Odd Man Out: Ousted Eagles Guitarist Fires Back with Book

Sunday News
Published: November 23, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

As a guitarist for the Eagles, Don Felder had thousands of screaming fans at his feet almost every night of the week in every corner of the world. "It's the greatest feeling to go on stage and see people have the kind of excitement I got when I first saw Elvis or B.B. King," Felder said. "That's the kind of validation you want for all your hard work."

It's the kind of validation Felder no longer gets, at least not as a member of the Eagles. When the band takes the stage tonight at Hershey's Giant Center, he'll be at home in southern California trying to enjoy his semiretirement. The Eagles unceremoniously terminated Felder, and his new tell-all book, "Heaven and Hell: My Life With the Eagles (1974-2001)," explains why.

It describes a poor kid from Gainesville, Fla., who played in garage bands with Stephen Stills, hung out with Duane and Gregg Allman in their teens, gave a young "Tommy" Petty his first guitar lessons and went on to join one of the world's biggest bands.

He got fired from that band, he says, for asking too many questions. Around the same time, his marriage of 29 years to his high school sweetheart was ending. It was an awful period for Felder."My entire world turned upside down. I was wandering in some kind of void, a fog," he said in a telephone interview from his Malibu home. "It was unnerving, disturbing."

During his three decades with the Eagles, Felder made an invaluable contribution, not the least of which was co-writing "Hotel California," "Victim of Love" and "These Shoes" and contributing tasteful, tough guitar licks that helped the band transform itself from a strictly country-rock combo into a harder-edged arena-rock supergroup.

His dismissal from the group in early 2001 was the result of the kind of wrangling and Machiavellian business style the Eagles were known for. It shook out like this: When the band got back together in 1994 for the "Hell Freezes Over" album and tour, the group's corporate structure was realigned, with singer-songwriters Glenn Frey and Don Henley given bigger shares of the revenue than Felder, guitarist Joe Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmit, each of whom would get one-seventh of the total pot.

Felder, by then the longest-serving member of the band besides Frey and Henley, was eager to play the hits again, and the thought of a massively lucrative tour was powerful incentive. "When someone is saying you could make 20 to 50 million over the next few years, you quickly become motivated." Felder agreed to the terms, with the understanding that he could renegotiate those terms later.

For Felder, it felt good knowing they had all survived the excesses of the '70s and came out the other side. The tour was like a celebration. But over the next five years, things went from unfair to worse, he contends. Deals were made in secret by Frey and Henley (whom Felder refers to derisively as "The Gods" throughout the book), essentially cutting out the other three members.

They and manager Irving Azoff began treating the rest of the group more as hired musicians than band mates, he says. "It got to the point where we were intimidated and afraid … like being at the office party when your boss is there," he writes in the book. "You just can't relax."

The extravagance of the touring organization also grew: pilates instructors, personal trainers, press agents, attorneys, accountants and hairdressers, not to mention nannies and tutors for the children that most of the band members kept in tow. Shortly after playing a hugely successful series of millennium concerts in Los Angeles in 1999, Felder demanded to see an accounting of revenues up to that point, which was his right as a member of the Eagles' corporate board.The response from the "Gods," he says, was to fire him.

Felder sued for breach of contract. Then he did one better: He wrote a book. The book wasn't meant to be a revenge project."It started out as a result of just spending some time each day meditating, asking myself how I had gotten to this place," he said.

"I started thinking about things I hadn't thought about in years and started jotting notes down like when you wake up from a dream and want to remember it in the morning." Writing longhand became tedious. "So I sat down at the computer, and naturally I started to flesh things out a bit, add some detail." It was his fiancée who first said it would make a good book.

"In the end, I think I learned that everything I thought was traumatic happened for a reason, was there to push me toward what was to come next," he said.But just when the book was about to go to press, another problem arose. Having gotten wind of the book, the Eagles sued to try to keep Felder from printing it.

Though the suit was essentially groundless ("We do have this thing called the First Amendment," Felder joked), it delayed the book's release by a year. In the end, all the suits and countersuits between Felder and the Eagles were conveniently rolled into one massive court proceeding. Less than a month before their day in court, the parties reached a settlement that Felder called "agreeable."

Felder doesn't regret publishing "Heaven and Hell," nor does he see the book as a barrier to reconnecting with his former bandmates. "The day they fired me, Glenn and Don dynamited all the bridges, so there were really none left for me to burn," he said.

He'd seen it before with other people who crossed Henley and Frey. "You either see it their way, or you are completely cut out." Felder sees irony in Henley's role as a spokesman for the Recording Artists' Coalition, a group that lobbies for better treatment of musicians by record companies. "That is like the Mount Everest of hypocrisy."

And while the group remains a draw, selling 6 million copies of its first new album in 13 years, "Long Road Out of Eden," they aren't the same band creatively. Felder insists the Eagles' success has done them in. "Greed is the ugliest human emotion," he said. "And with the Eagles, there were billions — and that is billions with a big 'B' — of dollars at stake over the years. "

"It ruins politicians, it ruins families and, of course, it has ruined many bands. And when there is that much money, the friendship and the music just get pushed to the back burner," he said, grateful to finally be away from it all.

These days, Felder is playing a lot of charity golf, doing corporate shows with the Don Felder Band, working on a solo album and promoting his book.Felder says he isn't bitter and feels lucky to have been part of such a successful, respected group, no matter how hellish the ride or how ugly his departure. "To be able to see people feel the way I first felt about music when I was 10 years old, that is the heavenly part."

Eagles New Stuff Doesn't Soar Like the Hits

New Era
Published
ByJOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

It's a joke that's been around at least as long as classic rock groups from the '60s and '70s have been reuniting. When the singer says "here's a song from our new album," he or she might as well say "everybody go and get a beer now…."

So for a band like the Eagles to start each of their two sets with no less than four new songs from last year's "Long Road Out of Eden" would seem like a colossally bad move. Knowing everything we do about Glenn Frey and Don Henley, it also might seem a brilliant tactical maneuver.

Interspersed between better-loved hits, the new tunes would surely suffer by comparison. And an audience not itching for the next old classic might be more likely to listen more intently to the new stuff that plays along with it.

About that new stuff: It's not nearly as good as "The Long Run," the group's last studio album from 1979, but that's so long ago it's like comparing Ataris to iPods.

When the band took the stage just before 8:30 Sunday night at the Giant Center, all of them wearing nicely cut black suits like a corporate board, it seemed the audience was unprepared for a rock and roll show. Nobody stood up for the first 20 minutes.

Workmanlike songs such as "How Long," and "Busy Being Fabulous" sound more like Rascal Flatts than the Eagles, but are certainly better than the stuff tacked onto "Hell Freezes Over," their 1994 reunion disc.

But it was, oddly enough, the classic material that sounded weak at first. "Hotel California," which used to open the group's shows on a dramatic note, sounded thin and forced.

Though a flamenco trumpet intro from one of the group's four back-up horn players established a sense of drama, it was robbed of its tension by the group's decision to lower the song's key over the years for singer Don Henley.

Glenn Frey's "Peaceful Easy Feeling" perhaps should have been lowered. As with almost all the songs Sunday night, the harmony vocals from everyone soared, but Frey seemed to struggle with what is a fairly relaxed melody.

Bassist Timothy B. Schmit, still the best singer in the group, turned in a seductive "I Can't Tell You Why," with extra sexiness layered on by support guitarist Stuart Smith's buttery R&B stylings.

But it was not until the spooky middle-eight of Henley's solo hit "Boys of Summer" that the band found its groove and was able to keep it, playing in front of black and white dreamlike images similar to the original groundbreaking music video.

Following quickly on its heels was Joe Walsh's "In The City," which let the singer/guitarist come alive for essentially the first time of the night. With added horns, searing slide and an extended ending, the song pushed the set to new heights.

Consequently, "The Long Run" was raised as well. Following a brief intermission, the group took to the stools for an acoustic set of new (and newer) songs: "No More Walks in the Woods," a predictably heavy-handed environmental statement from the pen of Henley that proved the four men could still harmonize flawlessly together; "Waiting in the Weeds," a notably better tune from Henley, comparing a dying romance to a dying town; Frey's forgettable "No More Cloudy Days," and Schmit's schmaltzy "Love Will Keep us Alive."

Then Frey nearly destroyed "Take it to the Limit." Originally sung by the soulful Randy Meisner, who exited the group in 1976, it was the only song of the night not originally sung by one of the four men on stage.

Henley's overwrought "Long Road Out of Eden," taking on the war in Iraq, economic uncertainty at home, and corporate greed — remember this is the band that made a deal to sell its disc exclusively at Wal-Mart to secure a better royalty deal — nearly stopped the show dead in its tracks.

