Category Archives: live

Lunch Break: Richard Thompson, “Feel So Good (I’m Gonna Break Somebody’s Heart)”

by

When we were discussing Wreckless Eric and the Stiffs Live a few weeks back, I thought of Richard Thompson with a smile.

He is indeed my very favorite guitar player (though watch it Richard, Mick Ronson and Bill Frisell are gaining on you), singer/songwriter, and live performer.

Since Peter brought Richard and Linda and Shoot Out the Lights to the forefront, such is my opening.

Just about everything Peter culled about Richard’s career is correct, although Thompson did take a break from performing in the 80’s at some point.

I am not sure exactly when, though I suspect it was the early 80’s, or perhaps even the late 70’s.

I know this because I caught the Austin City Limits with him many years back, and during an interview the guitarist noted that he had turned to selling antiques for a while, a gig for which he admitted he was not very good at.

But, he returned to music, and the interviewer asked what brought him back, and Thompson noted, “The Sex Pistols.”

When asked to elaborate, Thompson said, “I realized I didn’t have to turn into Elton John.”

Sometime after Amnesia ( which features the terrific Valerie) was released, then the closest thing to a breakout for Thompson with Rumor and Sigh.

It was then that I truly fell in love with Richard, for though I saw Fairport Convention in the early 70’s, the first time I saw him solo was opening for Crowded House around 1988, touring solo acoustic behind that album.

Rumor and Sigh featured the great Vincent Black Lightning 1952, Read About Love, and the song below, Feel So Good. The You Tube version is culled from Letterman, and his band is the Letterman band, meaning Paul Schafer is on keys.

Just a great great song.

 

Breakfast Blend: Hey Joe!

by

Jimi Hendrix Experience owns Hey Joe, right?

But the song first became a hit for an LA band called the Leaves.

The song was apparently written by a folk singer by the name of Billy Roberts, who at one point assigned the rights to the song to his buddy Dino Valenti when Valenti was in jail, so that he’s have something of his own when he got out. Valenti was a founding member of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and is perhaps most famous for writing the song Get Together, under his pen name Chet Powers.

Love had a hit with a great version of the song, though it pales besides Hendrix. As does everything.

For instance, The Offspring in 1993.

Back in 1975, Hey Joe was Patti Smith’s first single. In recent years jazz musicians like Medeski Martin and Wood, Vijay Iyer and Brad Mehldau have found melodicism in slow quieter versions. Patti got the slow part first.

 

Breakfast Blend: More Steve Gibbons Band

by

So, appalling sexual politics aren’t all Steve Gibbons delivers.

These two tunes are full of stylistic and rhetorical contradictions, none more clear than Gibbons reacting to the English punks and their obvious rock appeal, while maintaining his own solid rock fundamentals. Eddie Vortex is a straight ahead rockabilly ride, full of style signifiers that Gibbons says are okay, though at that point he’s not having much of it. Eddie Vortex ain’t too bad.

No Spitting comes a year later, and Steve is dressing more like a modern rocker while playing a Bo Diddley-White Reggae hybrid. This is the music of uprising, both of the 50s and Kingston, but in the voice of a man for whom a part of the job is maintaining public order and getting people to work.

Night Music: Little Feat, “Dixie Chicken” (with Emmy Lou Harris and Bonnie Raitt)

by

I’m kind of impressed how often Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special surfaces as ace performances. But of course, back in the day we stayed up to watch it, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Lowell George introduces this clip as featuring the backup singers, Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt, but the actual tune has them vamping. There aren’t that many harmonies to be found in Lowell George’s blues.

It’s a great clip, but it reminds me of the critique I tried to get across earlier today. Little Feat is kind of like the Steely Dan of Southern Rock. There is almost no way to argue against what they played, but for me the emotional point of entry is obscured. Despite the funky sounds, I hear more head than heart, and that makes me less interested.

But boy, they sure can play.

Night Music: Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, “Cover of the Rolling Stone”

by

Tom posted about Dr. Hook earlier today in his weekly story.

I was skeptical about Will Sheff’s claims about this long forgotten Dr. Hook DVD, from a show on German TV in 1975, but I started reading, which got me to listening, and he doesn’t exaggerate as much as he could have.

