livestreams Archives - The Real Easy Ed

Photo from Larkin Poe Instagram

Sometime during my first week of our pandemic lockdown I was mindlessly surfing through Facebook, as one does, when I came across two women playing and singing in a casual setting with minimal production value but pretty good audio quality. Larkin Poe. Name sounded familiar, but I don’t think I’d ever heard them play before. They were doing this cover version of a ZZ Top song that I’ve never really liked, so I moved on. Thirty seconds later I went back to watch them finish it. And then I watched it again.

Since March 12, I have listened to what seems like several thousand hours of music; watched Scandinavian television shows; sampled films from South Korea; did the Tiger King boogie in one sitting; started, stopped, and started again to binge Ozark; read three different books simultaneously; and have tried hard to play guitar at least an hour a day. I’ve risked my life for a dozen bagels and a bag of Oreos. Stood in line for over an hour to buy a dozen bottles of sparkling water and a carton of almond milk that did not feature the faces of any missing children on the side. Once, I repeatedly refreshed the Costco app on my iPhone over a 36-hour period without any sleep until it finally allowed me order a case of Bounty paper towels, which I patiently waited four weeks to receive. I’ve bought two black handmade face masks from a woman in Latvia named Veronika who posted them on Etsy, and she has sworn to me that they were sent to me over a month ago. And I believe her.

Have you ever heard of a band called Severe Tire Damage? Me neither. On June 24, 1993, they were the first band to perform live on the internet, beating out The Rolling Stones by a year. In 1995, RealNetworks streamed the first baseball game: the New York Yankees versus the Seattle Mariners. And in 1998 Dale Ficken and Lorrie Scarangella stood in a Pennsylvania church as the Rev. Jerry Falwell sat in his office in Lynchburg, Virginia, and officiated their wedding over the web. It wasn’t until 10 years later that YouTube hosted its first livestream and opened up a new media format for live music, sporting events, original programming, gaming, pornography, and things we’ve never imagined and are still evolving.

Two months after watching that first Larkin Poe livestream, which has since been viewed over one million times on Facebook, I am still enchanted by this sister duo. I’ve watched Megan Lovell play a duet with her musician husband, and watched her DIY slide guitar lessons. I have seen Rebecca Lovell’s kitchen and grabbed my guitar while she taught us a blues riff from one of their new songs. I’ve heard them cover Black Sabbath and sing a Bill Withers song when he passed, and they’ve talked about their new album, Self Made Man, that comes out June 12 and the worldwide tour that was planned and is obviously in pause mode.

It was only when I followed the trail to Larkin Poe’s Wikipedia page that I realized I had once known them as The Lovell Sisters, an acoustic roots band from Georgia that included their older sister Jessica, who performed together from 2005 through late 2009. I’d heard them on Prairie Home Companion and there’s a hard drive in my apartment that I’m pretty sure contains their two albums. As teenagers they were road warriors, touring in a minivan and playing up to 200 dates a year. When Jessica left the band, the other two formed Larkin Poe in 2010 and their music has since evolved into a hard-charging Southern blues, rock, and roots orientation.

Rebecca and Megan released several projects on their own and played as backing musicians on a number of tours with Elvis Costello, Conor Oberst, Keith Urban, Kristian Bush of Sugarland, and others. They were tapped by T Bone Burnett as players in the band for Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes in 2014 and made their debut at the Glastonbury Festival that summer. Their fourth album, Venom & Faith, reached number one on the Billboard Blues Chart in November 2018 and received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

Each of the Larkin Poe videos above were originally streamed on Facebook and Instagram during the lockdown. Both sisters are social media savvy, and for years have built a loyal following around the world by letting their individual personalities shine through the screen and interacting in a very natural way. They have certainly brightened my two months at home, and it feels like I’ve made two new friends who have broken the fourth wall.

Now living in Nashville, the sisters say this is the longest period in 15 years that they have not been on the road. And it comes at a particularly important time in their career, with Self Made Man scheduled for release next month. If you head over to their website, you’ll find links to the weekly livestream concerts they’ll be doing in May and June, along with tour dates – fingers crossed – that follow.

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

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.

This was published at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website, on my first day of self-isolation or whatever y’all want to call it. As you’ll see below, my area had 98 cases on March 13 2020, and as of today, sixty-one days later, there are 32,673 cases with 1,313 deaths. Knowing that “One day in April it will just disappear…it’ll be a miracle” was just another lie, I suspected we would all be craving live music. Putting together this video music festival was an idea behind the times, as a week or two later musicians began to livestream on social media. Now, mammoth events are taking place and people are spending a lot of time watching and hearing some great content. In any event, I still like my choices, and thought you might enjoy them as well. What do you have to lose?

As I sit in my apartment a few miles north of New York City, and only a few minutes away from what we’re now calling The Containment Area, I wait for the pandemic to land at my doorstep. In our little corner of Westchester County there are now officially 98 cases of the coronavirus reported, schools are closed, the National Guard has been dispatched, I witnessed a fight over toilet paper at the local Costco this morning, and, God help us, they’ve sold out of frozen pizza at Trader Joe’s.

With millions of people living in the tri-state area you might think that a few hundred confirmed cases doesn’t sound all that threatening, but all the public health officials are warning it’s only the beginning. The World Health Organization‘s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced that “We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction.” (The Washington Post — or #fakenews as some call it.)

While Tedros could be right, he’s probably not heard that here in America we’ve already developed an antidote to the virus. It seems that a weekend of playing golf at Mar-a-Lago and shaking hands with possibly infected ass-kissing conservative politicians and donors will make you immune to all future illness. And if for some reason that fails, we’ll be arming every doctor and nurse with automatic weapons and orders to shoot the germs on sight while we begin building walls around hospitals.

If you think I’m making light of this human tragedy, it’s only because I’m anxious and nervous, and humor is a form of relief. You see, at my age with an underlying medical condition and being a Democratic Socialist who likely conspired with the Chinese to cause this to happen, my odds of beating this virus if it lands at my doorstep aren’t all that great. And so here I am, acting like a young Brian Wilson: in my room.

Sadly, you’ve likely heard that music festivals and tours are being canceled in rapid succession. Musicians, record labels, and fans have lost money that they probably barely scraped together to attend SXSW in Austin. Marketing and launch plans have turned to dust, and the organization will not be issuing any refunds. To add insult to injury, any national economic relief plan that the DC superstars put together will exclude participants in the arts.

For almost six years up until 2016, Couch By Couchwest was a great way for musicians to share their music. Running concurrently with SXSW, the online video festival let anybody upload a clip to their site and you could tune in whenever you wanted and catch both pros and amateurs. I heard a lot of great music, made lifelong friends, and it beat the inconvenience, heat, and cost of any outdoor festival. If you guys are still out there, this would be a great time for a revival.

Lacking that effort, I’ve put together my own mini-fest of some recent (mostly) live videos for your enjoyment. Please wash your hands for 20 seconds before watching and try not to breathe. And please, stay safe.

For more information on finding sources for online concert streaming, check out this article from the San Francisco Chronicle. And for news on the financial impact the virus is having on the music industry, here’s an overview from Fortune.

Milk Carton Kids and Rose Cousins – “Wild World”