Not satisfied, Frey's "Somebody" tried to do the same, but was rescued by some tasteful slide, again from Walsh, who brought things back down to earth with James Gang oldies "Walk Away" and "Funk No. 49," as well as his ode to the rock and roll lifestyle, "Life's Been Good."

As things began to work toward a close, the band pulled out all the stops for Henley's funky "Dirty Laundry," "Life in the Fast Lane," and "Heartache Tonight," all enhanced by horns and the dueling lead guitars of Walsh and Stuart.

Nine new songs, despite the fact that they were all spot-on vocally, is still a heavyweight. Coupled with Walsh's three solo selections and the same from Henley meant there was no room for non-hit fan favorites like "Ol '55," "Victim of Love," "Pretty Maids all in a Row," "Wasted Time," or even "Best of My Love."Encores "Take it Easy" and "Desperado" reached back to the group's country-rock beginnings.

Couldn't have made room for Schmit to do one of his old Poco tunes? Then of course we might have had to sit through "The Heat is On" from Frey.

If this is to be the last Eagles tour, as Frey has sometimes intimated from stage in between his disc jockey-like banter, the effort to prove their current music can stand next to their classic hits is a bold move. It didn't quite work Sunday night.

Graham Nash 'for Beginners'

Sunday News
Published: Oct. 5, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

In 1971, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were on the ropes. Their album "Déjà Vu" had been massively successful, but the group's members were heading in divergent musical and personal directions, well-evidenced on the disappointing live effort "Four Way Street," which consisted mostly of members playing by themselves.

On top of that, Nash's three-year relationship with songwriter Joni Mitchell — about whom he wrote the hit "Our House" — had ended abruptly. The dissolution of these partnerships would be a creative inspiration for Nash. His first solo album, "Songs for Beginners," was a surprise release that year, and to this day is considered among his best achievements.

This fall, that album gets its first proper CD treatment as a two-disc set from Atlantic/Rhino, complete with remastered sound with several mix options, new liner notes and an insightful interview with Nash about his award-winning photography. Its release coincides with a tour Nash is undertaking as a duo with David Crosby, an on-and-off partnership since the very days of "Songs for Beginners." The duo will perform at 7:30 p.m. tonight at Sovereign Performing Arts Center in Reading.

When Crosby, Stills & Nash first came together in Cass Elliot's living room in 1968, Graham was the outsider. Stephen Stills came from the genre-defying Buffalo Springfield, and David Crosby from the folk-rock inventing Byrds, the closest thing America could offer as an answer to the Beatles. Both were Southern California music veterans.

Nash, on the other hand, was English, formerly a member of the twee pop group the Hollies. He had an incredible voice, had written several hit songs for the Hollies and had pushed the band toward bold psychedelic experiments. But he had little street cred.

Early CSN hits like "Marrakesh Express," "Our House," about his early bucolic bliss with Mitchell, and the group's most recognizable standard, "Teach Your Children," all came from Nash's pen. Neil Young, another heavyweight writer, joined the group in the summer of 1969.I

t wasn't until things fell apart in both Nash's musical and personal spheres that he finally earned recognition as a solo artist.Nash never intended to release a solo album, hoping instead to bring CSN&Y back together. (He had taken on the role of peacemaker in the group.)

But the songs came, and friends — from Young (who appears under a pseudonym) and Crosby to Dave Mason, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Rita Coolidge — were there to help out. The results are as good, and perhaps better in some cases, than the solo efforts of Crosby, Stills and Young that came first.

"Better Days" channels classic gospel to find hope in a hopeless situation, rising from a simple piano into a rousing refrain, drenched in saxophone and churchy singing.

On the gentle, acoustic "Wounded Bird," Nash expresses pain reborn as empathy in a tune written about bandmate Stephen Stills, then going through a tumultuous breakup with folk singer Judi Collins. He hints at his own well of loss on "Sleep Song," rolling over in the morning to kiss his lover awake, only to realize it was a dream and she is already walking out the door. A glimpse of her dress is the last thing he ever sees of her.

By far, the album's great triumph is "I Used to Be a King," a scathing, soul-baring bit of self-mockery that alludes to "King Midas in Reverse," an old Hollies hit that was still knocking around the CSN&Y set list.

Garcia's glassy pedal steel and Crosby's shaky baritone guitar give the song an epic feel befitting a story of a man fallen from great heights: "I used to be a king, but everything around me turned to rust," sings Nash, a man standing very much alone. Ever the stoic optimist, Nash manages a little hope in the chorus: "Someone is going to take my heart/ But no one is going to break my heart again."

Nash being Nash, of course, a couple of protest songs made the cut as well, as if to certify that he hadn't given up on ideas greater than his own pain."Military Madness" linked Nash's wartime birth to Vietnam, while "Chicago" was written about the fallout from the 1968 Democratic Convention protests. By 1971, seven people were being tried for inciting the riots. The song also was a thinly veiled jab at Young and Stills, who turned down an invitation to play a benefit for the defendants as a group. Nash went anyway.

To this day, these activist songs are two of his best, played as recently as 2006, when CSN&Y came to Hersheypark Stadium on their critically praised, culturally toxic Freedom of Speech tour.

This time around, Crosby and Nash are again out to change the political landscape in an election year. But as gentle, pensive and thoroughly inward-looking as "Songs for Beginners" is, the duo can do it quietly.

Mac man delivers 'Gift of Screws'

Sunday News
Published: Oct. 5, 2008
by John Duffy, Correspondent

For years, Lindsey Buckingham had the hardest time finishing solo projects. A resolute perfectionist and studio tinkerer, he would spend years crafting his elegant, eccentric pop music. Half of the time he would be delayed by label indifference or corralled into one more round with Fleetwood Mac, the group he has fronted with Stevie Nicks since 1974.

His career stretches back to 1968, when Fritz, a band he co-led with Nicks, opened for Big Brother and the Holding Company at Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. But he's only put out five solo discs since first trying in 1982.

He left the Mac in 1987 in an effort to keep his creative energies focused on his own songs, but it was another six years before anything came of it.With the delivery of "Gift of Screws" this month, he's improved his pace to two solo albums in two years. Buckingham is touring in support of the album and will swing by Sovereign Performing Arts Center in Reading on Friday, Oct. 10.

In 2006, Buckingham released "Under the Skin," a quiet, introspective and deeply personal recording. Most of the songs were written in hotel rooms on a mobile recording unit he crates along on tour. At the time of its much-praised release, Buckingham promised a new, "more rocking" record within a year.

Many folks didn't believe it was possible, considering his track record, but here it is."I started 'Under the Skin' with deliberate ideas of what I wanted the songs to be like, or in fact not be like," he said in a telephone interview from a Nashville, Tenn., hotel room. Instead of rock songs, he came out with acoustic-drenched chamber pop with lush vocals and airy arrangements."When I got around to finishing these new songs, it just sort of happened that it turned into more of a loud, electric, lead-guitar sound."

Most of the 10 tracks on "Gift of Screws" feature the drums and driving pop hooks its predecessor avoided in favor of atmosphere and introspection. Like all Buckingham efforts, the disc was recorded entirely at his elaborate home studio. The songs themselves took a long time to find a home."Some of the tracks date all the way back to 1997 when we got back together to do the live album," Buckingham said, referring to the multiplatinum Fleetwood Mac CD/DVD "The Dance."

The solo album he was pursuing at the time got shelved, taking some songs along with it. "Then working on a solo project again in 2001, we got into what became 'Say You Will.'" The 19-track Mac album contains virtually an entire Buckingham solo record.

"Its not the first time there was that kind of an intervention," he said, laughing. After more than 30 years with the group, he's learned not to be territorial.That kind of heavy borrowing has happened a few times, and it isn't entirely unwelcome."It's sometimes difficult to have stuff sitting around for so long, you just want to get it out there just to get it off the books."

He would prefer to do so at his own pace, but band politics and label agendas can dictate otherwise. While a respected tunesmith, Buckingham's solo discs have never moved the kind of units that the Mac has, and his work has often been met with indifference by the very people at his label that he has helped make millionaires many times over.

"Under the Skin" was dismissed out of hand by Warner Bros. "They said, 'Yeah, we want to work with you, but we're not going to do anything with this,'" he recalled. "And they didn't." The album received minimum promotion.

But he's quick to admit the benefits of his position. "It's great to be part of this big machine," he said of Fleetwood Mac's perennial success. "And that allows me to be my own small machine."That small machine has taken most of a lifetime to sync up with the bargains necessary to be an artist of both high commercial appeal and creative self-respect, a theme "Gift of Screws" explores at length.

"Underground" finds the singer at odds with his audience, his patron and the lover he feels he has neglected for his own pursuits. He wonders if it's just best to lay low and not fight the battles at all.The explosive Phil Spector-meets-Jeff Lynne chorus of "Love Runs Deeper" speaks of the "underground" place where we hide our deepest love.

