Boney Earnest's Suburban Hilltop Tent Revue

Chicago Brand Banjo

2010-07-30T08:10:00.002-05:00

This blog still get many hits every month from people searching for information on the Chicago Brand Banjo. I own one, bought for me about 6 years ago by my girlfriend at the time from a pawn shop on Central Ave in Charlotte. It cost about $75 and was in terrific condition. I swapped out the sort of lousy, worn out bridge -- which for all I know was the original -- for a lower-profile, wider bridge made of maple and ebony, and I've changed the strings a few times, and I've worn the varnish off the fretboard in many spots, learning how to play clawhammer-style -- "The Coo Coo" and "Little Sadie" and "Shady Grove" in the sawmill tuning, "I'll Fly Away" and "Going Down the Road Feelin Bad" in open G. "Little Birdie" in double C.

I've promised a few times over the years to do some research and write a nice long entry here about the Chicago brand, and maybe I still will some day. Who knows. But I just happened to stumble over a video this morning by a guy who tells us as much about this little Bakelite frying pan as I've ever heard, and then frails out a beautiful rendition of the haunting tune "Kitchen Girl." Ah, it just smells like apples and hay, doesn't it? Says the suburban boy sitting in his cubicle.

On the Trail of the Dave Rawlings Machine, part 2

2010-02-26T13:45:00.004-05:00

Earlier this month, my friends Carolyn Fryberger and Ginger Kowal spent a few days following the The Dave Rawlings Machine along the end of their tour in the great Northwest. Carolyn and Ginger are the founders of the Dave Rawlings Machine Fan Club -- and, I think I can say, friends of Dave and Gil as well. I asked them to write about their trek for the Tent Revue, and they both sent me wonderful pieces -- not only descriptive but thoughtful and interesting as well. I think you'll enjoy them. I posted Ginger's piece yesterday. Here is what Carolyn wrote for us.

(Thanks to Lindsey Best for letting me use her photographs of the Dave Rawlings Machine in these entries.)

The first show I saw of this tour was in Asheville, North Carolina in November, the second night of the first leg. I saw my eighth and final show (really I should just say the most recent; summer dates have already been announced!) in Olympia, Washington in February, the last show of second leg. In Asheville Gillian joked that they didn’t really know what the Machine did yet, but that they were sure it wore denim.

The tour began with long and frequent tuning breaks, and constant departure from the set list. More often than not Dave led off a song met with confused looks from Gil and the rest of the band and the grabbing of capos. By Olympia, the show was flowing from one song to the next with only the nod of Dave’s head, all met with delight by a group of fans that has swelled and amplified since the release of this first album. They had become – dare I say it? – a well-oiled Machine.

Now I haven’t followed any other act around as much as I have Dave and Gil, but my feeling is that their willingness to perform in this way – to put it all out there and to float from one song to the next as it feels right, to allow an audience to be witness to their transformation – is very rare. You get to watch them responding to each other, to the crowd, to their instruments and to the songs themselves. To see Dave and Gil perform is to watch them actively weaving together all the separate elements of the stage into an expression of a pure and distilled emotion. By the end of a show it feels as though you’ve had an intimate conversation with them, in which they revealed truths at once personal and universal.

Dave and Gil are phenomenal musicians of course, but I have seen phenomenal musicians that did not inspire me to seek them out in any corner of the country they may be playing. It is this intimacy that has kept me going to shows, far and near, for three years. I love to watch that interaction, to be part of it, and to watch it evolve from show to show. I love the intoxication of just feeling those emotions they conjure, to feel as though I am played by their melodies and exist for a moment in the space created by their harmonies.

Then after the show comes their only experiences of me as a fan, which are the brief conversations during which I am too excited, smiling too much, too eager, tripping over words and making stupid jokes. It’s a funny relationship to have with another person, so one-sided – I mean, they don’t want me to sign anything for them. Sometimes I think, “That’s it, from now on I will go to shows, but I won’t talk to them.” But that’s part of it, that rush of waiting to talk to someone who has become larger than life, and then the sweetness of finding that they are still just a real person, someone you could imagine yourself being friends with.

Carolyn Fryberger

Thanks again to Carolyn and Ginger both for contributing to the Tent Revue.

On the Trail of the Dave Rawlings Machine, part 1

2010-02-25T13:40:00.015-05:00

Earlier this month, my friends Ginger Kowal and Carolyn Fryberger spent a few days following the The Dave Rawlings Machine along the end of their tour in the great Northwest. Ginger and Carolyn are the founders of the Dave Rawlings Machine Fan Club -- and, I think I can say, friends of Dave and Gil as well. I asked them to write about their trek for the Tent Revue, and they both sent me wonderful pieces -- not only descriptive but thoughtful and interesting as well. I think you'll enjoy them. I'm going to draw this out a little, and post Carolyn's writing tomorrow. Here is what Ginger wrote for us.

(Thanks to Lindsey Best for letting me use her photographs of the Dave Rawlings Machine in these entries!)

I think you could say that David Rawlings had something to let out of his system. All of those years of standing quietly beside Gillian Welch, melding his small voice delicately and perfectly with hers, interjecting little brilliant scales on his guitar carefully between the verses of her meticulously arranged songs, smiling shyly to the cheering crowd with a small nod after each solo, he must have built up some steam. I don’t think that Dave was having a bad time as the second hand in the two-man Gillian Welch band, but when you give this man a banjo and a small group of slightly rambunctious young men to play onstage with, something kind of wild emerges.

