Liberation Music Orchestra

This Is Not America, from the late (2014) Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, sounds as relevant now as ever.  Carla Bley (far right, above) provided piano, arranged and conducted, and will be a featured artist in next year's Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Fidel Castro's recent death also reminds me of the Liberation Music Orchestra's 1970 effort, an ode to revolution from a line-up of jazz superstars (Gato Barbieri, Dewey Redman, Don Cherry, Michael Mantler, Roswell Rudd, Howard Johnson, Paul Motian, and Andrew Cyrille, among others), with Bley (far left, below) once again on piano, arranging, and composing many of the pieces, including the wittily titled The Ending To The First Side and Side Two's Drinking Song.

A luta continua . . . .

Sylvan Esso

Sylvan Esso at Georgia State University.  #saveWRAS

Update:  Right after posting the above, I came across this:

Spooning

Let's see now, what happened in 2005?  He visited his sister in San Francisco and came down with a case of the flu that he thought was going to kill him (it didn't).  He led several hikes up to the North Georgia mountains for the Zen Center and he spent a lot of that summer working at a large petroleum refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi until Hurricane Katrina came along and pretty much shut that whole project down. 

He finally ended - for good this time - the on-again, off-again relationship with the girlfriend he had traveled with and feuded with back in 2003 and 2004, and by that point he had came to consider his lovers not as life partners or potential life partners but more as pleasant companions for whatever particular incarnation he was experiencing at that time.

He had spent a lot of 2005 downloading box sets of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He had amassed the complete discographies of The Orb, Orbital, and Underworld, as well as the bizarre avant-garde music of The Residents. He was collecting electronica by prolific German composer Pete Namlook and the numerous Buddha Bar chill-out CDs by French producer Claude Challe.

The most significant musical event of 2005 happened for him late in the year. One winter morning, he saw an on-line post titled "Best Albums of 1995" and to his surprise realized that he didn't recognize the names of any of the bands. Spoon? Bloc Party? Black Mountain? Metric? Who were these guys? He hadn't heard of any of them, and yet the poster was saying these were the best albums of the year.

Caught up in downloading all of that increasingly obscure or vintage music from the internet and listening to whatever KCRW happened to be playing that week, had he really fallen so out of touch with current music that he had zero name recognition with the best new bands of the year?

It was a wake-up call, what an alcoholic might call a moment of clarity.  He downloaded all four albums and found that he really liked them all, a lot, but especially Spoon, who's Gimme Fiction stands out to to him now as the best of that bunch of the best.

But more importantly, he realized that even though it was readily available for free downloading on the internet, he needed to stop focusing so much on obscure, collector's item records, and start listening to contemporary music again.  There was a lot going on, and it was sounding pretty good.

He got busy looking for earlier recordings by those particular bands and simultaneously started seeking out new sources of new music.  It didn't take him long to rediscover his old forgotten friend, WRAS Album 88, who were playing this new indie rock on a regular basis. 

Speaking of Spoon, here's their latest song, from their forthcoming They Want My Soul:

Mercury Rev

In the 90s, most new, cutting-edge music was called "alternative."  The new sound had been called "New Wave" and "punk" in the 80s, "progressive" in the 70s, and "underground" in the 60s.  

In 1998, he started listening to a band called Mercury Rev out of upstate New York (initially, he thought they were out of Albany, but they were actually from Buffalo, the other end of the state). They played a kind of music that couldn't be called "alternative," as it sounded nothing like anything else being played at that time under the very broad umbrella of alternative rock.  It wasn't being played on the alt rock radio stations and the only reason that he had heard it all was because of WRAS, Album 88.  In retrospect, both by distribution and by sound, Mercury Rev were probably the first true "indie" band, a label that would later be slapped on most anything new coming out in the next century.

His Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

There are a lot of pictures in this particular post. It might take your computer a moment or two to download everything.

