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.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
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.
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.
Goth Rock Without the Freak Show
Sunday News
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Young rock groups almost always claim originality. They happily list the bands who've influenced them - sure to drop a few names no one's heard of - and then insist they don't sound like anyone else. More often than not, that kind of hubris spells doom. These are the bands destined to remain unlauded nobodies. Rare is the truly peerless artist, though there are some. Take, for instance, Murder by Death.
Their songs about treachery, drunkenness, prison breaks, executions and strained family loyalty recall the cautionary tales of folk music, blues and gospel with a decidedly morose undertone. Sarah Balliet's brooding cello recalls Victorian parlor music, and in her hands a modern digital keyboard can sound like a calliope or a church organ. Drummer Alex Schrodt plays with a downbeat-heavy rockabilly snap, and bassist Matt Armstrong sounds positively industrial.
Lead singer Adam Turla's voice is pure Midwestern baritone, perfect for songs that explore the dark nature of humankind and the forces that drive people down. In their own way, Murder by Death has reinvented goth rock. The band has wrested gothic away from the fishnet-and-nail-polish crowd and placed it squarely back on a dusty bookshelf beside a stash of old 78-rpm blues records and a ghostly graveyard of sepia-tone photographs.
"None of us had even done anything seriously in music before," Turla said during the band's recent stopover at Lancaster's Chameleon Club. "We just started playing together, and all of us had different musical styles we were into. "It came out sounding kind of odd, but we've been on the road with it for six years. ... We kind of tend to stand out a bit. That has helped us on tours where we didn't necessarily fit in."
Murder by Death returns to the Chameleon Friday night in support of Reverend Horton Heat. The band formed in, of all places, Bloomington, Ind., in 2000. Its first full-length album, "Like the Exorcist, But More Breakdancing," was followed by the far more serious sounding "Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?" about the Devil attacking a Mexican village but finally dying in a bar fight.
The band members have set songs to montages of World War I footage to chilling effect, and they court the imagery of frontier America through photographs and other design elements like no group since the Band. Their latest album, "In Bocca a Lupo," focuses on succinct stories, a collection of narratives about people living on the razor's edge between good and evil.
Sometimes they can't tell where that line is, or just don't care. The album gives little hint that the band, for all its cinematic weirdness and darkness, is actually made up of pretty normal and well- adjusted people. "We tried playing more normal songs at first, but this just seemed more fun," Balliet said. "We used to be more serious and play the role, but we've gotten to the point where it's okay if we smile onstage. We're having fun."
As an English/religious studies dual major at Indiana University, Turla became fascinated with the idea that good and evil were not always so clear cut. Studying Buddhism and Taoism alongside Herman Mellville, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner can do that to you. The band's latest batch of songs attempts to trace that blurry moral line.
In "Brother," a man bemoans his brother's drunken, thieving ways - acts of selfishness that bring havoc and pain to those who love him: "Johnny Law keeps pounding at my door/ 'Cause you [messed] up some new score." Yet as much as the man hates his brother's lifestyle, in the end, when the police come around, he swears, "They can knock all of my doors down, but I won't say a word."
"I have had a lot of people come up to me and say they really relate to that song," Turla said. "It's a very real song to some people, and that's very different for us." In the haunting "Shiola," a man grieves for a family he never had, or lost, or pushed away, or has invented in his mind to ease his loneliness. In "Sometimes the Line Walks You," a man languishes in prison for crimes to which he happily confesses, yet the song evokes sympathy for the criminal.
And consider the man in "The Big Sleep" who gives parting instructions to his wife as he is led to the gallows. He prays for forgiveness, yet tells his wife where to find a buried box of money "of which I never earned a dime/Use it to start over the way things should have been." "I think sometimes people are quick to judge when someone has broken the law," Turla said. "[They] want the harshest sentence. But when it is someone they love, it's a different story."
Taken as a whole, the album comes off as a real downer, but in the album's final moments, Turla and company find a glimmer of hope. After ruminating on the wickedness and pettiness of the human race in "The Devil Drives," a gospel song comes out of nowhere. "There's still time to start again" the song repeats over and over, building to a joyous refrain. It's the only segment of the album that isn't in a minor key, so the relief is almost ecstatic, downright Pentecostal by rock 'n' roll standards.
"That was a fragment of another song that we added. I was unsure of it," Turla said, "but everyone in the band thought it was a good idea. It's nice to end things, I think, on a hopeful note. "The album is a bit of a journey through all of these people's lives and their conflicts. But at any time, someone can decide to do what is right, to turn things around."
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Young rock groups almost always claim originality. They happily list the bands who've influenced them - sure to drop a few names no one's heard of - and then insist they don't sound like anyone else. More often than not, that kind of hubris spells doom. These are the bands destined to remain unlauded nobodies. Rare is the truly peerless artist, though there are some. Take, for instance, Murder by Death.
Their songs about treachery, drunkenness, prison breaks, executions and strained family loyalty recall the cautionary tales of folk music, blues and gospel with a decidedly morose undertone. Sarah Balliet's brooding cello recalls Victorian parlor music, and in her hands a modern digital keyboard can sound like a calliope or a church organ. Drummer Alex Schrodt plays with a downbeat-heavy rockabilly snap, and bassist Matt Armstrong sounds positively industrial.
Lead singer Adam Turla's voice is pure Midwestern baritone, perfect for songs that explore the dark nature of humankind and the forces that drive people down. In their own way, Murder by Death has reinvented goth rock. The band has wrested gothic away from the fishnet-and-nail-polish crowd and placed it squarely back on a dusty bookshelf beside a stash of old 78-rpm blues records and a ghostly graveyard of sepia-tone photographs.
"None of us had even done anything seriously in music before," Turla said during the band's recent stopover at Lancaster's Chameleon Club. "We just started playing together, and all of us had different musical styles we were into. "It came out sounding kind of odd, but we've been on the road with it for six years. ... We kind of tend to stand out a bit. That has helped us on tours where we didn't necessarily fit in."
Murder by Death returns to the Chameleon Friday night in support of Reverend Horton Heat. The band formed in, of all places, Bloomington, Ind., in 2000. Its first full-length album, "Like the Exorcist, But More Breakdancing," was followed by the far more serious sounding "Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?" about the Devil attacking a Mexican village but finally dying in a bar fight.
The band members have set songs to montages of World War I footage to chilling effect, and they court the imagery of frontier America through photographs and other design elements like no group since the Band. Their latest album, "In Bocca a Lupo," focuses on succinct stories, a collection of narratives about people living on the razor's edge between good and evil.
Sometimes they can't tell where that line is, or just don't care. The album gives little hint that the band, for all its cinematic weirdness and darkness, is actually made up of pretty normal and well- adjusted people. "We tried playing more normal songs at first, but this just seemed more fun," Balliet said. "We used to be more serious and play the role, but we've gotten to the point where it's okay if we smile onstage. We're having fun."
As an English/religious studies dual major at Indiana University, Turla became fascinated with the idea that good and evil were not always so clear cut. Studying Buddhism and Taoism alongside Herman Mellville, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner can do that to you. The band's latest batch of songs attempts to trace that blurry moral line.
In "Brother," a man bemoans his brother's drunken, thieving ways - acts of selfishness that bring havoc and pain to those who love him: "Johnny Law keeps pounding at my door/ 'Cause you [messed] up some new score." Yet as much as the man hates his brother's lifestyle, in the end, when the police come around, he swears, "They can knock all of my doors down, but I won't say a word."
"I have had a lot of people come up to me and say they really relate to that song," Turla said. "It's a very real song to some people, and that's very different for us." In the haunting "Shiola," a man grieves for a family he never had, or lost, or pushed away, or has invented in his mind to ease his loneliness. In "Sometimes the Line Walks You," a man languishes in prison for crimes to which he happily confesses, yet the song evokes sympathy for the criminal.
And consider the man in "The Big Sleep" who gives parting instructions to his wife as he is led to the gallows. He prays for forgiveness, yet tells his wife where to find a buried box of money "of which I never earned a dime/Use it to start over the way things should have been." "I think sometimes people are quick to judge when someone has broken the law," Turla said. "[They] want the harshest sentence. But when it is someone they love, it's a different story."
Taken as a whole, the album comes off as a real downer, but in the album's final moments, Turla and company find a glimmer of hope. After ruminating on the wickedness and pettiness of the human race in "The Devil Drives," a gospel song comes out of nowhere. "There's still time to start again" the song repeats over and over, building to a joyous refrain. It's the only segment of the album that isn't in a minor key, so the relief is almost ecstatic, downright Pentecostal by rock 'n' roll standards.
"That was a fragment of another song that we added. I was unsure of it," Turla said, "but everyone in the band thought it was a good idea. It's nice to end things, I think, on a hopeful note. "The album is a bit of a journey through all of these people's lives and their conflicts. But at any time, someone can decide to do what is right, to turn things around."
