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April 30, 2007

* "trying to remember which Merlefest stage i know you from..."

First off, per Grant's blog-request of a couple days ago, we present to you: Sometymes Why at the No Depression Booth at Merlefest, Sunday April 29th:

...and, via YouTube:

Thanks very much to Ruth Merenda, Kristin Andreassen and Aoife O'Donovan for stopping by and treating us to a very special unamplified performance. And equal thanks to our Saturday afternoon ND Booth performers -- the Carolina Chocolate Drops (5:30 p.m.) and Lynn Blakey and her husband Ecki (2:30 p.m.).

Look for Jerry Withrow's review of this year's Merlefest in our July-August issue of ND. In the meantime, just a few brief notes and recollections from this year's event:

* When I heard the lovely melodic lilt of "Goin' To New Orleans" wafting through the air from the main stage as we were setting up our booth Thursday afternoon, it took me a little while to place where I knew the song from. My memory was spurred a few hours later when I ran into Austin fiddler Warren Hood, who mentioned that he's playing these days with Bay Area band the Waybacks -- the act that had been on the main stage during that afternoon stretch. Eventually I remembered -- "Goin' To New Orleans" was a Walter Hyatt song [edited to reflect comment posted below] that had been recorded by Warren's father, the late Champ Hood (who played with Hyatt in Uncle Walt's Band, as well as with Toni Price, and Lyle Lovett, among many others). Warren and his cousin Marshall Hood also played their own headlining set on Sunday morning at the Americana Stage, and delivered a beautiful rendition of "Motor City Man" by Uncle Walt's Band leader Walter Hyatt, who's also no longer with us. Those of us in the crowd who knew Walter & Champ greatly appreciated the acknowledgment of their songs.

* Speaking of giving credit to songwriters where it's due -- Pam Tillis, who closed out the festival Sunday afternoon on the main stage, would perhaps be well-advised to revisit the way she introduces some of the songs in her own set. As she launched into a song from her new album, she commented, "This is called "Down By The Water" -- it's brand new, we appreciate you letting us try it out on you." Which sure sounded to me like the kind of thing you'd say when introducing a fresh original tune -- but "Down By The Water" was in fact written by Jim Armenti, and received a reasonably wide airing more than ten years ago when Cheri Knight recorded it for her 1996 album The Knitter. (I thought maybe Tillis would clear it up when she back-announced the song, but all she said was, "Thank you. This is one more new one here....") Songwriters deserve more props than that -- as Tillis should well know, seeing as how she herself co-wrote (with her brother, Mel Tillis Jr.) the standout track on her new disc: "The Hard Way" is one of the finest tunes I've heard from anyone all year.

* Festival food can be a bit of a drag after a couple days; there's only so many long lines you can wait in, with the end result being a bowl of beans or a turkey leg, before you've got a big-time hankerin' to go off-campus for a meal. A couple years ago, longtime Merlefest publicist Traci Thomas turned us on to Glenn's, a terrific old-style lunch counter down the street in Wilkesboro proper; the place has been there for decades, and apparently still they still the same cash register they had when they opened. The food is simple (burgers, sandwiches, fries, hush puppies), and the milkshakes are oustanding (including off-the-wall varieties such as hot fudge and peanut butter). Their only downside is that they aren't open on Sundays -- but that fortuitously caused us to venture further into town for lunch on Sunday afternoon, which led us to a first-rate traditional Mexican taqueria called (we think) La Fortuna. If you go to Merlefest in the future, make a special effort to patronize the independent local eateries. You'll be glad you did.

Posted by Peter at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 24, 2007

* "made me wonder just what happens next..."

As Grant and I debate amongst ourselves -- sometimes in our respective hovels on this site -- the pros and cons of the music-marketplace transition from physical disc to digital byte, one of the more prominent topics is the potential shift of focus from albums to songs. In essence, it's a doubling-back to pre-1960s days, when the single was a greater driving force than the album, both commercially and creatively. Grant remains steadfastly committed to the album aesthetic. I'm much less so, for a couple of reasons.

First, and most primal for me, is that my initial grounding in music was 1970s AM pop radio, an era that was rife with one-hit wonders -- and viably so. You really didn't need an album's worth of comparative material from the likes of, say, Looking Glass, Edison Lighthouse, or the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose to appreciate the immediate pop transcendence of "Brandy (You're A Fine Girl)", "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Grows" and "It's Too Late To Turn Back Now", respectively.

Second, and a more contemporary point, is that I believe there is a rather limited pool of artists who deserve to be heard at album-length. It's extraordinarily common nowadays to put on a CD and hear maybe a couple good ideas accompanied by about a dozen textbook examples of entirely unnecessary and uninspiring filler. This has, of course, only gotten worse through the stretching of album lengths from the more common 45 minutes of the LP's heyday to the increasingly excruciating 60-70 minutes of many CDs. As such, I find it very liberating that online downloading allows the consumer to purchase only those couple or three tracks which were good enough to release, and leave the rest of the garbage on the checkout counter.