"The Right Place to Fade" (sounding more than a little like the old Mac chestnut "Second Hand News") tries to discern the right time to cut one's losses and save face.The driving rocker "Gift of Screws" declares that anything worth an ounce of investment doesn't come easily. The title cut, Buckingham said, was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem.

"She writes about how in order to get the sweetest, most fragrant smell from the flower you must put it into the press. … I hope I'm paraphrasing it properly. You have to put in the effort to get the most of what's around you."

For Buckingham, that's a philosophy that has served him well, even if the wait sometimes seems interminable.

Springsteen Brings Historic Show to Hershey Tonight

New Era

Published: Aug. 19, 2008

By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

In 2005 we got the Rolling Stones. Two years later, a reunited Police.Short of U2, or some miracle Beatles reunion, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's show tonight should be among the most unforgettable nights the crumbling old football arena has ever seen.

Tonight's 7:30 show begins the homestretch of a worldwide tour in support of Springsteen's 2007 album "Magic," which debuted last October at number one on Billboard's Top 200 and has sold just over a million copies.Springsteen shows are something to behold if you haven't had the pleasure.

They start out as house-rocking parties, become feverish — punctuated by moments of high drama and relentless energy — celebrating both the redemptive power of rock and roll and the shared history between band and audience.They end, for many, feeling like nothing short of a religious experience.

The current tour began, as almost all Springsteen tours have in the last decade, last September in dress rehearsals at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, N.J. That's the beach town where Bruce began his professional career in the late 1960s and met most of the musicians who would come to join the ranks of the E Street Band.

Since October, Springsteen and the band — who've never played Hersheypark — have made two trips each across Western Europe and North America, over 200 shows in front of a total of 2 million people.And so far, it has proven to be one of the most memorable E Street road journeys of all, though not without its difficult moments.

E Street Band organist Danny Federici, a Springsteen cohort since he was invited to join an acid-jam rock band called Steel Mill in 1968, made what would be his final performance on March 20 in Indianapolis.Having battled melanoma for three years, Federici died April 17.

Other luminaries in Bruce's orbit have also been extinguished over the course of the last year: the fortune teller Madam Marie, a fixture on Asbury Park's boardwalk for over 50 years and canonized in Springsteen's 1973 song "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy);" Bill Chinnock, who played in groups with virtually every E Streeter; Terry McGovern, Springsteen's personal assistant, bodyguard, and all around aide de camp, who passed during the recording of "Magic."

Perhaps in defiance of those losses, the Boss has been turning in what even his oldest fans are calling some of his most exciting shows ever. And he has his audience to thank.

It was on the European legs that a strange new element began to enter the shows; that of fans helping to determine what Bruce and the band would play. Changing the setlist for any given night on the fly has been a fact of life with Springsteen since the early 1970s. But at some point fans started bringing posters with hand-written requests on them, turning each concert into a make-your-own-setlist event; setlist blogging, if you will.

"People have brought signs to shows before and Bruce has on occasion said 'put those signs down,'" says Chris Phillips, editor of "Backstreets" since 1980, the definitive print and now online source of Springsteen and Jersey Shore music.

"But in Europe it kind of evolved organically," he said. "When they moved to stadiums he became more receptive to it."It's become almost a stump-the-band challenge, as people request obscure oldies, B-sides and album cuts the band hasn't played in years.

"Now it's become a regular part of the show; he'll go out to the audience and collect the signs, then go through them and spring them on the band. It's really mind blowing," says Phillips.

So far, the band hasn't been tripped up. Having played together most of their lives — and almost non-stop since reuniting in 1999 — that would be hard to do.

The big favorites like "Born to Run," "The Rising," "Thunder Road," "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," and "Badlands" are there, but are each night surrounded by…well, anybody's guess. Dramatic epics like "Jungleland" and "Incident on 57th Street," as well as oldies like "Twist and Shout," "Little Latin Lupe Lou," or "Quarter to Three."

"So the setlist is useless," guitarist Nils Lofgren told Billboard magazine earlier this summer. "The band, musically, is in the best shape we've ever been, I think," added Lofgren. "It's fun to be part of something…where a band leader can do that much improv and get away with it and have a band that'll deliver and make it work."

Bruce Springsteen: American Man

Sunday News
Published: Aug. 17, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent


He began his career as a skinny outcast who fought with his father, dropped out of community college and was facing a hopeless life. But since finding a sense of community and a sense of purpose in rock 'n' roll, Bruce Springsteen has come to represent the ideals of the modern American man.

Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen recorded one of his most important, most undervalued songs. "Walk Like A Man," from his album "Tunnel of Love," seldom makes an appearance in concert, but it's stuck in the rotation of Springsteen's life.In the song, the singer is standing at the altar about to be married. His father grips his hand, cries on his shoulder and turns away.

All the singer can remember is walking behind his father on the beach as a child, trying to match his manly stride, "tracing your footprints in the sand, trying to walk like a man."

While Springsteen, who will perform Tuesday in Hershey, still argues with himself about the role his father played in his life — as recently as 2006 he called his dad an absentee father, even though he was physically available, if emotionally distant — the song signaled that he had made some kind of peace with his father and realized he still had lessons to learn from him.

Today, Springsteen seems to have a more mature understanding of life and his place in it. Praise has been heaped upon him like no other artist since Bob Dylan, and he has evolved into more than just an iconic rock star, peerless bandleader and celebrator of cherished American dreams.

In short, he is a fit model of American manhood.Springsteen hasn't been gunning for the title of "model man." He would probably scoff at the idea. But in his life and music, he meditates on a set of admirable values and principles: loyalty, fidelity, integrity, love of community, patriotism rooted in solidarity, the glad responsibility of citizenship, reward in one's work, respect for others and satisfaction in love.

By Springsteen's unspoken standards, a man worthy of calling himself as much is a loving husband and devoted father, a faithful friend, a spiritual seeker and an engaged, compassionate citizen. He is able to celebrate the victories of life, but knows the cost if those victories are hollow or cheaply won.

To that end, Springsteen has conducted his personal life in close harmony with his musical ideals. He has kept business and personal struggles out of the limelight. Go ahead, Google him. You'll be hard pressed to find anything more than a lawsuit against a crooked manager in 1976 and a disagreement over a horse two years ago.

There have been no public temper tantrums, attacks on paparazzi, mad stalkers, drug arrests, illegitimate children or DUIs. He is either very lucky or very grounded. The argument for the latter seems most convincing.

Growing up, Bruce Springsteen knew the frustration of poverty. The Freehold, N.J., house where he spent most of his youth had a gaping hole in one wall that was never properly repaired. He told friends a plane crashed there during the war. His father drove a school bus.

Years later, he would sing with childlike wonder about looking up at a mansion on the hill, and in another song swore that once he grew up and became wealthy he would never drive a used car. Bruce now lives in that mansion on the hill, a few of them in fact, and while he can afford any car he wants, he prefers classics from the 1950s and 60s.

Springsteen settled his family only a few miles from Freehold. He still makes occasional forays into town,
visiting the old neighborhood, having a beer with the guy who lives in his boyhood home. He's even played benefits for the Catholic school that nearly kicked him out.

In rock 'n' roll, Springsteen found hope in the bleakness of his surroundings. The voices he heard on the radio came from mostly working-class kids, black and white. They spoke to him, gave him comfort and a taste of an exciting, alluring world. More to the point, they introduced a set of ideals on which to build a life.

An outcast at school, Springsteen found friendship and understanding among other musicians who shared his passion for rock music, and they became his de facto family. When he finally got signed to Columbia Records in 1972, he called in all the best Jersey Shore musicians he had worked with over the years — all ace players, but first and foremost, friends he could depend on and trust, personally and musically.

Many of the members of his E Street Band have been playing with him for decades. In 1991, Springsteen married singer Patti Scialfa, who joined the band in 1984. In April, organist Danny Federici, who hooked up with Springsteen in 1968, died of melanoma. Every night since, he's been given a touching tribute on tour.

It's no wonder that themes of friendship, loyalty and fidelity have found their way into the core of Springsteen's catalog. His social themes took a little longer to develop.Only in the last decade has Springsteen developed a strong political voice. Throughout the first epoch of his career, he aligned himself with no movements, sang no protest songs and burned no draft cards. (He failed his draft physical.)

In 1979, he performed at the No Nukes concerts against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and power plants, but was the only artist not to contribute a statement to the concert program. He turned a 1981 concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum into a benefit for the fledgling Vietnam Veterans of America, saving the group from an early demise. There he performed Credence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain," recognizing the song as an unofficial anthem of Vietnam vets.

He added his gruff refrain to the all-star "We Are the World" single in 1984 to aid famine victims in Africa, but didn't play Live Aid the following summer. He signed onto Amnesty International's Human Rights Now tour in 1988, and played Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" to a hopeful audience in East Berlin a year before the wall came down.