Dylan, Thompson Both Transformers of Folk
Sunday News
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Rock critic Kurt Loder once wrote that Americans not knowing the music of Richard Thompson is about as absurd as not knowing about Jimi Hendrix. Or, for that matter, Bob Dylan. For as much as Dylan changed pop music by electrifying modern folk music and at the same time reaching back into the dustbin of American folklore, Thompson was instrumental in doing the same in the United Kingdom.
Dylan's latest album of new material, "Modern Times," debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart. Thompson, while a revered performer the world over, hasn't charted in the United States since 1982. His influence, both as a member of Fairport Convention and as a prolific solo performer, has had lasting influence on both sides of the Atlantic. Beginning in 1967, Fairport played a largely psychedelic rock derivative of Jefferson Airplane and the Mamas and the Papas.
But two years later, the band began forging a path that merged British-Scots-Irish folk songs, some extending as far back as the Middle Ages, with modern electric picking. In effect, they were mimicking Dylan's conversion, but in reverse. They were a rock band that began mining folk music, as opposed to the pure folk artists who dared to plug in and "defile" traditional music, as many accused Dylan of doing when he premiered electric music at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to mixed reviews.
For both artists, of course, the shift was a gradual discovery, the result of dissatisfaction with becoming mired in one set of expectations. But the musical journeys of Dylan and Thompson are each marked by a single significant signpost. For Dylan, the watershed moment came in the form of his May 1966 concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, widely bootlegged and mislabeled "The Royal Albert Hall Concert" until Columbia finally released an official two-disc version in 2001.
For the show's first half, Dylan dutifully played the acoustic- guitar-harmonica-in-rack folk troubadour, though he performed none of the folk standards and protest songs that made him a star. No "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol" or "Blowin' in The Wind"; instead it was "Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna." After the intermission, he plugged into a black Telecaster and, joined by Canadian roadhouse rockers the Hawks, proceeded to divide his audience in half with "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" and "Leopard- Skin Pill-Box Hat."
Catcalls and rhythmic clapping (not a compliment in the United Kingdom) can be heard throughout, topped off by the famous cry of "Judas!" from the rear of the hall. Dylan's response: He told the band to "play [freakin'] loud," and with his back to the crowd he threw a grenade into their midst in the form of a blistering "Like A Rolling Stone."
But as brutal as the show must have been for the performers onstage - Hawks founding drummer Levon Helm quit the band for a year, tired of being booed for playing what they all knew was incredible music - it proved liberating for Dylan. He was no longer anyone's spokesman. He also completely altered what a live rock performance could be. No longer was the artist expected to dutifully churn out the hits. Each night would be a confrontation and a negotiation, not a programmed nickelodeon. Every rock show since has felt in some way the reverberation of that night in Manchester.
And most importantly, Dylan tore down the wall between folk and rock completely. Forever. For Thompson and Fairport Convention, their concert crucible was a far more pleasant affair, even reverent. Having flirted with folk sounds on two previous albums, Fairport Convention was in the process of diving headfirst into that well in May 1969 when tragedy struck. Coming home from a show, the band's van was involved in an accident that claimed the life of drummer Martin Lamble and Thompson's girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn, and laid up several band members for months. In December of that year, the group performed at London's Royal Festival Hall for the first time since the accident.
Nick Drake, in one of the few live appearances of his brief life, was the supporting act. Led by a boyish-looking Thompson (barely 20 at the time) and angelic singer Sandy Denny, Fairport brought the threads of folk and rock together on that night, generating a reaction exactly opposite to the one Dylan received. Where Dylan created division, Fairport brought about healing.
Though the sounds themselves were dissimilar - Dylan and the Hawks all street-thug tough and loose, Fairport strident and multilayered - the effect the performances have had on musicians and songwriters is the same. The music Fairport premiered that night made up the bulk of its album "Liege & Lief," regarded as the pinnacle of British folk rock and a favorite in the United Kingdom to this day. Last year, a BBC poll dubbed it the best folk album of all time.
On it, the band merged sea shanties, Renaissance ballads and bawdy barroom tales with rock n' roll volume and swagger. There is no obvious American analogue, but if you've never heard it (shame on you), think Joni Mitchell fronting Crosby, Stills & Nash on an album of Carter Family tunes. For Thompson, the change began simply, by playing folk melodies on a Gibson Les Paul. But as his career progressed, both with Fairport and after his departure in 1971, he began to use the electric guitar as a new type of folk instrument. Or some kind of weapon.
Woody Guthrie is reported to have said that if you use more than two chords in a song, you're showing off. Thompson apparently never heard that adage, or didn't care. His wry, observant, sometimes brooding and morose lyrics, coupled with lifting melodies and ice- pick sharp playing - owing as much to Middle Eastern and Gypsy music as to blues and jazz - are his immediate trademarks.
But his bridging of the sensitive folk singer-songwriter tradition with the sexiness of the guitar slinger has influenced countless bands: Steeleye Span and Jethro Tull (both of which featured former Fairporters), right up through Dexy's Midnight Runners, the Pogues, the Waterboys, the La's and KT Tunstall. So some might rightly call Thompson the English Dylan. The comparison is not likely to go the other direction, but both men hold generations of hearts and minds, musicians and laymen, under their sway.
Flying Solo: Buckingham Treasures his Time Away from the Mac
Sunday News
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Mick Fleetwood had been a sucker for good guitar players for years. In late 1974, he was touring a recording studio and heard out of the control room a sound that stopped him in his tracks. It was a song called "Frozen Love," seven minutes of robust vocal harmony, multitracked guitar solos, even strings, recorded by the starving young duo Buckingham-Nicks.The members of the duo, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, met at college in 1969 and joined the San Francisco band Fritz.
When that scene ran out of gas, they began writing songs and recording together. They recorded one self-titled album for Polydor that nobody bought. But in retrospect, the combined effort of these soon-to-be stars is a brilliant work of carefully constructed pop music. The album still hasn't been released on CD - at least not legally. Based solely on what Fleetwood heard in the studio that afternoon, he invited them to join his band, Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham's personal sonic stamp quickly became integrated into the Fleetwood Mac sound.
Buckingham brings his first solo tour in more than 15 years to the Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater on Tuesday in support of his latest solo work, "Under the Skin." Buckingham's endless curiosity, willingness to experiment and ability to layer the perfect amount of guitar overdubs without crowding out the three-part, honey-sweet harmonies of Fleetwood Mac was key to the band's success.
He refused to record guitars through standard amplifiers, instead going straight into the board for a clean, punchy sound. He built fuzz boxes out of tape recorder guts and sped up backing tracks while playing over them at normal speed. After a string of FM rock hits and two massively popular albums, "Fleetwood Mac" (1975) and "Rumours" (1977), Buckingham wanted to push the music in a more experimental direction. He wanted to start recording some of his parts at home, where he'd be able to create when the muse inspired him. Some ideas - like recording vocals on his hands and knees on the floor of a bathtub to get just the right resonance - he naturally wanted to try in private.
The result was the band's sprawling double album "Tusk." By the time he started recording solo albums "Law and Order" and "Go Insane," he had earned a reputation as a studio hermit, tinkering with tape loops and finding ways to get new sounds out of old technology. "I think on this last album, we recorded some basic tracks over at Ocean Way," Buckingham said in a telephone interview from his Brentwood, Calif., home, struggling to remember when he last spent time in a traditional studio.
Two cuts on "Under the Skin" were in fact recorded there, according to the liner notes, but most of it was taped in settings that reflect the soul-searching nature of the songs. "Almost two-thirds of it was recorded on the road, in hotel rooms, the rest at home. I have a 16-track unit that I would wheel in. On days off, I would work on these songs. "As long as you got a carpet and mic everything right, it really doesn't matter. And if you're staying in a hotel room with no carpet, you're in big trouble."
In a way, Buckingham has returned to his studio-alchemist roots. As a youth enamored of the Kingston Trio, the Beach Boys and Les Paul, he taught himself how to multitrack on a reel-to-reel machine in a backroom of his father's Sausalito, Calif., coffee factory. "Under the Skin," the product of a bona fide rock star who with one phone call could get into the best studios in the world, is similar to those early experiments.
"I wanted to do something a little more intimate this time," he said. "Being a father certainly changes your perspective on things." Consequently, the new record is the sound of Buckingham coming to terms with his own legacy, his own perception of success and failure, and the balance between being a committed artist and a caring father. Many tunes are sparingly composed of baroque-sounding fingerpicked guitar, fleeting percussion - a lot of it also created on guitar - and whispered vocals.
Recording in nontraditional settings has worked well for Buckingham. In the mid-'80s, he was at work on his third solo album at a home studio at a house he bought in Bel Air, Calif., but that effort became Fleetwood Mac's "Tango in The Night" (1987), which would be the final album recorded by the classic '70s lineup of Fleetwood Mac.
