Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Happy 70th Birthday, Jimi Hendrix


Today would have been Jimi Hendrix 70th birthday, if not for the CIA-sponsored  assassination back in 1970 (no, I'm just kidding, he died of drug-related asphyxia over in London - there was no disappearance by any government).

His recording career, which only produced four albums during his lifetime, was too short by far.  In  tribute to one of the 20th Century's most singular musicians, I offer this performance clip from 1970.  Sorry about the abrupt ending (not my editing).



Monday, November 26, 2012

Crayon Fields



Lo-fi Australian pop band The Crayon Fields (Mirror Ball) have a new song out, the summery sounding So Do I (remember, it's the start of summer now Down Under).

The Crayon Fields play intricate, atmospheric pop music recalling the minor key majesty and close-knit harmonies of 60s maestros the Zombies, the Byrds, and the Beach Boys. After forming in the last year of high school in 2002 and releasing two independent EPs, their unruffled, dreamy debut Animal Bells was released in 2006, followed by 2009's All the Pleasures of the World.  They've reportedly been working on their new album for the past year and So Do I is being debuted as a part of a 20-song compilation (20 Big Ones) by their label, Chapter Music.

No word yet on any tour plans.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Poor Moon



Out with the old and in with the new: modern music continues to advance, and surprisingly (or not) often winds up back at its roots again.  Here's a video from an October 18 set at New York's 2012 CMJ festival by the Seattle band Poor Moon, a side project of members of Fleet Foxes, that builds on the vocal tradition of past generation bands like the Beach Boys and the Moody Blues.

The Poor Moon tour brought them to Atlanta on October 25, where they played  a warm and wonderful late-night set at 529.  Photos of that show, below.





Poor Moon's music is defined by their sense of harmony and inventive instrumentation.  To give you more of an idea of that sound, here's a video of Poor Moon that I found on the band's Facebook page performing their song Bucky Pony at Vancouver's Media Club back on September 22.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Dylan


In Thursday's interview, William S. Burroughs talked about visionaries and forward thinkers such as Galileo, Cezanne, and James Joyce, and how their work and vision was not only initially misunderstood, but attacked, censured, and ridiculed until the shock of the new had finally worn off, and how, once the public's eyes had been opened, the creative process marches on.

Here's Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "delivering rock n' roll to the dissident soul of folk music and poetry."  Note the booing at the end of the set, as the audience was not yet capable of understanding the new version Dylan was presenting of their beloved protest music.  As Thurston Moore noted years later, "For many it was already a viable meeting, but Dylan set it on fire for the world to see."




It's easy now to dismiss those who were booing the "electric" Bob Dylan as being short-sighted and provincial, but one has to understand that they legitimately believed they were defending and preserving the purity of their cherished folk music.  Rock music fans today who react in a negative way to hip-hop, to electronic dance music, and to other cutting-edge forms of music are really no different from that critical audience of 1965, and rather than ridicule Dylan's hecklers, they should recognize them as their aesthetic predecessors.

Like A Rolling Stone has been hailed by many critics as the single most important American song of the 20th Century, and while that's certainly debatable, it's delivery and impact on arrival was unquestionably one of the most revolutionary.  According to NPR, Dylan had finished recording the song just 10 days before the Newport festival.  "As usual, he didn't bring arrangements or charts to the recording session. He came in, taught the musicians the song and then they recorded take after take, experimenting with different tempos. The version of Like a Rolling Stone that ultimately got released was six minutes long, almost twice as long as most standard pop songs. That made it difficult for radio disc jockeys to program, but they did." 

Well, some did.  AM radio station WABC, the dominant Top 40 station in New York at the time, didn't play it, and I never heard the song, or any Dylan for that matter, on the radio, although I was familiar with Dylan's name and the reputation.  I didn't actually hear his music until sometime around 1967 or '68, to the best of my recollection, when I purchased a copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits unheard, based solely on reputation and the press.  I was only 13 or maybe 14 years old, but I can still remember putting that record on for the very first time and hearing that nasal voice on Side 1, Track 1, singing "Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good. they'll stone ya just like they said they would",  and thinking to myself, "What the hell is this?"  I had never heard anything like that before and his sound took some time for me to get used to, but I stuck with it and by the end of Side 2 (Just Like A Woman) it had become my favorite album and I was forever changed.

Very shortly after that, around '68 and '69, FM radio came to my attention, first WABC-FM, a more album-oriented version of it's Top 40, AM sister, and then later WNEW, which departed even further from the commercial mainstream into what was then called "underground rock."  The FM stations played Dylan, as well as the Beatles and the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and The Who. It was the start of a musical exploration for me, a journey which I'm still on to this day. 

Not to get too far ahead of myself, but it was on WNEW where I first heard King Crimson (In the Court of the Crimson King), which led me even further down the rabbit hole. Over the next five or six years, the voyage took me away from the radio altogether and to the import bins at the back on the record stores, where King Crimson led me to Robert Fripp, and Robert Fripp led me to Fripp and Eno, and Fripp and Eno led me to Brian Eno, and then things really began to get interesting.

But that's another story for another day.