If you still want the whole album, of course, you're still free to buy it in that form. My hope, however, is that an increasing consumer trend toward purchasing songs rather than albums will force artists to focus more on the sanctity of the song, as an artistic entity unto itself. There is potential, as I see it, for internet commerce to actually improve the quality of the song form, from both a writing and a recording standpoint.

All that said, however, I don't want to come across as someone who can't appreciate the proper artistic value of an album, when it's created and presented effectively as a suite or collection of songs (rather than just a way to squeeze as much content onto a 74-minute CD as possible). I can scarcely imagine my own personal musical journey without signposts such as Jackson Browne's The Pretender, or Rickie Lee Jones' Pirates, or John Hiatt's Bring The Family, or Son Volt's Trace, or Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator), to name just a handful of works from different eras that work just about perfectly as albums, in the fullest and truest musical sense of the word.

A chance conversation with an ND subscriber on the ferry a couple days ago got me thinking about that again. But the next morning I was spurred, while listening to the Avett Brothers' upcoming album Emotionalism, to look at the subject from a slightly different angle: sequencing.

As I see it, a good deal of an album's ultimate impact comes down to sequencing. That can include not only the order in which the songs are presented, but also what songs might have been best removed altogether. (It could also include the possibility of certain songs being added to the final sequence; but of course the listener rarely knows about those leftovers, unless/until a box set or "expanded version" is released later with bonus tracks.)

Rarely will sequencing determine whether an album is fundamentally "good" or "not good," of course. You gotta have the songs, first and foremost, to justify making a whole album to begin with; otherwise, you're better served to just record a couple of singles or a brief EP, and release them digitally as such. (Which is, happily, quite feasible these days -- another benefit of the internet-downloading age.)

Once you've assembled enough quality work to legitimately justify an album, however, sequencing can make the difference between whether an album comes across as "good" or "great." It's those little tweaks among the groupings and segues that can change the tone or even the meaning of an album. Sometimes it's a matter of arranging the songs so that they properly convey the "story" of an overarching theme; other times it's simply a matter of getting the mood right as one song blends into the next, and then the next. When it's done right, as I expect we all can attest from our personal experiences, the expressive effect is magic.

Matthew Sweet's 1991 album Girlfriend is an example of a record that I always thought ascended from good to great based largely upon the sequencing. The songs themselves assured that Sweet had a solid and successful pop record on his hands; but the way he constructed an arc in their progression -- from exhilarating discovery to difficult dissolution and finally to reflective acceptance -- gave Girlfriend an almost cinematic quality. It's no wonder the album still stands as his career artistic and commercial zenith, more than fifteen years later.

A more recent experience with the effects of sequencing that sticks out in my mind is Thad Cockrell's 2003 disc Warmth & Beauty. This situation was a little unusual in that I'd heard an early advance of the tracks, before the album was actually sequenced; as such, I decided to assemble the songs in an order that followed what I believed to be a sort of dramatic development lurking within the material. (Looking back through my files from four years ago now, I notice that I actually went so far as to write a four-paragraph "narrative" that outlined the progression I heard.)

Utlimately Cockrell chose a different sequence. (One thing very much to his credit, by the way, is that he was determined not to follow the trend of making CDs contain 14-15 tracks and run for an hour or more. The records that had affected him the most in his formative years almost always contained ten songs, and he was steadfast about sticking to that number, though the final version of Warmth & Beauty ended up just barely over that, with eleven tracks.) The funny thing for me is that when I go back and listen to that record now, I still listen to it in the sequence I'd created. To me, the sequence significantly affected the way I heard the album. What was released in the stores really was different, as I heard it -- even though it had all the same songs.

Which, I suppose, is another advantage of modern technology. Nowadays, once you've downloaded all the tracks on an album, you can very easily listen to them in whatever order you wish. If you think there's a logic or a feeling in a sequence that differs from how the tracks might have been presented in CD form, you're welcome to create your own impression of how the album might unfold.

Which brings me to the album that got me started writing this whole discourse. I'm listening this morning to an advance of the Avett Brothers' Emotionalism, which comes out May 15 on Ramseur Records. You'll find plenty more of my words about them in our May-June issue of No Depression that should be hitting stands and mailboxes any day now. It goes without saying that I think Emotionalism is a pretty special record, or I wouldn't have taken the time to write at length about them in our pages.

The Avetts in the past have been guilty of releasing CDs that were not albums in the finest sense. Last year's Four Thieves Gone clocked in at 73:52 for its 17 tracks; even accounting for the fact that the final track was 16 minutes of largely silence and garbage studio/party chatter (a whole 'nother problem for a different discussion), that's still 58 minutes for the other 16 tracks. Its predecessor, Mignonette, was even more frustrating, largely because it did in fact contain quite a few first-rate songs. But the band couldn't leave well enough alone; at 20 songs and 73 minutes, it's just too long for its own good, with not one but two hidden tracks trailing after a tune so definitively conclusive that it should not have been followed by anything.

