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November 27, 2007
* "this shirt is just an old faded piece of cotton...."
Surfing around our website today, I happened upon the "Buy Our Clothes" page where several photos of our various T-shirt designs are featured. I think I have one of each of those shirts hanging in my closet or folded in a drawer, many of which I wear from time to time. But, not always wishing to so shamelessly promote our own product when I venture out -- and also because, well, variety is the spice of life -- I still frequently choose something from the sizable stash of artists' T-shirts that have found their way into my hands over the years, through either having bought them (probably the majority of them, still) or being given them by some generous soul.
So today I got the bright idea to share a little bit of what's in my closet, along with a few comments about each shirt. There are enough that I may make this a mini-series of blog posts; we'll see how it goes. I've also got a good many others that I don't wear as much anymore tucked away in drawers, which I may or may not bother to dig out and photograph at a later date; a few were purged in our recent cross-country move, but many more I just couldn't bear to part with, even if they've shrunk too small (or I've grown too large!) for them to fit anymore. To finish the Mary Chapin Carpenter lyric which provides this entry's title, many a T-shirt crowding the corners of my closet is "so old I should replace it, but I'm not about to try."
Here's one of the oldest:
My rough estimation is that this shirt dates to either 1988 or 1989. My favorite band of that era, the Reivers, had a thing about baseball; this one played off the classic logo of the Texas Rangers, band leader John Croslin's favorite major-league team. The band's previous T-shirt design featured a variation on the official major-league baseball logo, with the profile of a player swinging a bat a ball replaced by the profile of a player swinging a guitar at a record. (If I recall correctly, anyhow.) There were two models of that shirt: the original from spring 1987, which carried the band's original name of Zeitgeist, and a subsequent fall 1987 version shortly after they'd changed their name to the Reivers. The former I still have in a drawer somewhere; the latter is the shirt I was referring to when I wrote, in a tagline at the end of my Whiskeytown cover story in ND #10, that "Peter Blackstock once gave Ryan Adams the (Reivers) shirt off his back." Somehow I sorta doubt Ryan still has it; no idea where it might be right about now.... but that does provide a nice little segue into T-shirt #2:
My recollection was that this had been given to me at the end of the 1997 No Depression tour (which featured Whiskeytown, the Old 97's, Hazeldine, and the Picketts), but the back lists tourdates from 1998, so I'm not really sure when or where I got it. I dug it out of mothballs amid our recent relocation, and wore it a couple weeks ago to a show in Raleigh which featured Walter Salas-Humara and Drew Glackin of the Silos teaming up with Tres Chicas members Lynn Blakey and Caitlin Cary (the latter of whom was, of course, in Whiskeytown). At least one other former member of Whiskeytown in attendence expressed a certain degree of mock outrage, upong seeing my shirt, that HE never got one! Apparently they just didn't properly estimate the necessary inventory when they placed the order with the silk-screener....
No such special story behind T-shirt #3:
This is one I've kept for more than a decade simply because I liked the design, which I believe is a logo borrowed from an east coast bread company. The color (a deep navy blue), the rubbery nature of the printed element, and the hardiness of the T-shirt material have helped keep it going strong when other lesser-quality shirts have faded or thinned or otherwise worn themselves out of regluar use. Let that be a lesson to all ye T-shirt-hawking artists out there!
OK, last (for this blog entry, anyway), but far from least:
There's no band-name being trumpeted in the artwork, which I expect is one of the reasons this is probably my favorite of all the band shirts I still wear regularly. It was from a Jack Logan tour of Europe in 1998; they did advertise themselves on the back, but wisely (I thought) left the front image alone. I believe it's Logan's own handiwork, though I'm not sure about that. All I know is that there's a really basic but moving simplicity and depth to the image; "time, love and death," I always figured, and the inherent relationship between the three. Logan doesn't really tour hardly at all anymore....but I still wear the shirt, at least once a month.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
November 20, 2007
* "there's a place for us, you know the movie song..."
A couple of semi-random thoughts related to the connective tissue between music and cinema:
Sunday night I made the journey up to D.C. to catch the Swell Season, a partnership between Glen Hansard of the Frames and 19-year-old Czech singer/pianist Marketa Irglova. The two musicians co-starred in the indie film Once, which I discussed in this blog a couple of times a few months ago.
Their live performance -- which included Frames members Colm Mac Con Iomaire on violin and Joe Doyle on bass, plus cellist Bertrand Galen -- was probably the best show I've seen all year. We'll have a full review of one of their recent concerts in the Northwest in our January-February print edition; meantime, if you live in one of the few towns still remaining on this tour's itinerary (Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago), consider yourself duly notified.
The big hanging question is whether their song "Falling Slowly" will be recognized by the Oscars when nominations are announced in January. It's certainly deserving; no song could possibly have carried more emotional impact for its film than when "Falling Slowly" swelled up during the final scene of Once. The Oscars do have a history of acknowledging terrific music from small but acclaimed indie films (Elliott Smith's "Miss Misery" from Good Will Hunting, Jorge Drexler's "Al Otro Lado Del Rio" from The Motorcycle Diaries), so don't be surprised if you see Hansard and Irglova onstage at the Academy Awards come February.