The album was the band's biggest success in 10 years, but Buckingham grew tired of derailing his solo ambitions and wanted out. It was an ugly scene when Buckingham finally stormed out of a band meeting and out of the group for good, or so it seemed. His third solo album didn't come until 1992. "Out of the Cradle," while somewhat self-indulgent, was hailed by critics as the pop masterpiece they always knew he had in him. But the Mac kept dragging him back. First there was the 1993 one- song reunion for President Clinton's inauguration.
The tepid live set "The Dance" followed four years later, as well as a very long and lucrative tour. What started as another solo session, with Buckingham inviting Fleetwood and bassist John McVie to work out some tunes, became Fleetwood Mac's 2003 hit album "Say You Will." That album was, as Buckingham put it, the sound of the "guys in the band redefining what this band was." Nicks heard about the jam sessions and sent over a pile of demos while she was on the road. She arrived later in the recording process.
It was the first Fleetwood Mac album since 1970 that didn't include vocalist/keyboardist Christine McVie. One less female onstage meant Buckingham could more easily play the part of guitar god, strutting around with his custom Turner. "Not everyone in the band was happy with that, but I just let the testosterone flow." Getting that high-energy rock maleness out of his system might have been more important than he knew at the time, for it was on that tour, in the quiet of his motel room after gigs and on days off, that Buckingham found himself winding down with some of the most personal and disarming music of his career.
The band also gave him more time alone onstage. On tour, solo acoustic renditions of "Big Love," "Go Insane," and "Never Going Back Again" were showstoppers. "They really seemed to have an effect on people," he recalled. "So it kind of got me thinking about working more with that sound." The first lines of "Under the Skin" wrestle with the problem of fame: "I was reading the paper/Saw a review/It said I was a visionary/ But nobody knew."
Buckingham has written plenty of songs about himself, but no album has come so close to self-critique as this. It's impossible not to hear Buckingham questioning himself as he sings in whispers. He reflects on the deaths of his parents and brother on "Flying Down Jupiter": "Fathers and mothers all those years ago/Did you ever, did you ever know/My sisters and my brothers all dead and gone/Did you know that wishing won't make it so?"
"It Was You" paints a picture of domestic bliss, complete with his children and a wife, who arrived in his life "just in time."
Buckingham weaves in takes on the rare Jagger-Richards penned "Tired of Waiting" and the Donovan chestnut "To Try for the Sun," songs that seemed to fit the mood. But this isn't some "Unplugged" throwaway. He still heaps on the echo and gives the singing some "pretty aggressive treatments." Just don't look for the rock backdrop.
Things could have easily gone the other way. In some ways, a heart- on-the-sleeve song like "It Was You" just cries out for drums, bass and a soaring electric guitar. But Buckingham wasn't tempted. "The folks at Warner Bros. certainly wanted that," he said. "But I just had to sit down with them and say, This is how I want it to sound.' "
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Mick Fleetwood had been a sucker for good guitar players for years. In late 1974, he was touring a recording studio and heard out of the control room a sound that stopped him in his tracks. It was a song called "Frozen Love," seven minutes of robust vocal harmony, multitracked guitar solos, even strings, recorded by the starving young duo Buckingham-Nicks.The members of the duo, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, met at college in 1969 and joined the San Francisco band Fritz.
When that scene ran out of gas, they began writing songs and recording together. They recorded one self-titled album for Polydor that nobody bought. But in retrospect, the combined effort of these soon-to-be stars is a brilliant work of carefully constructed pop music. The album still hasn't been released on CD - at least not legally. Based solely on what Fleetwood heard in the studio that afternoon, he invited them to join his band, Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham's personal sonic stamp quickly became integrated into the Fleetwood Mac sound.
Buckingham brings his first solo tour in more than 15 years to the Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater on Tuesday in support of his latest solo work, "Under the Skin." Buckingham's endless curiosity, willingness to experiment and ability to layer the perfect amount of guitar overdubs without crowding out the three-part, honey-sweet harmonies of Fleetwood Mac was key to the band's success.
He refused to record guitars through standard amplifiers, instead going straight into the board for a clean, punchy sound. He built fuzz boxes out of tape recorder guts and sped up backing tracks while playing over them at normal speed. After a string of FM rock hits and two massively popular albums, "Fleetwood Mac" (1975) and "Rumours" (1977), Buckingham wanted to push the music in a more experimental direction. He wanted to start recording some of his parts at home, where he'd be able to create when the muse inspired him. Some ideas - like recording vocals on his hands and knees on the floor of a bathtub to get just the right resonance - he naturally wanted to try in private.
The result was the band's sprawling double album "Tusk." By the time he started recording solo albums "Law and Order" and "Go Insane," he had earned a reputation as a studio hermit, tinkering with tape loops and finding ways to get new sounds out of old technology. "I think on this last album, we recorded some basic tracks over at Ocean Way," Buckingham said in a telephone interview from his Brentwood, Calif., home, struggling to remember when he last spent time in a traditional studio.
Two cuts on "Under the Skin" were in fact recorded there, according to the liner notes, but most of it was taped in settings that reflect the soul-searching nature of the songs. "Almost two-thirds of it was recorded on the road, in hotel rooms, the rest at home. I have a 16-track unit that I would wheel in. On days off, I would work on these songs. "As long as you got a carpet and mic everything right, it really doesn't matter. And if you're staying in a hotel room with no carpet, you're in big trouble."
In a way, Buckingham has returned to his studio-alchemist roots. As a youth enamored of the Kingston Trio, the Beach Boys and Les Paul, he taught himself how to multitrack on a reel-to-reel machine in a backroom of his father's Sausalito, Calif., coffee factory. "Under the Skin," the product of a bona fide rock star who with one phone call could get into the best studios in the world, is similar to those early experiments.
"I wanted to do something a little more intimate this time," he said. "Being a father certainly changes your perspective on things." Consequently, the new record is the sound of Buckingham coming to terms with his own legacy, his own perception of success and failure, and the balance between being a committed artist and a caring father. Many tunes are sparingly composed of baroque-sounding fingerpicked guitar, fleeting percussion - a lot of it also created on guitar - and whispered vocals.
Recording in nontraditional settings has worked well for Buckingham. In the mid-'80s, he was at work on his third solo album at a home studio at a house he bought in Bel Air, Calif., but that effort became Fleetwood Mac's "Tango in The Night" (1987), which would be the final album recorded by the classic '70s lineup of Fleetwood Mac.
The album was the band's biggest success in 10 years, but Buckingham grew tired of derailing his solo ambitions and wanted out. It was an ugly scene when Buckingham finally stormed out of a band meeting and out of the group for good, or so it seemed. His third solo album didn't come until 1992. "Out of the Cradle," while somewhat self-indulgent, was hailed by critics as the pop masterpiece they always knew he had in him. But the Mac kept dragging him back. First there was the 1993 one- song reunion for President Clinton's inauguration.
The tepid live set "The Dance" followed four years later, as well as a very long and lucrative tour. What started as another solo session, with Buckingham inviting Fleetwood and bassist John McVie to work out some tunes, became Fleetwood Mac's 2003 hit album "Say You Will." That album was, as Buckingham put it, the sound of the "guys in the band redefining what this band was." Nicks heard about the jam sessions and sent over a pile of demos while she was on the road. She arrived later in the recording process.
It was the first Fleetwood Mac album since 1970 that didn't include vocalist/keyboardist Christine McVie. One less female onstage meant Buckingham could more easily play the part of guitar god, strutting around with his custom Turner. "Not everyone in the band was happy with that, but I just let the testosterone flow." Getting that high-energy rock maleness out of his system might have been more important than he knew at the time, for it was on that tour, in the quiet of his motel room after gigs and on days off, that Buckingham found himself winding down with some of the most personal and disarming music of his career.
The band also gave him more time alone onstage. On tour, solo acoustic renditions of "Big Love," "Go Insane," and "Never Going Back Again" were showstoppers. "They really seemed to have an effect on people," he recalled. "So it kind of got me thinking about working more with that sound." The first lines of "Under the Skin" wrestle with the problem of fame: "I was reading the paper/Saw a review/It said I was a visionary/ But nobody knew."
Buckingham has written plenty of songs about himself, but no album has come so close to self-critique as this. It's impossible not to hear Buckingham questioning himself as he sings in whispers. He reflects on the deaths of his parents and brother on "Flying Down Jupiter": "Fathers and mothers all those years ago/Did you ever, did you ever know/My sisters and my brothers all dead and gone/Did you know that wishing won't make it so?"
"It Was You" paints a picture of domestic bliss, complete with his children and a wife, who arrived in his life "just in time."
Buckingham weaves in takes on the rare Jagger-Richards penned "Tired of Waiting" and the Donovan chestnut "To Try for the Sun," songs that seemed to fit the mood. But this isn't some "Unplugged" throwaway. He still heaps on the echo and gives the singing some "pretty aggressive treatments." Just don't look for the rock backdrop.
