soundchex

Murphy's Talent for Interpretation is (Almost) Unquestionable

2009-07-05T21:24:00.004-04:00

John Duffy, Correspondent
Sunday News

July 5, 2009

It's quite possible that Peter Murphy didn't think this one through: submitting his version of John Lennon's "Instant Karma" to be used in a Chase Bank television ad. Just ponder that for a second. One of the great iconoclasts of the postwar generation writes a song that professes a simple but defiant truth: Be good to each other, and we'll all be OK. Yet 35 years later, somebody deemed the song appropriate to use in an ad campaign for a financial institution that is fending off accusations of predatory lending. Of course, Murphy is not completely to blame for this. Yoko Ono approved.

And while Murphy is no stranger to playing other people's songs, he usually he gets it right. Of course, he's new to the commercial game."Instant Karma" is the first in a series of four cover songs Murphy is releasing as digital singles this summer, — a new one every few weeks. He'll bring his band to the Chameleon Club in downtown Lancaster on Wednesday, July 8. A new full-length album is due later this year.

With virtually no musical experience, Murphy in 1978 became singer and chief lyricist for Bauhaus, indisputably one of England's most important post-punk bands.With their charging, angular rhythms, electronic atmospherics and slashing guitars, combined with the alienation of a generation of Britons raised under a three-day week and a trendy androgyny, Bauhaus originated what became known as goth rock.

Over the next 25 years, millions of self-absorbed teenagers draped in black with bad complexions would follow. Bu ts original as it was, the sound did not come out of thin air. And Bauhaus was one of the few bands at the time that proudly recognized, even celebrated, its influences.

Amongst the band's first run of singles was an icy version of T. Rex's "Telegram Sam." Sessions for the BBC included songs by Brian Eno and the Strangeloves. Two years later, it was David Bowie's tale of rock 'n' roll narcissism, "Ziggy Stardust," that gave the group its biggest hit and its most recognizable video.

In his years as a solo artist, Murphy's talent for reinterpreting alternative rock standards has not diminished. If anything, it's led him to some of his most fruitful work. On solo tours, Murphy has performed the Doors' "Riders on the Storm," Joy Division's "Transmission," Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" and Bowie's "Be My Wife," among many others.

Murphy's not doing glam-rock oldies; he's doing alternative-rock standards. Better than droning on about one's influences, a well-placed cover can serve as a touchstone for artist and audience alike, even if, as becomes the case with each passing year, the song is one that fewer average concertgoers remember or know anything about.

As much as Bauhaus built upon the work of Bowie, Eno, Marc Bolan and the like, an entire generation of industrial and goth-inspired rock acts have followed from Murphy's originality — Jane's Addiction, Type O Negative, Placebo, Interpol, Dead Can Dance, Depeche Mode and KMFDM among them. Then, of course, there's Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails. As much as Reznor is a student of Murphy, the admiration goes both ways. As recently as this spring, Murphy was performing Reznor's "Hurt." (It's too bad for Murphy that Johnny Cash owns that song forever now.)

When Murphy, with and without Bauhaus, has toured with Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, the mixed sets and collaborations have been hard to keep track of. In a series of intimate radio sessions held backstage before concerts, they would tackle, in addition to each other's material, Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing" and Daniel Miller's "Warm Leatherette," both of which, coincidentally or not, were title tracks for albums by Grace Jones. Onstage, Reznor and members of TV on the Radio joined Murphy to perform Bauhaus' riveting 1983 psych-industrial epic "Bela Lugosi's Dead."

And on and on it goes. The second cover in Murphy's summer quartet, released early last week, is yet another Bowie classic, "Space Oddity." Might make a good ad for a fuel-efficient car or something. I'm sure General Motors will be in touch.

Success Mining "Coal"

2009-05-13T10:11:00.006-04:00

by John Duffy, Correspondent

Sunday News

April 12, 2009

It's been a year since Kathy Mattea released "Coal," a collection of mostly 20th-century songs about mining life that has done nothing less than redefine her career. As she tells it, an album that began as a labor of love grew into a transformative force in her life. "It's turned into a wild year," Mattea said in a recent telephone interview from her Nashville, Tenn., home. "[The album] has rippled out in so many ways. It has become a life-changing experience singing these songs and exploring where they lead me in my own life."

For an album with no radio singles, released on a tiny label, "Coal" has sold well and was nominated for a Grammy for best traditional folk album. More important for the singer, the recording has given her a direction on her path as an artist and activist. Written between the grooves of "Coal" was Mattea's plea for an end to mountaintop removal, the controversial mining practice that involves sheering off vast tracts of landscape with high explosives to reveal buried coal seams. The stuff that's left over gets pushed down the sides of the hill and can drastically alter habitat. The Environmental Protection Agency recently ordered the licensing of proposed mountaintop-removal operations to be halted pending further review.

Mattea, in addition to touring constantly in support of "Coal," has been actively involved in lobbying for an end to the practice.Mattea was one of the first 50 graduates of Al Gore's course to present the PowerPoint version of his award-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." She used her experience to author a presentation of her own, "My Coal Journey," which traces the arc of her latest album from her childhood in the green corduroy hills of West Virginia to the stages where she sings about them. She gives the presentation about once a month at colleges and community centers.Advocates and activists in the coal region say Mattea's voice has brought attention to a problem often overlooked by the rest of the country.

Southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, ground zero for mountaintop removal, is a flyover region, depopulated and depressed since the steel collapse of the 1970s and '80s, and isolated by both its geography and economy."It really is a marginalized population," Mattea said. "A lawyer I know said to me, 'This wouldn't happen in the Sierra Nevada or the Colorado Rockies because there are people with money out there who would never let it happen.' "But the mountains [in the coal fields] and the mineral rights were bought out a long time ago, and other industries just seem to get in the way."

Growth industries, other than prisons and landfills, have a hard time making it there, and mountaintop removal employs a fraction of the workers that sustain traditional underground mining operations. The music of "Coal" and Mattea's subsequent activism threatened to brand her as just another angry celebrity voice. But Mattea grew up in coal country and knew the mining life, even though her grandfather was the last in her family to ride the mantrip underground."I was concerned that I was going to end up becoming the West Virginia state mascot against mountaintop removal. I wanted to simply add to the discussion."

Immersion in the study of nonviolent and nonconfrontational social justice work has tempered Mattea's anger to the point where she feels she can be of more use. As much as she wants to see an end to mountaintop removal, she knows most of America's power is still produced by burning coal. "My task is not to say, 'You're bad,' because they are fulfilling a need," she said. The success of "Coal" and the experience of delivering the album to an enthusiastic audience has reinforced a long-standing ethic that has guided Mattea's career. "I think fundamentally this has been a good reminder that an artist is charged with staying awake in their form. "I would never make a record just to fulfill a contract. I will always put in a conscious effort to better what I've done before. With "Coal," I just wanted to shine a light in the dark."

Springsteen was once second-bill at $4 York College show

2009-05-13T09:48:00.008-04:00

by John Duffy, Correspondent
Sunday News
May 10, 2009

When Bruce Springsteen brings the E Street Band to Hersheypark Stadium this week, he'll have a small army of support personnel and musicians in tow, and about $1 million worth of lights carried by an armada of trucks. But at the start of it all, Springsteen (who turns 60 this fall) and what would later be called the E Street Band filled no more than a couple of station wagons and a rented box truck. When they turned off South George Street and rolled up to the back doors of the gymnasium at York College of Pennsylvania on the afternoon of Nov. 11, 1972, the band presented humbly.

If E Street today is a superhighway of rock 'n' roll, when the band played York, it was little more than a gravel road. But it was destined to lead somewhere special. Springsteen had finished his debut album, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.," earlier that fall, but he would have to wait until January 1973 to see it released. The York show was among the first few performances by Springsteen and the E Street Band (so named two years later). Helping the longhaired, scruffy-bearded, greasy-looking beach bums unload their amps, drums, saxophones and guitars that day were a handful students, the "free roadies" that are the backbone of college rock shows.

Among them was Tom Gibson."It was like any other of those kinds of college shows, a lot of pushing heavy stuff around and people yelling," Gibson recalled. Today Gibson is a telecommunications manager for the college and chief engineer of its radio stations. He also runs a technology summer camp on site. Above his desk is a yellowed poster advertising the concert. Put up by the college's student government, the posters appeared around campus in the week preceding the show.

Gibson's is the only one known to have survived. Crazy Horse, playing its own music in between Neil Young gigs, was the headliner; Springsteen, the undercard. In an ironic twist, Crazy Horse would later include guitarist Nils Lofgren, a current member of the E Street Band. Ticket prices ranged from $1.50 in advance for students to $4 for the general public at the door. At the Hersheypark concert Friday, May 15, $4 will get you half a cup of beer. At the time, Springsteen was essentially an unknown outside of New Jersey and a few select Northeast markets. But his reputation had been spreading by word of mouth. In the early 1970s, much like today, Pennsylvania colleges contained large populations of students from New Jersey.

"There were quite a few students who had heard of him or seen him in New Jersey or New York," Gibson recalled. "So there was definitely an advance buzz about the show. "People said, 'You may have never have heard of him, but you don't want to miss him,' … and they were right. It was amazing," said Gibson, who was lucky enough to see the entire show from just off stage. Perhaps it was that he was now riding on someone else's tab — it was only the third time he had been introduced as "Columbia recording artist Bruce Springsteen" — but Gibson said Springsteen seemed nervous at first, laughing awkwardly (a trait he hasn't shaken) and fiddling obsessively with the microphone. "But he pulled it off beautifully. He really won a lot of people over," said Gibson, who thinks Springsteen outshone Crazy Horse. "He was the support act, but he was amazing."

He should have been. The Jersey shore in the mid- to late-1960s had a thriving, incestuous music scene, and Springsteen and the other five guys on stage had been playing together in various combinations for as long as five years.They were all veterans: bassist Gary W. Tallent, organist "Phantom" Danny Federici, saxophonist Clarence "Big Man" Clemons and drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez, who had taken to decorating his kick drum with a pair of impala horns, like some outsized hood ornament.

"Yeah, I remember York College. We played with Crazy Horse," Lopez recalled. "We played with them a couple of times actually. Good guys." Most sets around that time featured most of the songs from "Greetings," some older Springsteen songs that hadn't been recorded, like "Cowboys of the Sea" and "Goin' Back to Georgia," and a healthy dose of early rock and soul covers. The sound was rollicking, swinging, soulful, full of swagger and poeticism, with inklings of the high drama that would infuse Springsteen's music over the coming decades. "What you hear on the first record, that was the sound that night ... just louder," Gibson said.

Lopez doesn't remember anything specific about the York show. "That's just how it was. If a gig went normally or nothing unusual happened, it all becomes kind of hazy," Lopez said. "It probably went pretty well. We did well at colleges." He had played plenty of them alongside Springsteen, Federici, Tallent and others in previous years. Springsteen started out with the clean-cut Castiles back in 1965 in his hometown of Freehold, N.J., playing Kinks, Beatles and Animals covers on the dance club and battle-of-the-bands circuits. Three years later, Springsteen happened to impress Lopez and Federici while jamming at an Asbury Park after-hours hangout called the Upstage.

The two had played in groups such as Moment of Truth and the Downtown Tangiers Rockin' Rhythm & Blues Band, and they immediately knew they wanted to play in a group with the longhaired guy on stage with the low-slung Les Paul. Eventually, they wore down the reluctant Springsteen. For years, Lopez thought he played a proprietary role in the band. "I asked Bruce to join my group, me and Federici. I thought it was my band." From 1968 through late 1970, they toured the East Coast as Steel Mill, a hard blues-rock combo in the vein of the Allman Brothers Band, Humble Pie, the Small Faces and Cream. Clubs, outdoor festivals and bars were the group's main haunts, but college shows allowed them to truly develop a stage presence and the kind of audience rapport Springsteen is known for today.

Frequent higher-ed gigs included Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Richmond, Ocean County College (where Springsteen had been expelled), Rutgers University and Monmouth College, which this fall will host a three-day academic symposium on Springsteen and his music. The band even crashed a festival at University of North Carolina that featured James Taylor and Sly Stone. As Lopez explained it, they just pulled up and started unloading before any other acts were ready. "I pretty easily talked my way past security. We were almost set up about to play when somebody finally asked us who we were," he said, laughing.

But after two years of slogging it out, Springsteen was leaning away from showy guitar rock and toward something more soulful, more confessional. He experimented with various bands, integrating rock and soul, but by 1972, the Asbury Park scene that had once sustained him and his fellow musicians was gone, the victim of devastating race riots the year before and an economic slump.Perhaps because the shore had become a lonelier scene, a more Dylanesque songwriting style emerged in Springsteen, yielding songs that were more verbose, with florid lyrics and complex acoustic arrangements. His songs combined elements of Curtis Mayfield, Van Morrison and Tim Hardin.

When Springsteen auditioned for Columbia Records in May of that year, he did so by himself. Legendary talent scout John Hammond (who had brought Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to the label) thought he was signing a folk act in Springsteen, the "new Dylan." But when Lopez, Tallent, keyboardist David Sancious and later Clarence Clemmons showed up to the sessions, it was clear Springsteen would not be pigeonholed."Greetings" was finished in a mere three weeks at a cost of $45,000, about two-thirds of the advance Columbia had forked over. And as Springsteen had not yet proven himself to be anything more than a regional cult act, that was the lion's share of the group's income for the year.

Mike Appel, the manager who got Springsteen signed to Columbia and produced his first three records, has claimed in interviews that band members got paid about $200 a week in the early days, and $250 a week by the time "Born to Run" hit the airwaves in 1975. "Yeah, keep dreaming. Keep dreaming," Lopez said, laughing. "We got our hotels and meals covered and about $35 a week. That's it! I never saw $200 a week." Further clashes with Appel would lead to Lopez's dismissal in 1974. He remains the only E Street-er ever to be fired. Gibson, by his best recollection, thinks the college's student government paid about $5,000 for the entire show that night, both acts.

Two years later, it was Appel who would be fired by Springsteen, who then successfully sued Appel for an undisclosed amount of back payments and full rights to his publishing. These days, Lopez leads Steel Mill Retro and has recorded two albums of songs from the days of the original band. He's on friendly terms with both Springsteen and Appel. Back on the night of Nov. 12, 1972, in a college gymnasium, as a gas shortage loomed, a recession lumbered on and Nixon sat poised to run the country for another, well, 10 months, nothing else mattered to Lopez, Springsteen and the rest of the crew but the sweet elixir of rock 'n' roll — until the set was over.

Professionals that they were, Gibson said, Springsteen and the band, after playing for about 80 minutes, said their farewells and hit the road before Crazy Horse had left the stage. A weeklong residency at Kenny's Castaways in New York was calling, then the Detroit Auto Show, then a free show for inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility … then another 30 years burning down the road. "It was a rough life, but we loved it," Lopez said. "It certainly wasn't for the money. You can only do it that way when you are young."

Odd Man Out: Ousted Eagles Guitarist Fires Back with Book

2008-11-26T20:27:00.008-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eagles New Stuff Doesn't Soar Like the Hits

2008-11-26T20:19:00.004-05:00

New Era
Published
ByJOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graham Nash 'for Beginners'

2008-10-06T23:05:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mac man delivers 'Gift of Screws'

2008-10-06T22:59:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Springsteen Brings Historic Show to Hershey Tonight

2008-08-20T00:30:00.003-04:00

New Era

Published: Aug. 19, 2008

By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Springsteen: American Man

2008-08-20T00:14:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reinventive Counting Crows Outshine Maroon 5

2008-08-06T14:53:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live Please Crowd, No Matter How Small

2008-08-04T17:45:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-07-19T22:44:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-07-19T22:35:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Who's Endless Wire Closes Quarter-Century Gap

2008-07-19T22:30:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-19T22:22:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-07-19T22:16:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-19T22:12:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hummel Out to Save Blues Harp with Tour

2008-07-19T22:01:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-19T21:59:00.003-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Williams Out "West"

2008-07-17T01:09:00.006-04:00

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.

Goth Rock Without the Freak Show

2008-07-17T01:08:00.005-04:00

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."

Dylan, Thompson Both Transformers of Folk

2008-07-17T01:06:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-17T01:04:00.002-04:00

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.' "

CSNY: Exercising Freedom

2008-07-17T01:00:00.004-04:00

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.

Too Hip for America?

2008-07-17T00:55:00.004-04:00

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."

The Quiet Beatle Remembered

2008-07-17T00:53:00.004-04:00

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."

George Jones; The One and Only

2008-07-17T00:49:00.004-04:00

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.

Hank III Going Straight to "Hell"

2008-07-17T00:44:00.003-04:00

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.

Gathering up Box tops

2008-07-17T00:40:00.003-04:00

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."

Drive-By Truckers Tackle Lifes' Dualities on New Disc

2008-07-17T00:37:00.004-04:00

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.

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."

Howe Now: Guitarist Rejoins Asia for Album, Tour

2008-07-17T00:31:00.004-04:00

Sunday News
Published: April 6, 2008
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

By the close of 1980, Steve Howe was at a crossroads in his career. He had given the previous decade of his life to Yes, and was one of the most revered guitarist in popular music, but progressive rock was on the way out, and punk was hip. The year before, founding singer Jon Anderson had left Yes. Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman exited as well. Aiming for a fresh sound, Howe, along with drummer Alan White and bassist Chris Squire, brought in Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, who together formed the synth-pop duo the Buggles.

The result was "Drama," an album considered by many fans to be among the band's worst. Almost 30 years later, Howe still defends the record. "I thought Drama' was a great Yes album," Howe said in a recent interview from a New York hotel room. Howe and the original members of Asia will perform Monday in Harrisburg at Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater. Howe recalled how, after "Drama," the band simply fell apart.
"Chris and Alan were keen on collaborating with Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Trevor and Geoff wanted to do another Buggles record, and I certainly wasn't going to try and recruit new members."