On Emotionalism, they've finally made a real album. At 59 minutes and 14 tracks, it's still teetering a tad toward the too-long side; but it's hard to fault them much because of the quality of the material from start to finish. I've experimented with trimming a couple of cuts, and did find a way that gets it down to 12 songs and 50 minutes, which perhaps makes the record slightly easier to digest as a whole. That said, both of the songs I removed are unquestionably very strong numbers. I wouldn't cut anything here for not being up to snuff, but simply to hone the final shape of the album itself. If they were to have left any songs off, they most certainly would have used them down the road in some capacity.

I also tried out a swap in placement of the #4 and #5 tracks, based mainly on my own theory that the #4 track on a record is a perfect spot for a "second single" type of pop tune, and they've slotted such a song at #5 here. This is undoubtedly more of a personal quirk on my end, but it's something I've noticed in many albums over the decades that have a very effective flow and feel.

Those are pretty minor details, ultimately -- fun to monkey around with, but in fact the Avetts sequenced Emotionalism remarkably well. The leadoff cut is perfect; the middle section radiates with the record's most creative and inventive material; and the denouement of the penultimate and final tracks is precisely as it should be. For a band that, despite all its obvious live-performance charisma, had yet to show they really knew how to make a great album, the Avetts surely turned a major corner with this one. If I had to make a list of the decade's ten best albums so far, Emotionalism would be on it.

(Address any comments to letters at no depression dot net)

adios,
peter

....The following comment was received from Scott M. Anderson on April 24:

I believe that an album is a representation and collection of ideas or songs, in an artist's life at a particular moment. It's a slice of art and life, and self expression. I don't think it was intended to be a handbook or manual. Just a reflection, in a point in time, created and consumed for all appetites. The infrastructure has changed from our record buying days to today's consumer. Instant gratification and attention spans play a significant role as well as technology. Now a day's you can hear a song anytime and access an artist through the internet, the store is always open.

I agree with you on uninspiring filler, there is too much of it. I'm reading a book right now by Benjamin Barber, called Consumed, How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole. Greed is all we're really about. There is no shame in making money, or how or from whom. When it comes to making money there are no rules or no guilty conscience. This attitude certainly spills into making album's and record companies, as well as the everyday. I think we all want our money's worth. However, ten well crafted songs, is always better than 20 songs of endless crap. It is about quality not quanity. At the end of 45 minutes of music or 80, it is about the condition of your soul. Filling the soul with feeling, understanding, passion and spirit. From the opening seconds of U2's, "Where The Street's Have No Name" from the Joshua Tree album to the closing, bitter sweet, stinging, reminder of "Learning How To Love You" from Mr. John Hiatt's Bring The Family. Well crafted albums will reflect as time pieces. We all have our own soundtracks to our souls, and enjoy making them. As you mentioned, an album comes packaged one way, technology allows you to play it your own way, and tomorrow you may want to hear it in a different way. It scares me to think what is next for music, it is as haunting to think about its future, as is the songs warning us. Hope this made some sense? Scott M. Anderson (Windsor, New York)

Posted by Peter at 1:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 20, 2007

* Show Log Mania, Part IV of IV: 1991

Part The Last, in which this silly nostalgic exercise finally reaches its transcribed conclusion. The printout logs end at August of '91; all those past that (corresponding with my move from Austin to Seattle) were already on my hard-drive and didn't need to be typed in from the old feeder-paper source. A few final notes, then:

* The Austin Music Awards on March 20, featuring the likes of the ill-fated Arc Angels and the long-forgotten E.R. Shorts, musically paled in comparison to the previous year's fete -- yet the night still looms large in my memory because that's when I took the stage in front of a couple thousand Austinites (to accept the award for Best Music Critic) and announced I would soon be moving to Seattle.

A couple weeks earlier, I'd spent a few days in Seattle, visiting a friend who'd moved there and also working on a long article about Will T. Massey, a young singer-songwriter who'd risen to prominence in Austin over the past couple years and had recently relocated to the Northwest. While there, I saw a terrific show by Brit folk-rockers June Tabor & the Oyster Band at a really cool basement venue called the Backstage on March 4; I attended a rather bizarre Seattle music awards show on March 3 that included performances by Massey, Kenny G, and Sir Mix-A-Lot; I caught a rather intriguing group called the Walkabouts on March 3 at a university-area bar; and on March 2, I checked out (on the advice of friend-of-a-friend Charles Cross) a new group called Mookie Blaylock at a small club called the Off Ramp.

Apparently the Mookie Blaylock guys had just been in the studio recording their debut album, and they took the Off Ramp by storm, their singer a fiery flash of furor soaring above music that was incredibly intense yet still very melodic. A couple months later, shortly before their record came out, they changed their name to Pearl Jam.

