Tag Archives: “Amanda Petrusich”

Easy Ed’s Outtakes #1

Photo by Sandy Dyas

Easy Ed’s Broadside weekly column has been a fixture at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music for over ten years. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

Killer Duets: Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones

Almost two months ago RS Country reported on a new project from Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones. They wrote: ‘Little Windows, the first collaborative album from singer-songwriters Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones, packs a whole career’s worth of sparkling pop gems and sobering country ballads into a collection that runs just short of 26 minutes. What’s more remarkable, however, is that the LP represents a relatively new partnership, and every one of the songs is original to the project, although any of the album’s 10 tracks could be mistaken for some long-lost sonic nugget from the Fifties or Sixties’. Read more here.

Bars of Allman Joy

The first time I laid eyes on the Allman Brothers was inside a beer and clams bar on the boardwalk of Atlantic City on July 4th 1971. It was a way too early too early Sunday morning and residue from the previous nights activities could still be felt and smelled. I was there with a blonde haired girl named Karen who was pregnant and running away from her boyfriend Bobby. He later married my cousin, and then they broke up. I recognized Duane among the seven or eight guys who sat across the stick from us, and I recall we traded some laughs about weed and the condensation dripping down the outside of the pitchers of beer that sat before us. They were finishing up a week long run at The Steel Pier. I may have seen then that week, or not. Hard to remember, but I know I went to one of their shows sometime that year. Duane was gone by October.

Garden and Gun has published a slideshow of photos that appear in a new book by Kirk West. This is one of my favorites, and here’s the link to it and the overview: Back in the 1970s, photographer Kirk West was just a self-described “hippie with a camera” and a diehard Allman Brothers Band fan who traveled to see his favorite Southern rock group whenever he could. He became such a fixture that the band invited him backstage and to studio sessions, and in 1989, West joined the crew as an assistant tour manager. “I was only supposed to work for three weeks,” he says, “and it ended up being twenty-one years.”

Over at Oxford American, my favorite music journalist and author Amanda Petrusich…whose books you should add to your reading list asap if you somehow missed them…has published The Road Goes on Forever, a beautifully crafted article on the band. You can read it here, but if you’re super-smart you’ll also buy the OA Georgia Music Issue before it sells out. It includes their annual sampler CD that is indeed exceptional. (Read more about Amanda and her books at My Back Pages.)

Radio is a sound salvation. Radio is cleaning up the nation. Radio, Radio

Somewhere along the way, despite my early adaption of digital music files over shiny discs of plastic, I missed the podcast thing. In a recent article over at No Depression from Sloane Spencer, her recap of the past year caught my eyes.

Top-notch programs from media powerhouses and coalitions of their expatriates have brought the medium to general recognition in America. Many of the early, grassroots, or DIY programs, though, went on permanent hiatus or completely ended their runs. A lot of this churn is normal attrition, but a lot of it is due to the success of podcasting itself. Superstars exploded from the top echelons while those bubbling up from below saw downloads stay flat or vastly decrease while streaming took over. For indie podcasts, streaming is not even monetized by the content maker, as most of it is via apps that pick up the RSS feed and redistribute thousands of programs.

As we all muddle along trying to figure out what is happening and will happen with “new media,” change is gonna come. Change is opportunity.

While I still figure out for myself if I have the time and inclination, my friend Carter recently shared with me how he finds so much (free) old-time music on the web using a couple of podcast apps. So as I was on the Smithsonian Folkways site today looking for something other than this, when I happened to discover that they have a series of 24 one-hour shows called The Folkways Collection. You could spend an entire day listening to this.

On Roy Zimmerman, Donald Drumpf, Kylie Jenner and the kitchen sink.

Every other week my Easy Ed’s Broadside column is published on the No Depression website, and my most recent one is a meandering walk through the current state of how hashtags have usurped the sixties protest music movement that used to ‘spread the word’ back in the day. Actually, I contradicted that thought when I noted the last song ever written that galvanized a generation to actually do something was Ray Steven’s “The Streak”. Anyway…you can read the article here and I’m putting up one of Roy’s videos for your amusement and joy.

https://youtu.be/Ege_RBhh37A

Every Picture Tells a Story

Sandy 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 website here and check out her work, books and blog. And more of her images can be seen on this site too.

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

A List of Performers at SXSW 2016 That I Found.

Happened to notice this on Untitled Magazine‘s site, and it just seemed such a strong image of randomness, not that I didn’t immediately recognize that it was simply arranged alphabetical. I choose to think that simply staring at the letters is particularly intellectually satisfying if you’re not planning to take the trip to Austin. And I’m not.