On the drive back from D.C. the next day, I slipped into the CD player a recent Norah Jones promo-only odds-and-ends collection sent out by her label Blue Note, apparently as a reminder about some of Jones' ancillary non-album forays this past year. The concluding, and most moving, track of the bunch was her version of Gene Scheer's "American Anthem", which was the musical anchor for the recent Ken Burns PBS epic The War.
A nice little subversive humanity-improvement prank to play on the mass population would be to alter all CDs, iPods, jukeboxes, and such which contain versions of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The U.S.A." so that when that song is selected, what plays instead would be Jones' version of "American Anthem". The world would be a better place if someone could somehow pull that off. Not only is Jones' version exquisitely touching in its subtlety compared to Greenwood's melodramatic bombast, but lyrically there's just no comparison in terms of eloquence and elegance, no matter what one's political views. Consider the two:
"I'd thank my lucky stars
To be livin' here today
'Cause the flag still stands for freedom
And they can't take that away."
and...
"Let them say of me I was one who believed
In sharing the blessings I received
Let me know in my heart when my days are through
America, America, I gave my best to you."
See if you can guess which is which.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 17, 2007
* mail call
Among this week's pile of postal deliveries was a new release from the band Moviola of Columbus, Ohio (coincidentally, I've got the Ohio State-Michigan game on the tube as I write this). We did a Town & Country piece on them in 2004 so they were kind enough to send along their latest effort, Dead Knowledge.
On the back of the mailing-envelope, whoever sent the package scrawled the following in ballpoint:
Perfunctory mailing of CD release to print magazine. ("Kindling")
Just thought y'all might get the same laugh from it that I did.
For what it's worth, I've never used a promo CD as firewood. Though I think they may be on to something!
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 13, 2007
* ND #72 Revisited
Paging through our new-on-the-stands issue and reflecting on its contents, as per usual bimonthly habit in this space:
* I found Grant's Hello Stranger column particularly intriguing for the way he weaved his comments about his own personal relationship with the guitar (which first led me to think, "Why's he telling us about this?") into his observations about the instrument's place within "the common language of our culture."
For what it's worth, unlike Grant, I do play, though hardly enough to consider myself a guitarist. For me it's mainly just a way to get enough of a chordal background going to write the occasional song. I'm lousy enough that I generally avoid bar-chords by simply capo-ing everything and just playing the G-key chords (sometimes D and A, perhaps E ... but no F!). I suppose it's enough, however, to appreciate his "common language" remark. Much as I wish I could do the same on piano, I can't, and it's largely because the guitar was just naturally presumed to be the thing to pick up when I first got curious about writing songs twenty-odd years ago.
Grant has also occasionally suggested that playing an instrument, or writing a song, or performing in front of an audience, is a beneficial experience for those who choose to write about music. Of this I'm not so sure, as I feel there are plenty of examples of valuable music journalists who've never played a note. A worthy critic first and foremost needs a discerning ear, second a proclivity to communicate with the written word; actually having played is much further down the list, just as it's not necessary to have played music to simply enjoy listening to it.
That said, there's no doubt a practicing musician can offer a different perspective on the art form than one who does not play, and at ND we've frequently placed some value on this. Several of our regular or semi-regular contributors have had at least passing experience in the studio or onstage (some considerably more than passing), and paging through ND #72 you may notice some particularly conspicuous cameos. In the Farther Along section, Tommy Ramone writing about CBGB proprietor Hilly Kristal and Rosie Flores writing about rockabilly great Janis Martin were both kind of no-brainers, as it was clear those artists knew their respective subjects intimately well. In the Not Fade Away reissues section, having Elizabeth Cook survey the work of Crystal Gayle was perhaps a more adventurous proposition, one which Cook seemed (to me at least) to handle with admirable clarity and precisely the sort of valuable perspective one might hope to get when issuing such an assignment.
* Moving on to the Miked live-reviews section: Had we not been loading up our truck on September 10 for the cross-country move we embarked upon a couple days later, it's quite likely I would've joined our correspondent Michael Berick at Lucinda Williams' Los Angeles performance of her 1988 self-titled album. Williams' decision to revisit several of her albums in their entirety in live performance in L.A. and New York seemed an inspired touch to me, especially in regard to that 1988 record which has long since become legendary. Somewhere around here I've got a CD-burn of that entire record's song-sequence as covered by a broad variety of artists over the years (save for "Like A Rose", which has always struck me as odd because it seems like one of the most coverable tunes on the album). How many records do you stumble across in which almost every single song has been recorded by another artist? Carole King's landmark Tapestry perhaps comes to mind, and that in itself offers some perspective on just how significant Williams' '88 LP turned out to be.