I remember when Carolyn and I first started following the Machine around the Southeast back in December of 2006, when it was still a one-off sort of experiment executed in small dingy venues at midnight, after the regularly scheduled show. Dave used to tip up onto his toes during his guitar breaks, like he was trying to reach something with his solo that was just slightly beyond him. While he was singing he would reach up for notes that both he and the audience knew he had small chance of hitting. During the shows these days he will sometimes ramp the band up to a tempo that they can just barely keep up with. Sometimes he will flail at his poor little guitar like he wants to beat something monstrous out of it. It’s not that Dave is limited. (Ha!) It’s just that he seems to want to play always harder, faster, higher, louder, more, more, more. No wonder he sometimes almost collapses backwards from the microphone after a solo. It must be exhausting to be straining towards something incredible all the time. (It is intoxicating to watch.)

If Gillian once called her approach “selective deconstructionism,” then I think the Dave Rawlings Machine is guided by a general explosiveness. Gillian said that she plays rock music, pared down to its most bare and raw elements. Dave seems to be able to take music from nearly any source or style and ramp it up to something spectacular. Witness “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”; “Monkey and the Engineer”; “Stop Dragging My Heart Around”; they are performing “Hot Corn Cold Corn” at their shows! All turn into alternately foot-stomping or heart-stopping masterpieces onstage. Having a full band up there, Ketch on fiddle, Morgan on bass, Willie on guitar and harmony vocals, expands Dave’s already formidable energy and intensity into a thundering old-time locomotive. Dave still plays like a one-man band, using his little Epiphone to fill in all possible harmonies and textures, seemingly attempting to strike as many strings as possible and create as much sound from that little guitar as possible, but having the boys around him just makes it all bigger.

Dave’s voice still expands unconsciously into Gillian’s when she joins him in harmony. Perhaps he is still just a little uncomfortable with his voice out there all by itself. Besides, imagine! if you sounded so completely perfect singing with someone else, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable singing together than on your own? The rapport with Gillian is still there, a solid base to this wild new band, a strong and beautiful joining of voices and talents that seems to keep Dave grounded. To hear them sing “Throw Me A Rope” together at the very center of the show, a deep well of darkness and nearly unspeakable beauty in the heart of that display of energy and excitement coming from an unstoppable Machine... well. It’s unspeakably beautiful. It always has been. I’m glad it’s still there.

Some artists have a style or a sound to sell, and that’s what they give you at their shows. You get to see a product, a finished thing. At Dave’s shows you witness the creation of the product. He’s selling tickets to watch the product taking form. It’s different every night; I guess this is one reason you can go to several shows one after the other and be completely entertained every time. He doesn’t ever seem to be content with playing anything the same way he has before. Each time around a song will have a different arrangement, a different sequence, a different resting spot here, a different crescendo and climax there. He’s able to bring the band along with him in his improvisation – you can see him direct them with a nod or a shout to start something new on the spot. They seem to enjoy it. There is an air of spontaneity and surprise, and yet security that I suppose only comes along with the trust of having played a nearly complete tour together.

...The effect on the audience? In Portland the band was called onstage for four lengthy encores. The people just wouldn’t stop cheering. As for my more personal perspective, I can tell you that Dave Rawlings Machine kind of makes me feel like dropping out of school and dedicating myself to following the Machine full-time. If anyone out there has some good ideas about why a graduate degree is more important than the joy of watching Dave Rawlings perform onstage night after night, I would love to hear them. Get them to me quick before I become a professional Machinehead.

Ginger Kowal

Lissie

2010-02-15T15:51:00.013-05:00

Wanting to hear something new, sometime around Thanksgiving last year, for a few weeks I awakened my old sleeping eMusic membership, and clicking though recommendations and member lists and free-associatin' links, I ran across this recent EP, Why You Runnin', by this singer called Lissie. I listened to a couple of samples. It was the Hank Williams cover that hooked me. And once I had listened to the rest of these tunes, I was good and caught.

I'm not the only one. I went looking around to see what this kid was all about, and uncovered an artist on the cusp of really hitting it big. As much as an artist can be "on the cusp" who has already sung on a Grammy-nominated single. Well whatever, Grammy nod or no, I hadn't heard of her and you hadn't either, right? But just as I did hear of her, she was doing Paste showcases, she was debuting on World Cafe, she was doing her second Daytrotter session, she was booking tour dates in London. She is on her way, and all there is for us to do is stand aside and watch her.

She is Lissie Maurus, from Rock Island, Illinois, based now in Los Angeles. I'd guess she's around twenty-three years old, but that is just a guess. Her Facebook fan page has 2,263 fans, which, while not Lady Gaga, makes her a sight more fanned than plenty of better-established artists I've added on the FB. She's a go-getter, you can just tell. There's a palpable fire in her singing and in her stage presence. She is earnest -- emphatically, sometimes painfully. You get the feeling that she could get hurt, way out there like that. You watch her because you like her voice, and because she's ridiculously photogenic, but also because you sort of worry for her. It wouldn't be hard, you think, for someone to lead her down the wrong path -- and not necessarily with bad intentions -- and with all that momentum, all that propulsion that's just built into her personality, she could find herself, in a hurry, way down at the end of a road she didn't ever mean to be on. You sort of want to pray for her safe arrival as a mature artist. Or maybe that's just me.