3ballMty, Abjects, Barry Adamson, Adée, Alex G, Alice on the roof, Aloa Input, Altimet & the Kawan Band, Anamanaguchi, And The Kids, Autobahn, Avec Sans,The Ballroom Thieves, The Band of Heathens, Bee’s Knees, Better Person, Beverly, Big Phony,Bird Dog, Bombino,Boulevards,Brass Bed, Bye Bye Badman, Laura Carbone,Rosie Carney, Caveman, Ceasetone, Chirkutt, Cirkus Funk, Cóndor Jet, The Crookes, Crystal Castles, Dash Rip Rock, David Wax Museum, Demob Happy, Dolce,Downtown Boys, Dubioza Kolektiv, Eau Rouge, EMUFUCKA, Expert Alterations, Lena Fayre, Fear of Men, Few Bits, Ian Fisher, The Foreign Resort, Andy Frasco & the U.N., A Giant Dog, Matt Gilmour’s Patient Wolf, Gold Class, Jon Dee Graham, William Harries Graham & the Painted Redstarts, Guerilla Toss, HÆLOS, Haihm, Har Mar Superstar, Hinds, Howardian,S ilvana Imam, Imran Aziz Mian Qawwal, Into It. Over it., Jahkoy, Jambinai, John GRVY, Judah & the Lion, KAO=S, Marina Kaye, The Kickback, La Banda Morisca, Lazyeyes, Lois, Demi Louise, Love X Stereo, Lushes, Mai Nimani, Mamamoo, MC Lars, Methyl Ethel, Mise en Scene, Missi & Mister Baker, Moving Panoramas, Mumiy Troll, The National Parks, Oil Boom, OKRAA, Paul Oscher, Overload, The Parrots, PHASES, Platonick Dive, The Pocket Rockets, Ron Pope, Prince Rama, Pure Bathing Culture, Quebe Sisters, Self Defense Family,S kyline, Sleepers’ Reign, Southern Hospitality, The Spook School, Suboi, Summer Heart, Sunflower Bean, Sur du monde, Tarmac, The Nightowls, Throwing Shade, Vaadat Charigim, Victim Mentality, Victoria+Jean, Waco Brothers, Wahid Allan Faqir, The Wet Secrets, Wildhoney, Marlon Williams & The Yarra Benders, Womps, Wordburglar, XYLØ, Yuck

I should note the passing of the SXSW music festival co-counder Louis Meyers who was part of the original team that started this back in 1987. He left it in 1994 citing the stress of the conference. Meyers was also a musician, playing banjo and recording, touring, producing or performing with Bill & Bonnie Hearne, Bob Schneider, Killbilly, The Killer Bees, Mojo Nixon, Fastball, Willis Alan Ramsey, Tommy Ramone, and Jello Biafra, among many others.

And In The End…A Song I Love That Sir George Martin Produced. RIP.

Amanda Petrusich and A 78RPM Groovy Kind of Love

This past Christmas I bought my oldest son a few books of the non-digital variety. One was a Johnny Carson biography, another was about a topless cellist I once saw perform in a Philadelphia park, and the third was Amanda Petrusich’s latest, “Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records”.

Although he thanked me, when I saw him slightly push Amanda’s book to the edge of the table I suspected he had already read it. And he had. Which was fine with me, since I was going to borrow it anyway. I loved her previous book, a road trip journal which obviously laid the groundwork for the author’s long- title fetish, “It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways and the Search for American Music”. It’s a great read for any roots music fan, and they are both available from Amazon, along with her first inappropriately short-titled Nick Drake book “Pink Moon”.

Yesterday I read the first chapter of Do Not Sell, and I’m already hooked on the storyline and her observations. A veteran music writer with an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia and currently a teacher at NYU’s Gallatin University, Amanda has a way of articulating feelings and thoughts on music that resonate with my own connection to consumption.

Like many people in the business of music, my own background in distribution, retail, working with labels and as a serial-blogger has allowed me virtually unlimited free music for most of my adult life. It’s been great to have access. But it also messes with your head. These days, with just a little skill in technology and web-surfing, everyone can find a song or album that can be “acquired and judged in the time it takes to eat a cheese sandwich”.

Amanda speaks to the acquisition of free music, in terms of the perception and value of it, like this:

“It’s reductive to suggest that the availability of free or nearly free music-and the concurrent switch, for most of the population, from music as object to music as code-has inexorably altered our relationship with sound, and I don’t actually believe that the emotional circuitry that allows us to love and require a bit of music is dependent on what it feels like in our hands. But I do think that the ways in which we attain art at least partially dictate the ways in which we ultimately allow ourselves to own it.”

With such unlimited and easy access to music, and especially with new releases flooding the marketplace (if you can still call it that) to the tune of well over 100,000 albums per year, I’ve experienced my own listening habits change from when I was a kid who visited ten record stores every Saturday and came home juggling bags of 45’s and albums. For the next week I’d sit alone in my bedroom and listen to everything, staring at the cover art and reading the liner notes…a term soon to be as extinct as a tyrannosaurus rex. And it took me someplace that I have long ago left. It was that obsessive compulsion to seek out and discover the new and unknown that gave me the passion to want more. Once I could just have it, I became a little bored, and jaded. Fast forward to 2015.

In describing her own transition from consumer-collector to critic, Amanda nails it:

“Unless I was being paid to professionally render my opinion, I listened to everything for three or seven or nine minutes and moved on. I was overwhelmed and underinvested. Some days, music itself seemed like a nasty postmodern experiment in which public discussion eclipsed everything else, and art was measured only by the amount of chatter it incited. Writing and publishing felt futile, like tossing a meticulously prepared pork chop to a bulldog, then watching him devour it, throw it up and start eating something else.”

Overwhelmed and underinvested. And this, my friends, is only page three. What follows is the story of those who still hunt, stalk and collect…in this case, the most elusive 78 rpm recordings ever released. Leafing through the pages, I can’t wait to read this book. And so I won’t.

Visit Amanda’s website for some great music and links to other writing.

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 .