The Jimmy Page thing never happened, but Yes was done. "We just gave it up," Howe said. Growing up in London, Howe played in the In Crowd and Tomorrow, bands that epitomized the psychedelic sound of swinging London in the 1960s. He joined Yes in 1971, helping to forge the 3-year-old group's sound for its third LP, simply titled "The Yes Album."

Among progressive-rock aficionados, the record has remained a favorite: bright and bold, ambitious without being dense, crackling with energy and innovation. Classic tracks "Yours is No Disgrace," "Starship Trooper," "I've Seen All Good People" and "Perpetual Change" cemented the group's reputation as the kings of the prog genre. The album set the standard for the group over the next decade, and while albums such as "Fragile," "Close to the Edge" and "Tales From Topographic Oceans" displayed accelerated ambition and vision, Yes was often criticized for self-indulgence, for overreaching and making rock n' roll into snob music.

Through it all, Howe remained a respected guitarist. Rock, R&B, ragtime, jazz, Renaissance - not only could Howe play them all masterfully, but he found hidden melodic connections between genres that even seasoned musicians often miss. But by the 1980s, that approach, exciting as it was, seemed tired. A few months after Yes dissolved, Howe was approached by former King Crimson bassist John Wetton through a mutual friend. The pair hit it off, and almost immediately began writing songs without having a band to play them.

Howe suggested Downes be brought in. Wetton snagged Emerson, Lake & Palmer drummer Carl Palmer. Then the writing got even better. Signed to a lucrative deal with Geffen Records, the band decided to call itself Asia. Immediately dubbed a prog-rock supergroup by the press, Asia was expected to churn out more of the long, complex, dramatic, spacey jams familiar to fans of Yes, King Crimson and ELP.

Instead, the group's self-titled debut album was one of sleek arena rock: catchy hooks, soaring harmonies, heavy drums and searing guitars all neatly edited and ready for radio. And radio proved ready. "Why did we end up sounding the way we did? That's the hardest question of all to answer," Howe recalled with a laugh.

"I think we were all just looking for something new, and we just kind of fell into it. For me, personally, I had carried the Yes banner for 10 years, and I wanted to carry a new banner." Asia was an unlikely success, and to Howe it proved liberating. On any given night with Yes, he might play classical guitar, a big Gibson through a fuzzbox or a sighing pedal steel, sometimes in the space of one epic song. Asia was different.

"It was certainly a lesson in streamlining for me," Howe said. "I really liked the idea of not having to go around the world with a dozen guitars dangling off the stage." With Howe's eclecticism reduced to its core and the pop songs of Wetton and Downes forming the band's foundation, Asia had found a winning approach. Howe insists the success came from the songs and the group's approach to songwriting, not from their abilities as players. "With any successful band, no matter how talented they might be, it's the music itself that is the foundation."

The gravity of their past successes combined with their concise pop arrangements made the members of Asia seem like more than just some seasoned art-rockers looking to cash in on new wave. The group's debut album topped the Billboard charts for two months and spawned the No. 4 hit "Heat of the Moment" (one of the most recognized riffs of the 1980s) and the top 20 "Only Time Will Tell." Both are still classic-rock staples.

Both songs had accompanying hit videos on the nascent cable network MTV. It was a serendipitous partnership. Asia could not have been successful without MTV, and MTV owed part of its success to Asia. "At the same time we were finding a new sound to call our own, we were finding a new look as well," Howe said. A few years older than anyone else on the network, Asia benefited from the video-directing prowess of Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who helped the group find a young audience almost overnight.

"I think those videos have held up well. It was a new way to engage an audience, and we enjoyed it very much," Howe said. It was a package for success that, in retrospect, might have been more influential than the group originally thought. On tour in 1983, Howe got an advance cassette copy of "90125," the new album from a regrouped Yes, featuring South African guitarist Trevor Rabin in Howe's spot, and with singer Jon Anderson back in the fold. The sleek new Yes sounded, well, a lot like Asia.

"I used to poke fun at them for doing it," Howe said. "I thought, Look, they're playing at our game now." The album, of course, was massive for Yes, yielding hits "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and "Leave It." Success for Asia, however, was short-lived. "Don't Cry," from the band's second LP, "Alpha," signaled the end of Asia's chart run. A third album, "Astra," flopped miserably. "We really just [undid] ourselves," Howe said, referring to the ego clashes and conflicts that dashed any hope of a sustained career.

Howe barely participated in recording Asia's third album, instead jumping ship to join former Genesis six-string noodler Steve Hackett in GTR. He also did session work for the likes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Queen and Dixie Dregs. Beginning in 1989, Howe participated in a dizzying array of Yes reunions and tours that continued into the new millennium. He also got more prolific on his own. In his first 20 years as a performer, Howe released only two solo albums. Since 1991, he has put forth another baker's dozen, featuring licks of jazz, folk, acoustic and electric guitar.

"It's become a biannual thing, I guess," Howe said, referring to his solo efforts. "Building a home studio and moving out into the country to write has really helped. I just keep finding different avenues to explore." In the midst of all this, Wetton got in touch with Howe in 2006 about an Asia reunion. Wetton and Downes had fronted various ad-hoc Asia lineups over the years with limited success. Howe was keen on gathering the original group, so they did.

Tours in 2006 and 2007 went so well that the group recorded a new album, "Phoenix," due out Tuesday, April 15, on the EMI America label. The title might be a little presumptuous, considering there's little chance the album will generate any hits. But "Phoenix" is far better than the last record this lineup put together. For Howe, for now, that's good enough. The original members of Asia will perform at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 7, at Whitaker

Police Gave Rock Global Perspective

2008-07-15T01:46:00.004-04:00

In 1979, the Police were one of the first bands of their generation to look at the world abroad and see things going wrong. Bored with contemplating suburban English snobbery and the timeworn love-gone-wrong themes, the trio once dubbed the hottest band in the world finally began to wonder about its place in it, and set off on an unbeaten path toward rock 'n' roll globalism.

By the time the Police burst onto the London scene in late 1977, they were already too old and too sophisticated to be punks. Sting had been an English teacher and played in jazz bands. Stewart Copeland had played drums with art-rockers Curved Air. Guitarist Andy Summers, who was nearly 10 years older than his mates, had professional roots reaching back into the '60s: Zoot Money, Kevin Ayers and the Animals. They were all accomplished musicians who could play competently, even expertly, and their abilities made them suspect. Punk values lay elsewhere. The Police were intelligent, well-read, ambitious and relatively sober men.

And though their first two albums, both brimming with hit singles and catchy hooks, showed some allegiance to punk by way of reggae- infused and jazz-inflected rock, their full potential as a band was not realized until "Zenyatta Mondatta." In 1979, the band toured the world for the first time, or as Sting said at the time, "the world and elsewhere," including dates throughout Asia and the Indian subcontinent. On tour, the problems of poverty, human rights abuses, despotism and militarism came into the band's collective view through train and taxi cab windows, from hotel balconies, on television and in the papers, even from onstage.

Copeland, the son of a CIA station chief, had lived all over the Middle East and Asia in his youth and served as the group's de facto guide through this period of discovery, bringing political insight to questions about social problems. The political realities were indeed severe. The Cold War was at its peak. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan to suppress a jihadist insurgency (that the United States funded, armed and trained) in an adventure that became a communist mirror of Vietnam.

In Iran, a reactionary Islamic revolution overthrew a corrupt Western- backed regime, became a repressive religious state and held 90 hostages, 53 of them American, for more than a year. Peace between Egypt and Israel was attained. There was snow in the Sahara and strange explosions in the waters of the South Atlantic.

Upon returning to the studio after the tour, the band broadened its focus and recorded "Zenyatta Mondatta." The album charted three singles, went to No. 5 in the United States in 1980 and snagged two Grammy Awards. Though overshadowed by massive hits three years later, critics and fans almost always list "Zenyatta Mondatta" as the group's crowning achievement.

In particular, the Middle East and Central Asia figured into many of "Zenyatta's" strongest tracks. On the slow, funky "Shadows in the Rain," Sting's faraway voice echoes as if through a desert canyon, while Summers sketches angular sounds on his electronically morphed guitar, referencing Middle Eastern instruments like the oud. Summers' own Grammy-winning instrumental, "Behind My Camel," takes things a step further, with his scales hearkening an Islamic call to prayer.

"Bombs Away" paints the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan as clueless interlopers, and their in-country supporters as willing tools. Summers' solo again features Eastern-sounding scales played with Western rock gravitas. And for a bit of comic relief, Copeland's bouncing "Man in a Suitcase" parodies the life of a rocker on the road, complete with the voice of a French airport intercom.

For the first time, a band was noticeably searching for something outside the dated hippie ideology and recognizing the futility of remaining static. "Zenyatta's" most fully realized tune is Sting's tense blues- reggae hybrid "Driven to Tears." The song was inspired by television images of famine abroad. He sings from the perspective of a journalist recording the nightmare of famine. "Too many cameras and not enough food/This is what we've seen," he sings. "Protest is futile/Nothing seems to get through/What's to become of our world/Who knows what to do."

No other group of the Police's generation was singing about global problems with such intelligence and sophistication. Only the Clash came close. Just about every star-studded benefit in rockdom, from Live Aid to Live 8, can trace an unbroken, ever-blooming path back to the global consciousness championed by the Police. This year's massive Police reunion tour benefits WaterAid, a nongovernmental aid agency that funds clean-water access and sanitation projects in developing countries. The tour stops at Hersheypark Stadium Friday night.

The band explored human rights issues further on "Ghost in the Machine," the dancy, horn-laden follow-up to "Zenyatta," on songs like "Rehumanize Yourself," "Invisible Sun" and "One World (Not Three)." But personalities clashed, sidetracking the band's momentum, and their best-selling 1983 album, "Synchronicity," once again looked inward.

After the final show on the 1986 Amnesty International Human Rights Now Tour at Giants Stadium, the Police were ready to call it quits. No one had said so publicly, but the band knew it. In one of the most touching, if contrived, moments in rock history, the Police, still onstage, unceremoniously turned over their instruments to the members of U2 at the close of their performance. Today, U2 is the most prominent rock group in the world and, by any estimation, the standard-bearer of progressive ideals in rock music. Looking back, no one can deny the symbolism, or the absolute rightness, of the passing of that torch.

Los Lobos: Immigrant Voices in a New America

2008-07-15T01:42:00.001-04:00

Sunday News
Published: July 30, 2006
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Since forming in 1973, Los Lobos has made music that illustrates and epitomizes the immigrant experience in America, taking the cherished remembrances of home and joining them with the traditions of a new place to create something entirely new. In the fertile cross-pollination of Southern California, the members of Los Lobos grew up listening to surf rock, R&B and the folk and popular music of their parents' native Mexico on the radio, as well as the garage rock, blues and American folk in their Anglo friends' record collections.

If there is any better example of the modern immigrant experience in America, it hasn't been seen in popular music: Four bilingual, bicultural youths make careers in the music industry by synthesizing the best elements of their native and host cultures. That is America. And in a nation fighting with itself over whose deserves the privilege of citizenship, Los Lobos stands as a pertinent reminder of the cultural value of immigrant America.

Three of the band's four founding members, David Hidalgo, Louie Perez, and Conrad Lozano, all now in their early 50s, were born in America to Mexican immigrant parents. Cesar Rosas' family moved here when he was a child.

They all grew up in, and still live relatively close to, the sprawling Hispanic neighborhoods of East Los Angeles: colorful, crowded, flavorful working-class streets that frame one of the nation's most unique immigrant communities. Their experiences growing up newcomers in a land of promise and heartache went into writing the band's new album, "The Town and the City," set for release this fall on Hollywood Records. This ambitious work focuses on the story of one immigrant's journey to America and his struggle to acclimate. Los Lobos will bring this tale to life when it plays Tuesday in Harrisburg at Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater.

"Anyone familiar with our music knows the kinds of things our songs are about," said multi-instrumentalist Steve Berlin. "But this story is a bit more cinematic, even oblique. It is there to hear and understand, even if it takes a few listens." With their first backyard gigs in East Los Angeles, the original foursome began a journey into musical styles ranging from traditional- son and norte a music to fuzzed-out experimental rock and everything conceivable in between.

Berlin, the only non-Hispanic member of Los Lobos, grew up in Philadelphia, the son of Russian immigrants, and joined the band in 1982. It was his love of the panorama of American music that made Berlin's entrance into the Lobos world so easy, and, as he recalls, he was never formally asked to join. At the time, he was working with both Los Lobos and The Blasters.

"One bus went north, and one bus went south," Berlin said. "The Lobos bus went north, and I got on it." The familial bond among the five coalesced almost immediately, and the stories of their lives growing up provided the glue to hold the music together. "The Blasters were a bit more combative amongst each other, " Berlin recalled. "Lobos was, from the beginning, far more egalitarian."

The five quickly found they had much more in common than rock 'n' roll. "All of us in the band are either first- or second-generation Americans, so we have an understanding of what the experience of coming to this country to start a new life is like. "It's really amazing the similarities we find in the stories of our families. We all came from families where our parents worked very hard to give us something better," Berlin said.

A chronicle of the band's music in some ways reflects the journey of immigrants. "Just Another Band From East L.A.," the group's 1977 debut LP, is a strident collection of traditional Latin folk music. The title cut from "Will The Wolf Survive?" (1984) tells of one man's struggle to bring his family to a new land. When the family arrives, it faces new challenges in "The Neighborhood" (1990). "Kiko" (1992) explores the dreamy spaces between the new and old worlds, while "Colossal Head" (1996) celebrates the vibrant community created by the newcomers. By the time of "Good Morning Aztlan" (2002), the neighborhood has been overtaken by violence and economic stagnation, though family, hope and faith still abound.

"The Ride" (2004) takes a long look back at the journey so far and features guest appearances by Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Mavis Staples and many others. In 2005, the group released an acoustic collection of mostly traditional tunes and a live concert recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco (also available on DVD). This spring saw the release of "Wolf Tracks," a single-disc compilation spanning the band's 33 years.

But for the first time, the story that has until now been told in fragments of celebration and blues will be told from the continuous perspective of one person. Given the current debate over U.S. immigration policy, some will look to "The Town and the City" for a bold statement on the issue. But Berlin said the group has always been cautious in the political realm.

Even in the very beginning, when the four original members were playing traditional music at weddings, barbecues, parties and restaurants, they chose not to actively involve themselves in the growing Chicano movement of the time - at least not as a band. To them, young people playing the music of the old country was sufficiently radical. "[The album] does to a certain extent say something about it," said Berlin, referring to the demonization of immigrants. "But the story is more poetic than pedantic, I guess." For four Hispanic Catholics and a Russian Jew, just telling the story seems to be enough.

Country Rockers Lucero are Road-Tested

2008-07-15T01:36:00.002-04:00

Sunday News
Published: June 25, 2006
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Anyone described as a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Kurt Cobain with a dash of Willie Nelson would turn some heads. That's how one industry insider characterized Lucero singer and songwriter Ben Nichols. At first listen, the description seems to fit the group's sound as a whole, but throw in a bit of Steve Earle, some Replacements, Bottle Rockets, Drive-By Truckers, Uncle Tupelo and a dash of Faces, and you'd be closer.

The Memphis, Tenn., quartet, which will perform at the Chameleon Club in Lancaster Tuesday, plays a compelling brand of country rock that has made them one of the best American bands you've probably never heard of. But the band is steadily growing a fan base not only through its 250 shows a year but also through the independent film "Dreaming in America," the result of filmmaker Aaron Goldman following Lucero on the road and in the studio for several months.

The film shows the making of the group's 2005 release "Nobody's Darling" with famed producer Jim Dickinson in his Mississippi barn. The resulting album won universal praise and earned Lucero a "band to watch" nod from Rolling Stone. Nichols, who spoke on the phone from the band's rehearsal space (located in the same building that once housed Elvis Presley's dojo), remembers how the filmmaker approached the band. "Aaron saw us perform one night and wrote us a letter asking if he could tag along to make a film."

Lucero, which includes Nichols, lead guitarist and co-founder Brian Venable, drummer Roy Berry and bassist John C. Stubblefield, allowed Goldman to ride shotgun in a cramped, smelly tour van to capture the band in its element. The film is a great introduction to the band: more honest than a glowing, superlative-laced press release, better than a Web site and almost as good as watching a show and then hanging out with the band afterward.

And even though it starts out showing the band members unable to finish a gig due to drunkenness, it also shows their willingness to play until there are no songs left in their repertoire. "I was nervous at first, but in the end," Nichols said, "it worked out really well for us because it gave people a glimpse into what we do and how hard we work at it. It really captured all the energy of our shows." That van, by the way, ever present in the film, like a fifth member of the band, died early this year on a southern California highway. A cracked cylinder head was the diagnosis. "We limped all the way back to Memphis in it going under 55."

The film also chronicles the band's dealings with the business side of music, its struggles with indie labels that go broke, lack of medical coverage and other woes not uncommon to bands on Lucero's level. "We are slowly learning how to play the game ... but that's a whole other barrel of monkeys." Nichols hopes to be able to concentrate completely on music at some point.

Lucero just finished recording its latest effort in Richmond, Va., in early June, tentatively titled "Rebels, Rogues and Sworn Brothers." Nichols calls the new album a triumph, an expansion of the previous album's stripped-down, four-piece, no-overdub approach. "I think it's the only time every song came out the way I first heard it in my head."

The album is expected to be released in September on the Liberty & Lament label, an imprint of Warner Bros. Nichols sings in a semi-intoxicated, close-mouthed drawl that sounds far past the point of hoarseness. His voice, while sometimes dragging through the verses as if the words won't come out, can't conceal his exceptional songwriting. Nichols' straightforward songs with simple words are never simplistic. When Nichols first began writing songs at 14, he was, by his own admission, terrible.