He imbued a man dying of AIDS with empathy and empowerment on his Oscar-award winning "Streets of Philadelphia"; pointed to the still-deep racial divide in America on "American Skin (41 Shots)," about the pointless shooting death of Amadou Diallo at the hands of New York City police; and channeled Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck on "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

But in choosing his stages, songs and statements, Springsteen steadfastly remained uncommitted to any political platform, party or candidate, despite having plenty of opportunities to declare himself.

When Ronald Reagan name-dropped Springsteen during a 1984 campaign stop in New Jersey, a state ravaged by the policies of Reaganomics, Springsteen said nothing. Twelve years later, Bob Dole tried the same trick. This time, Bruce wrote a letter to his local paper simply saying he didn't support Dole.

By the 2004 presidential elections, however, something had changed. Maybe it was due to the fact that he had three children, or that the activists of the 1960s weren't around much anymore, but Springsteen felt compelled to spearhead a barnstorming tour of swing states, dubbed the Vote For Change Tour, to benefit a liberal political action committee.

At the conclusion of that tour, he went so far as to endorse and go on the stump for Democratic nominee John Kerry, performing and speaking at several rallies late in the campaign. In endorsing the senator, Springsteen for the first time put the ideals of his songs into a political context. He had clearly been heading in that direction for some time.

"For the last 25 years, I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. Instead, I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens," he wrote to the New York Times.

Onstage in Washington, D.C., in October 2004, he was even more direct. "You deceive the country into war, you should lose your job! It ain't rocket science!"

Some of Springsteen's fans were less than happy. Bruce had always gotten a lot done working not with well-funded, high-profile politicos, but with food banks, union relief funds, homeless shelters and veterans groups. The risk, Springsteen said, was worth it because remaining silent would have called into question the sincerity of the ideals expressed in his music.

In his book "The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen: Rock and Redemption, From Asbury Park to Magic," writer Jeffrey Symynkywicz, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, summarizes the ideals of more than 30 years of Springsteen's music into what he termed the Ten Commandments of Springsteen.

Reflecting a balance of hope and bitter reality, the list of observations includes "There is always something more," "Our stories symbolize something deeper" and, perhaps the most important one, "Life without connections is empty and dangerous."

On his newest disc, "Magic," Springsteen, now 58, contemplates his mortality and wonders if, as a nation, we've strayed. Twenty years after "Walk Like a Man," Springsteen continues to chew on his belief that a man worthy of admiration is a work in progress. He should know.

Reinventive Counting Crows Outshine Maroon 5

New Era
Published: August 6, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

The pairing makes total sense from a marketing standpoint: Mom and Dad can catch the Counting Crows, while Maroon 5 can deliver safe, slick rock 'n' roll for the teenagers to enjoy.But the similarities in substance between the two groups are few, if any. And Tuesday night at Hersheypark Stadium, the match-up wasn't even a fair one.

Following a brief set from up-and-coming singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles — sounding refreshingly like a sunnier Norah Jones who doesn't seem afraid of her own shadow —Maroon 5 stormed through over an hour of slick, soul-kissed pop hits. Singer Adam Levine proved he is more of a sex symbol than a bandleader.While his clear voice and confident stage demeanor make him a god to teens and young adults, not to mention provide fodder for his side job as a guaranteed tabloid teaser, he is little more than a boy band singer with an actual band behind him.

Not a bad band, mind you. Maroon 5 can lock in a tight soul groove and stay there. It's just that hit after hit — "This Love," "Harder to Breathe," "Sunday Morning," "All I Need" — anyone with open ears over 30 wonders where they have heard these tunes before. Prince? Terrance Trent D'Arby? Morris Day? Maybe Jamiraqui? With two albums in less than seven years, it's not likely a pop act can pull off a show that is anything more than adequately slick, no matter how many 13-to-21-year-old girls sing along.

With a set of pipes like his and a monster hit-maker like Clive Davis behind him, there is no doubt Levine will have every chance to prove these assertions wrong.But there is a difference between simply a good band and a well-rehearsed one. And within minutes of Counting Crows' taking the stage shortly before 10 p.m. to the buttery tones of Bill Withers' "Lean on Me," the difference was clear.

"We're going to do something a little different tonight," is how a now noticeably svelte singer Adam Duritz introduced the band's performance. As he explained, it was the band's way of making sure they always play from the heart, instead of a setlist.

"It's a hard thing being a Counting Crows fan," he joked. "I read the boards, so I know. I know you want us to sing the songs the way you want me to so you can sing along with them," he said, alluding to his frequent habit of not ever sticking to the same phrasing of each song as it was recorded.On a good night, it can make a familiar song ring with new kinetic energy. On a bad night, it sounds like he's doing a bad Van Morrison impression.

"But if we played the same show every night, you'd be getting ripped off," he explained.It was an approach more appropriate for a small club or theater, but brandishing more acoustic guitars than electric, the band made it work, with most of the audience on its feet the entire show.What could have become a stadium-sized snooze became immediately memorable, and dare it be said, intimate.

Starting with their breakout hit "Rain King," recast in a slower country-rock delivery with lyrics from "Someone to Watch Over Me" the band played almost entirely re-imagined versions of its classics.Of the groups older material only the soaring piano/accordion ballad "Long December" and the touching "If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel is Dead)" were played close to their original forms.

"Angels of the Silences," which opened the band's second album in 1996 with crushing guitars and belted vocals, was played gentle and slower than its original, followed by the rare country tune "Four White Stallions," complete with pedal steel."Mr. Jones," the band's first hit single from 1994, was virtually unrecognizable to fans until well into the first verse.

Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" may have proven a hit for Counting Crows in 2002 but fans criticized its stiff, cheesy pop feel. Here the band atoned for that sin with a version entirely new — keeping the heavy beats of their hit version and referencing Mitchell's folksy original with harmonica and mandolin.

Only one song, "Washington Square," was played from the group's new disc "Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings."A band that can reinvent its catalog on a whim and still connect with its core audience is a talent to be applauded. Why it needs to share the stage with a derivative Top 40 band to do that is unclear.

Live Please Crowd, No Matter How Small

New Era
Published: Aug. 4, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

The closest thing to a hometown show and Live couldn't fill a small hockey arena Friday night. Bringing along Blues Traveler and Collective Soul — two other bands whose hit-making days are a decade gone — didn't help.

Maybe it's too early for 1990s nostalgia.After all, folks who came of age, went to college and found plenty of well-paying jobs in the booming mid-90s now face the demands of family and career in an economy that is turning Generation X into Generation Foreclosure.

So it may be understandable that the Giant Center was barely over half full for a triptych of Clinton-era hitmakers — even if one of them was local favorite Live, whose members hail from York and got their start at Lancaster's Chameleon Club.It didn't help that not one of the bands had new material to support. Collective Soul put out an album available only at Target over a year ago, and Blues Traveler hasn't had anything new out in four years, only a collection of acoustic versions of their hits.

Similarly, Live's "Radiant Sea" is an odds and ends collection.But all three marquee bands, by now seasoned enough to be able to pull off a good gig in a bad situation, played for the crowd that was there, not the one they could have drawn a decade ago.When Live took the stage shortly after 9 p.m. it was a sure thing that even though a disappointing number of seats were left empty, the ones that mattered were the ones filled.

Blasting through hits and an impressive number of favorites one came to the understanding that this group's catalog was richer than their latest sales figures reveal. "I Alone," "Simple Creed" and "All Over You" connected with ragged fury, even if at first singer Ed Kowalczyk's vocals sounded shrill and distorted. (Granted, his piercing voice is probably not an easy one to mix.)"Selling the Drama" rang true with its anthemic chorus, and their version of Johnny Cash's "Walk the Line" had a cleverly inverted re-arrangement.

But Live is a band that has had to find out how to grow up and approach middle age with grace and still somehow stand by its youthful rage. It has not been an easy transition, one marked with missteps into vague Eastern spiritualism.Live still gets airplay on hard rock and adult contemporary stations (that pays the mortgages for sure), but wide acclaim and credibility for a band that goes from sales of 8 million ("Throwing Copper") to less than 100,000 ("Songs From Black Mountain") is hard to come by. But as the cliché goes, they are still big in Europe.

The more mature Live was represented by Kowalczyk's wedding song "Turn My Head," the U2-soundalike "Stood Up for Love" and the perennially popular dirge "Lightning Crashes."As for the other acts, Blues Traveler frontman John Popper led his band through jammy versions of their hits, and showed that even though his caterwauling harmonica sound may have become dated and annoying, he can still play with plenty of power and originality.

Collective Soul, who came to the stage late due to bus trouble, crammed their set into an abbreviated rundown of hits and the ones that could have been. "December" featured three guitars and a heavier arrangement than the hit single. "The World I Know" lost the strings and its preciousness to became an arena-rock power ballad.

