dozens of musicians, Time magazine nevertheless called it one of his ten worst songs. I respectfully disagree.

Seventeen people were confirmed dead as the United States endured another horrifying school shooting at the hands of a teenage gunman armed with an AR-15 assault rifle. After initial reports of a shooter, officers surrounded the campus, directing the evacuation of hundreds of students from the scene, while other teens hid inside closets and under desks to stay safe. Students later told reporters that they at first thought alarms in the school were a fire drill, until they heard gunshots in the hallways. (The Guardian)

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you

The heavily armed man arrived at the school in an Uber at 2:19 p.m., shortly before dismissal time. According to authorities he shot people in the hallways and inside five classrooms on the first and second floors. He eventually discarded the rifle, a vest, and ammunition in a stairwell, and blended in with fleeing students to get away. After leaving the school, he walked to a Walmart and bought a drink at a Subway, according to authorities. At 3:41 p.m., he was arrested by the police as he walked down a residential street in Coral Springs, just a few miles from the school. (The New York Times)

May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay
Forever young

The suspect in the school shooting was a member of the school’s rifle team and represented it in marksmanship competitions. The 19-year-old was described as “very good shot” by members of the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The JROTC, which receives funding from the NRA gun lobby, used air rifles special-made for target shooting, typically on indoor ranges at targets the size of a coin. Former cadets say they were surprised the awkward teen they remember from a couple years ago now stands accused of slaughtering students and staff. But, in retrospect, there were signs of trouble. The executive officer of the JROTC battalion said Cruz spoke about guns and knives incessantly and liked to wear military-style clothing to school. He was also said to have bragged about shooting animals for fun. (The Telegraph)

Forever young
Forever young
May you stay
Forever young

After each massacre, survivors and witnesses have echoed the words “no more” — yet mass shootings have continued to plague the U.S. In fact, shootings only have continued to increase over the past few years. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is the third deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history to take place within the past five months. It’s also the 25th fatal shooting at a U.S. elementary, middle or high school since — and including — Columbine in 1999. (Fox News)

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you

The teenagers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland have emerged as passionate advocates for reform, speaking openly of their anger in the hope of forcing a reckoning on guns. But in certain right-wing corners of the web the students are being portrayed not as grief-ridden survivors but as pawns and conspiracists intent on exploiting a tragedy to undermine the nation’s laws. Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind the site Infowars, suggested that the mass shooting was a “false flag” orchestrated by anti-gun groups. Rush Limbaugh, on his radio program, said of the student activists on Monday: “Everything they’re doing is right out of the Democrat Party’s various playbooks. It has the same enemies: the N.R.A. and guns.” (New York Times)

May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
And may you stay
Forever young

The survivors of the shooting are fighting for change and vowing “never again.” They’ve also been unrestrained, and at times brutally direct, in calling out hypocrisy and challenging their critics. They’ve fought back, often on social media, and doubled down on their message: make the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — their high school — the last. Students have called out the NRA and the politicians who accept funding from the group. On Twitter, Sarah Chawick wrote “We should change the names of AR-15s to ‘Marco Rubio’ because they are so easy to buy.” (Vox)

Forever young
Forever young
May you stay
Forever young

Gabe Glassman: “I’m a sophomore at Douglas. At the time of the shooting, I had to hide in a closet for an hour and 20 minutes and get evacuated by a SWAT team. This is my life now. If I’m not at home, I’m in grief counseling, speaking at a rally or visiting memorials in the park. Then I go on social media to check my posts about gun control.”

Douglas High School senior Ariana Ortega is part of the activism, too — and she can’t believe how fast everything has changed. “Two weeks ago, we were all going prom dress shopping, sending each other pictures. All of those things seem so insignificant now.” Now, Ariana says, “We have many group chats, where we have students speaking about legislative stuff, emotions, plans, everything.” (NPR)

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift

Children have periodically played leading roles in social and political movements. With #NeverAgain, some of the students who survived the shooting this month in Parkland have organized effective social media campaigns in favor of greater gun control. So far the American public is paying attention. Children are effective messengers because they are difficult to convincingly attack. It’s easier to forgive their excesses and their mistakes, and they are not constrained by having full-time jobs. The very fact that children are doing something attracts news coverage. If even a child sees the need to speak out, we all should be listening; they of course have the greatest stake in America’s future. (Bloomberg View)