I don’t see quite the danger he does in Penicillin Penny, but then he’s watched the show enough times to know how the story plays out, and his reading of the song definitely makes the story better. And the story does play out, dramatically and expressively, when the band plays their greatest hit.

The way George Cummings hijacks THe Cover of the Rolling Stone is explosive, in the same way Andy Kaufman could wrangle the spotlight away from whomever and twist it onto some other space where Andy Kaufman shined brightest. Cummings is making a feedback screech, for some unstated reason, and it makes for surprisingly vigorous theater.

But the real brilliance is that this doesn’t seem at all staged. It’s just a guy in a band stealing the spotlight on this particular night in Germany. The stakes were small, the rebellion (in context) large. Caught on tape.

http://www.willsheff.com/we-never-have-to-be-alone-dr-hook-and-the-medicine-show-live-1974/

Great find, Tom! Will doesn’t overstep when he points to part of this show as being punkish. These guys were the guys Patti Smith hated in high school.

UPDATE: I posted the above, thinking I’d read Will Sheff’s story to the end. But I hadn’t. It turns out Sheff opens the story up into a discussion of all sorts of problems with authenticity and stagecraft, the very lack of which—in this program—I thought he was holding up to some esteem. But he has suspicions that the high drama might have been staged.

I find his late reveal on the potential that all this crappy stagecraft could have been orchestrated to be problematic. I feel tricked. At the same time, hate the storyteller, but if he’s right the tale gets better. And if not, the tale is as good as it ever was.

You are forgiven Will.

Night Music: Modest Mouse, “The Whale Song”

by

Modest Mouse is a band I really like a lot, and yet I forget to listen to even more than I like them for some reason (I do own a couple of their CD’s).

Not so niece Lindsay, who keeps me honest and dropped this killer cut on the birthday CD she burned for me. In fact, that disc is so good it prompted me to create the “Lindsay Says” category which I tagged to this piece.

But, I figure I can share the stuff she turns me onto to:

  • Give credit where credit is due.
  • Show that she is keeping me current on new shit (and that I am trying to keep up).
  • Make sure the site covers some bands more on the College list, which is always more interesting that what they play on the standard formats.

Either way, I love this song all the way through.

 

http://youtu.be/iG4tkZUCIW4

 

Night Music: Neutral Milk Hotel, “A Baby For Pree” and others

by

I learned about Neutral Milk Hotel maybe 10 years ago, reading something claiming that their album In The Aeroplane Over the Sea was one of the greatest albums of all time. I listened and I liked it, but it has that overly busy arrangements, overly obscure lyrics problem that most psychedelica has. Plus, it was fussy and arty.

I filed it under XTC in my drawer of records I like well enough, I can see the appeal, but I’m not seduced.

After constant touring after In the Aeroplane was released, Jeff Mangum retired from show biz (or touring). Apparently he also had some sort of nervous period and went silent. Well, not completely, but he did not perform publicly until 2011, when he played at a benefit for a friend of his at a club in New York.

One thing leads to another, and last year the band that performed In the Aeroplane announced that they were going to tour again.

Many were excited. I was interested because I like stories like Mangum’s, of withdrawal and then reengagement. Plus, who isn’t interested in a cult favorite?

A few weeks ago my friend Julie invited me to see NMH at BAM, a few blocks from my house. Yes, I said, because I like hanging with my friend and because I know there are lots of folks hanging on the Neutral Milk Hotel.

My fear was that the show was going to be like the album, which is good but also fussy.

But the show was great. The clip I bring from another stop on the tour demonstrates the bands artsiness, plenty, but it also (if you turn up the volume) shows a kickass rhythm section and a rock sense. Plus horns, accordions and saw!

Muscular and eccentric, which sounded really good in the beautiful Gilman Opera House.

Old Rock: Concerts for the people of Kampuchea

by

Concert for Kampuchea dvd cover and back Cambodia may not have a history of rock, but it does have a benefit concert in its past.

This is a pretty good lineup, a mashup of Stiff’s Live and the Concert for Sandy, kind of.

I’m attaching a Youtube of the whole concert, for the record, though I haven’t watched it all yet. But it starts with the Who playing old-style guitar-rock versions of Substitute and I Can’t Explain.