1995, as it turned out, was a pretty good year in Atlanta for outdoor concerts and events. In April, something called the Sixth Annual Great Atlanta Pot Festival was held in Piedmont Park, finally giving him his chance to see the band Cypress Hill.

By 1995, Cypress Hill was already a highly successful Latino-American hip-hop outfit, considered by many to be early and seminal exemplars of West Coast rap. They had already released their first two groundbreaking albums by the time of the Pot Festival, and while it was a bit surprising to see a band of their stature at a small, marginally legal event like the Piedmont Park festival, The Black Crowes had previously headlined the 1992 event with over 60,000 people reportedly attending. What's more, Cypress Hill had always been staunch advocates for cannabis, as demonstrated in their breakthrough hit Insane In the Brain, featuring rapper B-Real's exaggeratedly high-pitched nasal vocals, for which he credits The Beastie Boys for inspiration.

Black Uhuru, one of his favorite reggae bands, headlined the Pot Festival.  For the record, he first heard Black Uhuru on WRAS, Album 88, when they started playing the song Anthem. The album of the same name went on to win the first-ever Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album.

That year, he also attended the Second Music Midtown Festival.  The 1995 Music Midtown line-up included Gov't Mule, Little Feat, Blind Boys of Alabama, Our Lady Peace, Collective Soul,  Edwin McCain, Chris Duarte, God Street Wine, Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies, The BoDeans, Matthew Sweet, Everything, The Band, Buckwheat Zydeco, Adam Ant, Bottle Rockets, Magnapop, Delbert McClinton, The Josh Joplin Group, Rebirth Brass Band, Cigar Store Indians, Bone Pony, Five Chinese Brothers (who were not REM under a different name, as rumored), Francine Reed, Gracie Moon, The Kentucky Headhunters, Matthew Kahler, Shawn Mullins, The Sounds of Blackness, Supreme Court, Jackopierce, Lonnie Brooks, The Cruel Sea, Memory Dean, and Murphy & Vidal.

He recognizes a lot of the bands from his pictures of that festival, but there are also a lot of bands he can't recall.  Here's who he can identify:

CAKE

This wasn't his first time seeing Cake - they had played the inaugural festival the year before, and their quirky angular songs were alt-rock radio staples that year.

TINSLEY ELLIS

A veteran bluesman with several smoking albums under his belt, Ellis looks to him now a little bit like Kenny Powers from Eastbound and Down.

NRBQ, WITH THE SUN RA HORNS

Another veteran band, the unclassifiable NRBQ, were touring that year with "The Sun Ra Horns," but which turned out to be only two of the recently deceased bandleader's sidemen, Tyrone Hill and Dave Gordon. He's heard that when the band played around the Arkestra's home base of Philadelphia, saxophonist Marshall Allen and percussionist Donny Allen had also joined them.  Still, a little Sun Ra is better than none and goes a pretty long way.  

THE VILLAGE PEOPLE

Let's see:  a leather-bound biker, an Indian chief, and a cop - it isn't hard to identify the band in these pictures.  Even in 1995, though, the band were an anachronistic holdover from the 70s disco era, but the audience still went nuts for them.  On a somewhat disappointing note, in interviews during this comeback tour and in some of their stage banter that night, they disavowed any association with the gay community and strenuously refuted any implication that they might be gay themselves.  Who cares dudes, and why turn your back on the very audience that brought you fame and fortune?  

THE STONE ROSES

Manchester's The Stone Roses were already nearing the end of their run as a band at the time of their May 1995 Music Midtown appearance.  Some of the original band had already quit and remaining members were apparently feuding, and the tensions were apparent on stage. 

Amazingly, someone captured the set on video, including the bass player's on-stage tantrum - fast forward to the 1:20 mark for the drama.  Shortly after this set, the band cancelled their June appearance at Glastonbury, and the lineup that played on the Atlanta stage that afternoon never performed together again.  

The sound and picture quality isn't that great, but seriously, who had an iPhone in 1995?