Things could have easily gone the other way. In some ways, a heart- on-the-sleeve song like "It Was You" just cries out for drums, bass and a soaring electric guitar. But Buckingham wasn't tempted. "The folks at Warner Bros. certainly wanted that," he said. "But I just had to sit down with them and say, This is how I want it to sound.' "
CSNY: Exercising Freedom
Sunday News
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
When was the last time you saw an audience member flash their middle finger at a performer they paid good money to see? Probably not very recently, if at all. Reviews so far of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's current tour, dubbed "Freedom of Speech 06," have lauded the still exceptional vocal and musical abilities of the quartet of sixty-somethings. That's pretty much what we've come to expect of CSNY, which plays Hersheypark Stadium Aug. 25.
But this has been no ordinary summer outing for the group. While most fans have been cheering and singing along to the recontextualized songs of the group's peace-and-love loaded catalogue, numerous press accounts-from the Washington Times to the Orange County Register-have also noted the thousand or so fans walking out in disgust, sitting sternly with their arms crossed, or making their opinions known through the aforementioned gesture.
It's hard to image anyone at the group's early 1970s shows were supportive of Nixon's dragging out of the Vietnam War, but it's not out of the question to think there may have been a handful. It's even harder to imagine someone who is pro-war expecting a concert by unrepentant hippies to not insult their opinions. The real question is, what happened between then and now (and don't say Sept. 11, that's too easy) to sway even some part of their audience to the pro-war side of the fence.
To paraphrase Einstein, how does one support a war and sing along to songs about peace? For three years, Neil Young had been hoping some young rock artist or group would make a definitive stand against the war in Iraq on record, and rally the growing number of people who have turned against the current administration. But who wants a crusty old relic from the Sixties speaking out on today's troubles, he thought. Problem was, no one else had, though a few had come close.
Yet at a Q&A discussion at the South by Southwest Music Conference in March of this year, festival director Roland Swenson told Young frankly "...we need another Ohio.'" Swenson was of course referring to the incendiary song Young wrote and CSNY recorded just days after four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen at a peace rally at Kent State University in May of 1970. It has since become one Young's most famous songs, and one he has performed only sporadically.
He resurrected it most notably while on a solo acoustic tour just after thousands of students and workers were killed in the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989, very nearly the same place where the Olympic torch, perhaps the world's most recognized symbol of peace, will stand in 2008. But this time Young wanted to say something new and specific. So in a matter of a few weeks after the conference he wrote, rehearsed, and recorded twelve new songs that became the album "Living With War."
Without reservation, it's a hold nothing back indictment of the Bush administration's war and what Young perceives as its arrogance, given the fact that we are not allowed to see flag-draped caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base on television, and that the president himself has yet to attend a funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq. Young echoes (and even references) vintage Bob Dylan on "Flags of Freedom," honors the memories of soldiers who have died on the pained "Families," and reserves his most direct criticism for the sing- along "Let's Impeach the President."
He reaches back to the Vietnam era with "Roger and Out," wherein the current war reminds an aging trucker of a friend lost in a different conflict and the roads they traveled in their youth, and updates a well-known CSNY refrain in the ironically triumphant sounding "After the Garden." To move the new songs out as soon as possible, Young allowed the public to download or stream the entire album from his website while the tape machine was still warm, and had the CD version on record store shelves two weeks later. It was one of the most downloaded albums in Internet history.
Since then an offshoot of Young's official website has become a clearinghouse for people to post protest songs of their own and to discuss (pro and con alike) the war and other current events. And while it had been booked before Young recorded the album, this current summer tour allowed "LivingWith War" to become the centerpiece of what otherwise would have been just another greatest hits show.
Recent tours by the supergroup (the last one was in 2002) have been marked by a comforting musical democracy, this time it's largely Young's band. And the songs performed from his new opus are all the better for it. The combined voices of the foursome onstage bring more harmonic focus than the 100 voices-strong choir Young used on most of the album's tracks.
In addition, the wider sound of a full seven-piece band adds muscle to songs that were recorded quickly with just Young's fuzzed- out guitar, bass and drums. Playing in front of backdrops that include the American flag, a giant peace symbol, the faces of soldiers killed in Iraq, a ticker counting the dead, as well as lyrics to Young's new songs, these aging relics have for the second time in their almost forty year history have found themselves at the flashpoint of a nation's discontent.
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
When was the last time you saw an audience member flash their middle finger at a performer they paid good money to see? Probably not very recently, if at all. Reviews so far of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's current tour, dubbed "Freedom of Speech 06," have lauded the still exceptional vocal and musical abilities of the quartet of sixty-somethings. That's pretty much what we've come to expect of CSNY, which plays Hersheypark Stadium Aug. 25.
But this has been no ordinary summer outing for the group. While most fans have been cheering and singing along to the recontextualized songs of the group's peace-and-love loaded catalogue, numerous press accounts-from the Washington Times to the Orange County Register-have also noted the thousand or so fans walking out in disgust, sitting sternly with their arms crossed, or making their opinions known through the aforementioned gesture.
It's hard to image anyone at the group's early 1970s shows were supportive of Nixon's dragging out of the Vietnam War, but it's not out of the question to think there may have been a handful. It's even harder to imagine someone who is pro-war expecting a concert by unrepentant hippies to not insult their opinions. The real question is, what happened between then and now (and don't say Sept. 11, that's too easy) to sway even some part of their audience to the pro-war side of the fence.
To paraphrase Einstein, how does one support a war and sing along to songs about peace? For three years, Neil Young had been hoping some young rock artist or group would make a definitive stand against the war in Iraq on record, and rally the growing number of people who have turned against the current administration. But who wants a crusty old relic from the Sixties speaking out on today's troubles, he thought. Problem was, no one else had, though a few had come close.
Yet at a Q&A discussion at the South by Southwest Music Conference in March of this year, festival director Roland Swenson told Young frankly "...we need another Ohio.'" Swenson was of course referring to the incendiary song Young wrote and CSNY recorded just days after four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen at a peace rally at Kent State University in May of 1970. It has since become one Young's most famous songs, and one he has performed only sporadically.
He resurrected it most notably while on a solo acoustic tour just after thousands of students and workers were killed in the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989, very nearly the same place where the Olympic torch, perhaps the world's most recognized symbol of peace, will stand in 2008. But this time Young wanted to say something new and specific. So in a matter of a few weeks after the conference he wrote, rehearsed, and recorded twelve new songs that became the album "Living With War."
Without reservation, it's a hold nothing back indictment of the Bush administration's war and what Young perceives as its arrogance, given the fact that we are not allowed to see flag-draped caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base on television, and that the president himself has yet to attend a funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq. Young echoes (and even references) vintage Bob Dylan on "Flags of Freedom," honors the memories of soldiers who have died on the pained "Families," and reserves his most direct criticism for the sing- along "Let's Impeach the President."
He reaches back to the Vietnam era with "Roger and Out," wherein the current war reminds an aging trucker of a friend lost in a different conflict and the roads they traveled in their youth, and updates a well-known CSNY refrain in the ironically triumphant sounding "After the Garden." To move the new songs out as soon as possible, Young allowed the public to download or stream the entire album from his website while the tape machine was still warm, and had the CD version on record store shelves two weeks later. It was one of the most downloaded albums in Internet history.
Since then an offshoot of Young's official website has become a clearinghouse for people to post protest songs of their own and to discuss (pro and con alike) the war and other current events. And while it had been booked before Young recorded the album, this current summer tour allowed "LivingWith War" to become the centerpiece of what otherwise would have been just another greatest hits show.
Recent tours by the supergroup (the last one was in 2002) have been marked by a comforting musical democracy, this time it's largely Young's band. And the songs performed from his new opus are all the better for it. The combined voices of the foursome onstage bring more harmonic focus than the 100 voices-strong choir Young used on most of the album's tracks.
In addition, the wider sound of a full seven-piece band adds muscle to songs that were recorded quickly with just Young's fuzzed- out guitar, bass and drums. Playing in front of backdrops that include the American flag, a giant peace symbol, the faces of soldiers killed in Iraq, a ticker counting the dead, as well as lyrics to Young's new songs, these aging relics have for the second time in their almost forty year history have found themselves at the flashpoint of a nation's discontent.
Too Hip for America?
Sunday News
Published: April 15, 2007
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
For serious music fans and semi-serious rock scholars, it's a common topic of discussion: Why can some Canadian bands cross over to the United States and find success, while others can't? There's no consistent rule of thumb. For every Bryan Adams there is a 54-40 (who?), for every Nelly Furtado a Sarah Harmer or Kathleen Edwards.
One of the bands that tops the shortlist of great Canadian acts most people below the 49th parallel have never heard of is the Tragically Hip. Formed in 1983 by Gordon Downie (vocals), Bobby Baker (guitar), Paul Langlois (guitar), Gord Sinclair (bass) and Johnny Fay (drums) - all childhood friends growing up in Kingston, Ontario - the Hip didn't appear on record until six years later. Over the next 15 years, the Hip became one of Canada's most revered and respected bands through its frenetic live shows and pursuit of a distinctive sound. The blending of loud, angular guitars with Downie's wildly poetic lyrics gave the band a truly original sound: melodic, earnest, aggressive and demanding.