May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
And may you stay
Forever young

A slew of companies are ending their ties to the National Rifle Association in the wake of the massacre at a Florida high school that left 17 dead earlier this month. United, Delta, Enterprise Holdings, First National Bank of Omaha, Symantec and MetLife were among the first to call it quits after a #BoycottNRA hashtag started to pick up steam online last week. The gun rights group’s chief executive Wayne LaPierre openly criticized gun-control advocates and the media for its coverage of the shooting. “They don’t care about our schoolchildren. They want to make all of us less free.” (Fox Business)

Forever young
Forever young
May you stay
Forever young

Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the largest sports retailers in the U.S., has announced it is immediately ending its sales of military-style semi-automatic rifles and is requiring all customers to be older than 21 to buy a firearm at its stores. Additionally, the company no longer will sell high-capacity magazines.

CEO Ed Stack announced the decision on ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday, the same day that survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are returning to class. Stack said the 19-year-old gunman allegedly behind that massacre, which claimed 17 lives and wounded many more in Parkland, Fla., had purchased a firearm from the retailer last November. While that the weapon — a shotgun — was not used in the shooting, the CEO said the revelation deeply affected him and his colleagues at Dick’s.(NPR)

Last week the Stoneman Douglas High School drama club performed “Shine,” a song they wrote in the wake of the shooting at their school. May they remain forever young. #NeverAgain

Doo-Wop Music: Americana Lost and Found

I’m not sure that the twangy contingent of the roots music intelligentsia will agree with me on this one, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the vocal group harmony style that emerged out of African American communities in the late ’40s, and how it fits within the construct of Americana. It came out of cities like New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Newark, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and my hometown of Philadelphia. I recall first hearing doo-wop from a small radio station with a weak signal across the Delaware River in Camden by one of the greatest disc jockeys of that era, Jerry “Geator With The Heater” Blavat, who was also known as “The Boss With The Hot Sauce.” While he wasn’t as prominent as Alan Freed or Dick Clark, he helped bring doo-wop out of the urban ghettos and into the ears of white suburban kids like me.

Building on the small-group harmony style that was made popular in the ’30s and early ’40s by the Ink Spots, Mills Brothers, The Cats and the Fiddle, and the Delta Rhythm Boys, young black teenagers would get together on street corners, school gyms, and subway stations to sing a cappella, while hoping to come up with a sound that would let them grab at a piece of the American Dream. In his Survey of American Popular Music, author and academic Frank Hoffmann outlines the qualities and elements:

“Group harmony, a wide range of vocal parts, nonsense syllables, a simple beat, light instrumentation, and simple music and lyrics. Above all, the focus is on ensemble singing. In doo-wop vocal harmonies the echo runs underneath the lead vocalist. Generally, the second tenor and baritone blend together as one sound, with the high tenor (or falsetto) running over the lead and the bass reverberating on the bottom end. The group harmony does not usually lead throughout; however, it may occasionally alternate with a tenor in this capacity.”

“Nonsense syllables were derived from bop and jazz styles, traditional West African chants, a cappella street corner singing (in place of the instrumental bass line), and doo-wop-styled R&B songs during the 1950-1951 period. They were commonly used in the bass and harmony parts; their use tends to be more restrained, simple, and somber when employed in ballads.

“Gow gow hoo-oo, gow gow wanna dib-a-doo, chick’n hon-a-chick hole-a-hubba, hell fried cuck-a-lucka wanna jubba, hi-low ‘n-ay wanna dubba hubba, day down sum wanna jigga-wah, dell rown ay wanna lubba hubba, mull an a mound chicka lubba hubba, and fay down ah wanna dip-a-zip-a-dip-a’ are just a few examples.”

Hoffmann breaks down the evolution of doo-wop into these stylistic time periods: Paleo (1952-54), Classical (1955-59), and Neo (1960-1963). While independent labels released the majority of the music, the major labels smelled money and scooped up the most popular tunes to be re-recorded by popular Caucasian singers. But while that may have appealed to an older demographic or particular geography, teenagers bought the originals in such quantities that by 1955 songs from African American groups such as The Moonglows, Flamingos, Penguins, and Platters crossed over to the mainstream charts and helped usher in rock and roll.

