Skip to content

Category: Music

Country Wave

March 24, 2006 • • 4 Comments

It’s strange how things in life come in waves. I frequently find something new – or at least new to me – only for it to suddenly appear, quite independently, in several areas of my life, sort of like opening a random book to a random page only to find the perfect bit of advice that I need right then. Then I open another book and find something that reinforces the first bit as if the Universe – or at least my library – is saying, “don’t miss this.” Lately, I’m not to miss old-school country music.

After finally seeing Walk the Line a few weeks ago, I bought Johnny Cash’s 1968 CD At Folsom Prison. It’s a great record in which Cash plays a number of mostly prison and outlaw tunes. In the liner notes, Cash explains why he likes playing for prisoners:

Prisoners are the greatest audience that an entertainer can perform for. We bring them a ray of sunshine in their dungeon and they’re not ashamed to respond, and show their appreciation.

Cash’s performance is one of genuine engagement with his audience, and the listener can truly hear the appreciation of the inmates. The CD is more than just a collection of great songs, it’s a documented moment of providing hope to the hopeless. I spent the next few days thinking about what that must have been like to be locked up and then find that Johnny Cash would be coming to perform and what it would be like to hear those songs in that kind of an environment.

So Cash is where the outlaw country wave began. Then on Saturday night we saw Willie Nelson at the Backyard. Willie and Cash were fellow Highwaymen along with Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings. The wave grew and finally peaked on Tuesday.

Every week guests are brought in to motivate, inspire and sometimes entertain the kids. This week a couple of guys came in to do a Johnny Cash show. Now, I don’t exactly teach in a prison, it’s more like county lock-up for kids, but then this wasn’t exactly Johnny Cash. The effects, however, were similar to what I imagined.

The singer was an older gentleman who played guitar beautifully (despite a bandaged hand) and truly did justice to Cash’s material without imitating it. He also played other songs, but Cash was the focus. He opened with “Folsom Prison Blues” and played a number of songs from At Folsom Prison, which I might not have known had I not just purchased the CD. He did stay away from some of the rougher material such as “Cocaine Blues” and added such classics as “Ring of Fire” and “Walk the Line.”

I was surprised to see many of the kids who were raised on punk and hip-hop actually singing along. I think most of them even enjoyed the show, which gave me an approximation of what it might have been like to see Cash at Folsom Prison.

As the show was wrapping up, I mentioned to the teacher sitting next to me that after having seen Willie on Saturday night and now a Cash tribute show, I’d need to somehow try to catch Kris. Then he started into his last song: “Me and Bobby McGee.” I think that’s where the wave broke. Good enough for me.

Willie Nelson at the Backyard

March 21, 2006 • • 9 Comments

Willie Nelson Poster

On Saturday we went to the Backyard to hear Willie Nelson. I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve always wanted to see Willie play and now I am complete. Watching a show under the big oak trees at the Backyard is always a great experience and Saturday night was no exception. Despite a forecast for rain, the weather was quite nice: cool and overcast but not too humid.

Willie opened with “Whiskey River,” a perfect set opener if ever there was one. He spent most of the evening playing familiar classics including “All of Me,” “On the Road Again,” “Still is Still Moving to Me,” and my personal favorites “Me and Paul” and “Pancho and Lefty.” With as much material as he has, he probably could have played until dawn, but I’m glad he stuck with the classics. He’s Willie. He doesn’t have to impress anyone.

His band was low-key and mellow, which is about what I expected from Willie, who is now 73. They didn’t really sound like a typical country band. Instead they noodled in out of folksy jam rock, almost jazz, and western swing. Sometimes they sounded country, but they really sounded like they were a bunch of old friends (which they are) just kind of jamming together as they segued from one song to the next often without pause, just drifting like a bunch of people who just enjoy getting together to play a few tunes on the front porch. Perhaps it’s this semi-sloppy, thoroughly endearing aspect of Willie’s music that I love so much. He’s an incredible singer and a talented guitarist, but he’s really just there to enjoy himself and we get to come along for the ride, joining that band of gypsies as they go down the highway.

Check out Lenwood for a rundown of Willie’s Friday night show.

Outlaw Country

March 18, 2006 • • 5 Comments

When I was growing up there were certain artists whose music was always in the background. Foremost among them was Willie Nelson, and frequently heard were Willie’s fellow Highwaymen: Waylon, Kris and Cash. I always dismissed this stuff as my parents’ music, but it wasn’t until I was on my own without any of their albums that I realized I liked it and that I missed hearing it.

The moment came when I was in college, still new to Austin and Texas, and I found myself sitting around playing guitars with a friend. The conversation turned to secret musical fixations and I admitted to Willie.