* I'd forgotten that, as part of my decision to move to Seattle, I apparently decided I should try to soak up as much Austin music as possible before my departure. According to my logs, I went out to see live music every single day in the month of June except for the 20th. From May 24 through June 19, I had a string of 27 nights out to see music. Another short string immediately thereafter resulted in a stretch tallying 39 of 40 nights from May 24 through July 1. Some of that adventure seems to have led me to try some things I'd probably not have heard otherwise; whereas I mostly went to see alt-rock bands and country-folk singer-songwriters back then, the 27-nights-in-a-row stretch included such curveballs as D'Jalma Garnier's French Band, jazz great Joe Pass, Tex-Mex accordion whiz Steve Jordan, latin dance outfit Susanna Sharpe & the Samba Police, and Indian beat-poet John Trudell.

* Another name in the logs during that marathon stretch was an artist from Buffalo who was doing a sort of extended residency of solo scoustic performances, having been championed by local booker and music fan Sylvia Benini. I believe it was Sylvia (and/or perhaps upstate New York journalist Dale Anderson) who sent me a copy of the artist's debut cassette, Not So Soft, and urged me to go see one of her shows. I did, and ended up catching her twice more over the next couple weeks, playing to a dozen or so people at small clubs around town. That was my initial exposure to Ani DiFranco.

* I'm not sure whether it was the "Austin Does Austin Hoot Night" on April 23, or the "True Believers vs. Zeitgeist" Hoot Night on February 5 (both at the Cannibal Club), but at one of those, my friend Mike Lyttle and I performed a little Alejandro spoof we came up with called, "The Train Won't Help You When You're Run Over." (Sample verse: "I put a penny down on the tracks/I tripped and fell, now I can't go back/Lost my arms, when I got run over/Lost my legs, when I got run over...")

* I took a road trip out west in late July for one last chance to see a handful of Reivers shows -- July 21 at Club Congress in Tucson, July 22 at the Mason Jar in Phoenix, July 23 at Bogart's In Long Beach, July 24 at Club Lingerie in Los Angeles, July 26 at the Starry Plough in Berkeley, and July 27 at the I-Beam in San Francisco. (I'd very nearly gone out with the Reivers as a guitar tech a couple years prior, but journalism intervened and I missed out on the glamour of life as a roadie.)

I didn't know it at the time, but that trip was essentially saying goodbye to my favorite band, the one that had always been the anchor of my musical experiences in Austin. I moved to Seattle the first week of October 1991; a week later, the Reivers played their final show ever at the Cannibal Club. A major life chapter was fittingly closed...just as a new one was fixing to burst wide open.

But that's another story....

adios,
peter

Posted by Peter at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

* Show Log Mania, Part III of IV: 1990

Not to worry, we're pretty close to wrapping up all this nonsense. Meanwhile, here's a cursory review of some highlights scattered amidst everything I just transcribed from my 1990 show logs...

* The 800-pound gorilla in these entries is Butch Hancock. First came his legendary "No 2 Alike" series of shows at the Cactus Cafe from January 31 to February 5 -- six consecutive nights in which Hancock played all originals and never repeated a song. (It was originally scheduled for five nights but was held over when he couldn't get through everything he'd planned in just five!) Special guests ranged from Townes Van Zandt (doing a one-line cameo) to the late guitar great Jesse Taylor to a full-fledged Flatlanders reunion. Austin's never seen anything quite like it before, or since.

A few months later, my log shows entries on April 20 and 21 that read, simply, "Butch Hancock, Mariscal Canyon." The brevity of the notation only scratches the surface of the full story. This was part of a three-day, two-night raft trip on the Rio Grande in West Texas, run by a company called Far Flung Adventures. They'd begun doing these river trips where they'd bring along a musician and have them play campfire concerts at night -- the music echoing off the canyon walls, the stars blanketing the sky above. Soon as I saw Hancock was booked for one, I knew I had to go.

Butch enjoyed the experience so much, he eventually moved out to Terlingua (where Far Flung was based) and became a certified river guide with the company. I had such a fine time that ten years later I returned to do it again, this time bringing along my father as a present for his 70th birthday.

* I don't know if there's ever been a better Austin Music Awards show than the 1990 edition on March 14 at Palmer Auditorium. The lineup, in order of appearance: Townes Van Zandt, Daniel Johnston, Poi Dog Pondering, James McMurtry, Nanci Griffith, and the David Halley Band & Friends (I'm pretty sure Alejandro Escovedo was among the "Friends").

* I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Tiny Lights in here somewhere. I'd first seen them back in the summer of 1988 at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, while interning at a newspaper in the NYC area. I dragged a few of my fellow interns to the show -- I think to see another band that was on the bill -- but ended up being blown away by this quintet that featured strings and horns prominently in their fascinatingly diverse folk/pop/jazz/rock/chamber/funk/avant-garde repertoire.

A few months later they came through Texas and played a show in San Marcos, south of town; apparently they hadn't been able to get a gig in Austin. I went down to see them and dragged them back to Austin to stay at "The Lodge" (as my roommates and I had dubbed our house back then) for a night or two before they continued their tour. They returned in 1989 a couple of times and gradually built more of a following. By the time they visited in 1990, they'd earned a headlining spot on Saturday night (March 17) during South By Southwest at the Ritz, one of the larger downtown venues, and they played live on the air at KLBJ's studios the following night.

