The other night at the little hole in the wall bar across the street from my apartment, one of the TVs was turned to professional bull riding, opposite Will Smith chatting with Oprah. After I ordered my drink I found myself standing in the middle of the place gawking up at the television. Bulls are so ferocious and otherworldly looking and really handsome (if terrifying) animals. But what really captured me was the jarring contrast between the crazy drama of the bulls as they violently thrashed and the jaunty cartoonishness of the riders. Their costumes are a wacky synthesis of modern branded sport paraphernalia and the classic western costume. They wear what look like bullet proof vests over western shirts, and enormous tasseled chaps. Somewhere between Lefty Frizzell and Starship Troopers.
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The whole event is so heavily aestheticized, I can imagine gay subculture really taking the look in new and exciting places (the SS leather daddy thing is pretty tired).
Weirdest of all are the rodeo clowns, scurrying around dressed like some hold overs from the days of minstrelsy and medicine shows. Albeit, there's a strange nobility in putting oneself in serious danger while looking like a total douche.
I think you have to grow up in Real America for any of it to make sense. But as bar spectacle it was all pretty wonderful.
A couple of weeks ago I went with fellow Big States blogoscribe Joe Dixon to see Titus Andronicus at the Empty Bottle. Bird Talk opened playing spunky punk pop that could have fit comfortably among Lookout's roster c. '95. After that was another holdover, the band Shopping, fronted by a singer sounding very much like PeeChees' frontman Chris Applegren. Maybe this is representative of the rising stock of 90s bay area punk? The openers perfectly illustrated the ambition-less loyalty to style that Titus Andronicus fully transcend. Right away they owned all the sloppy stage craft and antics of any good punk band, but didn't stop at spirit and posture. They clearly know how to write a song which is always a big advantage. But they also aren't afraid of drawing from several musical histories, even those that might seem best avoided. They displayed a kind of "I love Rock n' Roll" shamelessness, but buoyed by smart lyrics and unflaggingly catchy songs. Midway through their set they covered Weezer's Sweater Song, which might give the best idea of how their sound balances the big and dumb with the small and felt. Best of all, there was none of the guilty cuteness that might suggest they didn't mean it for real.
There's an easy comparison to Springsteen (they're from New Jersey), which isn't to say they sound like him, because they don't really. But their music doesn't avoid Springsteen level hugeness and the unfashionable belief that rock can be righteous, or is at least more fun when it feels that way. By the end of the night I felt something like faith, both in the band and in the belief that fun and smart really don't have to be mutually exclusive.
For several months now I've been enthralled by the Blind Willie McTell song "You Got to Die" from the Atlanta Twelve String album. It's difficult for me to write much about it without succumbing to breathless praise. That being said, I'm pretty sure it's perfect.
Among the song's many charms is a great example of the 'talking guitar' blues convention in which the instrument finishes the singer's phrase. Take for instance the last chorus -- "You got to die/ You got to..." the final chord rings out, followed by the sound of knocking wood (fingers tapping on the body?) The twelve string guitar has an unnatural beauty even in the most prosaic player's hands, but this here is some next level business. The irregular rhythm-- leaning heavily on the chorus before speeding up on the verses-- and a vocal performance that goes from whisper to preacher's trill, give an idea of McTell's singularities and general greatness.
The song is related, thematically and structurally, to "You're Gonna Need Somebody When You Die" by Charley Patton
and more explicitly to "You're Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond" by McTell's friend Blind Willie Johnson.
(**the divshare flash player has been acting up. if the embedded player isn't showing up, you can scroll down to the mp3 links at the end of the post**)
On Blind Willie McTell's 1940 session with John Lomax, nine years prior to the Atlanta Twelve String recording, Mctell briefly talks about Johnson.
Lomax: "what do you consider his best music?" Mctell: "Well, sacred music. He have a heavy voice. Most sound like a preacher."