I don't always like the raspy voiced singers. I don't like Concrete Blonde. Something about Lissie's rasp though really snags me. It feels like how Bob Dylan described Roscoe Holcomb -- an untamed sense of control. There's an exactness to her rasp, but as well as she seems to know her voice, as carefully phrased as her readings are, sometimes she does lose her grip on the reins, and that voice runs away with her. Listen here, to her tune "Everywhere I Go," on this Daytrotter session. All goes as rehearsed until the bridge at about 2:20, when she reaches for an improvised falsetto, trips and tumbles. She doesn't seem to know that she's lost control. She leans into the fall, she puts all her weight behind this misstep, she owns it -- and her broken melody achieves an effect of emotional bareness that PJ Harvey and Portishead have spent their careers practicing for. This is what I mean about Lissie's painful earnestness. About how you could worry for her. Even though she doesn't really sing about anything yet, her voice is enough for now, her medium message enough until she does find something to write about. You don't just listen to her, you listen for her. You are impressed, but you flinch. Does she know how naked she sounds up there? Did she mean to fall down like that? Was that real? Is she OK?

Birdie Blog

2010-02-10T11:51:00.005-05:00

Singer-songwriter Birdie Busch has a new blog that I've been following. She writes little essays about her Bohemian life in Philadelphia. I like the way she looks at the world, sunny and uncynical but too sly to seem naive, and with a poet's affection for the derelict and the small. I like her limpid, bemused prose. You get the sense of someone lifting something fragile from a pile of rubble, and carrying it home, daydreaming.

Check her out: http://birdiebusch.blogspot.com/

Also check out her recent album, Pattern of Saturn, or any of her albums, really. They are all full of catchy, tiny, twangy pop tunes about how sad we all are, and how happy we could probably be -- unwinding here and there with a big crashing rock number that Birdie rides out like a happy gull in a hurricane. At first she comes across a little sweeter, and a lot cuter, than I normally like my singer-songwriters, but her voice is so weird and disarming, so homespun, with its breaking wobbly phrasing, she manages to cut the sweetness in a way that, say, Iris Dement just isn't able to do ... without alienating all but the most adventurous listeners, as the Freak Folk folks often seem to want to do.

Holden

2010-01-29T11:03:00.002-05:00

What the detractors don't get is that it's not Holden's privileged adolescent complaining, not his lousy spoiled attitude, that makes him such an indelible, lasting, loved character -- although, frankly, his bitching and moaning is the most hilarious and heartfelt in literature. But what really sticks, what changed me, personally, the reason I go back to Catcher again and again, is the way he loves the world around him, without quite understanding that he does, but showing his love through his description of it -- his "DIGRESSION!" In phrases he coins like "rollerskate skinny"; the way Allie's hair was so red Holden sensed that if he turned around, Allie would be standing behind him; the feel of a skate key in his hands; a jazz record called "Little Shirley Beans"; the way the kettle drum player at Radio City was so attentive even though he only got to hit his drum once; the way Jay Gatsby was always calling people "old sport"; Jane Gallagher's kings in the back row, which despite what high school teachers insist is not so much an algebraic symbol for Jane's self-defense as just a sweet, cute thing that she did that made Holden happy when he thought about it; the way girls, "every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are." It's a way of relating to the world, of experiencing and loving the world, that is distinctly literary -- and encompasses, contains, all of his disgust and his crushing melancholy. It is poetry. He felt the tiniest things so fully, and he didn't know how to handle it, because he was just a kid.

There's a new album out this week.

2009-11-18T16:04:00.001-05:00

Early christmas present

2008-12-17T08:09:00.005-05:00

From Anti- Records, a behind-the-scenes-of-Middle-Cyclone video.

Streamin Eilen

2008-12-05T10:42:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking about baking up a new banner image, but I probably won't get around to it. I'd love to Photoshop this blog's long, majestic/goofy name onto some kind of a wood- or linocut print of something spooky and musical and Americana. I'd take up relief printmaking myself, but let's be honest. I never even finished my 2005 top ten. (While we're dreaming, though, I've long considered, and am now again, making this an MP3 blog or podcast or something. So we can listen to songs and then talk about them. But besides being lazy, I have ethical issues with file sharing. Though I'll admit those scruples are mysteriously dissipating at about the same rate as my discretionary income.)

Anyway. Did I mention that I saw Eilen Jewell & her band in October? Well, I did. It was the first full set I've caught from Eilen, and it was excellent. Her rapport with the audience is so calm and easy, I'd guess a skill picked up from her busking days. Songs the band has played probably a couple hundred nights in the last year still feel fresh and energetic. They played a couple of new tunes, including a terrific garage-rocky number called "Sea of Tears."

If you haven't caught the Eilen Jewell Band yet, here's just what you've been missing:

http://www.folkalley.com/music/livefrom/eilen_jewell

That's a full 1.5 hour set for your streaming pleasure. You can't download it without forking over $60 for membership, but the stream sounds good and is safe for the cube or the littluns. Eilen's voice takes a couple of songs to warm up, so stick with it at least until the giddy Jerry Miller guitar break at about 10 minutes, and then see if you're not wholly on board. Oh yeah and listen for the aforementioned garage-rock tune at about 1:10:00, and the complementing 60's pop cover at about 1:19:00 -- both of which suggest, I think, an artist really growing into her own voice and a comfortable ensemble itching to explore their varied interests. I'm guessing, pretty presumptiously, that you won't be seeing the names Gillian or Lucinda in any but the laziest reviews of Eilen's next record, which she says we'll see in the spring.

Oh shit.