* Tiny Lights' front couple, husband-and-wife John Hamilton and Donna Croughn, returned the lodging favor in the summer of 1990 when I made a brief visit to New York. Turned out they lived right down the street from Maxwell's, the Hoboken bar where I'd first seen them play a couple years earlier. So I strolled the few blocks to Maxwell's on the night of July 26 to catch a trio whose debut record I'd recently reviewed for the Austin daily. Not many people were there, maybe a couple dozen. The band was pretty darned good. They called themselves Uncle Tupelo.

* September 21 shows an Emmylou Harris & the Nash Ramblers gig at the Austin Opera House, with a couple of opening acts. Emmylou must have been touring with Canadian outfit the Prairie Oyster Band, as they were in the middle slot on the bill. Typically there would be just two acts on a roadshow at the Opera House, but for whatever reason, a regional opener had been added on this night — some quartet from Dallas, featuring a couple of sisters named Emily and Martie Erwin. Awhile later they became considerably more well-known when they added a singer named Natalie Maines to the lineup, but even in that early incarnation, they aready were billing themselves as the Dixie Chicks.

* Few Austin bands shot up and fizzled out as fast as Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom, a sorta skiffle-style trio that began by busking on UT's West Mall (just as Poi Dog Pondering had a couple years earlier). Seemingly overnight, they had a huge following, They released a handful of cassettes that altogether sold in the tens of thousands, and played gigs at many of the prime venues around town (including August 9 at Texas Tavern, August 13 at Cannibal Club, August 17 at Saxon Pub, September 20 at Texas Union Ballroom, and September 23 at Laguna Gloria Art Museum). And then they were splitsville, as quickly as they had arrived. (A November 10 "reunion" gig at the Four Seasons Hotel for a friend's wedding served as a sort of asterisk/endpoint.)

Leader David Garza has since had many lives as a solo artist, and drummer Chris Searles became one of Austin's most seasoned session pros. Even so, I'm not sure anything they've done since has ever quite radiated with the magic they captured in the spring and summer of 1990. As such, it was a nice surprise to recently discover that the best of those cassette releases is available in streaming download form here:
http://www.wiseup.org/twang/songs/

* My memories from this era of Austin music are dominated by evenings spent at the Hole in the Wall, the Cactus, Liberty Lunch, Club Cairo (later rechristened the Cannibal Club), Chicago House, and the Texas Tavern -- but going through these logs, I was surprised to see how frequently I also visited the long-gone Austin Outhouse. It was a dive to beat all dives, probably the "funkiest" music venue in town back then; but there was something very comfortable, and comforting, about that place. Maybe it was the license plates all over the walls. Perhaps it was the height of the stage -- or, rather, lack thereof. Probably it was just the bookings: The Outhouse remained loyal to a less-prominent subculture of Austin singer-songwriters, even as they welcomed the occasional "bigger name" (and they helped raise some of those bigger names too, most notably Timbuk 3). Although losing Liberty Lunch at the end of the '90s was the hardest blow to Austin's venue heritage since Armadillo World Headquarters was demolished in 1980, the Outhouse will always carry its own unique footnote in the city's cultural history.

* There was a twinge of sadness, but also joy, in seeing two entries -- May 16 at Threadgills, and August 3 at the summertime Town Lake shindig Aqua Fest -- for the duo of Walter Hyatt & Champ Hood. Some of my friends back then raved about the 1970s heyday of Hyatt and Hood's old trio (with David Ball) called Uncle Walt's Band; I was too young to catch any of that, but it was nice to see Walter & Champ playing the occasional gig together around town so many years later. We lost Walter in 1996 on the ValuJet crash in Florida; Champ died of cancer five years after that. They were both phenomenal musicians, and gentle, caring souls. Both deserved much longer lives. Seeing their names amid all these listings was a kind reminder of the way they were...back in the good old days of 1990.

adios,
peter

Posted by Peter at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 18, 2007

* Show Log Mania, Part II of IV: 1989

Continuing on the theme from yesterday's blog, here are a few observations about my 1989 show log that I just finished typing in...

* Further to the Alejandro Escovedo career-development saga, the '89 logs find both the first Buick MacKane listing -- an April 7 show with Pork, the Wannabes and the Wild Seeds at the Texas Tavern on the University of Texas campus -- and what appears to be the first time an Escovedo show was billed as the Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra, August 12 at the Continental Club. The "Orchestra" gigs featured anywhere from three to more than a dozen musicians, though typically they leaned toward the larger end of that range.

* March 1 lists an event called "Texas Talent Night" at a meat-market-type country venue called the Lumberyard in North Austin. As I recall, I was among a small handful of judges for this small-potatoes midweek contest, along with my American-Statesman colleague Casey Monahan (now director of the Texas Music Office). The winner that night, Dan Harrell, was not heard from again (far as I know, anyway). However, the guy who finished second went on to have a pretty significant impact on Austin country music in the 1990s. This was the first time either Casey or I had seen him play. His name was Don Walser.

