Soul Coughing and Music Midtown 1994

So, the more things change, the more they stay the same, et cet.  Six years after deciding that he needed a change and left Atlanta, he had decided that he needed another change and returned to Atlanta. You never enter the same river twice and you don't live in the same city twice - it's changed after you've moved back and so have you.

His enthusiasm for alternative forms of jazz-based hip-hop continued, and one of his favorite bands of 1994 was Soul Coughing.  He considered their post-hipster combination of hip-hop, folk-rock, and jazz to be just about the coolest thing imaginable and was excited to see them perform a free, in-store performance at Criminal Records.

Frontman Mike Doughty is currently performing stripped-down, "reimagined" versions of Soul Coughing songs, and 20 years after the 1994 show, he caught Doughty perform at Criminal Records again, albeit at a new location and in a solo, acoustic set.  He caught Doughty again, this time with a full band, at Terminal West later that year.  

As with the years before, he listened to a lot of other music that year.  One Saturday morning in 1994, he saw in the local newspaper that there was something called Music Midtown that was going to be held that very day on an undeveloped tract of land at Peachtree and 10th St.  He went down on the spur of the moment and attended the inaugural event, and remembers seeing headliner James Brown for the one-and-only time in his life, as well as various other bands including Cake, Cracker, James, and Cowboy Mouth, but after that, it's mostly a blur of forgotten memories.

  

Fortunately, he took some pictures.

Michelle Malone

Flying Burrito Brothers

Glenn Phillips

Hugh Masakela

James Brown

For posterity's sake (and to attract Google hits), here's the line-up of the 1994 Music Midtown festival: Al Green, Allgood, Arturo Sandoval, Anson Funderburgh, Michelle Malone, Bela Fleck and The Flecktones, Billy Dean, Black Uhuru, Bobby Blue Bland, Brother Cane, Buddy Guy, The Charlatans, Cigar Store Indians, Cowboy Mouth, Cracker, Dallas County Line, Dash Rip Rock, Deborah Allen, Derek Trucks Band, Eddie Money, Five Eight, Flying Burrito Brothers, Glenn Phillips, Goose Creek Symphony, Hank Flamingo, Hugh Masakela, Hip Heavy Lip, James, James Brown, Jason & The Scorchers, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Joan Baez, Jupiter Coyote, KC & The Sunshine Band, The Knack, Lee Roy Parnell, Leo Kotke, Marsha Ball, Mr. Pitiful's Blues Bandits, Murray Attaway, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church Music Ministry, Ottoman Empire, Peter Case, Radney Foster, The Radiators, Raven Symone, Rodney Crowell, Rusty Johnson, Saffire The Uppity Blues Women, Sam Philips, Sergio Salvatore, The Smithereens, Subsonics, Syd Straw, Thing 1 Thing 2, The Tramps, Uncle Green, The Vidalias, and Wild West Picture Show.

In Pittsburgh

1993 was another one of those transitional years - he started the year still living upstate New York but spent most of the year living in Pittsburgh and ended the year living back in Atlanta again.  

It was definitely time for him to leave New York State.  He was still working for the same environmental engineering firm that he had joined in Atlanta in 1984 and when they made him an offer to finally leave Albany and manage their struggling Pittsburgh office, he leaped on the opportunity and rented a loft apartment in a former doll factory in Pittsburgh's Shadyside neighborhood.  Pittsburgh felt satisfyingly urban after his six years upstate, but it was a bad year for the economy and the office there barely broke even.  By the end of the year, he had to make the difficult decision to close the office and by December he had successfully found other jobs for the staff there.  He wound up living back in Atlanta again, working at the firm's flagship office.

He had liked it in Pittsburgh, though.  He liked it that the city had so many different neighborhoods, each of which was distinct and unique from the others.  His neighborhood, Shadyside had a jazz club, The Balcony, that featured Big Band Night every Wednesday.  The South Side seemed to be composed almost entirely of bars and clubs and was a fun place to visit.  The Strip District (not what you think - it was characterized by strips of warehouses) had a pair of nightclubs, Rosebud and Metropol, that featured live music.    

It was around this time that an alternative form of hip-hop had started to emerge.  Atlanta's Arrested Development came out with their debut album 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of. . . the year before, and A Tribe Called Quest had released The Low End Theory the year before that.  Us3's overtly jazz-influenced Hand on the Torch would drop later that year, but the summer of 1993 was the season for Digable Planet's Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and its single Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat).  The band featured three rappers, Ladybug, Doodlebug, and Butterfly (aka Ishmael Butler, who would later go on to form Shabazz Palaces), and their record sampled some of his favorite jazz artists, including Don Cherry, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Herbie Mann, Herbie Hancock, Grant Green, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.   

Anyway, it was all pretty heady stuff, and it was probably the period he was most involved in hip-hop.  He even got to see Digible Planets perform that year at Rosebud in the Strip District.  So, if he had to pick one single song to represent the year 1993, which otherwise had so many changes of address that music sort of faded into the background, it would have to be Cool Like Dat, because to this day every time he hears that song, he remembers the smoky interior of Rosebud and his brief time living in Pittsburgh. 