Hip songs often examine elements of Canadian history and identity in ways outsiders can't understand. In the same way Bruce Springsteen conjures images and icons of American culture, from Walt Whitman to Woody Guthrie to Charlie Starkweather to the anonymous Sept. 11 widow, the Hip speaks for Canada. But for some reason, a band that has sold 6 million records in its native land and can fill hockey arenas with ease can't break through in the United States.
The Hip will play Lancaster's Chameleon Club at 7 p.m. April 22. In the 1990s, the band made serious inroads into New England and the upper Midwest, regions served well by college radio, but failed to break through nationally. A 1995 performance on "Saturday Night Live" at the urging of fellow Canadian Dan Aykroyd, who gave them an enthusiastic partisan introduction, didn't do the trick.
Earlier this year, the Hip opened several arena-size shows for the Who, and the band has sold out most of its current U.S. club tour. Perhaps this will be their year. The band's latest album, "World Container," was released in the United States in early March, and the excellent two-disc set "Yer Favorites," an essential introduction to the Hip, is widely available.
There's no reason why the Tragically Hip couldn't be as big in America as an REM, with cerebral lyricist Michael Stipe being a close analogue to Downie. "I could do hours on this subject," Downie told the Toronto Sun. "You know, why not? Why isn't Canadian film big down there? Is Paul Martin big down there? "Who are you comparing us to? The Barenaked Ladies? Our music is entirely different. Nickelback? Avril? Because of the people we are and the music we make, we get the success we deserve."
In other words, Downie isn't really that concerned with breaking open America. He realizes that what makes the Hip unique may or may not be some Canadian "otherness," or perhaps it's something of the band's own making. Fortunately, the band can laugh about it. Canada possesses, as Vancouver writer Steve Burgess so aptly put it, a sense of humor that is often directed at its own reflection. Or as Hip drummer Fay once told Billboard magazine: Being Canada's biggest band is like being "the world's tallest midgets."
Published: April 15, 2007
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
For serious music fans and semi-serious rock scholars, it's a common topic of discussion: Why can some Canadian bands cross over to the United States and find success, while others can't? There's no consistent rule of thumb. For every Bryan Adams there is a 54-40 (who?), for every Nelly Furtado a Sarah Harmer or Kathleen Edwards.
One of the bands that tops the shortlist of great Canadian acts most people below the 49th parallel have never heard of is the Tragically Hip. Formed in 1983 by Gordon Downie (vocals), Bobby Baker (guitar), Paul Langlois (guitar), Gord Sinclair (bass) and Johnny Fay (drums) - all childhood friends growing up in Kingston, Ontario - the Hip didn't appear on record until six years later. Over the next 15 years, the Hip became one of Canada's most revered and respected bands through its frenetic live shows and pursuit of a distinctive sound. The blending of loud, angular guitars with Downie's wildly poetic lyrics gave the band a truly original sound: melodic, earnest, aggressive and demanding.
Hip songs often examine elements of Canadian history and identity in ways outsiders can't understand. In the same way Bruce Springsteen conjures images and icons of American culture, from Walt Whitman to Woody Guthrie to Charlie Starkweather to the anonymous Sept. 11 widow, the Hip speaks for Canada. But for some reason, a band that has sold 6 million records in its native land and can fill hockey arenas with ease can't break through in the United States.
The Hip will play Lancaster's Chameleon Club at 7 p.m. April 22. In the 1990s, the band made serious inroads into New England and the upper Midwest, regions served well by college radio, but failed to break through nationally. A 1995 performance on "Saturday Night Live" at the urging of fellow Canadian Dan Aykroyd, who gave them an enthusiastic partisan introduction, didn't do the trick.
Earlier this year, the Hip opened several arena-size shows for the Who, and the band has sold out most of its current U.S. club tour. Perhaps this will be their year. The band's latest album, "World Container," was released in the United States in early March, and the excellent two-disc set "Yer Favorites," an essential introduction to the Hip, is widely available.
There's no reason why the Tragically Hip couldn't be as big in America as an REM, with cerebral lyricist Michael Stipe being a close analogue to Downie. "I could do hours on this subject," Downie told the Toronto Sun. "You know, why not? Why isn't Canadian film big down there? Is Paul Martin big down there? "Who are you comparing us to? The Barenaked Ladies? Our music is entirely different. Nickelback? Avril? Because of the people we are and the music we make, we get the success we deserve."
In other words, Downie isn't really that concerned with breaking open America. He realizes that what makes the Hip unique may or may not be some Canadian "otherness," or perhaps it's something of the band's own making. Fortunately, the band can laugh about it. Canada possesses, as Vancouver writer Steve Burgess so aptly put it, a sense of humor that is often directed at its own reflection. Or as Hip drummer Fay once told Billboard magazine: Being Canada's biggest band is like being "the world's tallest midgets."
The Quiet Beatle Remembered
Sunday News
Published: September 30, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
There's a scene in the famous rock n' roll mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" in which a member of the band recounts his immersion in Eastern religion. The singer describes how his girlfriend helped sort out all the "bits of mysticism that drifted through my transom."
To which religion he has devoted himself, we are not told, but it somehow involves meditating while sticking out his tongue. The gag is clearly aimed at the many 1960s converts to Westernized versions of Buddhism, Hinduism and other fashionable "isms."
For most, it was a passing fad, often a drug-confused search for a meaning that rock n' roll stopped giving. But some stuck it out: Herbie Hancock remains a devout Buddhist, and Beach Boys great Mike Love still maintains that transcendental meditation can save the world. Up until his death in 2001, there was no greater example of Eastern religion's hold on 1960s rock n' roll royalty than George Harrison.
In his book, "Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison," Joshua M. Greene chronicles the steps on Harrison's path and shows how, in the face of death, Harrison reached peace with his god, his legacy and his mortality.
Harrison's music and life will be the subject of a multidisciplinary concert event at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, at Elizabethtown College's Leffler Chapel and Performance Center. The event is free, but seating is limited and will be offered on a first- come, first-served basis.
The Godfrey Townsend Band will perform music from throughout Harrison's career with the aid of film and photos, performance clips and interviews. Greene will serve as narrator. The event comes amid news that Martin Scorsese will direct a documentary about Harrison's life with the participation of his widow, Olivia.
In 1965, Harrison became enamored of Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar.
After immersion in the rites of Indian music, he became further intrigued by the spiritual roots of the music. What followed was a lifelong devotion to the Hare Krishna movement of Hinduism, which suggests that chanting the names of God in a mantra will bring the devotee to a conscious awareness of God. In "Here Comes the Sun," Greene, a professor of religion at Hofstra University and a Krishna devotee, limits his discussion of the Beatles to their conflicts instead of the revolutionary music the four men made together.
Even if they weren't chanting mantras, much of the Beatles' best music sought the same kind of awareness and healing that Harrison sought daily. When people point to the spiritual and cultural awakenings initiated by artists of the 1960s, they reference the Beatles as a group, not as individuals.
Among Greene's sins, he dismisses Lennon's "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite," a landmark of predigital production and perhaps the genesis of the sampling and tape-looping techniques that drive pop and hip-hop today, as hackneyed and throwaway. He has only kind words for Ringo Starr, it seems, but paints Paul McCartney and Lennon as cruel, insensitive, litigious and domineering.
His discussion of Harrison's cribbing from "He's So Fine" on the otherwise wonderful "My Sweet Lord" is given only two paragraphs and is described as an annoyance. Greene never even mentions the song was sung by the Chiffons. He gives much emphasis to how Harrison's contributions as a songwriter were overlooked by the Lennon-McCartney team (not really a team at all; they hardly ever wrote together) until he began using Indian music on tracks such as "Within You Without You" and "Love You Too."
But Greene's book is not a Beatles book; it's about Harrison's personal journey, and in that regard it is a success. It could well serve as a guide for others looking to discover what the working- class boy from dreary post-War Liverpool found on the banks of the Ganges River.
Greene shows that as much as Harrison's life was enriched by his religious devotion, it was not without hazards. In 1974, Harrison undertook a tour that proved to be a critical nightmare, as his heavy-handed preaching drove away legions of fans who wanted to hear Beatles hits.
Harrison also went through a period when he questioned much of the Krishna doctrine and became estranged from his first wife, Patti Boyd, to the point that she took up with his best mate, Eric Clapton. (In the end, an enlightened Harrison seemed cool with it.) Through it all, Harrison found true peace when cancer began to take away his life. "Still Krishna after all these years," he proudly shouted with friends on a 1996 pilgrimage to India.
In the end, according to those closest to him, he found what he was looking for and, ultimately, what we are all looking for, whether we find it in God, or rock n' roll, or both, or neither. Said his son Dahni, "He was not afraid of death."