My friend, a lifelong Texan, informed me that Willie didn’t count.

“Why?”

“Because everyone likes Willie. They just don’t always admit it.” We took a break from Joy Division and the Grateful Dead, and he showed me how to play a few Willie tunes. I finally had to fess up to something else, but what he said was spot on.

I’ve realized over the years that I can’t stand Nashville country, which sounds to me like it’s in, shall we say, its hair metal phase, but I do like the old outlaw country guys: Willie, Waylon, Kris, Cash, Jerry Jeff as well as some of the new country that comes out of Austin. It’s simple, nonpretentious music with a kind of hard-edged honesty and dark sense of humor that lends it a quality similar to old school punk or gangsta rap.

This all surfaces because of two events. Last week I saw Walk the Line, which put me on a Johnny Cash thing, and tonight I’m going to go see Willie at the Backyard. This will be the second time I’ve seen him play. The first was one of those God-I-love-Austin kind of days.

Back in the early ’90s, word got out that Willie was going to play a free show on the south steps of the capitol building. It was a Sunday afternoon, I think, and I decided to check him out. I rode my bike down to the capitol and waited with the small crowd. Finally, Willie came out and stood in front of the single microphone. He had no band; it was just him and Trigger, all beat up and full of holes.

He played a solo acoustic set that included many of his most famous tunes. I remember the weather was beautiful, the crowd was happy, and Willie seemed so pleased to just be making music for a small group of fans in his home city. Afterwards, he stayed up on stage while people passed him boots, belts, LPs, guitars, and posters to sign. He joked with the audience and didn’t leave until he’d signed everything that anybody wanted signed.

I’ve always associated Willie with Austin and as much as I love this town, it’s surprising that I’ve never made it to a real Willie show so I’m looking forward to tonight. Despite the forecast for rain, I’ll be there. After all, what would Willie do?

Cowboy Junkies at One World Theatre

February 18, 2006 • • 2 Comments

There are certain bands that just grabbed my attention the first time I heard them. The Cowboy Junkies have done that twice. The first was their beautiful spooky version of the Velvet Underground classic “Sweet Jane” that appeared in the otherwise tedious Natural Born Killers. Margo Timmins’ ethereal voice floating above the music was stunning and perfect for that particular scene. I didn’t know who the band was, only that it was the best part of the film.

I heard them again in the late ’90s when “Common Disaster” started getting play on KGSR. This time it was Michael Timmins’ guitar that hooked me. I love the gently distorted riff that shimmers in the background, fading away behind sister Margo’s haunting voice. That time I caught the name and bought the album, Lay It Down.

Trying to describe the Cowboy Junkies sound is difficult; there are many influences that converge creating an uncanny mixture of blues, country, low-fi alt rock, and folk. The end result is a quiet intensity and interplay between Margo’s vocals and Michael’s guitar.

I had no idea what to expect at last night’s show at One World Theatre in Bee Caves. I imagined that the show would be mainly Margo with her brothers backing her up, but what I heard went far beyond what I expected. The focus of the music moved back and forth from Margo’s vocals to Michael’s dynamic guitar work. I knew she would sound great, taking the audience on a journey of “heartbreak and misery” as she jokingly referred to the band’s music at one point.

I was surprised and pleased with how much of the show was dedicated to the musicians. I love listening to quiet, gently ebbing and well-controlled guitar feedback and Michael Timmins is very good at this. He can of course bang out rockin’ and bluesy solos, but creating and controlling noise in such a way that it adds to the color and overall feel of the song, surrounding it and giving it shape is something I love to hear live. The overall effect of the show was a feeling of being in a smoky lounge late in the night of a David Lynch film.

The set was a mix of old and new. They played several tunes from their latest album Early 21st Century Blues, a collection mainly of covers from influences such as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. A favorite moment of mine came when singing “Miles from Our Home” one of their hits, if the Junkies can be said to really have hits, Margo seemed to forget the words and had to refer back to a notebook. She kept going but with a wonderfully sheepish smile and a wink to the audience.

They ended their set with the closing track from the new album, a beautiful rendition of U2’s “One” an amazing song that takes me back to my Dallas year, cruising the plastic nightime highways with airplanes swarming over DFW like robot fireflies. It’s a song that has always filled me with a sense of melancholy and yet at the same time hope. It seemed perfect to hear the Junkies play it and was a great end to a captivating set.

Seagull S6

February 14, 2006 • • 2 Comments

My guitar

I’m more a guitar owner than a guitarist, but I do love playing them, so when looking for a subject for some photo-blogging, this looked interesting.