Murder In the Red Barn

Despite the whitewwater weekends, despite the chickens and the swimming pool and the garden and the Ben and Jerry's mural, there was a dark side to life in that little town in upstate New York.

A few houses up the street, a man picked up two teenage boys at a trailer park and brought them back home for an afternoon of drinking and sex.  They drank beer in his living room while the man showed the boys his guns and talked about drugs and his military service in Vietnam.  When the man tried to get sexy-time going and the boys weren't into it so much, things got out of control, a fight broke out, and one of the boys wound up stabbing the man in the neck with a paring knife. 

Panicked and not knowing what else to do, the boys decided to make the incident look like a burglary and a Manson-style satanic ritual.  According to press reports, they wound up stabbing the man 351 times, both before and after he actually died, and nearly severed his head.

The boys put all the items they had touched, a remote control, a towel used to wipe the paring knife, a bread knife, and their bloody shirts, into plastic bags. They left the apartment, but forgot to take the bags, leaving the evidence behind at the crime scene.  Not knowing what else to do to get back home, they called a taxi from a neighbor's house (not mine), and took a cab to McDonald's.  It didn't take the police long to find them.

It was 1992, a year after the Jeffrey Dahmer story had come out.  That year, Tom Waits released the album Bone Machine, featuring the song Murder In the Red Barn.

I lived in a red barn.  For the record, I had nothing to do with the ghastly incident up the road, but a running joke among friends was to always check my refrigerator for severed heads when they came over.

At least, I think they were joking.  

Weren't they?

Nirvana

He doesn't recall whether or not it's been mentioned that since 1986, when he first moved to upstate New York, he worked as a whitewater river guide on weekends, taking rafts of passengers down a 17-mile wilderness stretch of the Hudson River up in the Adirondack Mountains.  No matter how bad things got, he always had a bit of adventure waiting for him on the weekend.  His passengers might have had more of an adventure than they had paid for if they only knew that their guide truly didn't care if he lived or if he died.

Also, by 1991 he had shaved off his trademark beard. A new look for a new decade.

1991, of course, was the year of Nirvana, putting Seattle and the Pacific Northwest in the spotlight.  He liked Nirvana, a lot, and it was something new, even if its punk roots and its rock melodies sounded familiar to him.  The music of Kurt Cobain and the other grunge bands of the time (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, etc.) fit nicely into his 1991 playlist and were in heavy rotation on his new CD player.  And there was nothing sweeter than driving up north for a weekend of whitewater adventure with Smells Like Teen Spirit blasting out of the Jeep's speakers.

Little House He Used to Live In

In 1990, he finally broke down and bought a CD player, and began the long process of reacquiring his library of LPs and cassettes in disc form.  His inclination toward industrial and post-rock music began to be tempered somewhat by listening again to a lot of his earlier music in the new CD format, and also by the shimmering sounds of  a new generation of melodic rock bands, including Glasgow's Del Amitri and London's The Sundays.  Slowly, he backed down from the ledge of extreme music and back to appreciating somewhat more human - and humane - sounds.  

To this day, he still considers The Sunday's first two albums, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic and Blind, to be timeless classics that he can (and does) still enjoy anytime he hears them.  It never gets old for him.  He's fascinated by the sound David Gavurin gets from his guitar as well as by Harriet Wheeler's vocals. How could a voice that sounded so sweet sing such mean-spirited lyrics? "If I could have anything in the world for free, I wouldn't share it with anyone else but me" she sings in A Certain Someone, and "Just give me an easy life and a peaceful death" in Goodbye.  The lyrics might be considered downbeat to some, but anything less would have sounded too saccharin sweet for his still lingering pessimism, that "little souvenir of a terrible year" (Here's Where The Story Ends). 

Also, a full two decades before the current enthusiasm for alternative housing, he rented a small, barely converted barn out in the New York countryside and made his home there.  The barn notably had the Ben and Jerry's logo painted on its side, and the deal included a chicken coop (although he allowed the chickens to range freely around the property), a vegetable garden, a couple outbuildings for storing firewood, etc., and even an in-ground swimming pool. The owners' black lab would stop by from time to time to keep an eye on things, but otherwise he pretty much had the run of the place.

Autumn, spring, and summer were pretty sweet, but the long New York winters were harsh and he only had a single wood-burning stove for warmth.  But he was only a mere mile away from the old Erie Canal, and once it froze over, he could ice-skate along it for miles on end.

Listening to The Sundays, things didn't seem quite so bad to him after all.  With the 80s now finally behind him, their trauma and heartbreak and melancholia finally over, he was emerging out of the darkness and back into the light.

