Richard Manuel – Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week

At the Edge of Town / A Song for Richard Manuel

April 2, 2024 by martin colyer 11 Comments

Every April I think about Richard Manuel, born on April 3, 1943, in Stratford, Ontario. I still remember where I was in March 1986, when I heard that he had taken his own life — the magazine art department of The Observer newspaper. I remember feeling unmoored for days, which seems too much of a reaction for someone I hadn’t met or known personally, but The Band had been such an important musical influence on my life. They were my equivalent of another generation’s Louis Armstrong or Hank Williams or Charlie Parker. When Sam and Ann Charters came through London on their way to live in Sweden in 1971, Sam had brought me five of his favourite albums as a gift. One of them was Music From Big Pink. He sat me down (I was fifteen at the time) and played me his favourite song, Richard’s “In A Station”. It sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard. It still sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard.

Richard was one of my favourite singers, songwriters and drummers. He wrote incandescent, sui generis songs for The Band — “Whispering Pines”, “When You Awake”, “Sleeping”, “We Can Talk About It Now”, and “Lonesome Susie” — as well as putting the funereal music to Bob Dylan’s lyrics for “Tears of Rage”. There’s a lot of great writing about Richard’s extraordinary qualities, and a quick web search turns most of them up — or you can go to Jan Hoiberg’s excellent site on The Band, its history, songs and members. (https://theband.hiof.no/about_this_site.html)

I wrote this song in the 2010s, a meditation on his tragic death, which happened at a time when the Robbie Robertson-less group were touring places that were, in reality, beneath them. When I came to the point in the song where there’s usually a solo, I remembered a lovely version of “Georgia On My Mind” that my pal Mark had worked on as he figured out how to record in Garageband, and I dropped the mp3 in the track. The song was a favourite of Richard’s (highlighting his love of Ray Charles), to which I added the sound of a disinterested supper club. So here’s my song for Richard, that Stratford star, because there “must be some way to repay you / Out of all the good you gave…”

Filed Under: Extra! Tagged With: At the Edge of Town, Martin Colyer, Richard Manuel, Sam Charters, The Band

Wednesday, 10 December

December 15, 2014 by martin colyer Leave a Comment

Idiosyncratic Careers Continue/1
Joni Mitchell at 71, still an admirable toughie. She continues to work – her next project is a four-part ballet culled from her back catalogue. She was recently interviewed by Billboard: “I’ve had a very full life. I don’t miss much of anything. I can’t sing anymore – don’t miss it. I can’t play anymore – don’t miss it. I’ve got all these instruments laying around and hopefully one day I’ll pick them up. But I do want to start writing my short stories, that’s what I want to do after I get this ballet out of the way. If it can happen, great – if it becomes apparent it’s not gonna happen, alright, I’ve got plenty to do. And I’ll still paint.”

At the British Library
A highly recommended Gothic Exhibition drew us here (and it is exceptionally good), but if you are in the area it’s worth popping in for 15 minutes to see the Treasures of The British Library, a permanent exhibition of highlights. Here you’ll find Jane Austen’s writing desk, the Magna Carta and a great selection of handwritten Beatles lyrics (here’s “A Hard Day’s Night” scrawled on a child’s birthday card).

Idiosyncratic Careers Continue/2
And Bob Dylan announces an album of Frank Sinatra covers, with these words: “It was a real privilege to make this album. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a 5-piece band. That’s the key to all these performances. We knew these songs extremely well. It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking, and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.” Michael Gray’s take on it is here. All of this reminds me of a great Dylan performance of “Restless Farewell” at Mr Sinatra’s 80th birthday bash. Frank’s request, apparently, and obviously chosen for its proto-“My Way” lyrics, the best of which was this couplet… “And the dirt of gossip blows into my face/And the dust of rumors covers me…” Accompanied by an orchestra, a lovely, lonesome fiddle and a guitarist that slips a “Maggie’s Farm” quote in near the end. And as it finishes and the applause starts, Bob nods and says, “Happy Birthday, Mr Frank”.

Heal’s has pre-Christmas festivities, with incredible G&T’s and this stack ’o’ Speakers

Barney sent me this a few weeks ago, but I’ve just re-found it.
I love the fact that it’s Hudson’s Menswear Dept.

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: Bob Dylan, Heal’s, Joni MItchell, Richard Manuel, The Beatles lyrics, The British Library, The Revols

Five Things: Wednesday 5th March

March 6, 2014 by martin colyer 2 Comments

What’s Not to Love? Or Kill?
Looking for I don’t know, some picture of something, I noticed a few really interesting images come up in my google search, and that they belonged to a blog, Murder Ballad Monday. I’ve only just begun to delve into it, but if the post devoted to Norah Jones’ “Miriam” is anything to go by, it’s riveting. Highly recommended. A few weeks ago I caught NJ doing the revenge songs from the album this song was on, produced by Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, on Sky Arts’ Live From The Artists Den. Standing at the keys she had an intensity at odds with her rep and a terrific band to boot.

The Grit Stays in the Picture
Why do so few documentary makers retouch or clean up or adjust the exposure of the photographs they use? Studio City, a really likeable doc about the Van Nuys, Los Angeles studio where Buckingham Nicks met Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana recorded Nevermind is particularly bad on the loRes/Overexposed/Scratch scale. I understand if you can’t source the originals easily, but the amount of “shit on the blanket” (as the printers used to say) was catastrophic. I could barely concentrate on the talking heads for exclaiming each time another 80s promo pic or candid studio Polaroid covered in gunk was lovingly panned over.

Accent – Up There With Meryl Streep!
Andre Benjamin catches Jimi’s voice amazingly well in All Is By My Side. And I’m not ashamed to say I’m really looking forward to this.

One paragraph from a lovely post on Robbie Fulks’ website about flying/snow/grandfathers/children/rock clubs and Fats Waller
“I must admit that I have had it with rock clubs. Airports have their hassles and troublesome personnel. But after navigating through them, something definite happens: you get from one place to another. After navigating the shoals of silliness at a rock club, you’re right where you started: obscure, penniless, and a little sad. It seems to me that the daily operational grind of these places – wiping down last night’s spilled drinks and body fluids with strong bleach, stocking the bar, transporting in the sound man and one dozen other miserably paid mortals, hauling in the drums and other big pieces, setting up hospitality, sound-checking, and so on up to load-out – is not commensurate to the social value of the service, which is to let young people exhibit their talents (usually imaginary) to an audience (also known as a handful of acquaintances cajoled and shamed into coming) in a professional production environment (!), so that the act can ultimately gain enough of a toehold, through multiple appearances in these disreputable sick wards, to climb to a height in the music firmament from which it can create artistic works in financial security and perform for acres of ecstatic consumers, forevermore, amen (and for this pipe-dream, there is no number of parenthesized exclamation points equal to the author’s derision).”

And on the anniversary of Richard Manuel’s death (March 4, 1986)…