Published: September 30, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
There's a scene in the famous rock n' roll mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" in which a member of the band recounts his immersion in Eastern religion. The singer describes how his girlfriend helped sort out all the "bits of mysticism that drifted through my transom."
To which religion he has devoted himself, we are not told, but it somehow involves meditating while sticking out his tongue. The gag is clearly aimed at the many 1960s converts to Westernized versions of Buddhism, Hinduism and other fashionable "isms."
For most, it was a passing fad, often a drug-confused search for a meaning that rock n' roll stopped giving. But some stuck it out: Herbie Hancock remains a devout Buddhist, and Beach Boys great Mike Love still maintains that transcendental meditation can save the world. Up until his death in 2001, there was no greater example of Eastern religion's hold on 1960s rock n' roll royalty than George Harrison.
In his book, "Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison," Joshua M. Greene chronicles the steps on Harrison's path and shows how, in the face of death, Harrison reached peace with his god, his legacy and his mortality.
Harrison's music and life will be the subject of a multidisciplinary concert event at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, at Elizabethtown College's Leffler Chapel and Performance Center. The event is free, but seating is limited and will be offered on a first- come, first-served basis.
The Godfrey Townsend Band will perform music from throughout Harrison's career with the aid of film and photos, performance clips and interviews. Greene will serve as narrator. The event comes amid news that Martin Scorsese will direct a documentary about Harrison's life with the participation of his widow, Olivia.
In 1965, Harrison became enamored of Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar.
After immersion in the rites of Indian music, he became further intrigued by the spiritual roots of the music. What followed was a lifelong devotion to the Hare Krishna movement of Hinduism, which suggests that chanting the names of God in a mantra will bring the devotee to a conscious awareness of God. In "Here Comes the Sun," Greene, a professor of religion at Hofstra University and a Krishna devotee, limits his discussion of the Beatles to their conflicts instead of the revolutionary music the four men made together.
Even if they weren't chanting mantras, much of the Beatles' best music sought the same kind of awareness and healing that Harrison sought daily. When people point to the spiritual and cultural awakenings initiated by artists of the 1960s, they reference the Beatles as a group, not as individuals.
Among Greene's sins, he dismisses Lennon's "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite," a landmark of predigital production and perhaps the genesis of the sampling and tape-looping techniques that drive pop and hip-hop today, as hackneyed and throwaway. He has only kind words for Ringo Starr, it seems, but paints Paul McCartney and Lennon as cruel, insensitive, litigious and domineering.
His discussion of Harrison's cribbing from "He's So Fine" on the otherwise wonderful "My Sweet Lord" is given only two paragraphs and is described as an annoyance. Greene never even mentions the song was sung by the Chiffons. He gives much emphasis to how Harrison's contributions as a songwriter were overlooked by the Lennon-McCartney team (not really a team at all; they hardly ever wrote together) until he began using Indian music on tracks such as "Within You Without You" and "Love You Too."
But Greene's book is not a Beatles book; it's about Harrison's personal journey, and in that regard it is a success. It could well serve as a guide for others looking to discover what the working- class boy from dreary post-War Liverpool found on the banks of the Ganges River.
Greene shows that as much as Harrison's life was enriched by his religious devotion, it was not without hazards. In 1974, Harrison undertook a tour that proved to be a critical nightmare, as his heavy-handed preaching drove away legions of fans who wanted to hear Beatles hits.
Harrison also went through a period when he questioned much of the Krishna doctrine and became estranged from his first wife, Patti Boyd, to the point that she took up with his best mate, Eric Clapton. (In the end, an enlightened Harrison seemed cool with it.) Through it all, Harrison found true peace when cancer began to take away his life. "Still Krishna after all these years," he proudly shouted with friends on a 1996 pilgrimage to India.
In the end, according to those closest to him, he found what he was looking for and, ultimately, what we are all looking for, whether we find it in God, or rock n' roll, or both, or neither. Said his son Dahni, "He was not afraid of death."
George Jones; The One and Only
Sunday News
Published: June 18, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Somewhere there is a Mount Rushmore of country music, probably in some mythical forgotten place between Nashville and the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee. On its craggy surface, carved by wind and rain, are the faces of Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and George Jones. It is simply impossible to overestimate the impact Jones has had on country music. Though he began as a slightly out-of-place rockabilly singer in the mid-1950s, by the end of the 1960s he had become the master of the country ballad, a title no one has been able to steal from him.
And though he has had few hits since the mid-1980s, save the odd novelty, the last 20 years have seen a slew of country singers take at least part of their singing style from Jones, who is scheduled to perform Thursday at American Music Theatre. Any country singer who takes on a ballad, be it Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam or even Gretchen Wilson, owes a debt to Jones. His phrasing and carefully chosen tone forced Frank Sinatra to recognize Jones' genius, once calling him "the second- best white male singer."
On his recordings, Jones' voice displays incredible range, from a low growl to a high wail, and the versatile combination of countrypolitan polish and hard-core honky-tonk snarl. It was in 1980 that his career, long a reliable institution of hit singles and albums, had its grandest moment with the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today."
The album went platinum (no small achievement at the time for a country artist) and pushed his next few albums into the sales stratosphere. Millions of country music fans at one time voted "He Stopped Loving Her Today" the all-time best country song, and few artists have attempted to sing it again. Jones had done a lot of living by 1980. He had been twice divorced, the second time by country star and collaborator Tammy Wynette, who accused Jones of being abusive. He battled alcoholism and cocaine addiction and weathered the changes of decades of public taste.
But by 2005, life had assaulted him on other fronts: a nearly life- ending car accident, another long stint in rehab, missed tour dates due to illness, and a relegation to the sidelines of country radio in favor of younger artists. His old friends Willie and Merle struggled with the same industry disfavor, and thankfully, like Jones, they've all come out ahead. Jones responded by forming his own label, Bandit Records, which has released his first-ever gospel music collection and last year's "Hits I Missed ... And One I Didn't." Jones agreed for the album (made up largely of songs he passed up that became hits for others over the years) to record a new version of his most famous song. Someone once said good artists copy and great artists steal. Who do the very best have left to steal from but themselves?
Surprisingly, the new recording comes close to topping the original. And only Jones could do it, bringing to the sad song and even greater depth of feeling, a lived-in sense of regret and a delivery that doesn't try to disguise the fact that 25 years have passed. Fifty-one years after his first hit, Jones can still look the best moments of his career straight in the eye.
Published: June 18, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Somewhere there is a Mount Rushmore of country music, probably in some mythical forgotten place between Nashville and the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee. On its craggy surface, carved by wind and rain, are the faces of Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and George Jones. It is simply impossible to overestimate the impact Jones has had on country music. Though he began as a slightly out-of-place rockabilly singer in the mid-1950s, by the end of the 1960s he had become the master of the country ballad, a title no one has been able to steal from him.
And though he has had few hits since the mid-1980s, save the odd novelty, the last 20 years have seen a slew of country singers take at least part of their singing style from Jones, who is scheduled to perform Thursday at American Music Theatre. Any country singer who takes on a ballad, be it Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam or even Gretchen Wilson, owes a debt to Jones. His phrasing and carefully chosen tone forced Frank Sinatra to recognize Jones' genius, once calling him "the second- best white male singer."
On his recordings, Jones' voice displays incredible range, from a low growl to a high wail, and the versatile combination of countrypolitan polish and hard-core honky-tonk snarl. It was in 1980 that his career, long a reliable institution of hit singles and albums, had its grandest moment with the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today."
The album went platinum (no small achievement at the time for a country artist) and pushed his next few albums into the sales stratosphere. Millions of country music fans at one time voted "He Stopped Loving Her Today" the all-time best country song, and few artists have attempted to sing it again. Jones had done a lot of living by 1980. He had been twice divorced, the second time by country star and collaborator Tammy Wynette, who accused Jones of being abusive. He battled alcoholism and cocaine addiction and weathered the changes of decades of public taste.
But by 2005, life had assaulted him on other fronts: a nearly life- ending car accident, another long stint in rehab, missed tour dates due to illness, and a relegation to the sidelines of country radio in favor of younger artists. His old friends Willie and Merle struggled with the same industry disfavor, and thankfully, like Jones, they've all come out ahead. Jones responded by forming his own label, Bandit Records, which has released his first-ever gospel music collection and last year's "Hits I Missed ... And One I Didn't." Jones agreed for the album (made up largely of songs he passed up that became hits for others over the years) to record a new version of his most famous song. Someone once said good artists copy and great artists steal. Who do the very best have left to steal from but themselves?
Surprisingly, the new recording comes close to topping the original. And only Jones could do it, bringing to the sad song and even greater depth of feeling, a lived-in sense of regret and a delivery that doesn't try to disguise the fact that 25 years have passed. Fifty-one years after his first hit, Jones can still look the best moments of his career straight in the eye.