Wikipedia offers more of the story:

“1958 saw the rise of Italian American doo-wop groups. Like African-Americans, the Italian Americans generally attended church, where they gained singing experience, and lived in urban neighborhoods, where they would sing on street corners. By the late 1950s, Italian American street corner doo-wop groups were seen in cities such as New York, especially the Bronx and Brooklyn. The contribution of Hispanics is often overlooked. Early, especially in U.S. East Coast cities, Puerto Ricans were lead singers in some groups with black and white members. ‘Racially integrated’ groups with both black and white performers included the Del Vikings, Impalas and Crests.”

Coinciding with The British Invasion, by 1964 doo-wop virtually ceased to exist. Some groups, such the Four Seasons, Drifters, and Little Anthony and The Imperials managed to continue to chart and perform in the mainstream. Some members of other groups found a second wind at labels such as Motown, Stax, Chess, Atlantic, and Philadelphia International. Aside from Sha Na Na at Woodstock, the golden oldies revival shows of the ’70s, and the American Graffitisoundtrack, the doo-wop era was all but forgotten until Jersey Boys — the story of the Four Seasons — came to Broadway in 2005 and played through last year. Beyond the PBS pledge drive shows with reconstituted groups and cheap costumes, I think doo-wop lives on as just another footnote in the great big tent of roots music and Americana … whatever that is.

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

Willard’s Wormhole, Lonesome Lefty’s Scratchy Attic And The Demise of Music Blogging

Between the rapid rise and fall of the popular MP3 file sharing site Napster in 1999 and the launch of Spotify in 2007, a new music distribution platform emerged that was in equal measure criminal, historical, and fanatical. With a cavalier attitude toward intellectual property rights and the often unspoken encouragement from an industry that was blind to the changes that this technology would soon bring, the music blogosphere exploded. Divided into two camps, there were websites that were usually based in countries that stood outside the wall of the international justice system and specialized in hosting new music and popular catalog titles, and the more homegrown pages that often focused on 78 rpm or vinyl rips from out-of-print titles accompanied by long essays about the origin, credits, recording details, release history, and artwork.

It was the latter that attracted and fascinated me, less for the ability to download free music and more for the opportunity of receiving an education of the importance for preservation and archiving. As someone who spent his career working in both independent and major label distribution, I witnessed the loss and destruction of master tapes, the ignorance of both the importance and value of content, and the reckless abandonment of quality for the sake of squeezing a profit that still continues today. From the mishandled transition of analog tapes to digital carriers to the endless regurgitation of “new and improved” collections, it’s no surprise that a confused customer base grew weary.

I keep a folder in my internet bookmarks labeled “music blogs,” and although barely any are still active, sometimes digital dust is hard to sweep under the rug. For example, Lonesome Lefty’s Scratchy Attic hasn’t made any new posts since 2016, but this link will take you the still-hosted site. In some ways it’s like sifting through an archaeological site of old-time music, and you can tell that someone spent a great deal of time researching and resurrecting it. This particular site focused on the old Starday and King Records catalogs, leaning most heavily toward their country titles. It featured original artwork, liner notes, reviews, and pictures of the actual labels. Most of these titles will never ever see the light of day again, and if you hit the “download now” links you’ll be taken to a dead page or, worse, an anti-virus ad.

The closing down of Willard’s Wormholes was a complete and total erasure of one of the most extensive music websites ever created. With a ten-year run that ended last year, another site — BB Chronicles — published its obituary:

The great music-oriented blog Willard’s Wormholes is no more. And for those wondering just what may have happened to it, let me reassure you that it was not closed or shut down by any outside forces. No, ‘Willard’ just decided on his own that 10 years was long enough, and that he wanted to move on. And not wanting to attract undue attention or hoopla to the closure, he just quickly and quietly closed down the site. 

As all who frequented the site know, Willard’s Wormholes was most certainly one of the very best ever, if not THE best ever music blog of its type. Not only did it provide downloads of a wide variety of music types, popular and obscure, from classic blues and jazz to mainstream pop and rock to eclectic under-appreciated artists to obscure soundtracks, demos, and experimental sounds and sessions, but Willard always provided insightful commentary, information, and opinions on the music and artists.