This is a Seagull S6 that I’ve had for a few years. It’s a cedar top, which gives it a slightly darker, mellower tone than the more typical spruce top acoustic guitars. Seagull also uses a very thin veneer that I think gives a woodier feel to the sound along with some nice sustain, but it also makes it more prone to scratches. I guess that’s not so bad – look at Trigger, that’s Willie’s guitar, the way.

Speaking of Willie, The Armadillo Podcast has an interesting piece up about Willie’s new song, “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other).” Armadillo Podcast creator, Steven wonders if the rednecks of the world will choose Willie or homophobia. I’m betting they don’t choose Willie. Maybe he’ll play it when I see him at the Backyard next month.

Jazz, Photography, and Playing with Light

January 2, 2006 • • 2 Comments

Jazz and photography are probably my two favorite art forms so I was thrilled to receive as a Christmas gift a very cool book from my aunt and uncle: Jazz by Jim Marshall, which is a collection of photographs of great jazz musicians including such giants as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk often captured off-stage in moments when those icons of jazz music were mostly just being themselves, or in some cases, onstage in such a way that you can hear their music coming out of the image, such as with the breathtaking image of Monk that graces the cover or the image of Ray Charles silhouetted on a bass drum. The book has little text and is mostly just beautiful photography and captivating images of some of the most important and influential musicians taken between the 50s and the 80s.

As I enjoyed the book, I couldn’t help but think about the Ansel Adams exhibit that I had just seen a few days previously. Something that I read on the display card next to “Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico” stuck in my mind. It mentioned that several prints had been made by Adams and there were variations in the way he had chosen to do it each time, bringing out certain nuances here, obscuring details there.

When I got home, I looked up the section of his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs that details “Moonrise.” Adams wrote, “The printed image has varied over the years; I have sought more intensity of light and richness of values as time goes on.” This fascinated me since I always assumed that he just made one print and that was the image as it would be.

I’ve spent many hours in darkrooms trying to acheive an ideal print of some particular negative, but I usually threw away the prints that I didn’t think were perfect (well, okay, as good as I could do) because it never occurred to me then to have different versions.

Staring at the images in Marshall’s book and thinking about the subject matter, I remembered an analogy between photography and music that Adams, who was a classically trained pianist, had made in which he said the negative was like the score and the printing was the performance. This approach to photography goes nicely with the improvisational nature of jazz.

A photographer may spend hours in the field or perhaps just seconds composing a particular image, essentially writing sheet music in light, but the work isn’t finished until it’s performed. The image is then performed in the darkroom and depending on the filters and settings and quality of the chemicals and paper, the photographer takes the initial composition and improvises with it to create something of the moment. A year later, the same negative and same photographer might produce a very different image. Or perhaps exactly the same one.

I really like this idea that there doesn’t have to be one correct version, that there can be many, each existing momentarily like a saxophone solo that changes from night to night, each time sounding new and timely, but also part of something recognizable. And each of those slightly varying solos or images when taken as a whole might tell a fascinating story about the person who made them. It’s this active, living-in-the-moment aspect of these two forms that I so enjoy and admire.

All of this makes Jazz a great book for lovers of jazz or photography to get lost in while listening, perhaps, to Monk work the keys.

Four Days till Christmas: Music

December 21, 2005 • • 2 Comments

The decorations are up, and now it’s time to break out those once per year CDs and listen to some Christmas tunes. We have hundreds of CDs, but only four Christmas ones, so here they are:

  • Jingle Bell Jazz. It came out of the bargain bin years ago, but it really is good jazz with some cool takes on the classic caroles by Duke, Miles, Brubeck, Herbie Hancock and others.
  • Yule Be Miserable. This one came as a birthday gift a few years back from some friends who know me well. Click here for a good look at the cover. This is a great drunk and passed out in a bar with Santa blues and jazz collection featuring the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, BB King, and Billie Holiday. I look forward to this one every year.
  • Merry Christmas from Yo La Tengo. This one came from Yo La Tengo’s website a few years ago, but doesn’t seem to be available any longer. It’s three Santa songs that rock. I love Yo La Tengo, and I’d go to their Hannukah shows if I lived in New York.
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi. This one is, for me, the sound of the season.

I always look forward to these CDs each year. I suppose I could listen to them at other times than Christmas, but then they probably wouldn’t be as fun as they are when I only listen to them for two weeks at the end of the year. Well, the CDs are playing, the decorations are up. What’s next? Christmas TV. Yes!