"Then at some point I realized that every lyric doesn't have to be the best ever, it doesn't have to be poetry. And usually when you consciously try to write great is when you mess it up." Nichols sings of a world where some live and others dare not go, where booze drowns sorrow, where lost love is weathered like a hurricane and worn like a scar, and where the consequences of drinking and loving always seem to be put off to another day.

He is like Springsteen in that so much of his music contains an undercurrent of escape and personal liberation, and like Cobain in his knowledge that there often is no escape. Many artists, from roots rock to mainstream country, sing of similar themes, but few convey heartache in such judiciously chosen words, in a manner at once enraged and tender, as Nichols does throughout "Nobody's Darlings."

Among the album's best tracks is "The War," a song that loosely describes his grandfather's experiences during World War II. If there were a corresponding analog, it would be The Band's classic "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." In "The War," sung over a single acoustic guitar, the singer is drafted in early 1943, survives the Normandy invasion, fights across France, rides a tank into Belgium (he likes the Belgians better than the French), and when it gets cold, carries a bottle of liquor with his gun. Despite being promoted to sergeant, he is busted down in rank three times. "Following orders never suited me/Giving them out was much worse/I could not stand to get my friends killed/So I took care of myself first ..."

"Anybody who goes to war comes back wounded or scarred in some way," Nichols said of his motivation to write the song, which is unlike any other on the album. "It was really just a tribute to my grandfather, to express some empathy with him, but it does seem to have resonance with what is going on today, even though I wasn't necessarily thinking of that when I wrote it."

In the end, Nichols and the other members of Lucero want people to understand they are just a rock band that works hard for a living because they love what they do. "We watch the first three bands at the show and drink in the audience like everyone else. We don't hide in secret back in a dressing room or on some sort of island ... or wherever the hell rock stars hang out before the show."

The members of Lucero are still waiting for the day when they make enough money to, say, make a down payment on a house or start a family. The success of last year's album meant that for the first time in its history, the band earned money from selling records. Lucero sold almost 20,000 copies of its previous three discs, but hadn't received a valid royalty check from any of them. The band got one check, but it bounced. And they still drive a van from show to show across the country. But at least now it's a nicer van. This one has air conditioning.

Fake Doo-Woppers Please Crowd, But Not Like Originals

2008-07-15T01:28:00.001-04:00

New Era
Published: November 19, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY , Correspondent

You can tell you are getting older when people start trying to sell your youth back to you. Most folks are aware when this happens, and buy anyway. And sometimes what they're selling is not exactly what they say it is. But, as was the case with a doo-wop concert here Saturday night, audiences seem to like it anyway. Groups calling themselves Cornell Gunter's Coasters, The Marvellettes and The Platters played to an almost full house at the Strand-Capital Performing Arts Center.

Baby boomers and even pre-baby boomers - among them a busload from a local retirement community and a gaggle of Red Hats - were entertained by passable versions of the '50s and '60s hits they grew up with. They reminisced, they swayed, gave standing ovations, even danced in the aisles a little. Trouble is, none of the acts contained anyone who sang the vintage hits of those groups. In early 2006, Pennsylvania was the first state to make it a crime for any such group to perform without an original recording member, a federally registered copyright, or under a billing that clearly calls the show a tribute or review.

The Strand show was called a "Celebration of Doo-Wop, featuring the music of the Coasters, Platters and Marvelletes." Was Saturday night's performance a criminal act? Evidently, neither the state's attorney general's office nor the county prosecutors headquartered across the street thought so.

All three musical groups are the product of New York-based promoter Larry Marshak. The real doo-wop stars, and they are a sadly shrinking few, say they are routinely undercut by these groups. Marshak has been putting similar deceptively billed groups on the road since the 1970s. The lineup for Saturday's show had previously included a Marshak Drifters group, but a federal court ruling in September called the whole thing "an elaborate shell game."

Ticketholders were told via e-mail about the change three weeks ago. They were not told why. Drifter Charlie Thomas, who sang on hits like "On Broadway," "Up On The Roof" and "There Goes My Baby," runs his current touring efforts through management based in York, and was a York resident himself for many years. Thanks to the courts, there were no fake Drifters performing on his home turf. For most patrons, though, the concert brought back the carefree days of their teenage or young adult years - even if it included some unbalanced harmonies, competent yet unspirited musical backing, oversinging and mellismatic flourishes galore.

Most of the stand-ins onstage were not even born when the songs they sang were hits, but most concertgoers interviewed were aware of that going in and didn't see it as a problem. For Lee Bainbridge of York, the music of the groups represented is what counts. "This kind of music is responsible for bringing a lot of people together, and keeping them together still. The songs are immortal."

"We didn't expect to see the originals," said Carolyn Hood of New Freedom. Peggy Mayes, of Baltimore, didn't seem to mind, either. "They were older than us even way back then. They were great. They sounded just like the originals." But can anything really compare to the vinyl played on mom and dad's hi-fi?For a true trip back in time, check out some of the old television appearances by the real groups on youtube.com. (Consider anything in color to be suspect.)

As a matter of comparison, the Strand hosts Dark Star Orchestra in December, an act that lets concertgoers "relive the Grateful Dead." Notice the difference. They don't call themselves the Grateful Dead. Why not? Because Dead fans wouldn't stand for it. Perhaps the children of the 1950s are more forgiving. Nostalgia is a powerful thing indeed.

Where Gospel and Bluegrass Meet, That's Where You'll Find Doyle Lawson

2008-07-15T01:24:00.001-04:00

Intelligener Journal
Published: December 8, 2005
By JOHN DUFFY,Correspondent

Much has been written about the divide between church and secular music in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, and depending on the source, it was either an unbridgeable chasm or a difference nobody bothered much about. For Doyle Lawson, who will be performing at Lancaster Mennonite School Saturday, the two streams have always been inseparable.

From one, he took an unimpeachable sense of harmony and vocal diction, from the other the riffs and runs of an instrumental virtuoso. Lawson put these skills to good use, beginning his professional career on the road with the likes of J.D. Crowe, the Country Gentlemen, Jimmy Martin in the 1960s, and The Bluegrass Album Band in the 1970s. He grew up in Kentucky attending the Missionary Baptist Church, where musical instruments were not allowed; all music was purely vocal.

"It was the harmonies I took to at first, and then of course the songs themselves. I still feel the same way about them: They feed my hungry soul." He formed Quicksilver in 1979, and has released a steady stream of highly touted albums, mostly on the acoustic-leaning Sugar Hill label. The current lineup of Quicksilver includes original banjoist Terry Baucom, Jamie Dailey on guitar, Barry Scott on bass, and the young fiddle phenom Jesse Stockman. In addition to his early exposure to church music, Lawson's father also sang in an a capella gospel quartet for many years, but young Doyle and the rest of the family enjoyed listening to the country stars of the day on the Grand Ole Opry.

"It really didn't bother my family too much," Lawson recalls. Growing up on a farm, Lawson's spare moments were dedicated to learning the mandolin. "I'd play any chance I could get, both spiritual and country music, and they never said a cross word about it," Lawson remembers. "It may have been that way in some families, but not for me." Throughout the history of jazz, blues, and country music, there can be found numerous instances where popular singers recorded gospel songs, even sermons (sometimes under different names). Even Elvis tried to bridge the gap between rock and roll and gospel.

But today, the polarity remains, especially in Lawson's audience. By and large, the devout fans of his gospel work do not attend the secular bluegrass festivals he plays, nor do they purchase his non-spiritual CDs in great numbers. "And I don't judge them or fault them for that," Lawson declares. "They're following their convictions." (To please these fans, Sugar Hill put together a compilation of gospel tunes they missed out on that had been released on Lawson's secular albums over the years. )

His current album, "You Gotta Dig a Little Deeper," is an all-secular collection and his first for Rounder Records. He's already hard at work on a follow-up, spending a few days a week in the studio when not on the road. The latest disc features traditional-sounding bluegrass gems like "Girl From West Virginia," and "When I'm Knee Deep In Bluegrass," sparkling new arrangements of country tunes by Jim Reeves ("Four Walls") and Porter Wagoner ("What Ain't To Be, Just Might Happen").

Originals from Dailey, Scott and a rare instrumental from Lawson himself called "Rosine" show that significant songwriting skills exist in the group as well. Even though it's not gospel, the album has much to say about commitment, perseverance, and the passage of time. Heck, even the cover, a pair of calloused and dusty hands resting on a shovel grip displaying a conspicuous wedding band, speaks volumes. At 61, Lawson has learned a thing or two about music, business, faith, and love. To make any of them work, sometimes you have to find a hidden reservoir of patience and compassion ... dig a little deeper.

And thankfully there are enough fans that, like Lawson himself, can find satisfaction in a good song, no matter if it is sung in praise and thanks to God or about the trials of love, the longing for home, or simply to dance. "Most of my secular songs would work on a gospel collection anyway. There really isn't a great difference. I try to always pick songs that have something to say, songs that can have an impact."

My Morning Jacket: Rock to the Power of 'Z'

2008-07-15T01:22:00.000-04:00

Sunday News
Published: October 6, 2005
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Quite a silly name for a band really, My Morning Jacket. It suggests an in side joke we will never be privy to, or some literary reference too cool to be familiar with. Even the group's music, indie rock washed through southern gothic streams and drenched in syrupy reverb, is layered over with a sense of mystery.

Their 2003 major label introduction "It Still Moves" was a sleeper hit of sorts, garnering volumes of critical praise even from the mainstream press, and becoming a dorm room classic over the next two years. It even sold well for not having a bona fide hit single. Their new disc "Z" (ATO Records/RCA) hit stores last week.

My Morning Jacket brings their new songs from to Lancaster Oct. 11 with an all ages show at the Chameleon Club just prior to a two- night stand at TLA in Philadelphia. Sultry Canadian country-rock singer songwriter Kathleen Edwards opens on this leg of the tour. Coming at a critical point in the group's career arc, "Z" is all at once more focused and more wide-reaching than its predecessor, more detailed, more spacious, and if it's hard to imagine, more ambitious in its stylistic reach.

"We did a lot of things differently then they did on the first record," explains keyboardist Bo Koster, who along with guitarist Carl Broemel joined the group immediately after "It Still Moves" was released. "We cut the length down a bit, used a big professional studio." The group also brought in veteran producer John Leckie (Los Lobos, George Harrison, John Lennon), who moved them from their Louisville, Kentucky base to the rural isolation of upstate New York for tracking.

"He knows his way around a studio for sure. He knew how to get the best sounds out of the gear we had," Koster says, taking a break from the last day of rehearsal before the band leaves for its Atlanta tour opener. During the six-week recording process, Leckie used old-school tricks like recording to actual analog tape, using a vintage harmonizer, and slightly varying the playback speed of tunes (called varispeed) for subtle effects. But the result is anything but nostalgia.

The group intigrates tense modern electronic beats and R&B into "Wordless Chorus," which features looped drums, prickly guitar arpeggios and organ stabs along with singer Jim James' soulful falsetto wailing. "It Beats 4 U" conjures up the icy alt.rock of Radiohead, and "Off the Record" borrows the surf-guitar riff from the Searcher's "Secret Agent Man" to introduce a bouncing reggae/dub celebration.

Distorted hip-hop beats push "Lay Low," and the spooky minimalist jam-rock of "Dondante" is crisp as a biting wind. And while the echo that covered "It Still Moves" did serve dramatic purpose, it muddied some songs to the point that it sounded like they were recorded in an empty airplane hanger, obscuring James' soaring vocals. It did not help that much of the record sounded like aimless noodling either. On "Z," the echo and reverb effects are more carefully deployed, or left out altogether.

It indicates not only indicates an increasing confidence in the band of its own abilities, but a leap forward in James' ability to communicate with his voice. "It's definitely a noticeable difference," says Koster. "But it wasn't a conscious decision. I never heard anybody vocalize it. Just through Jim and John experimenting with different ideas it seemed to happen that way."

Thankfully, their record label left it all in their hands, says Koster. "They were never breathing down our neck, and we have a good relationship. I think that helped in the long run make this an artistically motivated album." The group will be on the road until Thanksgiving. "We're a little anxious," admits Koster. "But I'm really excited to see what these songs do in a live setting."

The Who rocks - And With Sentiment

2008-07-15T01:17:00.001-04:00

New Era
Published: November 28, 2006
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

The one thing you haven't come to expect from The Who in all its 40 years is tenderness. Great power chords and explosive rock anthems? Yes. Eye-dabbing sentimentalism? Not so much. True, some of guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend's more subdued moments have been downright introspective, but Monday night at the Giant Center he and vocalist Roger Daltrey, along with their exceptional band, were able to blow the roof off the place and bring the crowd nearly to tears.

Only an act with 40 years of depth and a still-present lust for loudness (even moreso than some of their oldest fans, it seems) could accomplish this. The duo, augmented by drummer Zak Starkey (former Beatle Ringo Starr's son), guitarist Simon Townshend (Pete's younger brother), bassist Pino Palladino and keyboardist Brian Keyroe filling in for longtime sideman John "Rabbit" Bundrick, offered a steady stream of hits as well as new material from the recently released "Endless Wire," the band's first disc of all-new material in 24 four years.

"Baba O'Reilly" was triumphant, ending with Daltrey's blues harp filling in for the familiar violin on the recorded version. "Eminence Front" featured three guitars and a whole lot of funk. "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" had all the sunniness of mid-1960s swinging London; and the savage anthem "Won't Get Fooled Again" found new fury in an anti-war treatment thanks to the images projected on multiple tracked video screens. The same screens made every number a visual as well as aural spectacle, interlacing vintage film footage, graphic design, and liquid lights. They found their most fitting use on "My Generation."

As if lifting the song away from its 1960s mod roots, the images made stops around the world and dipped into different pop subcultures (breakdancing and early hip-hop, punk, disco, swing, goth, 1990s rave culture) to prove that even a favorite oldie need not be a stale relic of its own time. Townshend's Fender Stratocaster alone, which he kept turning up as the evening went on, this night almost seemed like it could reverberate across the decades on its own.

But after all this and a memorable medley from the group's rock opera "Tommy" as an encore, Daltrey sang in a quiet, yet ravaged voice the words to "Tea and Theatre" alongside Townshend's unaccompanied acoustic guitar. The song, part of the song cycle that is the center of "Endless Wire," finds a rock star at the end of his career pining for the good old days. One member of his band has died, another has gone insane, the song goes, and only two remain.

The Who themselves have lost half their ranks along the way, maniac drummer Keith Moon in 1978, and stalwart bassist John Entwistle in 2002. "We did it all, didn't we?" Daltery sang. "A thousand songs still smolder now. We played them as one. We're older now..." A cheer rose up, both in thanks for the two hours of hits and new favorites, and in appreciation of the band's perseverance across the years.

Death, addictions, legal hassles, creative blocks, infighting and indifference all nearly stopped the Who in their tracks at one time or another. Few bands would be so bold as to end their show with a lament essentially about itself. Few others could get away with it. In a way the song was also a thank you from the band. After all, it was Townshend, guarded and often possessive about his songs and their meanings, who told the crowd that "after all this time they are more about you than about us anymore."

Def Leppard, True to Form, Rocks Best at Hershey

2008-07-15T01:12:00.000-04:00

New Era
Published:August 13, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Pennsylvania was the first of sixteen states so far to enact something called the Truth in Music law, which prevents imposter groups with no original members from billing themselves as that group. So far, it has applied mostly to groups like the Platters, the Coasters, the Drifters and other vocal groups from the '50s, the imposters now being forced to present themselves as tribute acts. But two of the three bands at Hershey Stadium Sunday night come dangerously close in their present lineups to violating if not the letter, the spirit of such legislation.

True, Foreigner couldn't very well be billed as "Mick Jones with Jason Bonham and a Steven Tyler Look-alike" or Styx as "The Tommy Shaw and Jay Young Show" and expect to sell as many tickets, but that's largely what fans got. That didn't stop both acts from playing like they were somewhere around their best years, a time when every guitar pick, drumstick, or raised index finger thrown out at the audience wasn't a terrible cliche.

All three acts have multiple platinum-selling albums in their catalogues; Styx scored four in a row at their late-1970s height, and Def Leppard's 1987 "Hysteria" remains one of the biggest-selling albums of its time and charted six straight Top 20 U.S. hits. All three groups made the difficult transition from the arena rock late '70s to the MTV '80s better than most acts of that era. The hour-long set format suited everyone well; play your hits, one encore, then get out. It saved everyone from having to endure the "here's a song from our new album..." dilemma: beer line or bathroom line?

Also, the fact that none of these groups has put out any new original music in a decade worked in their favor in this regard. Styx and Def Leppard have released stopgap but at times thrilling covers collections in recent years. Foreigner has done nothing new since 1995. Styx rocked their hardest on anthemic hits "Come Sail Away," "Blue Collar Man," and "Renegade."

Shaw noted that he and Young have shared the stage over half his life, and they still play in youthful admiration of each other's abilities. Lawrence Gowan stood in for singer Dennis De Young, who hasn't toured with the group since their successful mid- 1990s reunion tours. Foreigner closed out a hit-laden set with a lengthy "Jukebox Hero," complete with a verse of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" grafted in as a nod to Bonham's father John, whose explosive drumming anchored that group until his death.

Lone founding member Jones seemed out of place with a pink shirt on, looking less like a seasoned rocker and more like the A&R man he once was; albeit one who can seriously shred. His riffing on "Hot Blooded" sounded as punchy and brash as the original.

Five minutes into Def Leppard's headlining set, however, it was clear why they earn top billing on this tour. For the record, they can boast four-fifths of their original lineup, which came together in working-class Sheffield, England, as rock-smitten teenagers in 1977. They started with "Rocket," the 1989 hit that alludes to the groups they most admired: T. Rex, Thin Lizzy, Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Queen, but photographs from their own history paraded across the video screens at the back of the stage.