Three has-been bands grinding out their decade-old hits not enough for you? How about a throwback cover singer in between? Enter adorable Hana Pestle, who held the crowd rapt with versions of Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" and Radiohead's "Creep" during set changes.

But what really stole the show, and the entire night to be fair, was when the six kids of the Live band members came up onstage for "Heaven," the song wherein Kowalczyk reveals that all the pent up rage of his youth and spiritual searching of early adulthood is finally vanquished in the eyes of his daughters.The kids, between the ages of about 5 and 11, danced, played air guitar and in general looked quite at home rocking out with their dads.

And as if to declare exactly where the band's future is, and indeed his own, Kowalczyk sang the song while holding his 6-year-old daughter. Corny? Sure. Sentimental and a little bit tacky? You bet. But to a parent that can see God in the eyes of their child (and may he curse those who cannot), such considerations of cool-ness are none to even ponder.

Whether they rock for angry young metalheads or soccer moms, Live at least seems certain of that which will inspire them. No amount of hand wringing over declining record sales and low attendance figures can change that. And the kind of passion Live still feels can ignite a fire at any time.Don't count this band out yet.

Good Golly, He Won't Quit: Little Richard Still Rockin' the 88s

Sunday News
Published: March 2, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Little Richard and his band will play American Music Theatre in Lancaster later this week on yet another tour that he claims will be his last. Little Richard has made something of a habit of retiring. At the height of his fame in 1957, his childhood allegiance to the church got the better of him, and he pulled out of an Australian tour to go to a religious college and become a preacher. He was lured back to rock 'n' roll in the early 1960s.

In 2002, when he turned 70, he again said he was calling it quits, but then announced dates in Asia and Europe on his Web site. Last December, he turned 75. Maybe this time it's for real. Little Richard will play at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 8, at AMT, fresh from his appearance at the 50th Grammy Awards alongside Jerry Lee Lewis and John Fogerty. If it is, in fact, his final go-round, it would be the last time to see one of the few remaining rock 'n' roll originals on tour.

Elvis is dead, we think. Chuck Berry is a hermit. Lewis, while still "the Killer" when he sits down at the piano, is prone to assaulting concert patrons with mic stands. And Fats Domino just wants to chill in the New Orleans home he recently finished rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Of the original mid-'50s rockers, only Little Richard is still touring regularly and performing with even a portion of the original fire. Yet among the aforementioned stars, Little Richard is perhaps the one taken the least seriously.

His image - mascara, eyeliner, cartoonish pompadour, clothes pilfered from Liberace's closet - his Geico commercial, his outrageousness on late-night talk shows, his self-bestowed titles ("the Emancipator," "the Originator," "the Architect of Rock 'n' Roll," "the King of Rockin' 'n' Rollin' Rhythm 'n' Blues Soulin' ") and his uncomplicated music make him easy to pin down as a novelty.

Growing up Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Ga., he learned his stage antics and penchant for outrageousness from vaudeville acts and medicine shows, his belting vocal style from the church, and his fierce piano from the honky-tonks and pool halls. Little Richard's waffling between rock 'n' roll and the church is not uncommon among rockers of his generation. His house was a religious one, but his father was a bootlegger.

Even as far back as the 1920s, with the first true Mississippi Delta blues star, Charlie Patton, musicians had struggled to strike a balance, and few found a middle ground. For Little Richard, rock 'n' roll won out, to the delight of his fans. Though he put out some first-rate gospel music during his periods of piety, it never stuck, as if his outrageously rollicking personality could not be contained by the church doors.

Make no mistake: The man could play piano. His left-hand technique was straight Southern-fired boogie-woogie. His right could dance and trill on those upper keys as frantically as any of his peers. Fats might be the king of the triplet, but Little Richard could make it sound like a machine gun. And that kind of thing didn't fly in the church, even in the rowdiest congregations.

His relentless, manic attack on the ivories could only be bested by his vocal power - a combination of gutbucket hollers and moans that was still supremely musical. Little Richard's breakout sides for Specialty, beginning in 1955 and lasting the next two years, were as important to the early sound of rock n' roll as Elvis at Sun or Berry at Chess.

"Long Tall Sally," "Ready Teddy," "Rip It Up," "Slippin' and Slidin'," "Keep A Knockin' " and "Jenny Jenny" are perfect examples of his signature style: 12-bar blues played fast, heavy saxophone, lightning piano runs and lyrics that seemed inconsequential at best.

Little Richard's output on Specialty included lesser hits that prove he was equally adept at (somewhat) slower blues as well. They include "Baby," "Oh Why" and "Can't Believe You Want to Leave." Above all, Little Richard knew then and knows now what he is good at - blowing the roof off the place. In his day, no one could put as much verve, spirit, wild abandon and absolute freedom into a performance as Little Richard. He was the very spirit of rock 'n' roll then, and, by virtue of everything he has helped to create, remains so today.

Modern America; Band Makes a Stand for Credibility with 'Here and Now'

America has always had something of an image problem, both the country and the band. We're taking on the latter here. The pop group exploded onto the charts in both the United States and Britain in 1972 with "A Horse With No Name," a vaguely trippy acoustic tour de force that had many accusing the group of being a cheap Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young knockoff.

To the hippies, they were seen as posers: All three of the original members were sons of Air Force officers stationed in England. They didn't drop acid, jam for a half-hour at a time or sing protest songs. But criticism didn't stop America from producing a string of hits over the next four years, including "Tin Man," "Ventura Highway," "Sister Golden Hair," "I Need You," "Don't Cross The River," "Lonely People" and others.

Before anyone noticed, the group had a handful of gold albums but very little in the way of cool points. For as much as the band members were experts at crafting acoustic folk pop and charming, memorable melodies, they could scuttle it all with an irksome detour like "Muskrat Love" or an unwise choice of touring partners, such as a downward spiraling Beach Boys. If anything, America had become the anti-CSN&Y.

By the 1980s, save for a last-ditch hit with the synth-pop- leaning but still-smart "You Can Do Magic," the band's mojo was dried up. Co-founder Dan Peek had left the group. Singer-guitarists Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley didn't really know how to navigate the era of new wave, hair bands and music videos. Over the next two decades, they recorded sporadically, never with great results. But they were a bankable concert draw, even if their gigs were often second-tier arts festivals, state fairs and smaller theaters.

A three-disc box set in 2001 might have seemed to some the tombstone on the group's creative career, but it had the opposite effect, solidifying the band's legacy of tuneful pop craftsmanship and making its best work available in a reliable compilation for the first time.

Last year, Bunnell and Beckley hooked up with Fountains of Wayne frontman Adam Schlesinger and former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha at a studio in Chicago. The result is "Here and Now," the group's most consistent work in 25 years. (Yes, it's been that long.) Iha and Schlesinger knew that for America to sound its best, it would be wise to just let the guys be themselves and not spend too much time trying to make them sound hip with production tricks and endless overdubs.

They were confident enough to let Bunnell and Beckley speak for themselves. The cost of that gamble? Beckley begins the album with the innocently cerebral "Chasing the Rainbow," complete with chimes and glockenspiel. It's a pretty song, even if his vocal range has shrunk considerably (even more evident on "All I Think About," sung well above his comfortable range).

Beckley recovers with the poppy "Work To Do." Bunnell scores better with the echo-laden "Ride On" and a cover of "Golden," a very America-sounding tune originally sung by My Morning Jacket. But even he turns in a groaner of a line from time to time. Reference "I know the sun's gonna shine on me this time."

The album plies a formula that's been played out repeatedly in the last decade or so: Young musicians who've earned some cred use it to turn their fans on to stuff molding away in their parents' record collections by helping sidelined veterans make high-profile comebacks. These projects only hold water if the act doesn't end up making the same mistakes that made them has-beens in the first place.

The same group that did a driving rocker like "Sandman," from America's underrated debut album - complete with what was probably the first acoustic guitar solo played through a fuzzbox - also gave us "Hourglass," the 1994 album of tunes played against programmed percussion tracks (or the worst drummer in the world).

If Bunnell and Beckley want to wrest their legacy from the dominion of cornball oldies stations, "Here and Now" is the record to do it, despite its shortcomings.

The Who's Endless Wire Closes Quarter-Century Gap

Sunday News
Published: November 29, 2006
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Twenty-four years is an awfully long time to wait for a follow-up album. Many thought, and some had honestly hoped, that the terse, lackluster, synthesizer-laden "It's Hard" would be the Who's final bow. Since 1982, the band members have fought amongst themselves, launched successful solo and acting careers, been endlessly anthologized, suffered embarrassing legal problems and mounted a reunion effort in 1989 that accelerated over the next decade and a half.