2008-12-02T15:05:00.002-05:00

I just realized all my pictures are gone, my web banner and signature and so forth, like busted-out windows in the house where nobody lives. Well I do still live here, in the dark with the mice and the owls, and now I'm gonna have to see about getting the pictures replaced. And maybe the roof too.

2008-12-02T14:51:00.002-05:00

Neko Case + 200-yr-old barn + "piano orchestra" = good news from Paste.

I think it's awesome that a poor young woman can get rich enough to buy a farm in Vermont by making spooky music with Bigsby-bent guitar lines all reverbed out, and oblique lyrics about the ghosts of woodland animals. I wonder if a poor young guy can get rich enough to buy a farm in Iowa by blogging about her.

Well, anyway. In the meantime, I'm trying to think of what albums were new this year that I would put in the "best of" stall at the county fair. I don't think I'm gonna come up with ten. Help me out.

2008-09-24T14:56:00.002-05:00

I review the new one from Old Crow Medicine Show. It ain't pretty.

http://www.hickorywind.org/001884.php

A new Gillian Welch album, a Fiddler's Convention, some reductive rumination ... It's the Tent Revue's greatest hits!

2008-07-11T13:55:00.005-05:00

I'm here in blog limbo (where all the blogs that died before their first post go). We canceled internet at home, downscaling the budget like everyone else who isn't Myspace friends with Dick Cheney, so until the WPA starts hiring music bloggers, I'm posting less often, and when I do it's on another man's dime.

Firstly, a very big thanks to Günter at the blog It Was Colonel Mustard for the very nice thing he's done for the Tent Revue. I gotta think on't before I get more specific, and I will soon.

*

Last month we visited the Mt Airy Fiddler's Convention, and were disappointed to find not much going on. Maybe four vendors had come out to pitch their tents and hawk their wares, and two of them were selling food. Last year a variety of instrument vendors hosted all sorts of pick-up jams all round the periphery of the mainstage, where the pretty monotonous instrument competitions proceeded throughout the day, until the sun set and the main event -- band competitions -- launched. This year the midway was bare and quiet.

Also low in attendance: Bluegrass bands. Fewer than ten appeared, compared to last year's many, many competitors. Maybe a couple dozen Old-Time bands turned out this year to compete, which is what we came to hear, and I loved to listen to them ... but while I'm not a big fan of Bluegrass music, it's still sad to me that those pickers couldn't round up the gas-money to travel to the convention. I'm sure it's a result of fuel prices, in cooperation with food costs, healthcare costs, and so forth, and suggests to me a rift between the essential Bluecollarness of Bluegrass musicians and what's perhaps a more middle-class/information-worker tendency among the new Old-Timey set.

Of course, I'm an Old-Time youngster myself, and there's no room in my budget for an M.F.A., a Plasma TV, a hybrid car, or even broadband -- so what do I know. On the other hand again, I do have a bachelor's degree, work in a cubicle and there's no mud on the soles of my shoes. My high school friends are all buying big suburban houses and shop at Whole Foods, so maybe the difference is milieu and not income bracket. Old-Time music is more romantic (by way of Gothic) and less sentimental about rural living and manual labor than Bluegrass is. Old-Time music -- even reanimated by the likes of Old Crow Medicine Show, the Crooked Jades, the Mammals -- is a ghost genre, like silent film. It continues to wow and influence and some artists can still specialize in its techniques. But Bluegrass lives and breathes and breeds and continues to mutate and evolve like, say, Film Noir. If Bluegrass is meat-and-potatoes, Old-Time provides smoke and mirrors for those of us who need a little spooky reflection in our cube-shaped lives.

Which maybe makes ironic the paucity of Bluegrass at this year's Fiddler's Convention, and the surplus of Old-Time acts. But if you consider that as life everywhere grows more and more expensive for the people already less able to afford it, small-time musical acts will tour less and live music will by necessity become, as it was until recently in human history, a largely local affair. Parlors, front porches, and town square bandstands, with internet lyric sites substituting for broadsheet ballads -- while recorded music becomes more and more global. It'll be interesting to watch the diverging, changing tunes of the studio fiddler and the town-square fiddler, as Rome, or Constitutional democracy, burns.

Anyway.

Before I duck back into the tent I also wanted to point out news from a few of the Revue's favorite artists. Jolie Holland's new record, the excitingly characteristically morbidly titled The Living And the Dead will emerge from the dank basements of the collective unconscious on October 7th. Prepare yourself: the label's press release points out the presence of Moog synth. Which I think is awesome.

One of Eilen Jewell's side projects, trad-gospel act The Sacred Shakers, will release their first record August 16th ("Much sooner" on the label's website), but word on the Google alerts is that Eilen, whose band is on tour right now, is selling advanced copies at her shows. Eilen's getting more popular by the hour, folks, so catch her while you can.

Lastly: Ginger Kowal, co-founder of the Dave Rawlings Machine fan-club and friend of the Tent Revue, had a chance to chat with Gillian and Dave when they stopped in Asheville last month, and she learned first-hand from Gillian that the new Gillian Welch album -- and there is one coming -- will probably not land on your iPod until 2009, thanks to record label red tape. I don't have any more details for you, but you should go join the DRM fan club on Facebook and get the full scoop from Ginger.

2008-05-26T19:01:00.001-05:00

From my personal stash: a Muxtape of Gillian Welch live tunes, including rare originals and covers. If you've never heard Gil do "Snowing On Raton," then my friend, you've never heard "Snowing On Raton."

http://tentrevuegillianwelch.muxtape.com/

I didn't edit out any of the stage banter, so you get the true live experience. Some of the banter is pretty good, such as the intro to "Dusty Boxcar Wall" and the banter following "Single Girl, Married Girl."