* South By Southwest sure was a different animal back then. The event didn't start until Thursday (March 16), and the only real activity that night was the Austin Music Awards, held at that time at the Austin Opera House. The big headliner of the '89 Awards Show was Doug Sahm. Friday and Saturday I caught six bands each night, several of them local, in part because the out-of-town draw was still relatively small compared to what it is now. Most of the acts I saw have long since faded from view -- Sidewinders, Gunbunnies, Wednesday Week, anybody? -- though the one I remember best was a singer-songwriter named Hub Moore, whose song "Lucky To Be Alive" became a personal mantra of sorts for the ensuing year or two.

* An eclectic evening on April 5: first the Kronos Quartet at Bass Concert Hall, then off to Blue Bayou for an acoustic set by Poi Dog Pondering, and finally over to Liberty Lunch for Athens proto-alt-rockers Guadalcanal Diary. Just a typical Wednesday night in Austin circa 1989. (Well, maybe not entirely typical...)

* April 16 at Chicago House, a terrific acoustic venue downtown: Something's wrong with this picture. The list of acts reads: Alejandro Escovedo, Peter Blackstock, David Halley. Something's really wrong with this picture...

* The entries for May 26 and May 27 read, respectively: "The Roches Faint" and "Return Of The Roches." In what was certainly one of the strangest concert experiences I've ever had, the renowned trio of sisters got about halfway through the first song of their show at the Paramount when Terre Roche suddenly just flat-out fainted, right in the middle of a three-part harmony. Suzzy and Maggie quickly explained this was not part of the act, and legitimately employed the old cliche, "Is there a doctor in the house?" After about 20 minutes, it was ascertained that Terre was OK, but obviously the show could not go on. They told the audience they'd gladly come back and try again the next night -- thus the "Return" notation on the 27th. No further fainting ensued.

* I remember rather well the final performance of the Wild Seeds on June 10 at Liberty Lunch. The band had earned modest national attention with their 1998 album Mud, Lies & Shame (and its minor hit single "I Can't Rock You All Night Long"), but leader Michael Hall had decided not to let the group slowly fade out, opting instead to end things with the band essentially at their peak. He was probably right; it was unlikely the Wild Seeds were going to make it any further up the career ladder, and the band members would soon enough have other paths to follow. (Hall eventually became an editor at Texas Monthly; guitarist Randy Franklin opened the celebrated South Congress art gallery Yard Dog; drummer Joey Shuffield had at least a small window of big-time success with Fastball.) That last show was bittersweet: Here was a legitimately great American rock 'n' roll band, giving its all, and saying....goodbye.

* July 18 lists a performance at Green Mesquite Barbecue by Bill Neely, one of the very few occasions I got to see the legendary country bluesman perform. He passed away in early 1990; I wrote the daily paper obituary, which happens to be posted online here:
http://www.lostartrecords.com/neely/articles.html

* Perhaps a bit of foreshadowing took place on November 29, when I attended an Austin City Limits taping pegged on the Dirt Band's Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 2 album. Though I knew the pop-leaning ringers among the special guests (John Denver, Michael Murphey), I must admit I simply was not familiar with many of the others -- Jimmy Martin, Vassar Clements, New Grass Revival, Randy Scruggs, and two sisters named Helen and Anita who apparently were part of some influential country music family called the Carters. I'd learn a little more a few years down the road.

* One offshoot of revisiting a list such as this is that the time-markers of sequential events every couple days or so allows for surprisingly thorough reconstruction and recollection of other life events from that time. As such, 1989 was a difficult year to "relive" in many ways; no shortage of emotions flooded back as I typed in a year's worth of musical experiences and drifted back to what I was going through when many of those shows happened. It's all part of who we are today; but some of those things, I'm not quite sure how I made it through. And then again, some of them still echo within me to this day. That was (to borrow a phrase from Lynn Blakey) the beauty of 23.

tune in tomorrow for 1990....

adios,
peter

Posted by Peter at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 17, 2007

* Show Log Mania, Pt. I of IV: 1988

You may recall a few weeks back I wrote at length about David Halley and mentioned some specifics about having seen him play at a portentous "Hoot Night" in an Austin nightclub in January 1989. No, my memory wasn't actually that sharp as to the specific chronological details; I had help from my now nearly 20-year-old show logs.

Back in the fall of 1988, just after returning from a summer internship on Long Island at the daily paper Newsday, I started keeping a list of all the acts I went out to see every night. Little did I know at the time how valuable a historical tool those logs would become many years later. (In retrospect, I sure wish I'd started keeping the logs in 1985, the year I first started going out to see live music on a very regular basis; I often find myself digging for info about a show I saw in the mid-'80s, but I've no way to look it up.)