After losing bassist John Entwistle to heart failure in 2002 on the eve of a major U.S. tour, the Who fought back to become, once again, an imposing, if grayer and balder, live act. And even though Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, the remainder of the Who, have been touring almost steadily for nearly four years (they play Hershey's Giant Center Nov. 27), no one could imagine what might result if the two powerful personalities - Townshend's cerebral perfectionism and Daltrey's controlled swagger - were unleashed in the studio again.

"Endless Wire," without a doubt, proves that age and experience have made both men seasoned, sensitive performers, even at the expense of the youthful fury that defined the band in its first two decades. In a way, the Who has been pointed in this direction ever since Daltrey could no longer hit that spine-melting scream on "Won't Get Fooled Again."

From the mid-1960s, when the band ruled the punkish Mod movement, through the arena-rock years of the 1970s and 1980s, and the through the long battle against becoming yet another shattered oldies act in the new century, the tug of war between Daltrey and Townshend's musical personas has been setting up this showdown.

Daltrey's voice, weathered and deepened, is still a potent instrument for interpreting Townshend's emotionally turgid songs, many of them barely concealed autobiography, meditations on the trappings of fame or contemplations of life in accelerated times. "Are we breathing out or breathing in/ Are we leaving life or moving in/ Exploding out imploding in/ Ingrained in good or stained in sin?" Townshend asks on "Fragments."

The central theme of the band's classic concept album, "Tommy" - living inside the invisible prison of a disabled mind - gets revisited on "In the Ether," in which an autistic boy longs to strengthen his faint connections to the ones he loves. Religious fanaticism is the target of the sneering acoustic track "Man in a Purple Dress," though it's easy to see a connection to Townshend's own persecution in the media in recent years. (In 2003, police in England accused him of accessing child pornography on the Internet. Townshend maintains he simply stumbled onto it while researching the nature of his own childhood traumas. The charges were dropped, but the damage to his reputation had been done.)

The mini-opera, "Wire and Glass," that comprises the second half of the album contains the lion's share of strong melodies and aggressive playing as well as the best performances from both men. Highlights include "Pick Up the Peace" and "The Mirror Door," though at scarcely two minutes each, the degree of satisfaction these songs deliver is akin to getting a fun-size candy bar instead of a king-size candy bar in your Halloween bag.

"Endless Wire" succeeds as a fine rock album, if not as a rock opera, which has been the fate of virtually every similar Townshend attempt at the genre since "Quadrophenia." A tweak here or there - the elimination of some short bits for the extended versions tagged on at the end, reshuffling of the running order here and there - would have made it a great rock album. The argument has been made before on other Who albums: if only they had done this or that, or dropped that song, or reined in Townshend's ambitions here or there.

But even after decades of the same mistakes, we count the Who an FM rock staple. If "Endless Wire" is indeed the band's final statement, it's not a bad way to go. The music is older, wiser, still has something to say and remains punctuated by that windmill strum.

The Blessings of Bluegrass

Sunday News
Published: December 31, 2006
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Tonight, Del McCoury is coming home to York County ... sort of. The bluegrass giant hasn't lived here in more than a decade, but the hills and farms that fostered his young talent are not forgotten.In the 1950s and '60s, getting an invite to play with "Father of Bluegrass" Bill Monroe was just about every bluegrass picker's dream gig. It meant performing in front of large audiences around the world and maybe launching a successful stint as a bandleader.

When a young Delano McCoury joined Monroe's band in 1963, it was the pinnacle of his burgeoning career. And while McCoury's apprenticeship with the father of bluegrass was brief, it set the stage for his future successes, which have been many. "It's been amazing the way things have grown for us," McCoury said in a telephone interview from his home in Nashville, Tenn.

McCoury's accolades include no less than 24 awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association. The IBMA has named him Male Vocalist of the Year three times and Entertainer of the Year nine times (four of them consecutively) and has given him three nods in the Album of the Year category.

In 2005, he scored his first Grammy for the album "The Company We Keep." His first all-gospel collection, "The Promised Land," was released earlier this year on his own McCoury Records label. McCoury and his band will help ring in the New Year tonight at the Strand Theatre in York. Back in the cold February of 1964, California was calling McCoury, and he headed to the West Coast to join the Golden State Boys. After only three months, Del and his new wife moved back eastcloser to home. He grew up in York County on a Jackson Township dairy farm, and though Pennsylvania Dutch may have been the prevalent patois of his youth, McCoury's tenor voice bears all the hallmarks of the southern Appalachians.

Exposure to his older brother's 78 rpm Flatt & Scruggs records first sparked his interest in taking up the banjo. Careerwise, McCoury was in the right place at the right time. Partnering with Marylander Keith Daniels, he began to make a steady, if not stellar, living playing the honky-tonks in and around Baltimore. From the days of World War II through the mid-1960s, Baltimore drew tens of thousands of people from the hills and hollers of West Virginia, Virginia, western Maryland and Tennessee to fill manufacturing jobs.

The economic hardships that spread the blues northward from Mississippi and laid the groundwork for rock 'n' roll also pushed mountain music eastward. When the workers moved east, they naturally took their music with them. "And there were many places to play all over the area," McCoury recalled, "up along U.S. Route 1 and U.S. Route 40 east of the city, up Harford Road and in Essex. This was before the beltway (I-695) was built.

"We played The Stonewall Inn, The Carlton, Seagull Inn, downtown at a place called Jazz City that had music seven nights a week, the odd place along Broadway in Fell's Point." It was after several years in Charm City that McCoury was invited to audition for Monroe. Eventually, the scene began to taper off, and the bottom dropped out sometime in the 1980s when all the manufacturing jobs disappeared. The honky-tonks closed and turned into car dealerships, Waffle Houses and Dollar Stores. But as McCoury remembers, Baltimore was not the only city that supported a healthy roots-music scene.

"There were good homegrown bluegrass scenes in Washington, D.C., Detroit and Cincinnati as well at that time. Not just good places for national acts to play, but having great local acts." By the time he and his wife returned east, the scene had changed and music looked as if it might not be the magical calling it once was. Del got a construction job and did some logging as well to augment his meager music income - an income that had to support a growing family.

By 1967, he was fronting his own band, Del McCoury and the Dixie Pals, and he spent the next two decades as a mainstay in the mid- Atlantic. And though it was essentially a part-time gig, he recorded several albums for labels like Arhoolie, Rebel and Rounder, and toured extensively, sometimes traveling up to 1,000 miles to play weekend festivals. On the verge of a tour through Europe, son Ronnie, then 14, demanded his father let him join the group full time after sitting in with the group during summer vacation. "I said, No, you need to stay in school,' " McCoury recalled with a laugh. Oddly enough, it was Ronnie's principal that changed Del's mind.

"After he heard all the places we would be playing - Ireland, England, Germany, Sweden - he said Ronnie would probably learn more than if he stayed home." Ronnie returned the next year to finish his education, but the bug had bit. That was 1981. Six years later, younger brother Robbie took the bass chair before switching to banjo. Both boys have toured with their father ever since.

McCoury finally relocated to Nashville in 1992, as his career began to pick up steam, but he maintains a residence in Glen Rock. "We decided to keep it in case things didn't work out here. But we've stayed 14 years. Who knows, we may go back someday." It seems McCoury has once again landed in the right city at the right time. "This town is just booming," he said of Nashville. McCoury and his band are Grand Ole Opry regulars, enjoying the benefits of the weekly radio and television broadcasts that come with the gig. The band will play there throughout the month of January before going out on the road again.

"Back in the 1960s with Bill Monroe, there wasn't much happening in this town besides the Opry. There wasn't even a decent airport." There are countless places to play nowadays, "and you can go see music every night of the week." And musicians across the genres are feeding on the kind of collegiality that the music industry itself doesn't necessarily foster.

"A lot of these guys I've played with saw me performing years ago and now ask me to come on the road with them, and I'm happy to do it." McCoury's shared the stage with Phish, Leftover Salmon and the Yonder Mountain String Band. Consequently, a swarm of jam-band fans can always be spotted at a McCoury gig.

He's done songs by the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian, Tom Petty and British folk-rocker Richard Thompson in addition to the traditional tunes in the picker's songbook and a healthy batch of original compositions. In 1998, Del solidified his name as one of the best in the business by teaming up with Mac Wiseman and Doc Watson on "Del, Doc and Mac" for Sugar Hill. An album with alt-country rebel Steve Earle called "The Mountain" further enhanced the careers of both men a year later. They played the odd gig together around Music City and went over big at Farm Aid that year.

The collaboration with Earle exposed McCoury to an entirely new audience. "It really amazes me to see so many younger people in the audience, far more than there used to be." The band's itinerary takes them from laid-back summer festivals to crowded, smoky rock nightclubs - a variety that was unheard of even 20 years ago - from Carnegie Hall to the Lincoln County High School gymnasium in Hamlin, W.Va. (both venues are scheduled in coming months).