Hank III Going Straight to "Hell"
Sunday News
Published: October 8, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Hank Williams III's latest album, "Straight To Hell," released in August on Curb Records, continues his unapologetically self-obsessed fascination with drinking, drugging, evil and general bad behavior. Though the musicianship across the board is respectable - often first rate -and one or two songs show a glimmer of genuine talent for songwriting, Hank III cannot help but be himself. He has been accused of taking his obsession with drug and drink to the point of absurdity, making a mockery of the hard-core country music he claims to love so much.
His lyrics include such insightful couplets as: "I'm drinkin', druggin'. I'm havin' lots of fun/I always carry 'round my loaded shotgun" and "I've been awake for eight days straight/Well, it must've been them pills I took" and "I've been up for four days, so cut me out another line/An overdose of drugs, overdose of sin" and so forth.
Regarding his boozing, smoking and pilling, Hank is quick to blame the industry. "When you are on the road and playing all the time to the people we play to, that kind of stuff is everywhere. It's just part of what goes on," he said from his home outside Nashville. He's been to rehab once, but says he stays away from the hard drugs. "It's crystal meth that's killing America, not weed or whatever."
For a taste of the chemically fueled Hank III, attend one of his shows. (He's playing Lancaster's Chameleon Club Wednesday.) They usually start out with fiddle-heavy country music, including the occasional Hank Sr. cover. But by the end of the night, his band's punk alter ego lets loose with furiously distorted guitars and hard- core vengeance.
He's never been able to choose between the two styles. "I can't write or read music, so if I ever try to make it all work as one, I'll need some help. I'm no Frank Zappa." Jones, Cash, Haggard, Jennings, Coe, Hank Jr. and Hank Sr., the folks Hank III claims to hold in such high regard, certainly sang their fair share of songs about self-destruction. But they were, first and foremost, storytellers, and darn good ones. Not one of them released an entire album of such debauchery.
"[The dark stuff] is a big part of what country music and what those guys did is all about," Hank III insisted. To some, his art might seem to be a colossal put on, too perfectly disgusting to be true. Maybe it is. Maybe all of his tattoos are, in a sense, painted on. But III recently told NPR that he has pretty much been under the influence of one substance or another continuously since the age of 14. He also has claimed involvement in satanic activities. He dedicated "Straight to Hell" to the late punk misfit G.G. Allin, a bona fide sociopath.
Hank III's obsession with death, pills, booze and Beelzebub, regardless of whether it's cultivated for effect, is laced with a tragic irony. It was the sauce and painkillers that killed his grandfather in the back of a car on some frozen back road in West Virginia at the age of 29, and it was drugs that led to his father's attempted suicide in 1974. But in the 14 years he's been making music professionally, Hank III has given no indication that these or any other warnings will change his nasty ways.
Published: October 8, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Hank Williams III's latest album, "Straight To Hell," released in August on Curb Records, continues his unapologetically self-obsessed fascination with drinking, drugging, evil and general bad behavior. Though the musicianship across the board is respectable - often first rate -and one or two songs show a glimmer of genuine talent for songwriting, Hank III cannot help but be himself. He has been accused of taking his obsession with drug and drink to the point of absurdity, making a mockery of the hard-core country music he claims to love so much.
His lyrics include such insightful couplets as: "I'm drinkin', druggin'. I'm havin' lots of fun/I always carry 'round my loaded shotgun" and "I've been awake for eight days straight/Well, it must've been them pills I took" and "I've been up for four days, so cut me out another line/An overdose of drugs, overdose of sin" and so forth.
Regarding his boozing, smoking and pilling, Hank is quick to blame the industry. "When you are on the road and playing all the time to the people we play to, that kind of stuff is everywhere. It's just part of what goes on," he said from his home outside Nashville. He's been to rehab once, but says he stays away from the hard drugs. "It's crystal meth that's killing America, not weed or whatever."
For a taste of the chemically fueled Hank III, attend one of his shows. (He's playing Lancaster's Chameleon Club Wednesday.) They usually start out with fiddle-heavy country music, including the occasional Hank Sr. cover. But by the end of the night, his band's punk alter ego lets loose with furiously distorted guitars and hard- core vengeance.
He's never been able to choose between the two styles. "I can't write or read music, so if I ever try to make it all work as one, I'll need some help. I'm no Frank Zappa." Jones, Cash, Haggard, Jennings, Coe, Hank Jr. and Hank Sr., the folks Hank III claims to hold in such high regard, certainly sang their fair share of songs about self-destruction. But they were, first and foremost, storytellers, and darn good ones. Not one of them released an entire album of such debauchery.
"[The dark stuff] is a big part of what country music and what those guys did is all about," Hank III insisted. To some, his art might seem to be a colossal put on, too perfectly disgusting to be true. Maybe it is. Maybe all of his tattoos are, in a sense, painted on. But III recently told NPR that he has pretty much been under the influence of one substance or another continuously since the age of 14. He also has claimed involvement in satanic activities. He dedicated "Straight to Hell" to the late punk misfit G.G. Allin, a bona fide sociopath.
Hank III's obsession with death, pills, booze and Beelzebub, regardless of whether it's cultivated for effect, is laced with a tragic irony. It was the sauce and painkillers that killed his grandfather in the back of a car on some frozen back road in West Virginia at the age of 29, and it was drugs that led to his father's attempted suicide in 1974. But in the 14 years he's been making music professionally, Hank III has given no indication that these or any other warnings will change his nasty ways.
Gathering up Box tops
Sunday News
Published: May 21, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Not many of us can play in a Grammy-nominated band with a handful of perennial radio favorites to its credit, let alone do so as a sideline to our day jobs. But half of the members of 1960s hit-makers the Box Tops do just that: balance family life and career with life as a part-time oldies superstar. It's a lucky combination that not every oldies or classic rock act still sluggin' it out on the road can boast.
But with a couple of hit singles still in high rotation and a renewed interest in '60s garage bands among younger fans, the demand is there to be satisfied. The Box Tops will share the stage with the Shadows of Knight at Toyota Arena West in York on May 28 . Formed in Memphis in 1965, the band featured a 17-year-old Alex Chilton, whose voice sounded like he had been gargling with gravel. Bill Cunningham played bass; Gary Talley, guitar (the oldest at 19); Danny Smythe, drums; and John Evans, keyboards.
Their 1967 hit single "The Letter" topped Billboard's pop charts for four weeks in the fall of that year, keeping Bobby Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe" and The Association's "Never My Love" out of the top spot. It was even nominated for a Grammy. "Cry Like a Baby" followed the next year amidst nearly a dozen other singles and a handful of albums, most of which have received the deluxe remaster treatment on compact disc in the last half- decade.
Not bad for a group that by Talley's own recollection had no distinctive sound or direction when it formed. "We were just kids in a band who sounded like whatever group were we trying to sound like: the Rascals, Beach Boys, Beatles ... Two of us were still in high school," he said during telephone interviews with the band. "We never had any creative control. Really, the only thing we had that was distinctive was Alex's voice." With that voice as their trump card, the band members knew that working with seasoned producer Dan Penn was a deal they wanted to strike. Talley called his production "brilliant."
By the time the band had its second million-selling single, Smythe left the group, returning to college to keep a draft deferment. "I was about two to three weeks away from being inducted," Smythe said. Evans left to pursue higher education as well, followed by Cunningham in 1969. Soon enough, the Box Tops ceased to be a true band, with Chilton and replacement members often being supplanted in the studio by session musicians. Chilton and Talley played their last show in February 1970.
"We got home from a show - I can't remember where it was - and just decided we didn't want to go on the road anymore," Talley said. Both he and Chilton had begun writing their own songs and itched to move forward. "For 30 years or so, most of us didn't see each other," Smythe said. But surprisingly, when the group got back together in 1997, the chemistry was still there. The reunion produced the album "Tear Off!"
"We just jelled immediately," said Smythe, who had put down his drumsticks to forge a career in commercial design. At the time, his hits were with such labels as Franceso Rinaldi, Ocean Spray and Miracle-Gro. Cunningham had in the interim studied classical music and landed a gig playing in the White House for four years straddling the Ford and Carter administrations. He went on to study business and foreign relations and currently is an international trade negotiator for the federal government. Talley stayed active as a musician and today works as a session guitar player and songwriter in Nashville and plays a variety of musical styles as a backup musician.
Talley's session work has found him backing everyone from Edwin McCain and Billy Preston to Willie Nelson and Tammy Wynette. "Full time, all the time," he said of his music career. He also teaches guitar and records instructional videos. "There are tons and tons of good players in this town, and getting steady studio work is hard." So he welcomes the occasional Box Tops show. Chilton has had the most impact on the music industry since quitting the band in 1970. His post-Box Tops group Big Star had considerably less commercial success but has had considerably more long-term influence on generations of musicians including the Replacements, R.E.M., dB's, Teenage Fanclub, the Posies, Soul Asylum and many others.