The power ballad "Love Bites" may have dragged, having to be taken at a lower key than in years past, but the group connected perfectly as it took its last lap with "Armageddon It," "Photograph," and "Pour Some Sugar on Me." A couple of tunes played on acoustic guitars on the thrust stage about ten rows into the crowd gave the opportunity for a cell phone camera moment.

And if there was still any doubt as to who of these bands was most on top of their game, three fifths of Def Leppard, all of its members teetering around fifty, can still get a way with going bare- chested. Impressively buff guitarist Phil Collen went sans shirt most of the night The band closed with "Rock of Ages" as a light rain began to fall. Singer Joe Elliot closed a night of a hundred cliched rock shout outs ("Are you ready, Hershey?" being the most overused) with perhaps the most sincere. "Don't forget us, and we won't forget you."

Eddy Clearwater's Long, Blue Road Out of Chicago Worth the Drive

2008-07-15T01:03:00.002-04:00

Sunday News
Published: April 13, 2008
by JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater was something of a late bloomer. On the West Side of Chicago in the 1950s and '60s, at the height of the blues explosion, Clearwater was packing folks into clubs and dance halls. He remained a top attraction for years without generating so much as a hit single. "I was patient. I knew my time would come eventually," Clearwater recalled in a recent telephone interview from a hotel room in Angola, Ind.

Born Edward Harrington in Macon, Miss., in 1935, Eddy moved with his family to Birmingham, Ala., where as a teenager he began playing guitar in churches for local gospel groups. In 1953, he moved to Chicago, where he still played predominately gospel music, then as Guitar Eddy. He worked as a cab driver and dishwasher, but would spend countless hours watching the city's best-known blues players: Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Muddy Waters and B.B. King.

After hearing Chuck Berry, the young Harrington added a distinctive rock n' roll rhythm to his playing. He recorded "Hillbilly Blues" with an "A Minor Cha-Cha" B-side for the Atomic H label, owned by his uncle. It was then that he began using the stage name Clear Waters, an obvious homage to, and stab at, Muddy Waters, the undisputed blues king.

His shows would build into rousing celebrations of all things related to the blues. Clearwater kept one foot rooted in West Side Chicago blues, but could easily pivot into soul, funk, country and straight-ahead rock 'n' roll. "I didn't want to get bored really," he said, laughing. "I would always look for different ways to express myself, to show what was in my heart. How can you really show people how you feel if you sing the same way?"

Clearwater likens his approach to music to his appetite for food. "One day you might want steak, the next day bacon and eggs, or the next day gumbo ... you know, lots of different flavors at once." Singles for La Salle, Federal, Versa and his own Cleartone label followed. In the meantime, while Waters, Rush, King, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy toured the world, Clearwater kept the home fires burning in Chicago. "I knew I could get the attention they were getting," Clearwater said.

Most of the cream of the Chicago players had a few years on him. Muddy Waters had been recording electric blues as early as the 1940s. "And good for them. They were all my mentors." A sort of one-man blues welcome wagon, Clearwater often was the first performer blues pilgrims would try to see when they hit town. He would appear in a kitschy headdress and dubbed himself "The Chief" in celebration of his family's Indian lineage. "I never had a problem finding shows. I did play quite a bit locally, and had all the work I could ever really want."

In the late 1970s, he got a chance to perform at high-profile (and high-paying) blues festivals in Europe. His debut album for Blind Pig followed in 1979, and while he's jumped labels a few times, he has consistently recorded and toured ever since. Clearwater still plays his Gibson ES-335 - the same model popularized by Berry - left-handed. It's a right-handed guitar that he plays left-handed. The low strings are on the bottom, the high on top, exactly the opposite of the standard arrangement.

Clearwater said it can be difficult teaching other musicians new songs with his guitar strung this way, but most of the cats he hires can manage. "I was trying to show Ronnie Baker Brooks [son of legendary bluesman Lonnie Brooks] a certain chord I wanted him to play - a C minor sixth or something like that - and he kept turning his head upside down to try and figure out how I was fingering it." Once Brooks gave up, he nailed it just by listening. "That's the best way to teach someone: Just have them listen to it."

In 2003, Clearwater recorded his most popular album ever, "Rock n' Roll City," backed by Los Straitjackets, the best surf/garage rock band in the world (the members of which wear Mexican wrestling masks and use pseudonyms). "I told my manager I wanted to do something a little more rockabilly. He called a friend of his in Nashville and they suggested Los Straitjackets."

Clearwater went down to Music City to meet Straitjackets guitarist Eddie Angel, and if there were ever any doubt about the impact of Clearwater's multi-genre approach, it was removed that day. The members of Lost Straitjackets were fans. "They had even played a couple of my songs in their repertoire." "Hillbilly Blues" was one of them. "The second time I went down, we went straight into the studio."

That album proved a commercial highpoint for both the band and Clearwater. And though he wasn't sounding the least bit slow on the previous year's "Reservation Blues," "Rock n' Roll City" gave Clearwater a spark and helped to reaffirm his love of the music. Clearwater's latest offering, and his debut for blues giant Alligator Records, is titled "West Side Strut."

While the South Side gets all the credit as the birthplace of electric blues - the place where blacks by the thousands migrated from the South between the world wars - it is the West Side, Clearwater said, that holds the heart of the Chicago sound. "West Side blues is a little more raw, a lot more tunes in minor keys, two guitars and drums without a bass ... loud harmonica, while South Side blues is a little more sophisticated." "West Side Strut" takes the energy of "Rock n' Roll City" and puts it squarely in the middle of one of Clearwater's club gigs. That is to say, the album covers all of his favorite bases.

He dabbles in a little Elmore James on "A Good Leavin' Alone," some Chuck Berry in a duet with Lonnie Brooks called "Too Old to Get Married" and some gospel on "Do Unto Others." He throws in an antiwar plea on "A Time for Peace," and generally tears the roof off the place. "That's the West Side way," he said.

Josh Ritter Loves His Words, and His Notes

2008-07-15T00:57:00.000-04:00

Sunday News
Published: May 11, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

A critic once called Josh Ritter "atypically talented," and the label certainly fits. He's verbose beyond reason, bending language with apparent ease, not struggling as many songwriters do.

If, indeed, Ritter has to work prodigiously at his craft, he hides it well. "The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter," his 2007 album on SMG, effortlessly combines the bouncing melodic tick of Modest Mouse, the machine-gun-speed lyrics of early Springsteen, and the complex, low-fi ethic of Tom Waits.

Ritter began perfecting that mix in 2001 his debut effort, "The Golden Age of Radio," an album that underscored his name on the roster of "next big things" and branded him the best singer-songwriter ever to come out of Idaho. (Can you name another?) He's so huge in Ireland, apparently, that he's inspired a Josh Ritter tribute band.

Ritter opens his latest album with "To the Dogs or Whoever," in which he whimsically ponders mortality through the likes of folk heroes Casey Jones, Joan of Arc and Calamity Jane.He sings: "Joan never cared about the in-betweens/ Combed her hair with a blade did the Maid of Orleans/ Said Christ walked on water, we can wade through the war/ You don't need to tell me who the fire is for."Yes, he's aping Dylan here; it's obvious.

But instead of a strident folkie D chord underneath, there's a persistent drumbeat and guitars sounding as if they're fed through a transistor radio. Ritter's own voice is distorted, as if he were singing in the belly of a whale.He continues: "Oh, bring me the love that can sweeten a sword/ A boat that can love the rocks or the shore/ The love of an iceberg reaching out for a wreck/ Can you love me like the crosses love the nape of the neck?"

In "The Temptation of Adam," a man and woman — soldiers, we assume — are confined to a nuclear missile silo contemplating the end of the world, not its beginning. They fall in love, and the man is tempted not by a red apple, but by the red launch button. The only way he knows he'll never lose her might be to make sure there is no one left alive to take her away. On "Empty Hearts" the singer dreads facing another year alone and pines for a woman he says will "know me by the sound of my hoping."

Ritter bends musical genres and archetypes to his will as well as he manipulates words. Bright and sunny, "Right Moves" mimics 1960s pop, complete with horns and cheesy strings, while "Wait For Love" nestles into the strummed guitar and trickling piano of some post-Dashboard Confessional indie folk.

Ritter concentrates on his arrangements just long enough to discover how to best serve the lyric, never overextending himself or getting bogged down in knob twiddling, and never forcing the chords. And he gives each lyric the space it needs, even if it takes him to some illogical, tragic, silly or ironic place. The balance Ritter strikes between lyrics and music is truly rare.

Nils Lofgren: Rock's Singular Journeyman Guitarist

2008-07-15T00:40:00.000-04:00

Music Monthly
Published: November, 2001
by JOHN DUFFY

For the second time in his career, eternally youthful Nils Lofgren follows up two whirlwind years on the road with Bruce Springsteen by heading out on tour with impressive momentum in support of his own music. A battered old acoustic guitar in a case with only a heavy thumb pick opened an amazing world for a rock smitten kid growing up in the suburbs of Washington D.C.

Picking up that old guitar, he struggled for nine months learning to play with his fingers instead of a flatpick. When other players told him he needed to use a pick like everyone else, the kid didn’t want to start all over again, and instead developed into one of the most respected fingerpicking rock guitar players out there alongside Lindsey Buckingham and Mark Knopfler) .

Nils Lofgren; short, angel-voiced and possessing a personality as Spartan as his build, would become a giant among sidemen guitar players, possessor of a versatile, yet singularly recognizable tone on both electric and acoustic, and a professional of the first order. But the kid was just bumming around Kensington (his family moved when he was 8-years-old from Michigan) and jamming in groups like Paul Dowell and The Dolphin (who even released a couple of singles).

Lofgren remembers those young, wild years, fondly, sneaking backstage at The Cellar Door in attempts to meet his idols; seeing The Who, The Animals, and The Rolling Stones when they came through town. But at one particular concert that seems to grow in legend every year among D.C. players who were there, Lofgren saw his future. At 16, he saw Jimi Hendrix play at The Ambassador Ballroom in Washington and it changed his life, convincing him that this “music thing” was the way to go. He dropped out Walter Johnson High School and formed Grin with Bob Berberich and Bobby “Flash” Gordon.

Playing around the Washington D.C. area, the group caught the attention of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, who took the group out the to west coast to play. Lofgren eventually joined Crazy Horse on Neil Young’s definitive early work After The Gold Rush. That’s Nils playing piano on the scathing “Southern Man” and the whimsical title track. He played guitar on several of the album’s other cuts. Young gave him a Martin D-18 as a souvenir from the session. Nils still has it today.

At the time, he was still just 18. Using the leverage of having worked with Young, Lofgren got Grin a deal with CBS subsidiary Spindizzy. The group produced several worthwhile albums produced by Young collaborator David Briggs before splitting up due to the financial realities of keeping a band on the road that couldn’t quite get any big hits. One night opening for Mountain splinter group West, Bruce & Laing in front of 3,000 drunk college kids, Lofgren found that rock and roll is sometimes a life or death fight.

Grin’s gear didn’t make the gig, but Nils decided to play anyway. “I figured I’d go out there with an acoustic and do a few songs, just so my band could get paid,” he remembers with the good humor that nearly thirty years brings to such trauma. He closed his eyes and played, unaware that bottles were being thrown at him and breaking on the stage and drum kit. After being dragged off the stage by his manager, the promoter paid Nils to not finish his set, afraid of getting sued should a half-drunk bottle of Jim Beam crack Nils in the noggin.

This kind of life took its toll on Grin, and the band finally split in 1975, just in time for Lofgren to rejoin Young in support of Tonight’s the Night. At the time Nils was rumored to be one of the Rolling Stones’ choices to replace the departing Mick Taylor, though that has never been confirmed. Instead, Nils’ solo career took off in 1975 with the one-two punch of Nils Lofgren and Cry Tough, followed by several exceptional albums, including the live Night After Night, and A Rhythm Romance.

Following Neil Young’s maligned Trans album and tour, Lofgren joined Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band in early 1984, just in time to learn the departing Steve Van Zandt’s guitar parts and hit the road for eighteen months to support the massively successful Born In the U.S.A. He played on Springsteen’s subdued Tunnel Of Love album in 1987, and went back to solo work full time when the E Street Band was cut loose in 1991.

Crooked Line, his most lauded solo album yet, came in 1991. Lofgren filled the void with a couple more fine solo records (Crooked Line and Silver Lining among them), and joined Ringo Starr’s first All-Star Band tour alongside fellow E Streeter Clarence Clemons and other stars. When Springsteen went into the studio to add four new tracks to a Greatest Hits package, Lofgren and Van Zandt both played a part. And of course, Bruce’s 1999-2000 world tour reuniting the E Street Band for the fist time onstage in eleven years featured both guitar players as well. Which brings us to Break Away Angel, Lofgren’s 16th album since Grin’s 1971 debut 30 years ago.

A warm collection of songs combining Nils’ sincere, airy tenor (which gets pleasingly more rough with age) and his sharp acoustic guitar prowess, it is the culmination of a sound Lofgren has been developing since the early 1990s. On the soulful “Cryin’ Tonight” and the rich, Bruce Cockburn-ish folk-rock of “Driftin’ Man,” (co-written with Lou Reed) Nils’ pinched, harmonically rich guitar tone takes center stage. When he launches into one of those frantic solos on his choice Takamine, the distinction between acoustic and electric is blurred to its most hazy edge. This sound reaches its most exciting level on “The Hill,” a blue beat that cautions of the consequences of blind revenge.

A gentle cover of “All I Have To Do Is Dream” will make even the toughest manly man’s eyes water, and the joys of true love recounted in “I Found You” (featuring Jeff “Skunk’ Baxter on pedal steel) would make a perfect addition to that mix tape you’re sending to a distant girlfriend. Nils makes a nod to his past, closing the album with a very Youngish benediction, “Open Road,” even mimicking his former employers harmonica playing and gentle strum closely.

In fact, there is hardly an electric guitar on the whole of Break Away Angel, amazing considering Lofgren’s initial reluctance at playing without a 50 Watt Fender Super Reverb to plug into. “I did some acoustic shows with my brother [former Grin guitarist] Tom in the early 1980s that just came off feeling unnatural. It was uncomfortable and intimidating.” Lofgren persisted though, and soon realized the unique power of playing essentially unamplified and alone. “But there is a great intimacy to playing acoustically, you can play things that are more melodic, intricate.”

He of course got it right, and by the 1990s was one of the most dynamic, exciting acoustic acts then on the road, in addition to being a respected electric player from his work with young and especially Springsteen (check out both his slithering intro and blazing solo on the Boss’ “War” from Live 1975-85). Next time, Lofgren says, he’ll try something a little more electric and funky. “I’m pretty schizophrenic that way, Its just where I think I’ll be,” he reasons. The album was cut partly in Arizona, where Lofgren now lives with his wife Amy and son Dylan, partly with Timm Biery at Go! Digital Studios in Beltsville, mixed partly in Arizona and with Ron Freeland at Burnt Hill in Clarksburg, Maryland.

Speaking from his home, Lofgren is busy packing and gearing up for a five-week tour of the U.K. in support of Break Away Angel. A three-night stand at The Ram’s Head in Annapolis Oct. 19-21 helped whip his band into shape for the slog across England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. (He returns to the D.C. area with three acoustic nights at Wolf Trapp in February). In order to keep touring expenses at a minimum, he and his three-piece band will play a grueling 26 shows in 30 days. “I’ve done it before,” he says, passing off the severity of such a swing with manly bravado. “Its not the best time to be traveling,” he confesses, “but this is what I do… It’s not traveling first class like with Bruce or Ringo,” he admits.

Huffing it in a van for five weeks may seem a couple rungs down from touring the world with Springsteen and the world’s greatest rock and roll band, but if you ask him, Lofgren insists he has the best of both worlds. “I love fronting my own band and playing my own music, but anytime I get to go out on the road with someone like Neil or Bruce or Ringo its like a vacation, but it recharges my batteries and keeps me involved in music,” he explains.

Which means every time he goes out on the road with his own band playing theater and club sized venues, he can focus the energy of three nights at the MCI Center to down to three nights at the Ram’s Head with relative ease. “And playing in front of 200 people you can’t hide,” he declares. Though Bruce has no immediate plans for The E Street Band, Nils (now a youthful 50) stands ready for whatever might happen next. And to think, Lofgren figured by the time he turned 21, he’d be forced something else to do for the rest of his life. “We never even figured you could make a living doing this.”

Jon Spencer: Its All Blues!

2008-07-15T00:34:00.000-04:00

Music Monthly
Published: July 2001
by JOHN DUFFY

He strikes a bold pose onstage, one hand raised high above his head like a gospel preacher; holding the microphone like a weapon, a cheap, battered guitar draped low around his neck. The two-piece band behind him churns out a hard, fuzzy funk beat. Spreading his legs at shoulder width, he leans into the mic and declares with purpose…“the blues is number one baby, the blues is number one…but people I got one the thing to tell you this evening…I do not play the blues, I play rock and roll!”

On the surface, this seems to make absolutely no sense. But if you are even vaguely familiar with the music and life of indie rock icon Jon Spencer, such a seemingly bizarre statement is something you have come to expect, even if it cannot be easily understood. The song is “Talk About The Blues” from Acme (1998: Matador), the 1998 album from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

“We are very serious about what we do, its not a con,” he says, trying to settle for the millionth time any arguments still brewing that Spencer treats the blues as one big batch of musical clichés for the taking. While not recognized as one the group’s high water marks in their uniquely loud synthesis of punk rock and just about every form of black music to come along since the 1950s, the song is actually Spencer’s most honest moment. While some critics have felt Spencer’s irreverent take on the blues and soul is a form of deliberate mockery. This assessment, however, could not be more incorrect.