Yes, and "Throw Me a Rope" is on there too. So what are you waiting for?

Tent Revue Muxtape

2008-03-29T16:14:00.004-05:00

Thanks a bunch to Flop Eared Mule for showing us this cool site. Now you can hear just what the Tent Revue sounds like. Click on the tape!

The white boy and the country blues

2008-02-22T15:48:00.014-05:00

I'm happy to see that after several months of silence, Yuval Taylor has resurrected his blog Faking It with a response to this Newsweek article by David Gates about white kids' self-satisfying, myth-making fandom of the old country blues, and that fandom's relationship to, or underpinnings of, blackface minstrelsy.

Gates concludes that white fandom of Delta blues boils down to: "a voyeuristic vampirism, feeding itself on another's delicious pain."

And he says that like it's a bad thing. But doesn't that "vampirism" account for a big part of the allure of experiencing any art?--heightening and intensifying and exploring or even briefly escaping our emotions by sucking like a lozenge on an exaggerated representation of someone else's emotions? I think that fetishising the misery you may hear in the country blues is not so unlike swooning to the exaltation of, say, "Ode to Joy." (Gates's implied argument that the experience of performing a country blues song is more miserable than the experience of creating happier music is awfully presumptive, and Yuval points out that the presumption is its own form of romanticizing the suffering of black Americans.) The already bottomless tangle of black/white American race relations gives this particular instance of vampirism its fangs, but I wonder if the desire to imbibe the pain encoded in art can't be extricated from racism far enough that it can be understood, even in the case of the country blues, as not a bad thing.

'Course, I'm a youngish white guy who grew up more or less middle-class, and I love the country blues. The weirder and more mysterious (though not necessarily more pained) the better. So maybe my reaction is the reflex defensiveness of a vampire shown his reflection.

So I'm thinking harder about it.

I first came to the blues when I was 14 and my piano teacher taught me the I-IV-V progression and the E-blues scale. That year, a friend from school grew excited about Robert Johnson after an HBO viewing of -- oh yes -- Crossroads (that ultimate self-satisfying myth-making paternalist Orientalization of the blues and general Mississippi blackness), and my friend got hold of the Complete boxed set of cassette tapes. I remember, before having watched the movie myself, sitting with him in his basement, browsing the lyrics booklet for interesting-looking songs, then fast-forwarding the tape to find them. I remember hearing, for the first time, "Come On In My Kitchen." Looking at the lyrics. The hair on my neck raising at the sound of that bottleneck guitar. The keening verses and the crackle of the masters. I'd never heard anything like it. I felt as though I had put my ear to a wall on the other side of which was another fucking world, a shadowy, mysterious, fever dream distortion of my world. The sensation was of black thick crude oil bubbling up from my unconscious. And I remember that very night that my friend and I flipped past the Allman Brothers on MTV Unplugged, playing "Come On In My Kitchen" -- a coincidence that engraved the whole experience with the finality of revelation. We might've watched Crossroads that weekend, or the next weekend, and I guess I liked it, but the truth is I hardly remember it, while I still remember the exact fucking moment I heard the vocal/bottleneck doubled opening of "Come On In My Kitchen." It's still my favorite Robert Johnson song. My friend outgrew the country blues pretty quickly. I never did.

I know that to suggest that my introduction to country blues occurred in a vacuum is ridiculous. I was 14, and white, it was the 1980s, I had watched hours of TV every day, including re-rums of Gimme a Break and Good Times, all those Tom & Jerry cartoons with the big-legged Mammy chasing old Tom-cat out of the kitchen with a broom. I was acculturated as hell, I admit it. And as I grew a little older and started looking into the music on my own I certainly flirted with the specious idea of "authenticity" in blues. But I can tell you that my initial fetishising of the mystery in the sound of the country blues, still its most magnetic feature to me, was not racial.

Now, pastoral -- OK, yeah. My parents came from the country, central Illinois, a flatland of cornfields and small town streets that grew so still and spooky in limpid moonlight that I was afraid to shut my eyes or to open them. I spent whole summers out there, like Ishmael at sea, and attended funerals there in the winter, and I think that, since I first felt it with "Come On In My Kitchen," I've been looking for more music that returns me to my childhood impression that mystery and magic and weird dangers skulked in the poker-faced cornrows and along the lakeshores at night. This Grimms' Americana is, of course, not a new idea, but that only cements my feeling that it truly exists, even if it never existed -- part of the fabric of American memory, if not my own memory.

Now, European romanticizing of the pastoral predates American racism by, what, thousands of years, right? Along with the blues, Native American culture, hillybilly music, and lately in indie "folk" rock Eastern European gypsy music, just extend similar Orientalization of the rural (prelapsarian) "other." The African-American pastoral is uniquely thorny, poisoned and tangled at the very root, because its seed is, of course, slavery.

Though that at 14 I recognized Robert Johnson's music as rural suggests some cultural associations, again I don't believe that the blackness of the singer influenced my experience of the blues until much later.