* We felt quite fortunate to have John Milward write about his fellow Woodstock resident Levon Helm in our pages. While it was somewhat disappointing that Helm declined the invitation to talk with us, Milward's intimate knowledge of Woodstock's artistic community, and his interviews with Levon's daughter Amy and guitarist Larry Campbell, proved to be more than worthy compensation in producing an article well worth publishing, and reading. Kudos to John Flavell for his photos as well, especially that magic-capturing shot in the opening spread.
* I'd never really thought of Chuck Berry as a poet before, but Rich Kienzle's lead review of Berry's Chess recordings in the Not Fade Away section eloquently made the case for why he should be considered as such.
* Moving along to the Waxed record-review section: Grant and I had an interesting back-and-forth in editing Lloyd Sachs' lead review of the excellent Robert Plant & Alison Krauss disc Raising Sand. Sachs referred to Plant as "a founding father of heavy metal," which raised a caution flag with Grant, though not so much with me. We ended up settling on "forefather" rather than "founding father," but only after a fair bit of intriguing discussion, which we've since continued after the fact with a couple other folks (including ND senior editor David Cantwell and musician Tom Gillam).
What I learned from all our comments collectively is that there's a pretty fair range in the way that different listeners define "heavy metal" at its core. For Lloyd, it apparently seemed second-nature to consider Led Zeppelin in heavy-metal context; to Grant, Zeppelin was more blues-based and too primordial in the transition to formally be considered heavy metal (the rise of which he associated more with the likes of Black Sabbath). I suppose I fell somewhere inbetween, and also had a hard time relating since I never really came anywhere near to going through a metal phase in my youth, despite obediently purchasing a couple of Zeppelin records.
Not that I was totally green on the genre: One of my high-school best friends did drag me one summer to shows by Krokus, Fist, Saxon, and Riot. Now that was heavy metal. And also probably goes a long way toward explaining why I never went through a metal phase.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 6, 2007
* ND #71 Cover Subject Revisited (Josh Ritter)
Normally about this time every couple of months, I take a stroll through the pages of our new-on-the-stands issue and offer some thoughts and considerations about some of its contents. I'm gonna wait till next week to do that, though, because events of the past few days have gotten me stuck back on our previous issue once again -- specifically its cover subject, Josh Ritter.
Friday evening in Nashville, I snuck away from the Americana Music Association's official proceedings in order to catch a non-AMA show featuring Ritter and opening act Eric Bachmann at the Exit/In. Last night the two played at Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, North Carolina, not far from my new digs in nearby Mebane, along with a third act, Saddle Creek artist Maria Taylor.
Ritter was perhaps a slightly out-on-a-limb choice for issue #71's cover; comparing him to our other 2007 cover subjects, for example, he's not a longtime legend like the late Porter Wagoner (#70), nor is he a big-time chart-topper like country's Miranda Lambert (#69) or indie-rock's the Shins (#68), nor is he an Americana cornerstone like Lucinda Williams (#67). He is, however, an extraordinarily talented and stylistically adventurous up-and-coming singer-songwriter, an artist presently riding a wave of both creative and commercial momentum which feels just a bit like a runaway train.
That much was clear at both the Nashville and Carrboro shows. Both venues were packed solid (even on a Monday in Carrboro), and Ritter delivered knockout performances both nights. His remarkably tight backing band -- which has become about as good as that of any presently working singer-songwriter -- gave the music significant power and punch when it was called for; other times, they held back carefully and let Ritter's voice and words carry the moment.
Ritter and his crew might simply be one of many well-honed, song-centered outfits on the road these days, except that a close listen to some of his songs reveals that he has very few equals among contemporary pop lyricists. Ritter's "Wings" was the clear standout track on Joan Baez's recent roots-leaning album Dark Chords On A Big Guitar (outshining tunes from the likes of Gillian Welch, Greg Brown, Joe Henry and Ryan Adams); but the more recent number "The Temptation Of Adam", with its vivid storytelling details of a love affair in a missile silo, may well be Ritter's greatest songwriting accomplishment to date, as his performance on Monday to a pin-drop-quiet crowd attested.
If the Carrboro crowd could possibly get any more hushed and attentive, it did so when Ritter moved off-mike in the encore for a stunning rendition of Bruce Springsteen's "The River", before closing with a bang on "Lillian, Egypt". The Nashville audience got perhaps an even better finale, as Ritter unleashed his dynamic ten-minute epic "Thin Blue Flame" from last year's landmark album The Animal Years.
Ritter also deserves credit for his excellent taste in opening acts. Eric Bachmann's spare but spellbinding set with multi-instrumentalist Elin Palmer showed yet another side of this extraordinarily talented artist who previously fronted Archers Of Loaf and Crooked Fingers. And Maria Taylor, who opened the Carrboro show only (apparently on a brief side-jaunt from the Bright Eyes tour), delivered entirely on the significant promise of her recent solo records 11:11 and Lynn Teeter Flower, even unveiling a very new song -- so new that she and her backing bassist and drummer were still following lyric sheets -- presumptively titled "Did You Know" that's easily the catchiest thing she's written to date: think Buddy Holly, but with a mid-song kazoo solo.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)