While Johnson & Mctell's recordings share the irrepressible prettiness of the melody (supported by Johnson's female accompaniment), Johnson's crazy false-bass growl makes for a very different impression. Initially Johnson seems to have replaced Mctell's lyricism for a fire and brimstone warning of damnation. But a minute in, Johnson begins singing in the first person.
I heard the voice of Jesus saying He told me he had risen Now in the waning midnight hour I don't hold my breath
Johnson addresses the basic fear of dying alone while McTell sings of the imminence of death. And of course, that Christ provides an out --
"Death is not extinguishing the light from the Christian; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come."
Blind Willie Johnson's song "John the Revelator" was included on Harry Smith's seminal American Folk Music and "You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond" on Sam Charters' The Country Blues, giving Johnson a continued visibility and influence. The song was heavily covered and adapted in the sixties by Donovan, Taj Mahal, Buffy Sainte Marie and Captain Beefheart, among others. There's a very unfortunate youtube clip of Donovan performing the song. I considered including it, but thought wiser. It's out there if you're curious.
Captain Beefheart - You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond
We were sad to hear that one of rocksteady's founding fathers passed away Friday October 10. Possessed with one of Jamaica's sweetest voices, Ellis rose to prominence in the early 1960's after recording "Muriel" with Coxone Dodd at Studio One. He went on to work with everyone who mattered in the ska and rocksteady scenes, from Duke Reid to Phillis Dillon to the Heptones. He was inducted to the International Reggae and World Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2006. He died in London, England; the cause was cancer of the lymph nodes.
Here is the track that gave a genre its name, "Get Ready- Rock Steady":
Los Angeles is a tough city, and Highland Park is even tougher. This was one of those nights when the venue itself (the venerable dive bar Mr. T’s Bowl) felt like a dreary signifier of LA’s gradual return to charred sand and chaparral. Mistreated by the over-zealous bouncer (“What you got in that bag?” “…A guitar”) and vibed out by a blonde bartender who looked straight out of Day of the Locust and sold water for $2.50 a bottle, the bands played to each other. “This is our last Sunday for shows,” the graying booker of the club remarked.
A good band plays to the room. Dirt Dress is quite capable of hypnotizing a willing crowd, but they are also able to provide the soundtrack to a night that feels like the end of world. Woozy, stumbling guitars give way to squalls of feedback; the rhythm section feels satisfyingly (and purposefully) sloppy. Live, “Go To Sleep” has an otherworldly, almost terrifying quality to it. Noah, singer, chants the line with a sort of detached fervor. Over and over he repeats the words, as if he were trying to coax a lover to sleep, though the whole town’s ablaze.
If you happen to live down south, check them out at Echo Curio, November 8, or at the nebulous “GUERRILLA FEST,” proudly displayed on their myspace and supposedly happening at “different locations throughout LA” this Saturday, Oct. 11. Should be good, if you can find it.
We will be heading down Memphis way next weekend to bear witness to the mayhem and glory of Goner Records' fifth annual Gonerfest, four days of garage-rocking, fried chicken-eating, beer-swilling madness. We'll do our best to post daily re-caps; what we saw, where we ate, and who we listened to. Until then, a video testament to the charms of the Bluff City's only rock and roll festival, courtesy of Live From Memphis.
The Fleet Foxes are a band inspiring endless reference- The Beach Boys, Crosby Stills and Nash, Band of Horses, or "16th Century monks singing at high mass" (?). They aren't without singularity-- sincerity and misery are uniquely collapsed. They are colder, more thankless, and less fanciful than the warm pastoral sounds of the freak folk they forage from, and more glib than their Sub Pop label mates. The result is spiritless spirtuals, more contained than trippy, sharing psych folk's anachronisms and indeterminacy, but ever dismal, evoking (when managing) a fiction in which lives are spent in a perpetual winter, without sex or joy, shape note singing Band of Horses in drafty barns, or carving wooden shoes, contemplating the Mountain, the Tree, or the ever poignant River.
I can't argue with their taste in Flemish painters though. Brueghel is In.
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