When I started writing that Halley blog entry, I had a pretty clear memory of his Hoot Night performance, but wasn't really sure of the date. The hitch was that my lists from 1988-1991 were sequestered away somewhere on a massive dot-matrix feeder-paper printout -- I used to keep the log on my day-job computer back then (this was before the era of desktop Macs, at least for me). I finally dug through a few boxes and found it, and was reminded how I'd often thought about just typing all that old info into a current text file to allow for much easier access and searchability in the future.

Being between ND deadlines at the moment, and frankly scratching my head slightly as to what to blog about this week, I figured, what the heck, why not go ahead and do it now. My plan is to type in one year each day for the rest of the week -- i.e. 1988 Tuesday, 1989 Wednesday, 1990 Thursday, and 1991 Friday. (From September 1991 on, after my move from Austin to Seattle with a good ol' Mac SE newly in tow, the logs are already on my hard-drive.) I won't post the full list here, for fear of overloading even the supposedly endless bandwidth of blogospheres, but I'll make some general observations each day about what I've unearthed.

We'll start, then, with 1988, which I just finished transcribing. This one was relatively painless, as I didn't begin the logs until my return from Long Island in mid-August of that year (thus it's only four months worth). Still, there are plenty of entries that raised eyebrows as I revisited the tail end of that year. Among them:

* I believe I can identify Alejandro Escovedo's first-ever solo performance in this time-frame. Late 1988 was in fact a key juncture in Escovedo's career evolution. There are True Believers shows on August 27, September 3, November 25, and December 2 -- the last of those being, as I recall, the final True Believers gig (until reunions much later). Javier Escovedo had already left by this point, but the rest of the guys still played for awhile after his departure -- including a select few acoustic gigs billed as the Make Believers (October 4 opening for Harry Dean Stanton at the Cactus Cafe, November 19 headlining at Liberty Lunch).

Escovedo's name -- solo -- appears in my listings for November 8 at another of those informal "Hoot Night" outings at Club Cairo; this might well have been the first time he took the stage on his own. (Interestingly, my list also suggests there was a collaborative performance that night between Wammo and Frank Orrall, now leaders of Asylum Street Spankers and Poi Dog Pondering, repsectively.) The first formal Escovedo show in my logs -- not necessarily the first he played as such, but the first I witnessed, at least -- was November 20 at the Cactus Cafe, an opening slot for Joe Ely.

* It's easy to spot when the Reivers, Austin's top alternative-rock band at that time (and my favorite for many years), were on tour. There'll be a stretch where I've seen them play probably every week...and then there'll be a gap of a month or so without any Reivers entries at all. No, I didn't stop going to see them, they were just on the road. (As they must have been between September 24 and November 17 in 1988.)

* The band I saw the most during the latter part of 1988 was not the oft-touring Reivers (7 times) or the splintering True/Make Believers (6 times) or the fast-rising Poi Dog Pondering (8 times) ... but rather, the long-forgotten folk-pop ensemble Grains Of Faith (9 times). For a brief period in the late '80s they were quite possibly Austin's best band, before violinist Susan Voelz moved on to the Poi Dog camp (which changed the band's chemistry). Sadly, they've been lost to documented history; there were a couple of cassette releases that, to my knowledge, have never made it to CD (though there was an effort afoot awhile back toward that end).

* A Christmas-themed on-air "Hoot Night" on December 20 hosted by Jody Denberg at KLBJ's studios (before Denberg moved on to KGSR a couple years later) still stands out quite prominently, in part because for ages I had a cassette tape of the show (and still do, somewhere, I suppose) that received many repeated listens over the years. The lineup included the aforementioned Make Believers, the Ronnie Lane Band, the Flatlanders, Timbuk 3, the Wild Seeds, Darden Smith, and an upstart trio called the Barnburners which featured future Bad Livers frontman Danny Barnes, future Robert Earl Keen guitarist Rich Brotherton, and future producer extraordinaire J.D. Foster. The song that still burns bright in my mind from that night was "Barcelona", a song Lane performed that he co-wrote with Eric Clapton. "So we said goodbye to Barcelona...."

* I was puzzled as to why the name of one of my old roommates, Hunter Darby, kept appearing in the logs. He was the bass player for a punk-pop band called the Wannabes that I went to see frequently (6 times during this stretch), but Hunter never played any solo shows, far as I could recall. Then suddenly I remembered there was actually a short-lived BAND that had christened itself Hunter Darby around that time. Exactly why, I've forgotten; some in-jokes are buried with the artifacts of yore.

* Finally, I keep looking at this one list from October 15 and scratching my head as to how I managed to see all these things on the same night. It's almost modern-day SXSW-ish, except SXSW was in its infancy back then, and anyway has never operated in the fall. Here's how the entry for that day reads, anyhow:

sat oct 15
Bonnie Raitt, Austin Opera House
Chuck Jackson, Austin Opera House
Ruth Brown, Austin Opera House
Clovers, Austin Opera House
Lucinda Williams, Cactus Cafe
Grains Of Faith, Texas Tavern
Doctors' Mob, Club Cairo
Wild Seeds, Club Cairo

OK, then, onward to 1989 in tomorrow's blog....

adios,
peter

Posted by Peter at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 10, 2007

* "i can hear your voice in the wind..."