Spencer loves the blues. He loves soul. He loves rockabilly and R&B. He loves hip-hop. And it’s all blues really, right? Though JSBX has carved an impressive path since 1992 with such hybrid adventuring, the group’s newest full-length disc, Plastic Fang (Matador), is their most rock-oriented release yet.

Shedding the studio cut-and-paste approach that was at the core of Acme, Spencer, guitarist Judah Bauer, and drummer Russell Simmins cut most of Plastic Fang (Matador) like an old fashioned rock and roll album, an it shows. Speaking on the phone from his Tribeca apartment on a rainy Wednesday morning, the steamy blues-rock of Brooklyn group the Edison Rocket Train sizzles in the background.

They are one of Spencer’s new favorite groups, along with Manhattan’s own minimalist rock trio, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Both groups are on the very cutting edge of New York’s indie rock scene, a position that Spencer occupied for a number of years as head of the seminal sleaze-punk outfit Pussy Galore. Now pushing forty and a leading a double life as husband and musician, Spencer is becoming one of the elder statesmen of modern rock. His influence seems to be growing at an alarming rate, having been one of a handful or artists to inspire a genuine blues-punk hybrid, one of the most interesting musical developments of the 1990s.

But back in 1985, Spencer was just a snotty kid from New Hampshire studying film at Brown University. It was fellow Brown student and Washington D.C. native Julie Cafritz that prompted Spencer’s move to the nation’s capitol. The odd thing is we weren’t really great friends, just acquaintances really, but I went anyway.” Spencer immediately dove into the D.C. underground scene, producing two avant-garde films that were legendary in their efforts to offend the viewer. Following brief work with Shithaus, an industrial group (who put out a cassette-only release in 1985…try and track that one down), Spencer and Cafritz formed Pussy Galore, melding the deliberately offensive nature of his film adventures with the most outrageous punk deconstructions imaginable.

Pussy Galore’s music was at its best moments exciting in an angry, progressive kind of way, but more often than not just a snotty bunch of kids making s***load of tasteless noise (which I suppose has some merits on its own in a subversive kind of way). Song titles included “Adolescent Wet Dream,” and “Kill Yourself,” and those were the nice ones. During this time Spencer met musician/photographer Cristina Martinez at a Jesus and Mary Chain concert. The two later married and have a son, and have collaborated on numerous musical ventures, most notably the sometime band Boss Hog. Spencer and Pussy Galore quickly garnered attention in the D.C. underground.

But this was at the height of the harDCore explosion, and Galore’s deliberately offensive (and decidedly apolitical) didn’t quite fit in. But that was okay with Spencer. “Hardcore music didn’t exactly light my fire at the time, and we kind of fought against it,” he remembers. “I have more respect for those guys now.” Further poking only makes Spencer uneasy. “I’d really rather not get into that period too much.” Less than a year after forming however, Spencer and the group decided it was time to leave D.C. They had played just about everywhere there was to play, and felt that New York City was the true frontier they needed to conquer.

Manhattan’s underground rock scene adopted them immediately, and the group’s dissonant sound began to mature, to the point that their last two releases, Right Now (1987: Caroline) and Dial ‘M’ for Motherf***er (1989: Matador), were actually memorable assumptions of The Stooges, Cramps, and occasionally the Velvet Underground. But after six years of outrageousness, personality and financial disputes killed the band.

But Spencer was already moving ahead. After hooking up with Jeff Evans and his group Gibson Bros. and playing on their final two releases (The Man Who Loved Couch Dancing, Memphis Sol Today!), Spencer gravitated more closely to the blues and soul music that first turned him on to music as a teenager living in New Hampshire. Evans, who is largely credited with forming the first true punk-blues hybrid, had an immense effect on Spencer.

“He was my teacher, really. That’s when I really started to listen to the blues, that’s period of ‘89-‘90.” So when Spencer teamed up with guitarist Judah Bauer and drummer Russell Simmins to form Blues Explosion in 1991, his musical focus was far more in tune to what he really wanted to do. A power trio without bass remains the format to this day; Bauer playing funky, prickly Telecaster licks; Simmins pounding out thick, methodic beats, and Spencer on gravely, Elvis-on-crank sounding vocals and muddy guitar “Its just a cheap Japanese thing” he says of the junked looking axe that give him such angry sounds. “My wife bought it on Avenue B for $17 about ten years ago.”

And so far with that arrangement the music has come, fast and furiously intense, more on the money with each successive go around. The group’s debut, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (1992: Caroline) but things immediately began to pick up after that. An appreciation of hip-hop and electronic music was evidenced on Mo’ Width (1994: Matador), an EP of remixes. Orange (1994: Matador) served to increase the group’s audience to almost messianic proportions.

Another remix EP, Experimental Remixes (1995: Matador) followed, with tracks sweetened by the likes of Mike D, Beck, Dub Narcotic leader Calvin Johnson, and members of Wu Tang Clan. But perhaps the most important work thus far of Blues Explosion’s career has been that of backing up R.L. Burnside, the sixty-odd year old singer who led an army of rough and unschooled blues players (Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford, Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early, Hasil Adkins) back to the music’s roots in the 1990s.

Spencer and the Blues Explosion backed Burnside on his 1993 breakthrough Ass Pocket O’ Whiskey (Fat Possum), and while some critics lambasted Spencer’s irreverent, flagrantly loud approach, the marriage worked, signaling finally that blues was much more than just twelve bars and a good guitar solo, but attitude, passion, and more attitude as well.

Spencer’s fiery playing is a perfect match for Burnside’s loose, freewheeling style, and the result is like discovering the blues for the first time again. Initially, though, the project suffered from the same mistrust heaped upon it by mainstream blues scholars. “Burnside and his people were initially a bit wary of us, even though we had toured together for about a year,” Spencer recalls of the collaboration.

Opening night of the new experiment was at Washington’s old 9:30 Club. “Very tense,” Spencer remembers. “I think Russell almost got in a fight with Burnside’s drummer.” The album now stands as one of the great unlauded albums of the 1990s, and helped push the punk-blues hybrid into orbit. Today, groups like Immortal Lee County Killers, Soledad Brothers, White Stripes owe a debt to Ass Pocket O’ Whiskey.

The group’s most high-profile releases, Now I Got Worry (1996: Matador) and Acme (1998: Matador) earned the group even wider audiences, even if none of their songs were played on the radio, and the group’s best publicity was through word of mouth. But it was the concerts, part rock and roll exorcism, part blues revival, part sweat ceremony, and always loud and energetic, that delivered them the title of America’s favorite indie rock band. But for Plastic Fang, the group essentially reinvented itself.

Instead of flirtations with hip-hop and dub production styles, JSBX plays as a garage rock band. From the supersonic boogie of “Sweet N’ Sour” you know this is very different album. “Hold On” employs a funky backbeat and more of Spencer’s improvised lyrical style, but underneath is a standard rock and roll song structure. “Down In The Beast” is a churning blues number with Bauer’s tremolo guitar pushing the whole thing along. From the cover art to the lyrics of more than one tune, Spencer is fascinated with werewolves and vampires these days.

“I like the sexual imagery,” he says (part of his fascination with vintage horror and science-fiction films is the underlying sexual allegory). There is also the classic 1950s theme of werewolf as social outcast/rock and roller that is appealing as well. The cleverly disguised gospel song “Mean Heart,” is perhaps the album’s most interesting song. Balancing fiery bottleneck with pounding percussion and acoustic rhythm guitar (a first for Spencer) it may even shut up the few blues nerds who still point the finger of scorn Spencer’s way.

In fact, while the most basic rock and roll record of his career since the days of Pussy Galore, Plastic Fang also features some of Spencer’s best ever compositions, even some real songs based on chord structures and melody, and not so much the riff bombardment that has been his stock in trade. It was simpler this time as well. “Most of it was done pretty live. We recorded the basic tracks in about two weeks and then overdubbed and mixed for another two weeks or so.” It doesn’t come out sounding like the band labored endlessly over it…and that’s a good thing.

Spreading his legs at shoulder width, he leans into the mic and declares with purpose…“the blues is number one baby, the blues is number one…but people I got one the thing to tell you this evening…I do not play the blues, I play rock and roll!” It’s an allusion to Mississippi Fred McDowell in fact, whose 1969 LP I Do Not Play Rock and Roll hoped to separate true blues fans from the folkie sycophants who assumed that sine one form begat the next, they were interchangeable.

So what does Spencer do on his next album? He makes his most basic rock and roll album to date…honesty, contradictions, irreverence and honest tribute. Sure it may be a pun on the surface, but is really the most sincere of tributes. It is in fact McDowell’s rhythmic sound that is the logical source point of Spencer’s blues, soul, and R&B based punk rock. When you boil it all down to the bones, its all blues anyway.

Keter Betts: A Lifetime in Jazz

2008-07-15T00:28:00.000-04:00

Music Monthly
Published: August 2000
by JOHN DUFFY

Driving down tree-lined suburban streets, do you ever wonder about the lives of the people who live in these unassuming, cookie cutter dwellings? The anonymity rendered by well-manicured lawns and freshly-polished minivans is illusive. Too often in our fame infatuated world, we assume all the creative people live in luxuriously far-off places, while we toil away at our barely tolerable lives.

Passing by one particular house on a quiet Chevy Chase side street, you couldn’t make up a story more interesting than the one lived by the man who resides there, perhaps one of the greatest journeyman bassists in the second half of the first century of jazz. There is a lifetime of road in his eyes. They dance upward toward the ceiling as he struggles to recall dates and names and associations dating back to World War II, a world away it seems.

His sandy baritone tells a good tale, and makes you all the more grateful you listened, even if his humble delivery always hides a more fascinating story than the one just recounted. (He might finish an ordinary concert tale with "and Duke Ellington was there, too....").

By all accounts Keter Betts should be slowing down in his twilight years. But at 77 he’s only just begun to contemplate any kind of actual retirement. The music room of his Chevy Chase home is a tribute as much to his love of golf as to his long career in music. There are more than a dozen trophies and plaques to the one Hall of Fame Award from the Washington Area Music Association. A vintage Makintosh tube preamp powers the hi-fi system. "It’s not for sale, so don’t ask," he laughs.

He’ll answer any number of probing questions into technique or his legacy in jazz history with a humble wave of he hand. "Everybody in this life is called to do something by God. My calling was to entertain people...make a joyful noise." When Betts says it, it’s not simply rote piety, but a hard-won truth. Fifty years on the road will do ya’ some learnin,’ and humble you as well. And as he enters his "twilight years," as he calls them, he spends more and more time teaching these lessons to youth.

In school music classes, at community centers, he tells young people (some as old as five), that anything in life worth your time takes discipline, practice, and passion. He has a favorite analogy that relates to his own musical journey. "I tell people that at some point in their life an alarm clock goes off alerting you to what your calling in life is, whether it’s music or not," he explains. "And you best heed that alarm."

William Thomas Betts was 5 years old when his alarm sounded, in the form of an Italian parade in his hometown of Port Chester, New York. He was born there in July of 1926. "It was in the summer and my mother had sent me to the store to buy a loaf of bread, and when I came out of the store, this parade was marching by," he says remembering his youthful amazement. A captivated Betts wandered the streets of the town following the music, enthralled at the sound and pageantry. "I got home three hours later and my mother had a fit," he laughs.

But the alarm had sounded, and Betts heeded the call. Beginning in elementary school he learned the drums, eventually traveling by train to New York City for lessons. He did the usual high school marching band thing, but by the time he had acquired a full-sized Gene Krupa drum kit, the reality of lugging it around became a chore. He switched to bass in 1946, at the age of 18, the year he graduated high school. "We lived on the fourth floor in those days, and after driving back from New York... you know it’s late and you have to make three trips up the stairs." Betts rolls his eyes. "With the bass it was just one trip."

It was just that simple. After only one year with that instrument, Betts was playing his first professional gig. Carman Leggio, an older friend who was stationed in Washington D.C. in the Air Force was invited to put a band together to play a small 15th Street club. The four-week job turned into 13 weeks. And Betts was in as he terms it, "jazz heaven." The jazz scene in the nation’s capitol during and after World War II was second only to perhaps Harlem in the ‘20s and or St. Louis in the ‘30s, and an impressionable young player like the fresh-faced Betts was overwhelmed. "It was like Mecca," he says with very little exageration.

"There were clubs everywhere, musicians playing, sitting in, hanging out," he recalls. With some of the bigger acts of the day coming to venues like the Lincoln and Harlem theaters, young players like Betts, scratching it out in the clubs and smaller ballrooms were treated to an endless buffet of top-of-the-line talent. For an aspiring bassist like Betts that meant the likes of Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown, and Jimmy Blanten. "It was amazing," he says. "And to think at the time I was just one year out of high school and living this life and meeting all these wonderful people."

He recounts a few of the more familiar club names: The Bengazi Club, The Caverns, The Offbeat, Republican Gardens. All that hard work along U and T streets paid off when Betts was hired by rhythm and blues barnstormer Earl Bostic in the spring of 1949. Bostic’s band was the proving ground for young jazz musicians at the time; John Coltrane, Stanley Turrentine, and Benny Golson all numbered in its ranks at one time or another.

Bostic was known for separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and is never really given the proper credit. Betts must have fared well. He was hired shortly thereafter by Dinah Washington, at the time topping the R&B and pop charts with numerous crossover blues and jazz hits. It was his first association with vocal jazz, and one he credits with being one of the most influential gigs in his early career. "It was then, with Dinah, that I really started to learn about putting a song together, playing in order to frame the singer." With a singer at the front of the band-stand, Betts says, a good player becomes a tailor. "Imagine the singer being completely naked. It’s your job to dress the singer."

Applying this philosophy has even included work in other musical realms for Betts. "And working with singers you tend to do just that, dress them musically." Notable dates with Nat Adderly followed, including the 1960 album Work Songs with guitar great Wes Montgomery, and sessions with Jimmy Cobb. Throughout the late ’50s and early ‘60s, Betts was part of Washington D.C. native Charlie Byrd’s band, backing the guitar player on some of his most important bossa nova recordings alongside Stan Getz and the man largely credited with creating the form, Antonio Carlos Jobim.

But in ordinary conversation, Betts will likely gloss over these impressive items on his dossier, "dressing the singer" is how Betts has spent the remainder of most of his career. Betts began a partnership that stands almost unequaled in jazz or any other genre; 24 years with Ella Fitzgerald. Playing with the first lady of song on and off while picking up local work, Betts began playing with her full time in 1971, and performed on countless albums, television specials, and world tours until the singer’s retirement due to ill health in 1992.

In a trio or quartet that featured luminaries like Tommy Flannagan, Joe Pass, the great Duke Ellington. Betts was with Fiztgerald during almost all of her annual Carnegie Hall concerts, 13 week blitzes through Europe in the mid ’70s, scads of Montreaux and Newport Jazz Festival appearances, and several stays at London’s intimate Ronnie Scott’s Club, one of which led to Ella in London, one of her best latter day albums. All of this between television appearances, albums, and Betts raising a family of five children.

He was also with Ella when her health and eyesight began to fail (she insisted on performing into early in the ‘90s), and when she lost confidence in her aging voice. But besides a lifetime entertaining jazz lovers around the world, Betts learned much from Ella’s vocal mastery, developing a bluesy, rolling playing style that is still in fine form today.

Listen to Ella in London (1974) or Montreaux ‘77 - Ella Fitzgerald with the Tommy Flanagan Trio (1977) to hear Betts’ bass lines imitate Ella’s bent, blue notes and scat phrasing. Playing the only instrument in her regular band that could roll and slide notes (when Joe Pass wasn’t around), Bett’s became Ella’s melodic foil. The skill still serves him well today.

It was not until 1998 that Keter Betts got around to recording his own solo album. Bass, Buddies and Blues features a quintet in a mixed program of group originals and standards. Keter’s instrument is rippling with deep blues bends and warm slides. A second set featuring Baltimore singer Ethel Ennis, Bass, Buddies, Blues, and Beauty Too, appeared the following spring. A third solo album is now in the works.

Betts backed up Ennis at this year’s Artscape on July 23, the day after his 77th birthday. It is one of the last gigs he will play for some time, he says. The long days and nights on the road are done, and quite honestly, he’ll tell you he is very happy about that. He plays a lot of golf these days, several times a week if he can (the exercise helps his diabetes).

He performs occasionally with friends and teaches in area schools. Frequently, he also serves as musical coordinator for jazz performance programming at Black Entertainment Television, "...making sure the cameramen and the director understand what is going on musically, so they don’t tape anybody picking their nose or scratching their behind when someone else is soloing." And he’s resting.

For the first time in a long time (he can’t remember exactly when), Keter Betts is doing next to nothing save some renovations to his house and some time with Mildred, his wife of 46 years, and maybe even buy a boat. His eyes light up. "I’ve always wanted to buy a boat," he shrugs. "I’ve been wanting to buy a boat for awhile... enjoy my twilight years. I’ve always loved the water. Maybe it goes back to my youth." With Betts, it all seems to do that.

God Don't Make No Junk: Saints and Sinners Spring from the Same Musical Well on Goodbye, Babylon

2008-07-14T00:08:00.001-04:00

Various Artists
Goodbye, Babylon
Dust-to-Digital (2004, CD)

Baltimore City Paper
Published: March 31, 2004
By John Duffy

In early March 1865, one of the final battles of the Civil War was fought at a small southern Virginia crossroads known as Five Forks, in a fiercely rural locale called Dinwiddie County. Scarcely 40 years later, with the social and economic impact of the war still fresh on the minds of those who fought it and lived through it, a local gospel group recorded the spiritual "Down on the Old Camp Ground" in New York City for the Victor label.

They were known as the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet. It was 1902, and they were the first black vocal group ever recorded. The surviving recording of that performance is barely audible--scratchy, tinny, distant, and distorted, but it is nonetheless undeniably powerful. It spits and crackles with the residue of time, but shines through the performance's exuberant quality.