Making Notes

2008-02-01T14:04:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I talk a lot of trash about Charlotte. About how it's culturally bombed-out. How the region overflows with banker tools choking up the roads and the sky with their corny SUV's. About how the city is sprawling crime-ridden ugly and all the history is paved over to make room for more more more overpriced faux-industrial loft condos for the overpaid banker tools. About how Inland Empire didn't play here, though it played in Columbia, SC (WTF?). And most of all about how most of the bands I want to see only stop here to fuel up the van between Asheville and Carrboro -- and who can blame them, as when they do schedule a date with the Queen City, the Queen City stands them up?

Well all that is true, yes. But now I feel compelled to say -- and not only because they're publishing my essay in one of their books -- I feel compelled to say that the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County is pretty cool. I check their books out frequently, and so does my wife, and so does my kid. Right now I'm reading Drop City by T.C. Boyle, which I checked out yesterday. I just got an e-mail that an Alec Wilkinson book I've reserved is ready to be picked up. There's a whole big library uptown just for kids. The main grown-up library uptown, its exterior decorated with subversive and inspirational quotes about literature and free speech, impressed Cowboy Junkies when they stopped here last year. The library presents free film series and holds an impressive Festival of Reading (though it's lamentably and, for po' folks like me, prohibitively expensive, unlike the Decatur's superior festival, all of whose readings are free free free, but hey, whatever). Oh and they also publish some handsome books under the imprint Novello Festival Press. It's clear that, though the rest of Charlotte may have all the culture of a Wal-Mart parking lot, the people who work at the Library care about what they do and where they live.

One handsome book that Novello Festival Press will publish in April is titled Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas. Which you can pre-order from the distributor's web site. And if I were you, I'd take that very action.

"Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #7, #8, and #9

2008-01-30T16:04:00.000-05:00

Sorry I've been remiss about these. Here are some more. Dan writes:

I saw Gillian Welch for the first time after a Cardinals game at a club in St. Louis a couple of months back. My friend had gotten the tickets and was really juiced to go but, I wasn't really sure who she was. It wasn't until I saw her live in concert that I realized that I have enjoyed her voice many times before on the "O Brother Where Art Thou" soundtrack and her duets with Ryan Adams. Since the concert I have been in love with her voice and have purchased many of her Cds. I had never heard this new song, "Throw Me a Rope," until last night when I was watch her concert at St. Luke's in London and now I can't get it out of my head.

Emma generously shares with us this terrific coming of age vignette:

I guess I'll fall for your ruse--I'll swap you my Gillian Welch writing for your recording of a song which I have only heard through the grapevine is a must-have. Gladly. I'm in the library of my college at a tiny wooden carrel with the window open and freezing Maryland air blowing in on me but I can't bring myself to close the window and I
have a half hour or so to kill before I really need to get down to homework business.

HOW I FOUND GILLIAN WELCH [AND, SOMEWHAT, MYSELF] or TRYING TO PUT OFF HOMEWORK FOR THE SAKE OF ONE DARN MP3

I don't know when I first heard of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. For brevity's sake, I'll say it was about 4 years ago, when I was 14, though I think it was earlier. I started taking guitar lessons from a woman named Toy. Toy was from Louisiana and had a sweet singing voice with a twang I now covet and loved music with that same twang.

I was 14 and though I'd lived my whole life in the south, wanted nothing to do with it. I'd implore my parents to turn off anything that, to me, sounded "too country". My father listened alternately to dry, sarcastic indie rock and classic- and alt-country like George Jones, Whiskeytown and Lucinda Williams. I hated it. I hated southern accents, I hated hot summers, I hated sweet tea and I hated that I lived in North Carolina. Even the 'north' filled me with anger--why couldn't we be a stand alone state instead some god-forsaken redneck place that was really just a sad-sack half of Carolina?

In any case, Toy loved Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. I seem to remember her traveling a great distance to see them in concert and how wowed she was the next guitar lesson, which I did not understand at all. She made me a CD of her favorite songs which I listened to once and then discarded [how I wish I could find that CD now]. Too country was my refrain all the time. I associated it all with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and had no idea of the finer shades of this sweet southern music--old time, bluegrass, creole music, whatever. It was all "too country". Toy tried to find some "not so country" songs to teach me but in the last few lessons she snuck a Gillian Welch song in there. I don't even remember what it was, now, but I can still half play it, unrecognizable to me.

I got older. I started to look at colleges, growing less and less certain that I wanted to leave the state. My friends and I slowly fell into an allegiance with our hometown, just before we were to leave it, which grew into love for our state and soon enough the southeastern US and everything it entailed. I learned to love sweet tea and all of a sudden, the only thing that was "too country" was Tim McGraw. I took up the banjo and we wasted countless hours trying to figure out Old Crow Medicine Show lyrics. I checked out the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk music from the library and forced myself to listen to all 6 discs until I understood a little better where it all was coming from. Hearing it leak from my headphones, my roommates here at school dismissed it all as 'too country' for their tastes. I simply turned it up louder and and shook my head.

I kept reading about and hearing about Gillian Welch, kept putting her on my list of things to buy, eventually, when I wasn't such a poor high school student. I've never been that crazy about female vocalists, but I loved the snippets I had heard, and everything else I listened to seemed to lead back to Gillian and David--David produced an album I liked or Gillian Welch and David appeared on my favorite Ryan Adams records, whatever. I began my hunt in earnest [and oh, how this embarrasses me to say] when I heard in a radio interview a few weeks ago that Jill Andrews of The Everybodyfields, a band I love, say that she counted her as a big inspiration. I figured I should get will versed and downloaded a smattering of eight songs.

For three weeks now, I have listened to nothing else. I asked some friends which songs I should get next, with no car and no easy way to a record store. One said Throw Me a Rope, so here I am. As soon as I can, though, it will be my first purchase, even though I now already have many of her songs.

