Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 19th September
September 19, 2012 by 2 Comments
Oh, Lighten Up Man!
Wynton Marsalis, responding to Mojo’s
Questionnaire, in their November issue:
[I’ve cut this to just the opening of each answer]
What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album?
I don’t have a favourite album.
What was the first record you ever bought?
Bought? I don’t think I’ve ever bought a record.
Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be?
I’ve never wanted to be another musician.
What do you sing in the shower?
I never sing in the shower.
What is your favourite Saturday night record?
I don’t think I’ve ever played a record on a Saturday night—I’ve played a gig almost every Saturday night since I was 13.
To be fair, the rest of the answer to Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? is interesting: “You have no idea what they’ve had to deal with. The person I rate for something musical might have had an endless headache, or a back pain. Every person has something you can’t imagine to deal with.”
Classified Ad Mann
So I’ve just filed an interview with Aimee Mann to Rock’s Backpages and it has this reference to a movie that she’s going to make:
“I’m actually doing a little indie movie. Joe Henry is involved in it and his brother, I think, wrote the screenplay. It’s based on a This American Life episode [TAL is a weekly public radio show broadcast on more than 500 stations, usually centering around a theme that tells stories from everyday life] about this journalist who thinks: suppose she got a bunch of musicians from Craig’s List, just kind of randomly posting, Looking for musicians, and forms a band and puts them in a studio for a day—what would that look like? So I’m playing that woman. And Joe Henry’s going to be in it, and John Doe is going to be in it and Loudon Wainwright… and Joe is doing the music for it. So it sounds interesting, right? Too bad I don’t know to act…”
The next day I get a mailer from a website I like that runs a weekly Mystery Song competition, and (click to enlarge):
The actual version of Rocket Man is, uh, quite interesting…
From the Hammersmith Odeon To Lillehammer: Steven Van Zandt
Van Zandt’s extraordinary profile, seen to great effect in The Sopranos and, this week, Lillyhammer, reminded me of the extraordinary first night at Hammersmith Odeon in 1975, picture captured here by courtesy of the battered Chelsea School of Art photographic department black Pentax, on Tri-X.
Why They Invented The Internet, And Why It’s Come Time To Shut It Down…
Yes, A Bob Dylan Tempest Commonplace, crowd-sourcing the sources of the lyrics on Tempest. They don’t want to read what Bob said about the plagiarism issue in Rolling Stone…
The Harry Smith Conference: A Postscript
Esteemed writer and documentary maker Mick Gold emails about the Conference: “Harry Smith conference had good stuff. Very detailed history of Moonshiners Dance Part One from Anthology, which was funny history of Minneapolis/St Paul. Rani Singh (director of Harry Smith archives) said that when they were reissuing the Anthology in 1997, they asked Alan Lomax for a comment. Lomax’s reply was dismissive, similar to Charters’ – Smith was a nasty piece of work, his Anthology wasn’t that important, he ripped people off. Clearly there are political tensions in how this old music was presented historically, and the message it conveyed. Remember that when Irwin Silber got involved in running Folkways in 1960s, he changed the Anthology cover, substituting a Ben Shahn FSA (Farm Security Administration) shot of a poor farmer for Fludd’s celestial monochord. Perhaps Alchemical versus Popular Front perspective.” Mick had earlier told me that in his opinion, Greil Marcus “created Harry Smith the Magus. Why? Because Harry offered Greil a completely different narrative on the uncovering & collecting of traditional songs & blues from the “voice of the people,” oppressed blacks, Lomax popular front orthodoxy. Harry offered alchemy, esoteric magic, mystification, and he came from the West, all big pluses in the eyes of Greil. Hence Invisible Republic.”
Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 25th April
April 25, 2012 by 2 Comments
The First Time I Ever Heard The Band
was when Sam Charters came through London in 1969, leaving America behind. He gave me his five favourite albums, one of which was Music From Big Pink…
Levon…
always reminded me of my dad. Wiry. Ornery. Absolutely lived for music and drink-fueled good times. A great turn of phrase. The man who made the party happen—wherever he was. So whenever I watch any footage of Levon, I’m always put in mind of Bill.
The Song That Meant The Most
“The melody—too beautiful and out of reach for any words I have—spins the chorus into the pastoral with a feel for nature that is really hedonistic—
Corn in the field
Listen to the rice as the wind blows cross the water
King Harvest has surely come…
—and a desperate, ominous rhythm slams the verses back to the slum streets that harbour the refugees of the pastoral disaster.”
—Greil Marcus, Mystery Train
“King Harvest was one of his greatest, most intuitive performances, and the sound of his kit more than did it justice. “King Harvest was one track where I got my drums sounding the way I always wanted them. There’s enough wood in the sound, and you could hear the stick and the bell of the cymbal.” Jon Carroll wrote that Levon was “the only drummer who can make you cry,” and listening to him on King Harvest—the anguished fills and rolls, the perfect ride cymbal figure accompanying the line Scarecrow and a yellow moon, pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town—it’s hard to disagree.”
—Barney Hoskyns, Across The Great Divide: The Band & America
Two Bits A Shot
In the nineties, in the early days of rocksbackpages, Barney and a group of us were pitching ideas to Malcolm Gerrie (creator of The Tube) for magazine tv shows about music. My most unlikely idea was to almost fetishistically examine great musicians’ instruments… and of course the opening feature would have been Levon’s wood rimmed kit, with the harvest scene painted on the bass drum, filmed from the inside out…
Levon Helm, Thank You Kindly…
“They took me out to the location, and it was like going back in time: The film crew had rebuilt Butcher Hollow, Loretta’s hometown… We started work late in February and filmed for about six weeks, until old Ted Webb [Loretta’s father, whom Levon was playing] passes away… I was sad when my character died and my part of the movie was over. I didn’t really want to get in the coffin for the big wake scene, but I also didn’t want to be thought of as superstitious or “difficult.” So I told Michael Apted he’d have to get in first to show me how to look. So he kind of warmed the thing up for me, good sport that he is. As the “mourners” gathered around to sing Amazing Grace, I had to sit bolt upright. It was like coming back to life.
Cut! 
“It’s my funeral,” I told them, “and if you’re gonna sing Amazing Grace, it’s gotta be the old-fashioned, traditional way.” And I taught ’em in my dead man’s makeup how to do it shape-note style like they would’ve back in the holler in those days. Some of the ladies they’d hired as extras turned out to be church choir singers, so once we’d got it off the ground it didn’t sound too bad. We rehearsed it a few times, then I got back in the coffin, and we shot the scene.”
—Levon Helm (with Stephen Davis) in his biography, This Wheel’s On Fire
Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week 