The connection between the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet and the Civil War's last great armed confrontation is tenuous, merely ironic at best (the tune itself pre-dates the war and was sung by Confederate soldiers as "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground"), but like the antiquated origins of the music itself, it serves as one of those bridges across history that makes Goodbye, Babylon, a box-set compilation of old-time gospel and sacred music, so masterfully conceived and executed.

Like most of the music on this set, the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet's performance was recorded on ancient recording technology in often less than ideal conditions; in churches, makeshift studios, in the open air. Today, the tune's technological shortcomings only make it more appealing. Calling out for redemption and forgiveness across a century, warning of the justice of a righteous God, "Down on the Old Camp Ground" contains a zeal, an innocence, and a timeless quality that makes it more than a museum piece.

In fact, many of the vintage tunes on Babylon have lived well beyond their early recordings. Eddie Head and his Family's "Down on Me" would later be a concert staple for Janis Joplin, and "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," from Da Costa Woltz's Southern Broadcasters, was transformed by the wandering ear of Woody Guthrie and recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco on 2000's Mermaid Avenue Vol. II.

Conceived, developed, and financed by Lance Ledbetter, a 27-year-old Atlanta software installer, Goodbye, Babylon presents 160 recordings on six compact discs (five of widely diverse music and one of recorded sermons) that span the first half of the 20th century, though many of the tunes reach back to Colonial times. And even without the resplendent design (the discs come in an 8.5-by-11-inch cedar case, packed in raw cotton, and the set includes a 200-page book), Babylon presents a monumental piece of American cultural documentary, an embarrassment of riches. Babylon collects popular recordings by known artists such as Hank Williams, the Louvin Brothers, Thomas A. Dorsey, Skip James, and the Carter Family, artists who recorded occasional spirituals either out of pragmatism or genuine piety.

Alongside them are performers for whom their lone recording date was perhaps the highlight of their professional or clerical career, and whose stories are lost to the mildew of time or known only to archivists: the Virginia Dandies, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Ernest Phipps and Congregation, Cotton Top Mountain Sanctified Singers. Babylon contains country music, stately hymns, string-band and jug-band music, acoustic blues, and the haunting strains of sacred harp singing, all of it under this vast umbrella of gospel.

But the music presented here, taken as a whole, easily transcends what would be considered the gospel genre, and in fact can be heard as nothing less than a testament of the social history of America itself. The secret to understanding the soul of America, how it formed, where it went awry, and how it may once again redeem itself--"the old, weird America" that rock scribe Greil Marcus hears in Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes--Babylon shows existed all along.

Like Harry Smith's now famous 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, the breadth of gospel only needed to be presented in its own context to be understood fully as a major piece of the American experience. Here are black and white, Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal, all in one tapestry, praising the same God and trying to save souls--though maybe at times not the same souls.

Presented as a continuum, the songs on Babylon testify to the innumerable ways that Americans expressed their faith in song. There are raw, almost improvised-sounding performances, like the big-voiced Brother Claude Ely's "Isn't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down," with its rapturous clapping and freewheeling accompaniment from a congregation of background singers.

The Rev. T.T. Rose and Singers belt out "Goodbye, Babylon, Part 1" with such fervor that they sound dangerously close to overloading the microphones. Rose's voice, stretched and strained, rings with conviction even when it comes close to giving out on him.

But well-rehearsed, even restrained music appears on Babylon as well. The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers' multilayered "Present Joys" represents what became known as shape-note singing by the end of the 19th century. Dating to post-Renaissance European social music traditions, the curious form of transcribing and performing music was intended to simplify group signing for people who had no musical training or were of limited literacy. In the end, the form led to some of the most harmonically rich and complex music to emerge from American folk culture.

The recorded sermons possess an undeniable musicality as well. It's almost possible to count the bar patterns on the Rev. A.W. Nix's "Black Diamond Express to Hell," as he warns in a gruff baritone of the vices and sins that make one express-bound for damnation--fornication, lying, gambling. His voice twists from one root note to a flattened third, at once mimicking the common blues scale like a guitar player bending notes and intoning the tradition of psalming, or singing prayer passages, still common in some churches.

But beyond being a monolith of great music and a testament to the cleansing powers of modern digital mastering, Babylon's unique appeal is that it demonstrates the sheer breadth of religion's impact on popular music, and that, in the end, nearly all strains of American folk music, up to and including what would become rock 'n' roll, flowed from the same source.

In his 1993 book Blues and Evil, musicologist Jon Michael Spencer sought to destroy the long-held assumption that the blues and gospel music of the pre-World War II South were subject to fierce separation, that Southern blacks who played the blues were reviled by the church establishment for their hard-drinking, sinful ways. He argued that blues singers and sacred singers were often the same people--a fact Babylon makes plain: the two musical strands themselves were in fact nearly one in the same.

On Babylon, Sister O.M. Terrell sings with clarion-voiced conviction on "The Bible's Right" that there is no room in heaven for philanderers or even tobacco chewers, but her bottleneck slide guitar accompaniment is straight Mississippi blues, as if she dragged a less than reluctant Fred McDowell into the studio with her for the date. And blues legend Blind Lemon Jefferson sings "All I Need Is That Pure Religion," originally released under the pseudonym Deacon L.J. Bates.

Spiritual music called more than just the fiercely devoted into its ranks. It was and, despite market segregation today, is a music for all people to enjoy and participate in. With commanding authority, Goodbye, Babylon is the most comprehensive audio overview of American spiritual music ever attempted, and it offers a glimpse at just how widely influential religion has been on the secular world of pop.

Soundchex: Ana Egge

2008-07-14T00:05:00.000-04:00

Ana Egge

Out Past the Lights

Grace-ParkinSong/Ryko Distribution (2005, CD)

Baltimore City Paper

Published: April 15, 2005
by John Duffy

When a 22-year-old Ana Egge emerged out of Austin in 1999 she was widely praised for her songwriting and performing maturity by some well-heeled admirers (Shawn Colvin, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams). It’s hard to fathom, but in the six years since she’s grown an entire new career. While her earliest work fit nicely into a conventional alt-country niche, Egge’s newest, Out Past the Lights, reveals a singer moving far beyond the well-worn paths in which she first trod.

Now a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident, her music has evolved into a convincing clash of urban and rural, indie rock and folk. A broad palette of bubbling Wurlitzers, lazy horns, and rolling pedal steels—brought along by producer Jason Mercer (Ani DiFranco, Ron Sexsmith)—color Egge’s songs with odd angles atypical to a singer/songwriter album. But Egge’s compositions—every last one a stirring yet comforting melody—coupled with an unparalleled sense of word economy and her voice, are the true accomplishments here.

When she dryly sings of a world “small enough for us” on the back of a motorcycle, an unused wedding dress hidden away in a closet “like a secret shotgun,” or whispers of a snow-covered morning signaling life’s renewal, she does so in round, sandy cellolike tones. She precisely conveys vivid emotions—joy, coyness, shame, pride, innocence—without effort, artifice, or haste.

Soundchex: Vashti Bunyan

2008-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Vashti Bunyan
Lookaftering
DiCristina (2005, CD)

Baltimore City Paper
Published: December 21, 2005
By John Duffy

Nick Drake never sold enough copies of the three albums he recorded in his lifetime to pay the recording costs of the first. But the tale of his Island label mate folk singer Vashti Bunyan makes Drake’s time on Earth the epitome of fame.

Bunyan’s one LP, Just Another Diamond Day, sank without a trace upon release in 1970. Then she, too, simply vanished. Until last year, that is, when a friend of Bunyan’s internet search revealed that a small cult had formed around Diamond Day, which was rereleased to warm reception. Lookaftering ends her 35-years hiatus.

As anyone who’s heard Diamond Day might expect, Bunyan’s new CD is a quiet, meditative work recalling the best moments of her former contemporaries: Pentangle, Lindisfarne, Incredible String Band, Sandy Denny, Fairport Convention.

Modern touches creep in here and there, most notably backward loops of ghostly voices and guitar that skew the traditional feel of “Here Before.” Orchestration that includes chimes, recorders, harp, and wine glasses waltzing alongside her whispering voice is for the most part well-placed but may sound like dated Renaissance fetish to cynical ears.

An album trying to catch up with 35 years of musical history all at once, however, would be far too great a gap for anyone to traverse. Lookaftering serves its purpose perfectly, showing that Bunyan can still write lovely, feathery, wintry songs and sing them in a voice that, even if starting to show its mileage, remains as delicate as porcelain. What she does next will be her real test.

Safe at Home: Gary Louris Takes the Jayhawks Back to Basics

2008-07-13T23:56:00.000-04:00

Baltimore City Paper
Published: January 16, 2002
By John Duffy

Another year, another tour, another game of musical chairs for the Jayhawks. Following the lackluster sales performance of the group's 2000 Columbia release, Smile, the band is once again in flux--with respect to its membership, its sound, and its record label. This unrest is not at all unusual for the Jayhawks, who have gone through more drummers than Spinal Tap and more labels than they would care to remember. But guitarist, songwriter, and leader Gary Louris is used to the by-now semiannual incidence of forced tactical withdrawals.

"It's going to happen to a band that's been around for 16 years, I guess," he says with knowing stoicism by phone from the group's Minneapolis rehearsal space. "If we were a much younger band, it might be a bigger deal." Louris' damn-the-torpedoes attitude notwithstanding, badly timed personnel changes have arguably led to some of the group's biggest career snags. But the band seems to bounce back every time. Over the past year, the Jayhawks lost second guitarist Kraig Johnson and keyboardist Jen Gunderman, but Louris isn't worried, and most anyone who has followed the band for any length of time shouldn't be either.

After the sudden departure of co-founder and songwriter Mark Olson in 1995, nobody expected the band to recover the masterful form country-rock gems Hollywood Town Hall (1992) and Tomorrow the Green Grass (1995)--but the Jayhawks did.

The group's first post-Olson recording, 1997's harder-rocking Sound of Lies, was highly praised, but due to label American Recordings' financial chaos, it became impossible to find it in stores within weeks of its release--and it's rather difficult to get people to buy an album that isn't there. In addition, keyboardist Karen Grotberg, key to the group's more fleshed-out sound since 1992, left to raise her newborn daughter. 2000's Bob Ezrin-produced Smile was a much sunnier affair than the dark and moody Lies, and it got a healthy promotional push from Columbia, but its use of electronic beats and tense looped percussion didn't sit well with the Americana crowd.

Things started to change again in mid-September 2001. When commercial air travel became more problematic, the North Carolina-based Gunderman and Johnson --who was on tour with his other band, Iffy--were unable to appear at several Jayhawks dates, forcing Louris, bassist Marc Perlman, and drummer Tim O'Reagan to play as a trio. "The power-trio dates," Louris recalls. "Those gigs were fun, very liberating." With almost no time to prepare, the group found a way to play with the most basic of rock elements.

And performing as a trio made Louris realize that the Jayhawks could work without keyboards, which had been a part of the band since 1992, and a second guitar, which it had never been without. The group could save a bundle on road expenses by shrinking down to its barest essentials. Touring costs have always been a thorn in Louris' side. "It had gotten so complicated logistically, always flying people in," he says. "We just couldn't afford to tour as a five-piece anymore."

The group has toured Spain twice in the last year, however, thanks to the sponsorship of Mondo Sonoro, a Barcelona-based rock magazine. Twice in one year? "Have you ever been there?" Louris asks. "Trust me, you'd want to go back. The people are wonderful [and] the food is great." But the second Spanish tour was the last for the five-piece Jayhawks, leaving many dedicated U.S. fans quite peeved. This month's all-acoustic mini-tour is the first outing of a four-piece version, with Long Ryder Stephen McCarthy on guitar and pedal steel.

Fortunately, Louris is quite familiar with retooling old songs for different situations. "Waiting for the Sun," a signature tune from Hollywood Town Hall, has been played live at least three different ways since its release--as a loose hard-rocker over chords borrowed from David Bowie, as a countrified ballad, and as a swaggering Led Zeppelin-type smoker.

Not surprisingly given the recent instrumental changes, the tunes Louris and O'Reagan are writing for the group's next album embrace the more streamlined sound. "I hate to overuse the word 'rootsy,' but that's what they are," Louris says. "When we do get around to recording them, we want to do it as live as possible." But don't expect Hollywood Town Hall Part II. "Mark Olson was a big part of that album, and we're a different band now," Louris says. The new tunes may, in some less obvious ways, though, bring to mind that record.

The group, with McCarthy in tow, is set to begin recording soon in Los Angeles, the Jayhawks' first studio sessions as a quartet since their 1986 self-titled debut on tiny Bunkhouse Records . After recording for Rick Rubin's American Recordings imprint, the now label-less band is employing Rubin as producer--a function, perhaps, of Louris' mixed feelings about the busy sound of Smile. But if the upcoming album is likely to be more sonically straight-ahead, but Louris doesn't expect it to be easy.

"I'm never really satisfied," he says. "So it will be a challenge. I never listen to our records when they're finished. I'm pretty hard to live with that way."

Get Right with God

2008-07-13T23:47:00.001-04:00

Almost Midnight: An American Story of Murder and Redemption
by Michael W. Cuneo
Broadway BooksJanuary 2004, 352 pages, $24.95

PopMatters
Published: March 3, 2004
by John Duffy

Writer Michael Cuneo is fascinated with the fringes of mainstream religion in America. In his two books, the Fordham University professor of sociology has displayed both an interest in how religion intertwines with the social fabric of American life, but also how it can lead to consequences completely out of step with Judeo-Christian doctrine.

His first book, American Excorcism, Cuneo explored in detail the ancient practice and noted both its acceptance and clandestine use by a surprising cross-spectrum of American religious groups; renegade and mainline Catholics, Evangelicals and charismatic preachers alike. In Almost Midnight, Cuneo traces the life story of Darrell Mease, a Missouri outlaw charged in a trio of shotgun killings.

Written as a piece of investigative journalism in the mold of Truman Capote’s genre-defining In Cold Blood, Cuneo is far more interested in the elements of faith, outlaw justice, and revenge at play in Mease’s life story.
Raised in the Ozarks, Mease, poor and white, was a child many thought destined to become a preacher. Steeped in the Pentecostal faith endemic to the region, he was a likeable kid whose piety was only outweighed by bad circumstances. After killing three people in cold blood half a lifetime later, he would return to his fiery Christian roots, and become a voice against the sins of capital punishment.

Drafted into the Marine Corps and sent to Vietnam as a combat engineer, Mease started using drugs heavily. Upon returning home, he fell in with the hard-living and hard-drinking culture of the Ozarks, where blood feuds last through generations and outsiders are greeted with open disdain, even hostility.

Two failed marriages and a life of persistent poverty eventually pushed an emotionally paranoid Mease into the methanphetamine underworld. But soon, the opportunity of making real money as an independent crank dealer led to a disagreement with Lloyd Lawrence, crank kingpin of the Ozarks and an outlaw of legendary proportions. You didn’t fuck with Lloyd Lawrence, but Mease wanted out, sure that Lawrence was using him and scamming on his new trophy girlfriend, one Mary Epps.

Mease, certain of Lawrence’s wrath, escaped into the desert southwest with Epps, a woman half his age who despite her almost middle-class upbringing was drawn to the Ozark outlaw culture. Fueled by Mease’s own paranoia (not to mention liberal doses of bad crank), the couple returned to Missouri to “end it with Lloyd” after wandering the west for almost a year.

Then, in 1988, Mease stalked Lloyd for three days, finally gunning him down in a creek bed in a creekbed along with his wife and their crippled grandson Willie. Convicted and is sentenced to death by lethal injection, Mease underwent a jailhouse epiphany, and was brought back to God and the fervor of his youth. So unshaken was Mease that he swore a miracle of God would intervene and spare his life.

In a bizarre turn of events, Pope John Paul II, who happened to be visiting St. Louis of all places at the time in early 1999, intervened on Mease’s behalf, successfully seeking a commutation of his sentence from Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan. At a mass before 100,000, the pope called the death penalty “cruel and unnecessary,” and the next day personally asked Carnahan to commute Mease’s sentence.

Caught in a political Catch 22, the governor relented, and overnight, Mease became the rallying point for death penalty abolitionists. (Killed in a plane crash months later, Carnahan would go on to become the only dead person to ever win a seat in the U.S. Senate, beating out future Attorney General John Ashcroft.)

Cuneo, who spent more than a year exploring the backroads, hills and hollers of Mease’s native southern Missouri hills interviewing family members, fellow outlaws and enemies alike, spends much effort in the book trying to come to terms with the inevitability of Mease’s crime. Reveling in tales of the rough and tumble Ozarks, Cuneo seems to indicate that Mease had little chance of ending up anything more than a bottom-dweller, despite his early religious fanaticism and being what locals constantly called a “genuinely good guy.”

Paralleling Mease’s journey from good ‘ol boy to death row convert, the Ozarks converted themselves from a dead-end place to one of America’s most family-friendly, squeaky-clean destinations. But as Cuneo discovers, the back roads outside of Branson are still places many tourists never go, and frankly wouldn’t be welcome. The irony is painfully evident; an area known for as a hotbed of outlaw activity, blood feuds, a source of some of America’s worst vices (first hooch, then marijuana, then crank) was somehow, almost overnight, transformed into the squarest place this side of Salt Lake City.

Today, the Ozark hills today remain a hotbed of methamphetamine production. Last year, over 2,000 seizures were made by law enforcement agencies in Missouri, more than in any other state. The same poverty, depravity, and redneck code of honor that created both versions of Mease (both the outlaw and the Bible-thumper) still persist. And they are not, of course, peculiar to mountainous, backwoods hollers.

There are thousands, possibly millions of Darrell Meases being created in America. His story, while seemingly unique, is in no way any different from those of other desperate men who will never benefit from the publicity of being saved by the Pope. Poverty, ignorance, police corruption, post-traumatic stress, paranoia, drug addiction; Mease had virtually every factor possible to lead him to become a killer.