In addition, the musical community that developed around the Wormholes was the best on the internet, providing useful, helpful, and worthwhile comments and background, and the thorough and abundant reader links that developed provided an additional treasure trove of musical goodies for all to enjoy.

In my nine-year tenure of writing here at No Depression, I’ve kept away from covering or exposing this musical underbelly primarily because of the murky legalities, but also because it appeals to such a narrow audience. Wrath of The Grapevine, which shut down in 2013, addresses the former, and it’s similar to notes you’ll see on most of the blogs:

The music on this site is mostly old, hard-to-find, or under-noticed music. Many of the musicians are dead. As for the living musicians, I put their music here because I want to spread and publicize it, not because I want to rip them off. Musicians, like artists, are a hard-working and under-compensated lot, and I highly recommend that if you like the music you find here, you seek out their other recordings. Of course, if any musician finds their music here and wants it removed, contact me and I’ll happily oblige.

Somebody out there probably wants to learn more about Hylo Brown and the Timberliners, Willie Clancy or Bashful Brother Oswald … and there are still a handful of sites out there still actively trying to keep this anarchist-archival aesthetic alive. But to Willard, Lonesome Lefty, Lost in Tyme, Sed De Musica, Time Will Tell You, The Secret Vault, Record Fiend, Jukebox City and the rest of y’all, this is a fond farewell.

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

Bill Browning and The Grateful Dead: 60 Years of ‘Dark Hollow’

Back in 1958 a young singer-songwriter from West Virginia named Bill Browning recorded for a small regional record label. After one of his tunes – “Borned With The Blues” – was released, the song on the flip side of the record was quickly noticed and re-recorded by two other artists with better distribution: Luke Gordon and Jimmie Skinner. While Browning and His Echo Valley Boys’ version was cut in the rockabilly style, Gordon and Skinner’s versions are heavily influenced by Hank Williams. The song was called “Dark Hollow.”

For a song recorded dozens of times by numerous artists and that has become a staple at bluegrass jams, there is very little known about Bill Browning. He was born in 1931 in Wayne County, West Virginia, and actively recorded for three years on several labels including Island, Alta, Enola, Quality, and Starday. During that time period up until 1960, he also performed on WWVA’s Jamboree radio show, and he played gigs in both his home state and Ohio. Sometime in the early 1970s he moved to Hurricane, a small town in West Virginia, and opened up a recording studio while also running Alta Records, which he did until he passed away from cancer in 1977, just shy of his 46th birthday.

Jimmie Skinner was born in Berea, Kentucky, and his family rode that “hillbilly highway” to Hamilton, Ohio, in the early ’30s. Although his recording career had several false starts and didn’t take off until 1949, he managed to write a song that charted for Ernest Tubb and another for Johnny Cash. Throughout the ’50s, Skinner was based in Cincinnati and recorded for Capitol, Decca, and Mercury, where he took “Dark Hollow” to #7 on the country charts.

Luke Gordon’s family also migrated from Kentucky, but headed east to Falls Church, Virginia. He performed in the Washington, DC, area, often entertaining for the wounded military men at Walter Reed hospital in Bethesda and became well known in the Northern Virginia area. His version of “Dark Hollow” also charted, and in 1966 he created his own record label called World Artist.

How the song morphed into a bluegrass standard isn’t clear, although it appears that both Mac Wiseman as well as Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys featuring Larry Sparks started playing it around the same time, in the mid- to late ’60s.

There’s some interesting theories on how the song finally came to the Grateful Dead, with some folks giving Bob Weir credit and others pointing to Jerry Garcia, which seems to make more sense to me. In 1963 Jerry met his first wife, Sara Ruppenthal, and as a duo they played folk and bluegrass at local clubs around Palo Alto. The following year he started up the Black Mountain Boys, a bluegrass band with him playing banjo, Eric Thompson on guitar, future NRPS member David Nelson on mandolin and the Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter doing bass. There’s a great long recording of them here. Garcia was so into bluegrass that he traveled to Bill Monroe’s annual festival with the hope of auditioning for him but lost his nerve.

In March of 1967, Garcia had gone electric and was down in Los Angeles. Visiting the Ash Grove, a famed local club of the time, he introduced a set of Clarence and Roland White’s band and it included this version of “Dark Hollow,” which is close to the style that the Dead eventually recorded acoustically around 1970 and released on the Bear’s Choice album in 1973.