"So many of our shows attract young listeners who are maybe seeing their first real bluegrass show or are regulars themselves. But then I look out and see guys my age standing there for the whole two hours. It's hard for me to do it sometimes."

The 'R' Word; Marty Stuart may be Nashville's Best Hope for Keeping its Identity

Sunday News
Published: July 29, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

People tend to throw around the term "renaissance man" way to often, labeling anyone as such who may have eclectic tastes in art, has on their living room shelf works by Updike, Foust, and Turkel, but is into "The Simpsons" or watches PBS and reads Maxim magazine.

But if there ever was a renaissance man of country music, it is Marty Stuart. The artist appears at the Schaefferstown Firemen's Carnival at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 4. More accurately, his passion for country music is simply something that cannot be contained to albums and tours. There is just too much, enough to go around several times. And to his credit, he is using it quite well.

In describing Stuart, the dried out and overused term "renaissance man" just sounds even weaker. It would be enough that he provided country music in the 1980s with much needed honesty, being one of the few before or after who would use the guitar for more than a prop. He can really play, providing the missing link between Buck Owens and a refreshing crop of skillfill pickers today. Brad Paisley, Dierks Bentley, Keith Urban, tip your hats.

But consider this; not only has Stuart released a string of good- to-excellent albums since the early 1980s that have earned him a slew of CMA honors and even a Grammy nod or two, but these days he is also a producer, archivist, humanitarian, radio host, and all around spokesman for country music's heritage.

Since touring with Johnny Cash in 1980, he has amassed one of the largest collections of country music memorabilia and ephemera in the know universe, including flashy suits by the celebrated Nudie shop, boots, guitars, tapes, records, letters, studio logs, and lyric sheets. "It started out just in my bedroom when I was still a teenager living with my parents," he explains from his tour bus, weaving its way through the Smokies toward Asheville, N.C.

"Then I got a storage space, then two, then three," he laughs. "And then it took up an entire warehouse." About 20,000 pieces in all, about one quarter of which are on display at the Tennessee Folklife Museum through mid-November as part of an exhibit called "Sparkle and Twang: The Marty Stuart Collection."

Stuart is looking for a permanent home for the collection, as keeping hold of it himself is becoming a huge insurance burden. But Stuart is quick to point out that he is not simply a collector, a music geek raiding estate sales, attics or used record bins for bits of ephemera that others have cast away. "The most important thing is the people who made the music. The most important thing is to remember them. Then the music itself is the next important thing," he says, both music recorded and unrecorded. "Thirdly comes the artifacts in importance, but you need all three to get the whole picture."

His collection includes, for example, a letter written by Patsy Cline ordering stage clothes for an upcoming tour. She was dead only a few weeks later. He's even got Johnny Cash's original black suit. A tape given to him by Cash more than 25 years ago when Stuart was in the legend's band recently saw the light of day on a new album by Porter Wagoner.

A tune called "Committed to Parkville," about the famed detox center outside Nashville where both Cash and Wagoner had gone to clean up, found its way onto Stuart's new album, "Wagonmaster." It was Stuart, acting as producer, who got the 79-year-old Wagoner into the studio in celebration of his 50 years at the Grand Ole Opry. Johnny Cash had written the song specifically for Wagoner, but Stuart only remembered where it was once the Wagoner sessions had begun.

The album has earned favorable reviews from just about every music publication that matters, exposing Wagoner's music to a new generation of fans. "Country music has always had something of an identity crisis," he speculates. "Way back in the early 1970s the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a rock group, recorded an album called Will The Circle Be Unbroken,' and it opened up country music history to a lot of people."

"It always seems to take a movie or a rock star to get country music to recognize its heritage," Stuart says. Now Stuart has made yet another crossover hit. Recently, Wagoner opened for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden and stole the night. "There were 20-year-old kids singing along with the Green, Green Grass of Home.' You'd think by now Nashville would get it," Stuart said.

The case of Wagoner, Stuart says, is emblematic of the problem he sees all to often. "He's a country music figurehead, a true artist. But I had to try and get him back into his sound again." Consequently, he bypassed Nashville altogether, and took "Wagonmaster" to indie punk label Anti for release.
"It used to be that Nashville owned its soul," Stuart intones.

"But now most of the labels are owned by corporations thousands of miles away, and so they don't know about the music. To them its just dollars and cents. "I just don't understand why some folks have to go outside of country music to get a country record made." Stuart has perhaps done more than anyone of his generation to ensure the folks he learned from as a young mandolin phenom are not forgotten.

Traversing the Twin Poles of Folk

Sunday News Published:
January 20, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Arthel "Doc" Watson was born in 1923 in Stoney Fork, N.C., where songs rise out of the halos of misty hills. Daniel Boone is said to have spent a good deal of time in the area. Some of Watson's ancestors might have known him; they had lived there since 1790.

Ani DiFranco was born in 1970 in Buffalo, N.Y., and was busking by the age of 9 with her guitar teacher. Her well-educated parents divorced when she was a teenager. She gravitated toward folk music, but also to rap and punk. No two artists grounded in folk could be more different, but this wide, accommodating genre has room for both. DiFranco will perform at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 23, at the Forum in Harrisburg. Watson, joined by his grandson, Richard, and David Holt, will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 25, at Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater.

Blind from infancy, young Watson borrowed a guitar and picked out tunes he heard his parents and neighbors singing in church or in their living rooms. The songs were timeless ballads, shape-note hymns, blues and gospel. While at school, he heard the music of Django Reinhardt and was amazed at the gypsy guitarist's speed.

By the early 1950s, Watson was playing electric guitar in a country dance band, adapting fiddle tunes to his Gibson Les Paul. In the process, he took flat-picking to a new level. Today, at 84, he is revered as one of the greatest living acoustic guitar players. Watson is old-school, singing the old-time folk, gospel and country of the American South - songs that don't seem to have a definite birth, songs peeled away from some ancient Scottish reel and transformed by the labors and lusts of a new land.

The views and attitudes of many of the folks who sang these songs would have been anathema to the likes of DiFranco, a post-hip-hop, post-feminist songwriter whose frailing guitar style and alternate tunings seem custom built for an urbanized, modernly militant, populist form of folk. Her guitar style combines a partially electrified (and usually quite loud) acoustic frailing method loosely related to flamenco styles. Traces of Dave Van Ronk and Leo Kottke seep through, but she often plays guitar like a drummer.

The notes come off her hands percussive, bright, direct and aggressive, though in recent years her music has become less confrontational and more graceful. Her songs deal in a frank manner with every concern of modern leftist politics: war, reproductive rights, gender and race. Watson, a product of the Depression, never expressed any overt political views. And while the socially minded folk movement of the 1950s and '60s turned his mediocre living into a lucrative career, Watson owes little to Bob Dylan or those who followed him.

Watson's mantle boasts a clutch of seven Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievement honor from 1994. His tunes, and the others songs he knows, seem limitless in number and scope, the fruit of what Greil Marcus called the "old, weird America." If Watson and DiFranco share anything, it's firm roots: He's bound to the culture of a nation; she's anchored to that nation's indomitable, independent spirit.

Named one of the most influential artists of the past 25 years by CMJ magazine, DiFranco pressed her first 500-copy cassette of original music in 1990. That tape and everything she's released since (something like 17 studio albums, five compilations and a growing list of live bootlegs) have been produced through Righteous Babe Records, which she owns in whole. No major label has gotten one whiff of her business. It's purely her own music.

Watson's music comes from a time when commerce and music, at least folk music, didn't intersect. Folk music was something folks sang in praise of their god or for simple pleasure. Everybody did it. It was music purely of the people.

Hummel Out to Save Blues Harp with Tour

Sunday News
Published: March 4, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

In 1941, a team of musicologists visited Clarksdale, Miss., to document the rapidly changing folk music traditions that had given birth to the blues. Among their observations, they found that the harmonica seemed to be the most widely used instrument in blues playing at the time. "The harmonica is a more intimate and a more convenient companion than any other instrument. It stays tuned, ready for instant performance. There are no strings to break. ... The harmonica probably belongs more completely to the instant mood of the lonesome traveler than any other instrument," a portion of the resulting study read.

For bluesman Mark Hummel, those words, written by John W. Work III a half-century ago and only recently published in the book "Lost Blues Found," sum up why the harmonica represents the absolute essence of the blues. "The harmonica was at one time the premier blues instrument," Hummel said in a telephone interview from his home in Palo Alto, Calif. "Think about it: It's really only one step away from singing."