Friday, November 23, 2012

Local Natives


I hadn't expected the first two posts at this new blog site to be quite so focused on the past.  Let's fast forward to the 2010s for at least a day and enjoy some contemporary music.   


LA band Local Natives, who have a new album, Hummingbird, coming out in January, apparently spent their Thanksgiving performing a Soirée de Poche (evening pocket?) in a Paris apartment for La Blogothèque web site.  Local Natives played Atlanta twice while touring behind their previous album, 2009's excellent Gorilla Manor, performing both times at the god-forsaken Masquerade, first in May 2010 and later that year in October (the first Rocktober).  Their current tour schedule does not bring them to Atlanta - they're taking the tour de ville through Nashville and Asheville, but there are plenty of open dates on their schedule before and after those two shows for them to book a gig in either Atlanta or Athens.

Local Natives at The Masquerade, May 2010

The Soirée de Poche will apparently be posted soon, if my French is correct (the Google English translation isn't much help). However, La Blogothèque has already posted Local Natives performing A Take Away Show (Un Concert à Emporter) on the streets of Brittany, bringing their trademark harmonic acrobatics to Who Knows, Who Cares, a favorite from Gorilla Manor.



And here, simply because it's so much fun, is the video for World News, their breakout song from Gorilla Manor:

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Burroughs


I know that I'm skipping ahead by more than a few chapters, but there is a direct lineage from the music of the Velvet Underground to Thurston Moore's Chelsea Light Moving, and in honor of my Thanksgiving tradition, I want to post CLM's Burroughs.


A little William S. Burroughs goes a long way, of course, but this being Thanksgiving and all makes me want to indulge in a just a little more.  Director Gus Van Sant cast Burroughs as a character in his brilliant 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy, but the role was really more of a elegiac tribute to the man than any element of the film's plot.  Someone stitched all of his scenes together into one clip, presented below.  With his Kansas accent and odd cadence and rhythms, Burroughs talked like almost no one else before or after, but he was also about the most honest, direct, and insightful individual you'd ever want to meet.  Just listen to his prophesy starting at about the 3:56 mark in the Drugstore Cowboy clip, and the wisdom evident in an excerpt from an interview with journalist Jurgen Ploog after the Cowboy clip.




Finally, here's a fascinating clip in which Burroughs explains not only his cut-up technique but also hints at possibilities for time travel and also foreshadows Steve Reich's early phasing experiments.  There's a direct  path from this spoken word piece to Reich to My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and to all of hip-hop.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Forward Into The Past


The time has come, if not already passed, to move the Water Dissolves Water music content off of Live Journal, where I've already used up most of my 1 gig of free storage and where I've experienced all manner of technical problems, and back to a Google Blogger platform.  I liked the "cut" feature of Live Journal that allowed me to post pictures behind a "(Read more...)" link, but that's about the only thing I'll miss.  The posts from the time I used the site will stay over there, sort of a document of that period, but for at least the time being, my music posts will appear here.

The real dilemma was in deciding what music I should post for my first entry here. All music, without exception, is a direct expression of the buddha-dharma, so there was really nothing "wrong" to post, and the most natural thing might have been to simply just pick up the postings where I had left off without any self-conscious deliberations.  On the other hand, I remember a day back in the late 1970s when Boston radio station WBCN moved into their new studios, and for the first song played from their new location they reached way back to the 60s for a somewhat ironic airing of Iron Butterfly's Inna Gadda Da Vida, generally considered even at that time to be the very epitome of unhip "dinosaur rock,"  but at the same time, "familiar sounds in a new setting."

I guess I could have posted the same as a tribute to 'BCN's decision, but I really didn't want to hear that song again nor did I want to subject whatever readers wander over here to it.  But I did want to post something that would qualify as "familiar sounds in a new setting," something that reached way back into my own musical experience and at the same time still informs my current tastes.  After perusing some old American Bandstand and Shindig videos (and don't even get me started about the Soul Train clips), it did not take too long to arrive at the Velvet Underground, and this rare footage of Nico (1938-1988) singing Femme Fatale, a song written by Lou Reed for Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick.  



By my recollection, I was listening to Velvet Underground and Nico at least as early as 1970.  I can remember the 1967 Velvet Underground & Nico album, the one with the Andy Warhol-designed cover featuring a banana with a sticker for its peel, scattered among all the other psychedelic flotsam and jetsam at my secret hideout during my high-school years - the VU music was required listening for when the dissonance of too much acid rock began inducing paranoia.  Brian Eno once said that although that album only sold 30,000 copies,  "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."  I may be the one exception (although, to be honest, I never actually purchased the album myself, only listened to it, and my friends who had purchased it did in fact play in occasional bands), but to this day, the Velvet's droning folk rock and frequent forays into noise and musique concrete (check out Black Angel's Death Song before writing the band off as "soft rock") are the very templates for my understanding and appreciation of modern indie rock.

It was equally tempting to post videos of some other Nico gems, like All Tomorrow's Parties or Chelsea Girls (not to mention VU standards like Venus In Furs and Heroin), but one clip seems like enough to get us started, no?

So that's the past and the springboard back to the present.  The usual postings will begin soon enough. Meanwhile, enjoy the video and follow the links if you've got the time. . .