Folks who keep track of such things note that the Dead performed the song over 30 times over a 10-year period, with at least a few electric versions. In 1973, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, and John Khan were in Muleskinner, a bluegrass band with Bill Keith and Clarence White, releasing  one album that featured “Dark Hollow.” When the three left and formed Old and In The Way along with Garcia and Vassar Clements, the song was again included in their repertoire.

The list of bands who have continued performing this American folk song is extensive and includes the following: J.D. Crowe and The New South, Larry Sparks and The Lonesome Ramblers, Kentucky Colonels, Seldom Scene, Country Gazette, David Bromberg, Tony Rice, String Cheese Incident, Bill Monroe, Del McCoury, Dwight Yoakum, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and a few dozen more.

We’ll close this one out with not one … not two … but three different versions from the Dead and friends. The first is from 1970 with Jerry playing pedal steel guitar, followed by an acoustic version from the  October 1980 Radio City Music Hall series, and the last features just Jerry and Bob with Joan Baez at a benefit concert in 1987.

Happy 60th and hats off to Bill Browning.

The Milk Carton Kids Are Missing! (But They Came Back)

Just a note of clarification before you read this: Within a few months after I posted this article, the Milk Carton Kids released a new album titled All The Things I Did & All The Things That I Didn’t Do. It was a departure from their previous pure duo format, with a full contingent of backing musicians. The guys went out on the road to support it and although perhaps not as acclaimed as their past work, it is a fabulous album that shows both enormous growth and potential.

Last week I remembered to check the humidity level in the room where I store some of my guitars in the winter months, and when I opened the case of my Martin 000-15M the smell of mahogany filled the room and triggered a memory. My one and only visit to the Newport Folk Festival was back in 2013, and among the highlights was an amazing afternoon set by Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale. They looked a lot like Chad and Jeremy, sounded harmonically close to Paul and Artie, and used humor not unlike a dry-witted version of the Smothers Brothers. Joey plays the Gibson J-45 and Kenneth picks his runs with a 1954 Martin 0-15, also made of mahogany like my own but with a white handkerchief tied around the neck, hence my momentary olfactory recollection.

In May it’ll mark three years since the “kids” released their fourth album, Monterey, and it feels like they’re long overdue. From their first release back in early 2011 through 2016, they have been hardcore road warriors playing concerts and festival dates around the globe. And so it was a bit surprising when I checked their website the other day and read this:

For the first time in seven years, The Milk Carton Kids have no upcoming performances.

After playing hundreds of gigs they actually slowed it down quite a bit in 2017 with only 14 dates that came to an end on Nov. 7 at the Taft Theater in Cincinnati. A week later they were featured on a special episode of Austin City Limits along with Graham Nash as part of the Americana Honors and Award night. And then poof … gone.

After checking Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for both the band and individual members, all is quiet with the exception of a couple retweets here and there. Being the internet sleuth that I am, a couple of breadcrumbs popped up on the trail. Woodstock musician Ed Romanoff is releasing his new album The Orphan King on Feb. 23, and Kenneth is a guest player. And this month in an interview with the LA Review of Books, producer Joe Henry mentioned that he’s currently working with the duo.

For the first time in seven years, The Milk Carton Kids have no upcoming performances.

Three years isn’t that long of a stretch between albums, and taking it easy on the road last year compared to their previous nonstop travel makes pretty good sense, both physically and spiritually. Of course, on the other hand, would it kill them to do a least a small tour? Maybe a few dates here and there? After all, it’s just two guys, two guitars, a couple of suits, some extra picks and handkerchiefs, and their iPhones. Low key and easy, unlike some bands. For example, when the Rolling Stones go out on tour they travel with 20 18-wheelers, six tour buses, gourmet chefs, physical therapists, personal trainers, doctors, nurses, accountants, social media assistants, makeup artists, hair stylists, wig makers, costume people, filmmakers, archivists, an acupuncturist, nine wives, 15 grandkids, three girlfriends younger than their grandkids, one cryogenic tube, a blood transfusion van, and portable microbrewery.