Glancing over today's new releases on our "Please Release Me" page, the name of Cliff Eberhardt caught my eye. He has a new one out today on Red House Records titled The High Above And The Down Below, which, listening now to the advance that arrived a couple weeks ago, sounds pretty decent in that trusted Red House folk-based singer-songwriter vein.

For me, though, seeing Eberhardt's name brought back memories of an album he put out a long time ago, one that never quite got the attention it deserved, from where I stood. His 1990 debut The Long Road came out on Windham Hill, during a time when that label, renowned for its instrumental new-age recordings by the likes of George Winston and Michael Hedges, was putting out feelers in folk directions. They brought John Gorka and Patty Larkin on board for brief tenures, and also signed Eberhardt, a relative unknown from the East Coast acoustic circuit.

Apparently his music didn't leave much impression on the label, which didn't include one of his songs their recent Windham Hill 30th Anniversary box set. All these years later, though, many of that record's songs still linger in my mind.

The Long Road probably did well enough to give Eberhardt a boost that helped him continue and sustain a career since then, but it wasn't the kind of breakthrough that, say, Steady On was for Shawn Colvin right around the same time. That's an apt comparison given that Colvin guests on "White Lightning", one of the more memorable tracks on The Long Road.

It's also apt because those two albums were quite similar in one very salient aspect: Both were positively loaded with really strong folk-pop material. So much so, in fact, that either artist could quite easily take a stage today and play nothing but songs from their respective debut albums, and the audience would not be shortchanged in the slightest.

The song I remember most is probably "Always Want To Feel Like This", a bold declaration that those most emotional moments are worth reaching for. "Your Face" is maybe a close second; Eberhardt's weary then soaring vocal perfectly delivers the deep longing that drives the tune. The opening "My Father's Shoes" and "Right Now" are more upbeat and urgent in their expressivness, while the title track receives a soulful boost from guest vocalist Richie Havens. "Voyeur" would be a bit of a novelty except that Eberhardt sells the song so well, he convinces you his narrator is more honorable than the song's title suggests. (Probably; there's just enough ambiguity to keep things intriguing.) The aforementioned "White Lightning" is a brilliant mood piece; "That Kind Of Love" is an admirably simple, no-nonsense love song; and "Goodnight" is a perfect closing track, essentially a lullaby but injected with the same sort of dramatic/melodic flair that runs through the entirety of the album.

Sometimes records like this -- great first efforts that didn't ultimately make any big waves -- get lost in the shuffle. This one shouldn't.

adios,
peter

Posted by Peter at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 3, 2007

* "and i'm looking for space..."

As I suspect is the case with most folks reading this, I occasionally do a little surfing around MySpace to check out things I've maybe heard a little bit about and might wanna check out. The secret to MySpace's success, of course, is ease of use; it's remarkably simple to just go to a page and start up a song immediately -- often easier than searching for a particular song or artist amid a stack of CDs. If I want to go deeper, I'll dig out the disc; but MySpace frequently is a breezy way to do a "drive-by" listen.

Anyhow, a couple of my most recent finds:

* Gina Villalobos, "If I Can't Have You": Yes, it's the old Yvonne Elliman hit (written by the Bee Gees) from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Always was a good song, one of the best from that zillion-selling album; I'd not have guessed, though, how well it could be adapted into a rootsy ballad. Villalobos' take recalls the brilliant makeover that mid-'90s Bay Area band Swingin' Doors did on the old Blondie hit "Dreaming". You can check out Villalobos' "If I Can't Have You" here:
http://www.myspace.com/ginavillalobos
The track is also available on Villalobos' new disc Miles Away, which comes out today on Face West Records.

* Kurt Hagardorn: Somehow I either never met this guy or don't remember him from our respective tenures in the NC Triangle area; seems hard to fathom, since his credits include gigging with Thad Cockrell and Caitlin Cary, two artists whose shows I rarely missed during my four years there. Anyhow, a friend from Portland, Oregon, on the old Yahoo ND board mentioned him a few weeks back -- apparently Hagardorn lives in Portland now -- so I checked out his stuff and, yeah, I can certainly hear how he would've fit in with Cockrell in particular. Relatively minimal stuff, but very nice and easy country-folk melodies on the four tracks he has at his myspace site:
http://www.myspace.com/kurthagardorn
Three of the four tracks there are from his new disc Ten Singles, which came out a couple months ago on Bladen County Records.

* Stephanie Dosen: This one I mentioned last week in my "Try not to speak" blog; but leaving that matter aside, just check out the songs on her site. Well worth the visit, I believe, as this is beautiful stuff:
http://www.myspace.com/stephaniedosen
The three tracks there are apparently unreleased on disc at present (far as I've been able to ascertain, anyhow).

adios,
peter

Posted by Peter at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)