Head Like A Hole

In 1989, he was still part zombie.  On the outside, be appeared to everyone else like a normal, living person, working, playing, even dating, but inside he was empty, still trying to build a new persona to occupy that burned-out shell.  Like Devo's Mongoloid, he wore a hat and he had a job and be brought home the bacon, but few people knew that there was no one there inside.  To this day, he still considers himself to have been dead for those years, which is part of the reason that now it's easier for him to consider that past incarnation as a "him" rather than an "I."

Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine was the musical successor to Ministry's Land of Rape and Honey, but in many ways it also represented the mainstreaming of the angry industrial sounds that he often thought that he and he alone appreciated.  The album gave "industrial music a human voice, a point of connection" with its "tortured confusion and self-obsession," and brought "emotional extravagance to a genre whose main theme had nearly always been dehumanization" (Allmusic).  Rolling Stone called it "the first industrial singer-songwriter album."  The song Head Like A Hole got heavy airplay on MTV and it was a little bit jarring to hear the snarling sound of the song sandwiched in between commercials for acne medicine and pop-music videos.  But the commercial success of the album opened the doors for other adventurous bands to be heard as well, and as his healing started to near its completion, there was a lot of new music and new sounds to help him complete his transition back to the living.

Oh yes, and at the end of the year, he moved out to the countryside.

Little Dragon at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta - June 14, 2014

The Little Dragon Nabuma Rubberband tour rolled through Atlanta last night, placing the band in Variety Playhouse on a Saturday night (fortunately, no one apparently told them that touring bands avoid Atlanta on weekends and leave the stages for local bands).

One of the big mysteries of the night was who would be opening, as no one was listed on the venue website, the marquee, the press, or anywhere else I could think of looking.

The answer, as it turned out, was someone named Lawrence Rothman, a soulful, R&B-influenced singer accompanied by a backup singer and a hip-hop dj.  "I'm from Missouri," he said by way of introduction, and came across as something of an All-American good-old-boy with a penchant for danceable, blue-eyed soul, but a little bit of Google searching reveals him to be a somewhat more complex character.

He formerly performed as Lillian Berlin of the St. Louis band Living Things, and he's now something of a conceptual artist/performer who, as opener for Little Dragon, takes on a different character each night, so what we saw in Atlanta is probably very different than what others saw in different cities.  Last year in New York, he was flanked by two gauze-covered dancers and performed in silhouette in front of flood lights.  His Facebook page shows many different looks for him, from a bald-headed, face-tattooed punk to a bruised, black-and-blue goth.  

Last night, he performed a short, 25-minute or so set of about a half-dozen songs in his everyman,  persona, frequently embracing his backup singer.  The songs were good and his baritone voice was in fine form, and the audience seemed to appreciate his set.  It will be interesting to see what he does next and where he goes from here.  

But make no mistake, the sold-out audience was there to see Little Dragon.  Interestingly, the audience was much more diverse than most shows I've attended.  The audience was at least 50% black, indicating Little Dragon's cross-over appeal, and there was a fairly large contingent of gay men, who often seem to appreciate female-fronted dance-music bands.  In other words, the audience was much closer to Atlanta's actual demographics than the predominantly white audience at most of the shows that I go to, and a refreshing opportunity to rub elbows with some new and different fans.    

We've seen Little Dragon twice before, on a big stage at Seattle's Bumbershoot in 2001, and at an intimate, early-morning show in Portland's Doug Fir Lounge as part of KEXP's MFNW coverage that same year, with singer Yukimi Nagano performing barefoot and still in her pajamas.

Yukimi wasn't in her p.j.'s last night, and looked terrific if a camo-patterned, midriff-baring sundress.  Like in 2011, she was an energetic performer, dancing along to the music and cheerleading the band when she wasn't singing, but she's also abandoned some of the Bjork-like quirkiness of the past.  

Gone were some of the science-fiction electronics that were parts of their past sound, although elements of krautrock can still be heard in their EDM sound (they played Kraftwerk's Autobahn over the PA before the set).  Many of the songs from the new album, such as Twice, are slower and more toned-down than the more aggressive dance music of past albums, and Yukimi has said in interviews that the inspiration for a lot of Nabuma Rubberband's songs came from the dreamy state she used to get from listening alone to some of Janet Jackson's slower ballads. 

This new approach has probably led to their increased popularity but it's apparent that this is a band that's not likely to include songs like Blinking Pigs in their set list again any time soon.  

The ballads and slower-paced songs might have caused the energy to drop in the hands of a lesser band, but Little Dragon wisely devised their set list to mix the slow and the fast, and when they launched into Ritual Union, the title track from one album back, the audience went wild.  

A video crew was filming the entire show and during the encore, Yukimi announced that they were going to shoot a live video that night for their song Klapp Klapp, if we could put up with them performing the song a second time (as it turned out, we could).

Little Dragon will be playing the Bonnaroo Music Festival today (Sunday, June 15), with a webcast from 9:30 to 10:15 p.m. Central Time, competing against Elton John on the other of two web channels. Hopefully, video of that performance will be available someday, as well as their Live-at-Variety-Playhouse video for Klapp Klapp.