Consequently, Chilton, who has released a steady stream of curious, sometimes brilliant solo albums, often turns away from publicity. His bandmates understand his reluctance. They all got to lead normal lives, while Chilton has been deified for decades by just about every punk and indie rocker this side of Minneapolis. "And it's not some kind of prima donna thing," Cunningham said. "In fact, if anything, it's the opposite. He just can't be bothered by it."
Last fall, when Hurricane Katrina struck Chilton's hometown of New Orleans, friends and fans grew concerned when he was listed as missing. He had simply lent his car to a friend to get some people out of town, boarded up his house and waited it out in the French Quarter. Even Cunningham has trouble keeping track of Chilton's whereabouts. "He's been playing a lot in Europe, but I think he's on his way to Atlanta right now." That may seem a cavalier way to run a band, but since the group only agrees to about a dozen gigs a year, it's more like a jam among old friends than anything else. Everyone just shows up. And since they can choose their gigs judiciously, it's a lot better than it was in the '60s, Smythe said.
With the band members living separate lives in Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C, and New Orleans, they don't even meet to rehearse. "We know the songs cold," Smythe said. "The gear is there, and we just walk onstage and play. I think that helps keep it exciting. We don't even get tired."
Published: May 21, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Not many of us can play in a Grammy-nominated band with a handful of perennial radio favorites to its credit, let alone do so as a sideline to our day jobs. But half of the members of 1960s hit-makers the Box Tops do just that: balance family life and career with life as a part-time oldies superstar. It's a lucky combination that not every oldies or classic rock act still sluggin' it out on the road can boast.
But with a couple of hit singles still in high rotation and a renewed interest in '60s garage bands among younger fans, the demand is there to be satisfied. The Box Tops will share the stage with the Shadows of Knight at Toyota Arena West in York on May 28 . Formed in Memphis in 1965, the band featured a 17-year-old Alex Chilton, whose voice sounded like he had been gargling with gravel. Bill Cunningham played bass; Gary Talley, guitar (the oldest at 19); Danny Smythe, drums; and John Evans, keyboards.
Their 1967 hit single "The Letter" topped Billboard's pop charts for four weeks in the fall of that year, keeping Bobby Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe" and The Association's "Never My Love" out of the top spot. It was even nominated for a Grammy. "Cry Like a Baby" followed the next year amidst nearly a dozen other singles and a handful of albums, most of which have received the deluxe remaster treatment on compact disc in the last half- decade.
Not bad for a group that by Talley's own recollection had no distinctive sound or direction when it formed. "We were just kids in a band who sounded like whatever group were we trying to sound like: the Rascals, Beach Boys, Beatles ... Two of us were still in high school," he said during telephone interviews with the band. "We never had any creative control. Really, the only thing we had that was distinctive was Alex's voice." With that voice as their trump card, the band members knew that working with seasoned producer Dan Penn was a deal they wanted to strike. Talley called his production "brilliant."
By the time the band had its second million-selling single, Smythe left the group, returning to college to keep a draft deferment. "I was about two to three weeks away from being inducted," Smythe said. Evans left to pursue higher education as well, followed by Cunningham in 1969. Soon enough, the Box Tops ceased to be a true band, with Chilton and replacement members often being supplanted in the studio by session musicians. Chilton and Talley played their last show in February 1970.
"We got home from a show - I can't remember where it was - and just decided we didn't want to go on the road anymore," Talley said. Both he and Chilton had begun writing their own songs and itched to move forward. "For 30 years or so, most of us didn't see each other," Smythe said. But surprisingly, when the group got back together in 1997, the chemistry was still there. The reunion produced the album "Tear Off!"
"We just jelled immediately," said Smythe, who had put down his drumsticks to forge a career in commercial design. At the time, his hits were with such labels as Franceso Rinaldi, Ocean Spray and Miracle-Gro. Cunningham had in the interim studied classical music and landed a gig playing in the White House for four years straddling the Ford and Carter administrations. He went on to study business and foreign relations and currently is an international trade negotiator for the federal government. Talley stayed active as a musician and today works as a session guitar player and songwriter in Nashville and plays a variety of musical styles as a backup musician.
Talley's session work has found him backing everyone from Edwin McCain and Billy Preston to Willie Nelson and Tammy Wynette. "Full time, all the time," he said of his music career. He also teaches guitar and records instructional videos. "There are tons and tons of good players in this town, and getting steady studio work is hard." So he welcomes the occasional Box Tops show. Chilton has had the most impact on the music industry since quitting the band in 1970. His post-Box Tops group Big Star had considerably less commercial success but has had considerably more long-term influence on generations of musicians including the Replacements, R.E.M., dB's, Teenage Fanclub, the Posies, Soul Asylum and many others.
Consequently, Chilton, who has released a steady stream of curious, sometimes brilliant solo albums, often turns away from publicity. His bandmates understand his reluctance. They all got to lead normal lives, while Chilton has been deified for decades by just about every punk and indie rocker this side of Minneapolis. "And it's not some kind of prima donna thing," Cunningham said. "In fact, if anything, it's the opposite. He just can't be bothered by it."
Last fall, when Hurricane Katrina struck Chilton's hometown of New Orleans, friends and fans grew concerned when he was listed as missing. He had simply lent his car to a friend to get some people out of town, boarded up his house and waited it out in the French Quarter. Even Cunningham has trouble keeping track of Chilton's whereabouts. "He's been playing a lot in Europe, but I think he's on his way to Atlanta right now." That may seem a cavalier way to run a band, but since the group only agrees to about a dozen gigs a year, it's more like a jam among old friends than anything else. Everyone just shows up. And since they can choose their gigs judiciously, it's a lot better than it was in the '60s, Smythe said.
With the band members living separate lives in Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C, and New Orleans, they don't even meet to rehearse. "We know the songs cold," Smythe said. "The gear is there, and we just walk onstage and play. I think that helps keep it exciting. We don't even get tired."
Drive-By Truckers Tackle Lifes' Dualities on New Disc
Sunday News
Published: September 24, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
For most of its early life, Drive-By Truckers was just another alt- country bar band with a cool-sounding name. But without really setting out to do so, the band has matured into one of the best acts of the eclectic Americana scene. Singer/guitarists Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley met at college, initially playing in punk bands together, but had formed the nucleus of Truckers by 1996 in Athens, Ga.
Published: September 24, 2006
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
For most of its early life, Drive-By Truckers was just another alt- country bar band with a cool-sounding name. But without really setting out to do so, the band has matured into one of the best acts of the eclectic Americana scene. Singer/guitarists Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley met at college, initially playing in punk bands together, but had formed the nucleus of Truckers by 1996 in Athens, Ga.
With independently released albums teasingly named "Gangstabilly" and "Pizza Deliverance," it was easy to dismiss the group as irony obsessed, even if it tackled subjects like death, suicide and arachnophobia. But a rock opera released in 2001 based loosely on the rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd - and chronicling Patterson's coming to terms with his Southern heritage and its musical legacy - signaled the quintet was aiming for something higher, even if that goal might prove to be out of reach. Hood, while preparing for a show in Philadelphia, spoke by phone about how the rock-opera project earned the group a reputation even before it got off the ground. "I knew we were onto something because everyone we knew said it was an absolutely horrible idea. But I always said something can be so bad that it comes out the other side as pretty good."
When it was released, it wasn't the dud everyone predicted, and while the project, from recording to artwork to packaging, cost the band a total of $5,000, Universal's roots-rock Lost Highway picked it up for distribution. From then on, the band was taken more seriously. "But I hope we don't take ourselves too seriously. We sing about some weighty subjects, but in the end, it's still just a rock n' roll show, I hope." In April, Truckers released "A Blessing and a Curse," their seventh full-length album, on New West Records. And while it was recorded in exactly the opposite fashion of "Southern Rock Opera," with most songs written in the studio and often tracked the same day, it is by no means a throwaway affair.
The songs discuss the nature of love and its power, its positive and negative impact. A man suffers loneliness after the death of a spouse on the touching acoustic ballad "Space City"; a youth grows up in the shadow of a deceased sibling on "Little Bonnie"; and a friendship shatters on "Goodbye." "To love is to feel pain. There's no way around it ..." said Hood, almost paraphrasing Buddha in the spoken verse of the album's final track, "A World of Hurt." That pretty well sums up the album's theme: Love is both a blessing and a curse.
The decision to tackle matters of love was almost simultaneous among the group's three songwriters, Hood said. "In the last year, several of us have had babies and started families, and we see love as a much more powerful thing than before," he said. "We live pretty cooped-up together on the road, so we talk a lot and sort of came to the same conclusions." Hood is overjoyed at being a father, but it makes life as a road rocker more difficult.
"It's turned something that is usually a really cool job into something that at times is painful. We're away from home 150 days a year," he said. "It can't help but affect what you write about." Hood said that, in the end, the album's scale tilts toward the "curse" side of love. "Maybe we'll sing more about the blessings on the next album." In closing out the album, the band still acknowledges the blessings amidst the pain. In the end, Truckers would have you believe it's all worth it. "It's not too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into it with everything you've got ... It's great to be alive."
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