BUSH

Bush were still rising in popularity at the time of their 1995 music Midtown appearance, but their songs Everything's Zen, Machinehead, and Little Things were already getting heavy airplay on radio station 99X.  They'd return to Music Midtown in 2002 to play an evening set, but in 1995 they were still relegated to the daytime slot.

JONATHAN RICHMAN

Jonathan Richman had been a favorite of his for years, from back in the mid 70s when Roadrunner was a Boston radio staple and through Jonathan's quirky early 80s records that were broadcast on Atlanta's WRAS, Album 88. He caught Richman live for the first time in the late 80s at a club (QE2) in the back of a White Castle hamburger joint in Albany, New York, and he vowed that night that he'd catch every Jonathan Richman show he possibly could from then on.  He's kept that vow, and by now has seen Jonathan a countless number of times, more times by far than any other performer.  His next scheduled Richman show is in Seattle on Labor Day weekend.

So that's who he can recognize.  Here are some of the bands below that he can't.  Any help at all identifying any of these performers would be most appreciated.  Seriously, please.  Anyone?

He can't even tell if this first band is reggae, hip-hop, or rock, or some hybrid of all three.

Any idea who this studious-looking guitarist is?

Or these guys?

Or these?

Does anyone know who this all-female band is? (He assumes the drummer was probably female, too.)

Or these two ladies?

No clue below, but the hat suggests country, or at least alt-country or folk.

Meanwhile, beyond these festivals and concerts and shows, somewhere around the time of the murder in the red barn, he had become a fan of the Chicago-based My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult.  He even got a chance to see them perform at Pittsburgh's Rosebud.  By 1995, when he wasn't attending Pot Festivals or Music Midtown, even though he had already turned 40 by then, he was cruising the dark streets of Atlanta playing 13 Above the Night, looking for love, looking for adventure, looking for action, looking for anything that was out there to be found.

At least he wasn't in fucking Albany any more.

And This, Folks, Is Why You Don't Wear White Pants After Labor Day

In 1986, he got the change he was looking for and then some.  He didn't head off to Denver, but instead took an assignment from the environmental engineering firm for which he worked and left Atlanta, Georgia and his life of the past five years and started a new office for them in upstate New York. 

The funny thing, though, is that with the move, he stubbornly became more entrenched in southern culture than ever before.  He was frustrated by his inability to get sweet tea and proper barbecue at northern restaurants, and he bewildered New York drivers by proudly displaying a plate on the front of his car reading Pocahontas Road Church of God, Bessemer, Alabama.

He probably never listened to more country music in his life than he had that first year upstate.  He favored western swing bands like Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and Asleep At The Wheel (who actually came through Albany a surprising number of times).  He listened to Top 40 country artists like George Strait and Randy Travis, as well as old-school stuff like Merle Haggard and Ernest Tubb.  Friends back in Georgia would mail him cassette tapes of WRAS Album 88's Cowtipper's Delight radio show and WRFG's Sagebrush Boogie to keep him current on the latest redneck trends.

1986 was the year that the first Steve Earle record, Guitar Town, came out, and while it was more country rock than country, its twangy sound was still one of his favorites of that year.

He was starting over, making a new beginning, hitting the reset button.  A new location for a new life. He could identify with Earle's lines, "When my boots hit the boards I'm a brand new man, with my back to the riser I'll make my stand."  He was now in his 30s.  It was time for the brand-new him to make his stand.

The problem with this kind of retrospective, however, is that it creates the impression that each selected song is ALL he listened to that particular year.  Yes, when he looks back on 1986, he remembers country music in general, and yes, Steve Earle sort of stands out in his memory. but that's not all that he listened to by any means.  While he was listening to Earle's twangy sound in 1986, he was also still following The Art of Noise, who were also exploring twang as well that year and released their mix of the classic Peter Gunn, featuring twangmaster Duane Eddy on guitar.