I could go on and on, about the Gillian Welch concert I missed to attend a horrific senior prom, or the way my friend and I puzzled over the hard G/soft G pronounciation of Gillian, or the time we watched Old Crow Medicine Show's Wagon Wheel video again and again just to see David Rawlings, but I think this is more than enough. Sorry.

I am in college in Maryland and have been here for only 2 months. I'm growing increasingly sure that it is not the right place for me and as the seasons grow colder, I only get more and more homesick for the home I once maligned. I don't have much of a drawl, not as much of one as I'd like, anyways, but get teased for the slight accent I have and southern phrases I have held fast to. In Gillian's sweet voice, despite her California Girl roots, I hear echoes of my home and a rich tradition of music I always rejected. I guess that's all there is to say... just that when I hear these songs I think to myself that "But I missed those hills with the windy pines/for their song seemed to suit me..."

And Tommy tells a story of meeting Gil & Dave that legitimizes the song title "Throw Me a Rope" ... and the Tent Revue's speakeasy distribution of the MP3.

So my story with Gillian goes like this:

I was familiar with her only by name and her work in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" That is, until I visited my sister in Lexington, KY last November. It was then that, as we walked by The Dame (a rockin' awesome venue in downtown Lexington) that my sister suddenly said, "Oh, Dave Rawlings is going to be here this week. It says 'with special guest'...I wonder if Gillian is playing, too?" Well, those might not be her exact words, but that's the gist. So we went to the concert, and much to my delight I was in awe of them during the whole show. But my favorite part of the show was a song that, not knowing the actual name of it, I coined "the pretty unison song." I tried as hard as I could to find out the name of it, but to no avail.

A few days later, I moved back to Birmingham, AL, where the Dave Rawlings Machine was scheduled to play in a couple of weeks. I bought two tickets but ended up going alone to the show. I'm glad I did, though, because I saw some old friends there, and it also kept me free to stay late after the show and talk to Gillian and Dave. Dave, being as humble as he is, was stoked that he had met someone who had come to TWO "Machine" shows on its first tour. After I had them sign the CD I had just purchased, I asked Dave and Gillian what the name of "that pretty unison song" was that they played in Lexington. They said it had two names, "Throw Me a Rope," and "The Way It Would Be." They said that it hadn't been released on any recording, but I might be able to find it on the net somewhere as a bootleg. So I tried, but once again got nothing.

Now it's a year later, and I joined a Facebook group that led me to your blog and offer. I can't tell you how excited I am to hear the song again!

Thanks folks for contributing!

Still more to come.

Self-congratulation!

2008-01-19T19:32:00.000-05:00

I just learned that my short appreciation essay, "Link Wray," has been selected for publication in a Music of the Carolinas anthology to be released in the Spring by Novello Festival Press, a publishing imprint of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

I developed the essay from a short entry I posted here when Link Wray died, a couple of years ago (though I removed the post from here when I decided to work it up for submission). Usually associated with D.C., where his career found its legs, Link Wray was born in the I-95 truck stop town of Dunn, NC, where a circus performer named Hambone introduced an 8-yr-old Link to the blues.

If you wanna read more, buy the book! I'll post more details when I get 'em.

Brendan's 2007 lists

2008-01-04T15:20:00.000-05:00

My favorite new albums of 2007, some disappointing new albums of 2007, and a few favorite discoveries from years past. Cross-posted at HickoryWind.org.

Top 8 Albums of 2007

8. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings: 100 Days, 100 Nights
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings continue to do that thing they do. I'm the last to catch on as usual, but happy I caught on at all. Now I have to catch up.

7. Mighty Ghosts of Heaven: Mighty Ghosts of Heaven
Mighty Ghosts of Heaven call up Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Moonshine Kate on the Ouija board of an open-back banjo, and take a roll in the hay with Old-Time string band music, and they do it with so much joy and verve it's impossible not to remember that some of our smilingest moon-faced moonshine music came out of a Great Depression.

6. The Sadies: New Seasons
The Sadies zero in on their heretofore neglected deftness with lyric and melody and come up with their first album that doesn't sag or lag between peaks in their instrumental acrobatics. Pure distilled Bigsby-bent energy.

5. PJ Harvey: White Chalk
Polly takes it down a notch and delivers her strongest album since To Bring You My Love.

4. Nina Nastasia & Jim White: You Follow Me
Nina overcomes partner Jim White's Throw-My-Drums-Down-the-Stairs technique to deliver the strongest PJ Harvey album since Rid of Me.

3. Josh Ritter: The Historical Conquests of ...
"The Temptation of Adam" threatens to crack beneath the weight of its cleverness. Each progressively cute couplet creaks the rafters. But that last line is so haunting, so chilling -- both beautiful and horrifying. With that tune and the rollicking first track, Josh reminds us that right up to apocalypse, be it Biblical or nukular (or both, as our case might be), boys and girls will continue to fall in love and sing songs to get each other into bed. That assertion of the essentially carnal human spirit, both gentle and animal, is comforting in this gloomy age of the decline of our empire.

2. Eilen Jewell: Letters From Sinners & Strangers
Eilen, with a voice made of liquor and wildflowers and a band of crack sidemen that would comfortably back either Patsy Cline or Rose Maddox, uncovers an astonishing treasure of melodies from the same three-chord creek in which American songsters have been panning for gold a century or longer.