There are millions of Americans who live on the brink of normal life every day; he ones who lose jobs, or find themselves where there are none, the ones who become frustrated with the plodding pace of public assistance and dare to strike out in search of financial security any way they can, the ones who make one bad decision that finds them spiraling into a life wasted.

Mease, while one of the last true, “good ol’ boys” of the Ozarks, was a victim of consequence, geography, bad decisions, economics, untreated mental illness—the list could go on. The true miracle of this story is not how the benevolence of the pope and a governor who couldn’t say no to him spared Mease the needle of justice, but that crimes like his don’t occur more often than they do.

By trying, but perhaps ultimately failing, to come to terms with the circumstances of what led to the three killings, Cuneo attempts to find some sort of redemptive resolution to the tale. Mease may have been one of Missouri’s most feared killers in a generation, but in the end, he found God, and was saved by a man of God.

Cuneo, like the anti-death penalty activists who had hoped to find a silver lining to Mease’s sentence being commuted, struggles to find greater meaning in his story. Sadly, there is none, and Cuneo knows it.

Dylan pumps up Hersheypark crowd

2008-07-13T23:37:00.001-04:00

Intelligncer Journal
Published: June 25, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Wearing a Western-style suit he's favored for the last 10 years or so, his band decked out in matching gray silk ensembles with fedoras, Bob Dylan and his band at times looked more like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys on Sunday evening at The Star Pavilion at Hersheypark Stadium.

There was enough swing in numbers like "Summer Days, Summer Nights" and "Rollin' and Tumblin'," with the band's two guitars and pedal steel sounding like a full horn section in some California dance hall circa 1960. But as much as Dylan has affected the Old West dandy appearance for more than a decade, his sound is as fresh as it's been since his triumphant return 10 years ago with "Time Out of Mind."

Let's remember, in some of Dylan's best shows in the 1970s, he performed while wearing grisly white face makeup. Dylan and his band played to a moderate-sized crowd Sunday night, seated behind the usual stage setup for stadium shows at Hershey. That meant he played into the sunset for the first few numbers - a dazzling effect.

While his playlist at times may have seemed a bit too heavy on the 12-bar blues shuffles he's been fond of lately - sometimes sounding like little more than vehicles for the affecting couplets only he can seem to dish out at will - the performances were spirited and lively.

Dylan himself spent almost the entire night, save for one or two opening songs, at stage right, standing at an electric organ. He played leaning into the keys with his left foot back. Although he's certainly no Augie Myers or Garth Hudson, he played like he meant it, nimbly switching to harp on a few select tunes.

For the most part, he let others - Denny Freeman on guitar and Den Herron on pedal steel, mandolin and fiddle - take the instrumental spotlight. The audience, spread out on the lawn, stood for most of the set and gave its most enthusiastic reactions to songs that hinted at Dylan's looming mortality. One song was old, the other new.

"My Back Pages," rendered into a 1966 hit by the Byrds, was the old tune. Each time he sang the refrain about being so much older then and younger now, it got a cheer. "Is youth wasted on the young?" the song seems to ask. Certainly not on the 50-something guy in the Hawaiian print shirt swaying with his arms in the air as if he were at church. On a newer tune, the singer asked "Am I over the hill? Am I past my prime?" A great "No" came up from the audience. "Well then," he sang, "we can still have a wonderful time ... ."

And indeed Dylan's age did show Sunday night, as on all nights in recent memory, but like Ella Fitzgerald before him, Dylan has learned to use his aging pipes as a new creative tool. He couldn't hit the high-pitched snarl of "Highway 61" as he did many years ago, but instead he gave it a sinister growl befitting its apocalyptic imagery. And when he stood with his five-man band at center stage to receive the audience's final ovation, he did so with his legs spread in a fighter's stance, holding the microphone stand like a gunslinger.

The other Kowalczyk'

2008-07-13T23:32:00.002-04:00

Sunday News
Published: November 20, 2005
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Growing up in York, the brothers Kowalczyk fought constantly. Ed would wait behind a door to jump the younger Adam as he came home from school, or kick the Nintendo in the middle of his brother's game. "We fought constantly," Adam said.

The boys' roughhousing was a constant annoyance for their mother, but it may have served as training for life in the topsy- turvy world of heavy rock. Ed's band, Live, hit it big in the mid- 1990s and scored several hit singles here and around the world. Once success came, Ed wanted more freedom on stage than playing guitar afforded him, so he called his brother.

For the past seven years, Adam has been playing backup rhythm guitar with Live, freeing his lead-vocalist brother to roam the stage at will. "It's been amazing seeing the world, playing to tens of thousands of people I feel very lucky," Adam said, relaxing between segments on a recent edition of WRVV's local Sunday-night "Open Mic" music show.

For two hours, he enthralled radio listeners with stories of lion attacks in South Africa, massive European summer festivals where the crowd's appreciation for the band is measured in how much stuff they can throw at them, and tales of how the brothers played both security guard and deranged fan as kids to add variety to their regular pummeling sessions.

Adam's motive for appearing on the broadcast was to promote his own music, which he will be performing live Wednesday at the Chameleon Club along with The Mint and John Gault Line, all supporting acts for the Jack Dillman Band. "The day before Thanksgiving is supposed to be one of the biggest nights out of the year, so hopefully we'll get a good turnout," Adam said. Live may be one of the biggest bands in the world, but Adam doesn't even have a record deal. His Chameleon gig will celebrate the release of his second self-produced disc, "The Dream EP."

The new disc is 12 tracks long and clocks in at just under 40 minutes, so it's really a full- length album. "It was supposed to be an EP," he explained. "We were going to record just four or five songs, then very quickly that doubled. I kept trying out different songs and (the engineer) would say, Wow, we should record that!'" The product is a rich disc filled with a variety of song styles: loud guitar rock, power ballads, sultry tunes with more than a hint of an R&B influence. Adam's raspy, soulful voice tackles all of them.

There are gentle acoustic guitars, roaring electrics, and every vocal range possible from a whisper to a scream. Adam also possesses a falsetto that might make some think of him as one of the brothers Gibb. Similarities between the two Kowalczyk brothers' sounds is understandable. They listened to the same music growing up. Adam would steal Guns & Roses, INXS, and Black Sabbath tapes from his brother's room, hide them, listen to them in secret, then return them to the exact spot he found them to avoid yet another pounding. "I'd even rewind the tape back to the exact spot I found it at," he confessed.

But as he tuned and retuned his Takamine acoustic guitar, Adam recalled, he was also influenced by his mother, Mary's, taste in music. "I think the melodies I write stem directly from listening to my mom sing in the car when she was taking me to school," he said.

She would blast Carole King, Paul Simon or James Taylor, he remembers, and it served as a form of therapy for both of them. By the time he began writing his own songs, Adam was hooked on Jeff Buckley, REM and U2, artists known for their drama and passion. The first show he played with Live was at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., to some 80,000 fans in 1998.

Lately, he's far more likely to be in some coffeehouse or club, singing his own songs to a crowd of up to a couple hundred that allows him some anonymity. "Too often, bands who are starting out aim for the stars right away," he said. "But I've done that, so I think that helps me focus on what's important about the songs when I'm doing my own material. I like that I can do both."

There will be no be anonymity at the Chameleon. This is partisan territory for anyone named Kowalczyk. But with songs as strong as he's got, Adam is clearly not simply living in his brother's shadow. "The Dream EP"

Runnin' on diesel-billy fuel

2008-07-13T23:18:00.000-04:00

Sunday News
Published: September 18, 2005
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

San Francisco at the zenith of the Haight-Ashbury years may seem an unlikely place for a country band to make its mark. But a group of motley players from Ann Arbor, Mich., three guitarists and a saxophonist, fit right into the freewheeling scene.

Taking a distorted version of serious honky-tonk mixed with a little Memphis soul, a little Bakersfield country and a lot of drug references, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen was one of the most popular touring acts in America in the late '60s and early '70s. Think Johnny Cash meets Big Brother and The Holding Company, or Frank Zappa sitting in with Buck Owens.

Essential to the band's success was a lanky guitar player named Bill Kirchen, whose firecracker tone and lighting-fast licks made him the envy of nearly every West Coast picker. Kirchen, who graduated from Ann Arbor High School in 1965 alongside future rock luminaries Iggy Pop and Bob Seger, started out as a classical trombonist. During the "folk scare" of the early '60s, he picked up guitar and banjo. After a brief foray into psychedelic freak-out music with a band called The Seventh Seal, Kirchen joined Cody just prior to the group's move to California. In the '80s, he played alongside, produced, and toured with iconic English country/New Waver Nick Lowe.

"But I still consider what I play today as a form of folk music, really," Kirchen said. Specifically, its called diesel-billy, a label Kirchen says he invented. For a sampling, check out "Tied to the Wheel" and "Raise Up a Ruckus," two recent titles released on roots- oriented label Hightone Records.

"If I start to curse, don't worry. It's just driving in the city," Kirchen quipped via cell phone. He apparently missed the exit for the beltway on this, the return trip from crashing the Philadelphia Folk Festival in late August. "I'd played it a few times before, so I just showed up."

Now, driving through Maryland, he's on familiar ground again. Kirchen based himself in the nation's capital for many years before moving to Austin, Texas, in 2001. "It's a great music town, as everyone knows, but it's hard to make a living there as a musician because there are so many good ones. It's a buyer's market." Thus Kirchen's 150 dates a year take him from Texas roadhouses to northern California honky-tonks to the hip nightclubs of New York City. A trip to Australia last year was wildly successful, and Kirchen heads to the U.K. for a set of dates at the end of October.

Kirchen and his band, Too Much Fun, play the family-friendly Blues Courtyard Concert Series at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 25, at Marion Court (East Orange and Marion streets). Power blues makers Bill Hector & The Fairlanes of New Jersey open the show at 2 p.m. Lancaster's own D.C. & Co., a big, horn-driven blues band, closes at 5 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the gate.

Commander Cody and his current lineup of the Airmen played the BlueSunday series Aug. 28. And though they missed each other by a month here in Lancaster, even after all these years their paths still cross. "How is the crusty old one?" Kirchen asked. "We play together about once a year or so at reunion gigs. Sometimes we'll team up for bigger shows."

Kirchen's latest release, "Dieselbilly Road Trip," is part of a series of 15 roots releases from the National Council of Traditional Arts and Hightone, currently on sale at Cracker Barrel restaurants nationwide. Other volumes include "Asleep at the Wheel," "Cephas & Wiggans" and "The Seldom Scene." It is "basically a cross-section of music that can be considered Americana. And I'm happy to have been included. It came out sounding really good," Kirchen said. Played on a beautifully battered Fender Telecaster with fast, nimble hands, Kirchen's signature sound is indeed synonymous with some of the best American music. Not only does he tackle country and blues classics, but the Lost Airmen repertoire gets regular revisits.

Kirchen's own live version of the old Commander Cody chestnut "Hot Rod Lincoln" has turned into a hilarious marathon-length tribute to the giants of rock, blues and country. "I started trying to imitate different car-horn sounds on the guitar," Kirchen explained. In the song, the singer is racing a Cadillac on a long stretch of Western highway. Other drivers move over to let him pass by as he cruises down the road at 110 mph.

"I made the sound of a Freightliner truck, a bus full of hippies, things like that." At one show, he grafted the famous opening riff from Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" onto the song without warning. "There was one night when, just to amuse ourselves, we started every song with that riff," he said. "After that it was off to the races man. We never planned it or discussed it, I would just drop someone's name and play the riff, and the guys would follow along."

In its current version, the song features musical-signature snippets of everyone from the Rolling Stones to Flatt & Scruggs, from Muddy Waters to the Sex Pistols. It is understandably a crowd- pleasing climax to just about every Bill Kirchen performance.

And that, Kirchen says, is what diesel-billy is all about. He'll play Lefty Frizell, Blackie Farell and follow with Bob Dylan or the Byrds. "That's the great thing about inventing your own genre; there is no competition, and you can include whatever you want in it."

Vocal group celebrates American roots of U2

2008-07-13T23:12:00.002-04:00

Sunday News
Published: October 6, 2005
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Unlike many artists who emerge from brief pop music fads, The Persuasions didn't hit their creative stride until long after street corner do-wop had become a curiosity only to be found on oldies radio. Formed by five casual friends who frequented the same pickup basketball games in Brooklyn, the quartet has forged a singular trail touching five decades of music.

"We all came up to New York from the south at different times, and we all wanted to sing," recalls Jimmy Hayes, who founded the group in 1962 when he invited several of the basketball players/singers to his apartment for a rehearsal. The four who showed up became the Persuasions, and began working on complex arrangements before knowing each other's full names. Their first paying gigs were a series of cocktail receptions on a Sunday afternoon that same year.

"We went out and bought some of those Harry Belafonte-style puffy-sleeved shirts and thought we looked pretty good. We did four shows in order to make $25 between us," says Hayes from his Brooklyn home, a stone's throw from the same street corners where the group honed their skills as younger men.

By the mid-1970s, the Persuasions had recorded a series of critically lauded albums including "Spread The Word," and "Streetcorner Symphony," which actually made the charts. "Chirpin'," a return to their a cappella roots following some ill-advised attempts to sing with a band, was heralded by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the 100 best albums of the 1970s. They became cult heroes to a younger generation years later when they recorded the songs of Frank Zappa following his death a tribute to the man who got them their first major recording contract.

Volumes of tunes written by the Grateful Dead and the Beatles followed, as well as a children's album and a collection of Christmas favorites. "All of those sold pretty well and brought us new fans so we were happy to do them," says Hayes. The band was accustomed to rearranging other people's songs for their repertoire, especially in its early days. "You had to be able to do what was popular, whether it was I Want Hold Your Hand' or The Great Pretender' or something by the Temptations," Hayes said.

For their twenty-seventh studio album, the group turned to the catalogue of Irish rock superstars U2 art the suggestion of an associate. On the surface, the pairing may seem odd, church-rooted street-corner harmonies blended with righteous post-punk rock anthems, but critics and musicologists have for years noted the highly spiritual elements of U2's music. U2 concerts are often invigorating, reaffirming, uplifting experiences of something close to messianic proportions.

Perhaps only Bruce Springsteen is better known for the rapturous nature of his performances. Bringing these elements together with the group's gospel and R&B roots, the Persuasions found a connection that could not be overlooked. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" was one of the first songs Hayes listened to when the idea of recording U2 was suggested.

"I knew who they were and had heard some of their songs, but I never really listened until I heard that one." He put it on at home and was immediately taken by it. "It just floored me. It reminded me really of the struggles we had coming up in the south, dealing with the hardships of racism," he says, having sensed this connection between the struggle of American blacks and what the Irish have gone through as the underdogs of the British Empire.

That deep well of feeling and history convinced Hayes the project was well worth the attempt. "That's when I told the guys Hey, these songs are tailor-made for us.'" Tunes rendered include the recent hit "Sometimes You Can't Make it on Your Own," "One," "Even Better Than The Real Thing," and "Pride (In the Name of Love)." With the exception of "Pride," which celebrates the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was a hit single in 1984, all of the songs chosen by the Persuasions were recorded by U2 from their 1987 multi-platinum album "Joshua Tree" onward.

Not surprisingly, this was the period where the Irish band became fascinated with various forms of American music like R&B, gospel, country, and blues. This is evidenced at moments like their collaboration with B.B. King on "When Love Comes to Town," the horn- laden "Angel of Harlem," recorded at Sun studios in Memphis, and "The Wanderer," sung originally as a duet with Johnny Cash.

All these songs are on the Persuasions' new disc as well. Over three days last April, the group recorded twelve tracks, eleven of which made the disc, at St. Peter's Church in Chelsea neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Befitting the high-fidelity ideals of the group's label, Chesky Records, the songs were recorded with no overdubs, no signal processing, with all the singers around a single stereo microphone. The end sound is a collection of profound voices in a holy place.

This is far more than just doo-wop, a name woefully inadequate for what the Persuasions have accomplished. "We've seen so many groups come and go, so many styles, and we stick to what works and what we enjoy," says Hayes. "It's clear that we were meant to do it this way."

Dr. John: Knee deep in New Orleans

2008-07-13T23:01:00.001-04:00

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

There is music and singing again in New Orleans. In parts of the city that weren't destroyed, cafes are opening, musicians are playing, and people are celebrating life in the face of destruction. Many are preparing to mount Mardi Gras festivities, refusing to let a storm halt nearly 300 years of tradition.

If there is any silver lining in the Hurricane Katrina cloud, it is that people have been turned on to New Orleans music more than ever through benefit albums, concerts, radio appearances and refugee players busking in their new hometowns. While not personally affected by Katrina, Dr. John has emerged as one of the major performers people have turned to for catharsis, celebration and lament. Dr. John, who along with his band will appear Feb. 2 at the Whitaker Center in Harrisburg, began as a young guitar slinger under his given name, Mac Rebbenack.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, he played for Professor Longhair, Allan Toussaint and Joe Tex. In 1968, he created a mysterious voodoo-inspired persona, Dr. John The Night Tripper. The moniker allowed him complete musical freedom, license to ply the waters of soul, psychedelic rock, blues, R&B, funk, jazz and pop, often at the same time. His debut album, "Gris Gris," was an underground freak-out classic. Albums over the next four years solidified Dr. John's reputation as the premier interpreter of New Orleans' musical past and the hand bringing its future.

Though he never sold an impressive amount of records and is often written off as a novelty, his reputation as a dramatic performer and Southern musical chameleon has never been in doubt. Living much of the last 30 years in California, Dr. John regularly returned to his beloved hometown for extended stays, each time finding new vigor and inspiration. In the months since Hurricane Katrina, Dr. John's career has taken a new turn. His latest recording, "Sippiana Hericane," is knee-deep in the context of history, with the ghosts of tragedies past as both inspiration and touchstone. If anyone can be seen as the messenger of New Orleans' broken heart, it is Dr. John.