Born in the 1950s and raised half a nation away from the Mississippi Delta in southern California, Hummel began making music professionally in the 1970s after hitchhiking around the country and working odd jobs, learning the blues along the way. He's been steadily touring and releasing albums since 1980, including a collaboration with Canadian guitarist Sue Foley ("Up & Jumpin' "), a session of jazz/blues hybrid tunes that was the last recording date for the legendary pianist Charles Brown ("Lowdown to Uptown") and a heavy handful of releases featuring his crack band the Blues Survivors, including "Golden State Blues," "Playing in Your Town" and "Heart of Chicago."

His first live album, "Blowin' My Horn," was appropriately titled considering Hummel's fat, electrified sound and choice of oversized harps often brings to mind a saxophone. In 1991, he hosted an all-star jam at a nightclub in Berkley, Calif., that has turned into one of the longest-running blues showcases in memory. The aptly named Blues Harp Blowout comes to Lancaster's Chameleon Club on Saturday night.

Hummel said it all started out as a jam to benefit a sick friend, but with each passing year, the gig took on new cities up and down the West coast, until a national tour began to make sense. San Mateo-based Mountain Top Records has put out three collections of live recordings from the Blues Harp Blowout shows. For this tour, Hummel is bringing along Kim Wilson, the Fabulous Thunderbirds' leader and harp blower; and Charlie Musselwhite, a living legend of blues harp if ever there was one.

Past Blowout editions have included James Cotton, Carey Bell, Snooky Pryor, Magic Dick (J. Geils Band), Billy Boy Arnold (Bo Diddley), Lee Oskar (War), Jerry Portnoy (Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton) and Huey Lewis. Think what you will about his mid-1980s pop hits and even more recent sins, but brother Huey can throw down.

Since that time, it's become more than an annual roll across the country with a hot band and some good friends, it has become something of a crusade. Since the era of the guitar gods in the late 1960s, blues music has been increasingly focused on the six-string virtuoso, forcing harp blowers, horn players, singers and pianists to sometimes take a back seat. Guys like Peter Green, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, Jeff Beck and Jimi Page became superstars thanks to the fiery chops of the Chicago bluesmen they emulated: B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Freddie King, Matt Murphy and Albert Collins.

Now the youngest generation has come into its own: Kenny Wayne Sheppard, Luther Dickinson, Robert Randolph, Johnny Lang, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, fine players all. "But no harp players seem to become as big as the guitar players," Hummel said. "For example, Charlie Musselwhite is perhaps the most well-known blues harp player out there. Among harmonica players and blues fans, he is like Eric Clapton, but he has nowhere near the kind of fame Clapton has."

A few years ago, Hummel recalled, he sat down for a radio interview and was asked by the host right off the bat: "So, the harmonica, pretty unusual instrument in the blues, am I right? Right then, I knew I was [in trouble]," he said. "This was going to be a horrible interview. But it just goes to show how much the harp has suffered in the past 30 years or so."

Consequently, fewer young musicians who discover the blues pick up the harp. The guitar is just flashier, sexier, he said. As if he needed any more evidence, consider this: At all the Blues Harp Blowout events Hummel has helmed, he's been the youngest player by far, with maybe one or two exceptions.

"There simply aren't any known harp players under the age of 30 or so," he said. Don't go thinking Hummel is anti-guitar. In fact, he even plays a bit himself. But the feel of a harmonica in his hands wrapped around an old ribbon microphone and honking through an overdriven tube amplifier just seems more natural to him. "It's not like guitar, where you can watch the player's hands," he said. With the harp, it's all in the mouth, lips, tongue and diaphragm. "Guitar has gotten its due many times over. Now it's the harmonica's turn."

Jazz Legend Hancock Even a Master at Playing Beer Bottles

New Era
Published: August 25, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Some may wonder why after more than 40 years in the business Herbie Hancock is still as hip and revered as ever, still a godfather among vinyl-sniffing turntablists, hip-hop beatmakers and searching musicians of all stripes. Then you go and see him play and it all becomes clear.

Few artists could get a standing ovation even before they play a single note. But Friday night at the Strand Capital Performing Arts Center, Hancock did (and a real ovation too, not just people getting out of their seats because the house lights go down). Deftly balancing between grand piano and various synthesizer sounds - thanks to computer controlled switching - Hancock delivered an inspired and uplifting program that highlighted his long career and still gave notice of his desire to always move forward.

Hitting the highest peaks of a career that defines the word prolific (more 40 albums not including compilations) meant that whole decades were bypassed. But what the concert lacked in completeness it more than made up for in the sheer joy and ability evident in every band member, from Hancock himself to bassist Nathan East through drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and guitarist Lionel Loueke.

Hancock and his band began the show winding their way through "Actual Proof" and a lengthy "Watermelon Man." Having played that song in various permutations since he wrote it in 1962, as he explained, Hancock took a detour courtesy of Loueke, a Benin-born virtuoso, whose composition "Seventeens" was grafted in seamlessly. The song is named "Seventeens" because that is how many dizzying beats are in each measure.

Bassist East mimicked the signature wind melody of "Watermelon Man" with his voice. Then, after several minutes of pouring and emptying to achieve the right note, Hancock played the two-note melody on an Amstel bottle. That's right he can even play jazz on musical beer bottles. East also stood in for the various singers not present who took part in Hancock's 2005 disc "Possibilities": John Mayer on "Stitched Up," Joss Stone and Johnny Lang on the U2/B.B. King tune "When Love Comes to Town" and Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You."

Regarding that tune, Hancock could have picked a hundred better Wonder songs to explore and should therefore be given high marks for tackling an insipid piece of fluff. But even Hancock's urbane chord substitutions, cleverly inserted under East's rendition of the melody, could not make more of the song than what it is.

A hot take on "Cantaloupe Island" put things back to right with an aggressive vamp, some tireless drumming from Colaiuta, and Hancock's most inspired playing of the night. But for all the funk and fury of the night, the most memorable moments were those that were the most sublime. Using digital loops, a device known as a vocal harmonizer, and various picking and tapping methods on his guitar, Loueke created a World-jazz hybrid that could have carried an entire program on its own.

Hancock's solo version of his 1960s masterpiece "Maiden Voyage," oozing with glissando waterfalls and overtones created by pressing a sustained pedal virtually the entire time, was ample evidence that for all his detours and restless exploration Hancock at his core is a jazz pianist. And one of the most inventive alive. And at the end of the tune, as if to acknowledge this, even the humble Hancock gave a satisfied nod.

Williams Out "West"

Sunday News
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Lucinda Williams earned a reputation early in her career for taking so long to record albums that the process often outlived the labels that promised to release her music. Her 1998 breakthrough "Car Wheels on A Gravel Road," took six years of continuous work, the patience of a handful of top-shelf producers, and was twice started over from scratch. But the results; gold record sales, Grammy nods, multiple accolades, and not to mention setting a new benchmark for country- rock singer-songwriters to aim for, without a doubt must have seemed worth it in the end.

In the meantime, singers Patty Loveless, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Emmylou Harris made hits out of Williams' songs, helping to pay the rent long after she'd probably spent the advance. She also found a home at Universal subsidiary Lost Highway, which meant she could create in peace without worrying if her label is going to go broke and leave her in limbo.

Since then, Williams has kept up a brisk pace that oddly enough has only resulted in a continued increase in quality. Essence (2001), World Without Tears (2003), and a pair of live sets in 2005 have proven that while it took awhile to reach her stride, Williams is a modern talent with few equals.

In fact "West," her newest album, may be her greatest work yet, in the sense that Williams has given up on trying for perfection. "West" is full of holes; like the complete lack of bass on "Come On," the album's biggest rocker, the underdeveloped arrangement that makes "Are You Alright?" sound so perfectly sweet, or the dryness in Williams' voice when she sings of words that "move in phrase frozen til they decide/to melt and drip over pages/until that moment they live inside" on "Words."

Themes of losing loved ones, moving on after the loss, and in the end gaining from it, have been common themes for Williams, but here she has wrenched even more genuine emotion than ever before. The secret may lie in the fact that producer Hal Willner saved the scratch vocals from early demo versions of her songs through to the end of the recording process. It's an old trick, but one that's not often used any more in the age of Pro Tools and digital voice correction.

Of course, with a decent set of songs, it's nearly impossible to do wrong with veteran players like Jim Keltner, Gary Louris, and Bill Frisell, whose woody, atmospheric guitar, drenched in watery tremolo, is a sympathetic counterpoint to Williams' worn-sounding Southern voice. But what it means is that the genuine vulnerability and heartache Williams sings about is not lost in the often-repetitious process of making an album. It means that on a gem like the gently waltzing title track, which closes the album on a hopeful note, the instruments are played around her voice, not underneath it, or behind it.

When you hear the aching distance she sings about, the simple request to "come out west and see/the best that it could be," it's as if the song came up out of the California sands in which she traces the initials of the one she pines for. Instead of spending two presidential terms trying to get it to sound right, Williams has finally learned that she's good enough to get it right without trying very hard at all.