Alright guys … I wish you were here too, but you’re still young with lots of creative juice, and I expect you’ll be around for far longer than I will. So take a break, get your houses in order, do some side projects, hang out at the Largo, eat pie at DuPars, maybe go to Disneyland, get a little ink on your arms, and catch some Dodger games. But just know that I miss you guys and can’t wait for y’all to get back to work. Just to give you a little push, if you’re reading this: While four albums in four years might seem like a lot, Japanese “noise” artist Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, has averaged one album per month for over 35 years. Now that’s a lot of noise.

For the first time in seven years, The Milk Carton Kids have no upcoming performances.

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

Photo Credit: Chicago 2017 / Photo by @megandoodlebaker

Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music

Several months ago when I transitioned from an owner of music to a renter via streaming, the first selection I imported into my cloud-based digital library was a collection of folk music I first heard when I was just a little sprout. I was introduced to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music by an aunt who also taught me how to make chords and strum her guitar. She allowed me take her well-worn vinyl disc box set home, and for weeks I devoured this music. I couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old, and along with having an older sister who endlessly played Joan Baez’s early albums as often as she’d listen to doo wop, rockabilly, and Elvis records, this early life genre convergence and musical immersion set my plate for life.

In the midst of reading a book about the life of Bill Monroe, I was recently reminded that both the Anthology and I will turn 66 this year. While much has been written about this compilation, it seems a good time to both rekindle the memories of older roots music fans and introduce this work to a younger generation.

Harry Smith was a man with diverse interests. He has been described as an experimental filmmaker, visual artist, mystic, bohemian, self-taught anthropologist, and collector of string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles, Ukrainian Easter eggs, and out-of-print commercially released 78 RPM recordings from 1927 through 1935. After moving to New York in 1950, he found himself in need of money when his Guggenheim grant for an abstract film ran out, and he offered to sell his entire music collection to Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records. With the introduction of the long-playing album format, Asch instead encouraged Smith to create a compilation of these songs, and he provided him with office space and equipment. What resulted were three two-disc sets titled Ballads, Social Music, and Songs.

In 2014, author Amanda Petrusich published her book Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records and devoted an entire chapter to the Anthology, which was reprinted and is still viewable online at Pitchfork. It is easily the finest and most interesting account of Smith’s assembly of songs, and I love this particular description:

“Previously, these tracks were islands, isolated platters of shellac that existed independently of anything else: even flipping over a 78 required disruptive action. Shifting the medium from the one-song-per-side 78 to the long-playing vinyl album allowed, finally, for songs to be juxtaposed in deliberate ways. It’s possible now, of course, to dump all eighty-four tracks onto one digital playlist and experience the entire Anthology uninterrupted, but I still prefer to acknowledge the demarcations between its three sections — to play it as Smith did.”

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the benefactor and guardian of Moe Asch’s wonderful record label, re-released the Anthology on six compact discs in 1997, and all of the songs are available to listen to for free on their website. The box set includes a 96-page book featuring Smith’s original liner notes and various essays by writers, scholars, and musicians. Here are two brief excerpts:

“The Anthology was our bible … . We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated. They say that in the 19th-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote along with him. It was like that.” – Dave Van Ronk

“First hearing the Harry Smith Anthology of American FoIk Music is like discovering the secret script of so many familiar musical dramas. Many of these actually turn out to be cousins two or three times removed, some of whom were probably created in ignorance of these original riches. It also occurred to me that as we are listening at a greater distance in time to a man or woman singing of their fairly recent past of the 1880s, we are fortunate that someone collected these performances of such wildness, straightforward beauty, and humanity.” – Elvis Costello

The collection offers something for everyone – folk, blues, Cajun, gospel, stringbands, Hawaiian and more – and is less historic and more the progenitor of modern day mix-tapes and curated playlists. Inspirational and influential, if you’re looking for the starting gate of both  yesterday’s traditional old-time roots music and today’s popular Americana-branded genre, this is it.

Postscript: Producer Hal Willner paid tribute to the Anthology with a revisionist version called The Harry Smith Project, which included a two-CD set and DVD that were culled from a series of concerts in London, New York, and Los Angeles in 1999 and 2001. Featuring a wide variety of musicians from Steve Earle to Lou Reed, Sonic Youth to The McGarrigle Sisters, it is a loving interpretation that you may have missed. Here’s a taste with Richard Thompson, Eliza Carthy, and Garth Hudson covering Clarence Ashby’s “The Coo Coo Bird.”

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