Every American tragedy, from flood to Dust Bowl, mining disaster to shipwreck, is solidified in the collective memory through song. It is in this rich tradition that Dr. John and his band, the Lower 911 named after the section of the now-famous Ninth Ward where they formed perform the songs and meditations on the new recording. The centerpiece of the album, a four-part suite based on the old spiritual "Wade in the Water," is a performance that looks back much farther than August of last year.

In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River flooded a portion of the southern river basin the size of New England. The system of levees and dikes, spillways and backwaters, in constant expansion since the late 1700s, were put to their greatest test and failed. Well over 1 million acres in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee were inundated. More than 600,000 people, greater than the entire population of New Orleans in August 2005, were left homeless.

As with Katrina, the hardest hit were poor and black; many fled north, never to return. The tragedy found its way into the acoustic blues of the time, reaching its zenith in the Mississippi Delta with Charlie Patton's two-part recording, "High Water Everywhere"; Big Bill Broonzy's "Southern Flood Blues"; Son House's "Levee Camp Blues"; and Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues." Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" was recorded even as the waters were still receding in May 1927.

Memories of the disaster combined with the difficulties of Jim Crow in the South and with common biblical imagery in pop music. And while he is singing about recent events on "Sippiana Hericane," Dr. John and his band channel those songs of old with convincing soul. The album is short (barely more than an EP, really) and in places sounds like the rushed production it is, but the results are some of the best music Dr. John has recorded in 20 years.

The beauty of it all is that he didn't even have to record "Sippiana." Any ordinary performance by Dr. John is a celebration of the past, present and future of New Orleans, its music, its people, and the gifts it has given everyone.

Merle, Willie and the song they made famous

2008-07-13T22:41:00.001-04:00

Sunday News

Published: Sep 02, 2007

By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

In 1983, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded the hit album “Pancho & Lefty,” the cover of which shows the two country legends against a desert backdrop, Nelson smiling and Haggard working his characteristic stoic grimace. The best of friends. The title song, however, was written in 1972 by the late Townes Van Zandt, and explores the consequences of betrayal. When Nelson and Haggard pull into the York Fairgrounds this Friday as part of their Last of the Breed Tour, they will no doubt perform the song along with numerous other hits.

Country-rocker Steve Earle once called Van Zandt the greatest American songwriter ever, “and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” Van Zandt is rumored to have replied that he had met Dylan and his bodyguards, and that there was little chance Earle would ever get near his coffee table. Despite his well-known sense of humor, Van Zandt wrote some of the most hopeless and haunting songs in the country and folk songbooks. He was an American poet of the first order.

Thorny, witty and relentlessly self-destructive, he was one of those artists who achieves ultimate recognition through the work of others. Van Zandt was one of the songwriters every country crooner wanted to be, and “Pancho and Lefty” is the song everyone sang, including Emmylou Harris, Hoyt Axton, Delbert McClinton and bluegrass supergroup Old & In the Way.

Nanci Griffith gave a teary version on national television shortly after Townes died of heart failure in 1994. Dylan has even performed it on several occasions, the ultimate nod. Nelson and Dylan played it together on their recent tours together. But perhaps the most memorable version of the song is the one Nelson and Haggard took to the top of the country charts. While the rest of the album is filled with workmanlike (though never unpleasant) efforts, the duo’s version of “Pancho & Lefty” remains strong today.

The song is the ultimate Old West fable, professing the lessons of loyalty and betrayal, the inescapability of consequence and the twisted nature of notoriety. In 1983, Nelson and Haggard were near the zeniths of their popular careers, ensconced in middle age, though in fine voice, and rapidly approaching a time when they would seem anachronistic next to mainstream country artists. Together they sing “Pancho & Lefty” as if spinning a yarn from some lonely barstool: Pancho was a bandit boys/ His horse was fast as polished steel/ Wore his gun outside his pants/ For all the honest world to feel.

Pancho is finally killed, we are led to believe, by Mexican police with the assistance of a man called Lefty. Even if he didn’t pull the trigger, Lefty is somehow complicit in Pancho’s death. Lefty escapes to Cleveland with money nobody can account for. There he grows old, forgotten and living in a cheap rooming house, while Pancho, whose dying words no one heard, is celebrated in song and verse: The poets tell how Pancho fell/ Lefty’s livin’ in a cheap hotel/ The desert’s quiet and Cleveland’s cold/ So the story ends we’re told.

The final verse implores the listener to say a few prayers for Pancho, but to save some for Lefty, too, because he “only did what he had to do.” When Nelson and Haggard perform the song this week, some will be listening for the prophetic overtones of men growing old and passing their winter years with memories of triumph and regret. But unlike Lefty, the sacrifices of these two performers have yielded great results.

Haggard has always been candid about the twists and turns in his life: how he fought off temptation when offered the chance to escape from a California jail, having been in and out of correctional facilities for much of his youth. Haggard chose not to escape, vowing instead to turn his life around through music. Nelson nearly gave up on music when he couldn’t fit in with Nashville’s “countrypolitan” scene of the early 1960s. He found refuge in Texas and the outlaw movement of the 1970s.

Nelson’s more recent public stand regarding his marijuana use and a fiercely anticonservative streak through his work with Farm Aid have no doubt cost him a few fans in Middle America. But despite their choices, or perhaps because of them, Haggard and Nelson will themselves be the subject of song for future generations of poets like Van Zandt.

Rock and Roll is Kids' Stuff: Medeski, Martin and Wood release album for children

2008-07-13T22:20:00.001-04:00

Sunday News
Published: Jun 15, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Grown-up pop musicians making albums for children is a time-honored tradition going back to when Carole King put Maurice Sendak's stories to music in "Really Rosie." But unlike that classic, many such albums are thinly veiled career moves — artists looking to get another buy out of aging fans who all of a sudden have made raising a family a greater priority than going to concerts or buying CDs."Let's Go Everywhere," the 17th album from jazz-fusion trio Medeski Martin and Wood, is different.

Considering how the group normally makes music, this children's album seems to be a natural extension, something that was almost bound to happen. MMW fans have probably been playing albums like "The Dropper," "Combustication" and the live "Tonic" for their kids anyway. The band's jazz/rock/funk/free-form sound has always been experimental, noisy, somewhat whimsical, almost always intense and never self-serious.

Onstage, the trio often veers into on-the-spot composition, trading licks like kids on a playground saying "Watch what I can do!" or combining sounds like some kind of science experiment ready to bubble up and explode.

John Medeski plays his hot-rodded Hammond B3 with the dizzying skill of Jimmy Smith, but with the same enthusiasm as a toddler who figures out how to open up grandma's old Baldwin upright. Bassist Chris Wood is a testament to Jaco Pastorius and James Jamerson, yet possesses the spirit of a child who tries to play the vacuum cleaner like a bagpipe. Drummer Billy Martin is as apt to play like a kid banging spoons in the kitchen sink as he is to channel Bernard Purdie. Somehow their music always smiles, and swings.

All three band members sing, as do their children, on just about every track of "Lets Go Everywhere," which is new territory for the instrumental trio. The title track is a funky electric-piano-driven rewrite of that cool Johnny Cash tune "I've Been Everywhere" that quickly develops into a perfect in-the-car singalong. Classics such as "Pat a Cake" and "Hickory Dickory Dock" are turned into exciting drum and voice workouts that would impress any student of polyrhythms.

Tunes such as "Pirates Don't Take Baths" and "The Train" are downright fun, while "All Around the Kitchen" pairs a klezmer-sounding riff with kids shouting out the names of their favorite foods. It's about the closest thing to educational material on the album. "Let's Go Everywhere" makes a strong case that children's music need not be dumbed-down, simplified, insipid or unsophisticated, and shows grown-ups that serious music doesn't always have to be serious. You can sing about broccoli without having to keep a straight face. It's okay.

The Last Platter

2008-07-13T21:50:00.002-04:00

Intelligencer Journal
Published: May 30, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Different stories have been floated about how The Platters truly started, but bass singer Herb Reed takes the credit. And because Reed, 77, is the only original member alive and kicking, he gets final edit on the history of the group. "I started the group, and I named the group. There never would have been a Platters if I hadn't had a car. I was the only one," he said. Most accounts agree that the most influential vocal group of the early rock 'n' roll era began in 1953 in Los Angeles.

Singers present were Reed, Cornell Gunter (later of the Coasters) Alex Hodge, Joe Jefferson and David Lynch. Initial success was slow. The group recorded some singles for Federal Records but still worked as parking attendants. By 1955 the group was under the management and close musical direction of songwriter Buck Ram. New members Paul Robi and Zola Taylor and lead tenor Tony Williams helped strengthen the group's sound enough to earn a recording contract with then-fledgling Mercury.

Reed and Lynch were the only original members by this point, but the winning combination of voices was in place. The group first hit in July 1955 with "Only You (And You Alone)," which was quickly followed by "The Great Pretender" hitting No. 1 before Christmas. It was the first of a string of hits that lasted five years and established the Platters guaranteed hit formula — taking older pop or rhythm & blues standards (or Ram originals in that style) and recasting them as lush rock ballads.

They connected the urbane sound of the Ink Spots a decade earlier with the doo-wop explosion of the mid-1950s. And unlike the soft teen-idol sounds of the early 1960s, The Platters sang with the depth of gospel and the soul of true rhythm & blues. "The Magic Touch" and "My Prayer" hit the spring and summer of 1956.
An impressive 11 charting singles would follow over the next two years before the group hit No. 1 again with "Twilight Time."

Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" proved to be the original group's last major hit, topping the pop and R&B charts in October 1958. Reed's clear, distinctive bass voice graced all these hits, and on the phone so many years later his voice still sounds strong and well-cared-for.

He talks in a higher pitch than you might expect for a bass singer, but on occasion he unconsciously drops down into his singing register when speaking, giving an unexpected musical edge to ordinary conversation.
He currently lives outside of Boston. After fifty years, he is understandably reluctant at times to talk about things he's already said so many hundreds of times. "I don't know what you'd want to ask me, its all been written so many times before," he said. But at the mere mention of the classic Platters sound, he is quick to share memories. "From the very beginning, we were equal. Nobody was the star."

Reed said the secret of the Platters' success was that they all knew how lucky they were to have found that special chemistry. That classic lineup of the group, lasted five years, an eternity in the world of doo-wop. The slide began in 1960 when Williams, whose powerful yet gentle croon had fronted all the group's hits, left to start a solo career. The arrest of several group members on narcotics charges the year before didn't help their clean-cut image, either (all were acquitted).

Sonny Turner was brought in as a replacement for Williams, and while the hits were harder to come by, the group remained a top-of-the-line concert attraction. They toured South America and Europe — even Iron Curtain-bound Poland in 1962 — as President Kennedy's Goodwill Ambassadors to The World. "That was the greatest success for us ever, the best show by far," Reed said of Warsaw. "It was beautiful. We were treated so nicely by the people there." From Reed's perspective, it had nothing to do with the politics of the Cold War. "They just loved the music so much. We had to sing 'Only You' five times before they would let us go on to something else."

But back home, Mercury refused to release anything but backlogged Tony Williams singles until the group's contract expired. Williams' solo career with Mercury sputtered, backing Reed's claim that there was something special about the Platters' chemistry that was bigger than any one person.
"He sang lead on all those hit songs with the Platters, but didn't get anywhere near the charts on his own," Reed said.

Rare among groups at the time, the Platters was a corporation owned in whole by its five members and Ram's company. Each singer therefore held stock and received benefits like any other company. If they sold their shares, they could not take the name with them. That last part didn't work so well, and to this day Reed regrets the arrangement. "It didn't help us at all. If anything, it became a hindrance," he said. "If I could change anything I would have gotten better legal advice outside of the management circle."

Soon, a steady stream of members began exiting the group to lead their own ersatz Platters: Robi, Turner, Monroe Powell (Turner's replacement) and other short-term members fronted groups calling themselves The Platters but created nothing more than a diluted pool of talent nowhere near the strength of the original group. Reed left in 1969. "It was getting ridiculous," he said. "They had people coming in and out of the group every month. We would bust our humps and rehearse and then people wouldn't show up. It would be someone different every time. And I couldn't stick with that."

They were destroying the reputation of the Platters, and Reed didn't want to be part of that. And then it got ugly. Ram's lawyers sued Turner for starting his own Platters group. Since 1971, Turner has been forced to sing under his own name. Reed, the only member not to have sold his rights in the original group, was given permission to use the name in 1987.

Reed then successfully defended a suit against Robi's widow for rights to the name. Then there were — and sadly still are — groups out there with no direct or indirect ties whatsoever to the original Platters. One Web site lists as many as twenty currently or recently active, some of them claiming to be licensed by the heirs of Ram's management company.

To protect against the phonies, many states in the last few years have passed laws to protect consumers from being duped by shady promoters who pass off groups under legendary names who have no connection to the real deal. Reed, alongside other friends and doo-wop veterans, helped get the laws passed, but he hasn't seem much difference. "It hasn't helped me a bit," he said. "I didn't really expect it would. When you deal with politicians and bureaucrats, you can't expect that they will take an interest in you personally and professionally." Pennsylvania was the first to pass a Truth In Music law.

"And two months later, there was a show with a phony Platters group in it," Reed said, referring to a concert in York last November. "So it doesn't mean anything." But for Reed, while the struggle has been difficult, he has weathered the storm by saving money, being thrifty, and living simply. "I don't go in for booze or dope or new flashy cars. What am I going to do with something like that? "Save your money, because you don't know if next month you won't have any work. Be honest. Respect people."

With all the other original members having died — Williams in 1992, Taylor in 2007, Lynch in 1981, Robi in 1989 — or enjoined from billing themselves as the Platters, Reed is the only one left of the classic group. And by default, he is the only one who can make a claim in calling his group The Platters. He's the last one standing, and the last one singing. Even if there are others out there who claim the applause he has worked his life for.
"But really, I am truly happy doing what I'm doing," he said, having just returned from a successful European tour. His group works regularly on cruise ships.

But even swank gigs like that have their difficulties. "They aren't as good as they used to be," he said. "The ships are so big you've got to walk two blocks to get to your room." But Reed hesitated when he realized he sounded like he was complaining. "I'm still out there working," he said. "Everybody else is gone. I have good people around me and I get to keep singing."

Van Halen rocks - finally

2008-07-13T21:24:00.000-04:00

New Era
May 19, 2008

By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

It was Van Halen's third scheduled performance this year at the Giant Center Sunday night, and this time they actually played. And though the previous cancellations were barely mentioned — singer David Lee Roth offering a perfunctory "better late than never…" — the group certainly played like it needed to make it up to its fans.

The massively successful reunion tour with original singer Roth was originally scheduled to play the Giant Center March 19. In late February, that date was pushed back to April 11. Days before that show, the entire tour was put on hold for a month; 17 dates in all, due to guitarist and co-founder Eddie Van Halen's need for treatment of an undisclosed medical condition.

After months and even years of just such a reunion never making it past the rumor stages, this show was that much greater a relief to local fans. When the band took the stage shortly after 8:30 p.m., Eddie seemed as happy as ever to be on stage.

Unlike reports from earlier concerts, he even ran around (just a bit) and jumped up and down a few times. Honestly, a guy that good who has been playing as long as he has cannot still possibly consider this kind of thing work. The smile hardly left his face all night.If nothing else, this tour has become a valedictory lap of sorts for one of the greatest hard-rock bands of the last 30 years.

And since none of the songs in the group's set were written any more recently than 1984, the feeling of nostalgia could not be helped. One after another, the hits came — "Ain't Talking Bout Love," "Panama," "The Cradle Will Rock," "Everybody Wants Some," "Pretty Woman," "Unchained," a thundering "Running With the Devil," a sickeningly fast "Hot For Teacher" and a truly swinging "Dance the Night Away."

And on and on. The set list included the band's first two albums almost in their entirety.
As if reveling in it, the band members took no pains to disguise their age, and just how far back the musical worlds of three of the four men on stage go (Eddie's son Wolfgang on bass not included).

In the middle of "Somebody Get Me a Doctor" — a song they played without a hint of irony — they grafted Cream's version of "Crossroads." "Romeo Delight" featured Roth lifting lyrics from "Stairway to Heaven" and "Magic Bus," with Eddie taking a riff or two from "Whole Lotta Love."

Alex Van Halen's drum solo also referenced Led Zeppelin, utilizing the swirling phaser
sound John Bonham was fond of. Then there was Roth's attempt at a heartfelt remembrance of the group's early days in Pasadena, Calif.; tales of sitting around smoking pot to Bob Marley and Pink Floyd in some friend's blacklight-filled basement, and how they used to empty a friend's ice cream truck out to keep beer cold in it.

You guessed it, cue "Ice Cream Man."In his extended solo spot, Eddie mixed Syd Barret-like atonal noise and Robert Fripp-styled percolating notes in addition to his patented fret-tapping speed demonstration.

All night, though, it proved tough work for Roth to get the crowd on its feet. The hits of course connected, but some fans' record collections may not be so deep if a note-perfect "Little Dreamer" barely registers. To a man, nobody on stage showed any disappointment. And while the song sequence was a mix of the band's first eight thrilling years of hits, the concert was bookended by "You Really Got Me," the Kinks' cover that anchored the group's very first album side, and "Jump," the massive synth-heavy hit that proved their last hurrah with Roth before he left the group in 1985.

It was frustrating then, when, after a night of nearly spot-on renditions of their classics, the group would stumble when playing to the prerecorded synthesizers on "Jump," playing half a step off and at times half a beat ahead. Oh well, the raining confetti and stage props almost made you think it was 1984, or 1978, or somewhere in between.