Hell’s Belles Salute Austin

December 6, 2005 • • 2 Comments

On Saturday, we went to see Hell’s Belles, the Seattle-based all female AC/DC tribute band, play Stubb’s. As mentioned in a previous post, my cousin, Lisa (Malcolm Young) Brisbois, is in this band and that’s what brought us to the show. Now I know my cousin is in this band, so I may be biased, but I’m also not that into AC/DC so I think it balances out.

In a way, not being familiar with much other than AC/DC’s most well-known songs allowed me to appreciate the band in their own right. Had it not been for such crowd-pleasers as “Highway to Hell,” “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” and “Big Balls,” I probably wouldn’t have known that they were covering AC/DC. But it didn’t matter. Hell’s Belles just absolutely rocked. I love seeing shows when I know very little of a band’s music and still walk away having totally enjoyed the set. This was one such evening.

One of the things that contributes (emphasis on tribute) to the band’s show is what comes across as a real love for AC/DC. This is not a parody or a deconstruction act; this is truly a tribute to the energy, excitement and fun of AC/DC’s music, and seeing that legendary band’s testosterone-heavy swagger performed with such enthusiasm and love for the material by a group of highly talented women is wickedly subversive in its own right, which is exactly what hard rock should be.

Lead guitarist Adrian (Angus Young) Conner and Singer Jamie (Brian Johnson/Bon Scott) Nova maintained an all-out intensity throughout the evening that had everyone on both levels of Stubb’s indoor venue rocking, dancing, and having a great time. This was a show where everyone was into the music and having fun. Even the woman who fell and busted her ass while doing what appeared to be an I-used-to-be-a-stripper routine for her husband came up smiling and kept on rocking.

This was one of the most energetic, all-out rockin’ shows I’ve seen in a long time, and I do hope they come back. In the meantime, Conner – who is based in Austin – has a band called Adrian and the Sickness that is surely worth checking out when they play around here.

Highway to the Rose Bowl and to Hell

December 2, 2005 • • Leave a comment

I’m looking forward to tomorrow as it will be a day of football and live music. After the Longhorns sew up their bid to play in the Rose Bowl for the national title, Hell’s Belles, the Seattle-based all-female AC/DC tribute band, will be playing a free show at Stubb’s, which is especially exciting for me because my cousin, Lisa Brisbois, is in this band. I haven’t seen her since 1982 when we were kids, so not only do I get to catch up with my cousin and show off how cool Austin is, but I am about to rock. Salute me! Or come and salute yourself.

(Always) Rediscovering Daydream Nation

November 18, 2005 • • 3 Comments

Ever since I first read about Sonic Youth’s album Sister back in 1987, I’ve loved this band despite never having heard them. Granted, I never could find Sister at any of the record stores (either of them) in Newport, RI, but I knew they were my favorite band.

I finally heard them a year later when their follow-up, Daydream Nation, arrived. I had moved to Austin by then and was able to locate what would become my favorite album ever. Period.

I’ve tried to explain to many people for many years why I love this noisy, spacey album so much, why it’s my desert island disc. But then love of a particular work of art is a lot like loving a person: you just can’t always explain it.

I suppose when I heard it, it was so at odds with everything else that was floating around out there, so unexpected, and so stimulating that I couldn’t stop listening to it. Literally. I think I listened to “Teenage Riot” five times before letting the tape (yes, a tape) advance to “Silver Rocket,” which was the track that sealed the deal. I still love the way the song descends into that insane pit of boiling feedback and white noise to finally be rescued by a drum roll that rises out of nowhere, growing louder and louder, organizing the chaos back into music and then, suddenly, the band is back, tight as ever, from wherever they had gone. Amazing.

I never tire of listening to the intro and outro to “‘Cross the Breeze” and Kim Gordon’s lyric:

I took a look into the hate,
It made me feel very up to date

Or Lee in “Hey Joni”:

She’s a beautiful metal jukebox,
A sailboat explosion,
The snap of electric whipcrack

So cool. So hip. So unlike anything I’d ever heard before. This is one of the few, if not the only, bands from my high school years that I still follow, and Daydream Nation is why. In 1989, it seemed like everything that was worth knowing about popular music had been distilled, destroyed, and rebuilt in this album that still sounds like a punk rock Dark Side of the Moon.

Sparking this post, I ran across two exciting treats in store (or should I say in stores soon):

  • Continuum will be publishing a 33 1/3 Series book about Daydream Nation
  • Billboard has this (discovered by way of Kofi’s hat) which mentions that the band is looking into doing an expanded release of Daydream Nation as they did with Goo and Dirty. It also mentions several other releases to look forward to in the meantime.

I finally found Sister in 1994 when it was re-released on CD by Geffen. It was as good as I knew it would be and inspired an interest (obsession and grad school project) in Philip K. Dick’s writing, but alas, that is a post for another day.