1. Wilco: Sky Blue Sky
Yeah, it's sort of a boring pick. I didn't mean for it to be my favorite 2007 album. But I put it on the car stereo around Christmastime, for the first time since the early Summer, and I realized that I knew all the words to all the songs, and felt as though I always had. I think it's no coincidence that on the heels of their tour promoting this record, which itself plays like a career retrospective, Wilco have forted up at home in Chicago to play through their entire back catalogue, one album at a time. Sky Blue Sky feels like the end of a decade-long ride, and I'm curious as hell to see where they go next.

* * *

Disappointing Albums of 2007

Grant-Lee Phillips's half-baked Strangelet disappointed, too heavy on the rocknroll drums and curiously light on the loving lyrical tangles that made Virginia Creeper Grant-Lee's best album before or after the Buffalo. For its stray moments of melodic invention (listen to the second line of the first track's chorus), and for its bombast that suggests Buffalo nostalgia, I considered tacking Strangelet on for a number 9. I would still follow Phillips's luxurious and raggedy voice over the edge of a waterfall, but comparing Strangelet to similar artist Josh Ritter's pretty amazing Historical Conquests ... they just aren't in the same league. C'mon, G-L, you can do better.

Meanwhile, with At the End of Paths Taken, Cowboy Junkies made a third much-diminished return to their 2001 peak album Open. They do this every six or seven years: one great album and its several receding ripples. Maybe their next record will make the next big splash.

After their deeply affecting previous two albums, Okkervil River's The Stage Names felt flimsy and forced to me, unable to sustain the weight of its own whininess.

And if I may indulge a moment in contrarian blogger snark: The Everybodyfields? Somebody hand these kids a mop. Jesus Christ. I agree that life is full of suffering -- but damp, lacy Victorian bathos like Nothing Is Okay is partly why.

* * *

5 eMusic Explorations

Why top 8? Well I'm sure there'd have been two more new albums I'd have loved this year if I had heard them, but I spent so much time riffling around in eMusic's dusty shelves and drawers and shadowy eaves, I think I ought to spend some space reporting on a few of the nuggets I discovered there this year.

Band of Blacky Ranchette: "Getting It Made"
Howe Gelb's oddball country music side project wobbles in quality across a full album, but Neko Case's gusty melodic contribution to this country-pop tune made it one of my iPod favorites this year.

Alela Diane: "Dry Grass and Shadow"
A hay-flavored slice of New Weird American pie, Diane's honey-sunny apple orchard voice turns her words over and over to taste their consonants and connotations. Her album The Pirate's Gospel wears itself out early thanks to the sameness of its bare-guitar texture, but this fully fleshed single is an expert-cut little gem.

Corrina Repp: "Safe Place in the World"
Somewhere I read that she's a combination Neko Case and Portishead, so, you know -- I was right there. Turns out Repp is more Nico than Neko: cold and alien, though still dampened enough by rainy Northwestern hominess to soften her snooty Mod influences. She tends toward moody more than groovy, but this tune grooves in its spacey way, like Nancy Sinatra heard through Martian underwater radio.

Simon Joyner: "You Don't Know Me"
Soul-scarringly bleak, this Bright Eyes forebear sings like Lou Reed if Lou Reed were an Omaha hobo. The backing band sound like Patti Smith's band on Horses, hard-edged, strung-out and hungry, only with cowboy hats. Oh but there's so much jaw-dropping poetry and honest emotion brimming across the whole despair-dazed record, it's worth plumbing the unremitting grimness. Just don't listen to it if you're already feeling lousy, because it will stifle your last breath of hope. Oh and don't listen to it if you're in a good mood, because its pelt of freezing rain will break up your parade and follow you home and into your bed and beneath your covers and into your dreams. Powerful stuff.

Karen Dalton: "Same Old Man"
The late Middle Weird America matron too late catching a piece of long-owed recognition in 2007, thanks to eMusic's promotion and a spot on Oxford American's Southern Music CD, Dalton worked mainly on pedal steeled-up Memphis soul, to uneven results, ranging from exemplary to what my wife rightly characterized as Bad Karaoke ("When a Man Loves a Woman"). But it's Dalton's pair of banjo tunes on this cult classic album In My Own Time that rappel most deeply the steep misty face of Amerian folk music. The clawhammer "Katie Cruel" and up-picked "Same Old Man" seem to belong to no time period at all, but only to the ground beneath their feet, reminding me most of Washington Irving's supernatural Alleghenia, sowed with the blood of warring Europeans and enslaved Africans and thousands of years of Native Americans, and growing these strange mushrooms, hallucinogenic and bitter.

"Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #5 & #6

2007-11-16T12:21:00.000-05:00

Folks, it pains me to say this, but I'm fixing to get sick of reading about Gillian Welch. So before I cross that line, I'm cutting off the MP3 offer for now. It may come back some day. I wish I could think of a way to honor, in the same fashion, other artists we love, but no other music I write about here generates the volume of Google referrals that "Throw Me a Rope" does. Except possibly, mysteriously to me, Critter Fuqua of Old Crow Medicine show. That's something I still mean to look into -- what's with the global Critter obsession? (If you're reading this because you followed a "Critter Fuqua" Google search to this post, please for Chrissake drop me a line and help me understand.)

Anyway, I have enough "Throw Me a Rope" guest entries to take us into the new year. I don't want to post them all in one batch, because I think that's unjust to the folks who spent time writing them, and I don't want to post them one after another, with none of my own entries between, because I don't want new visitors to this site to think I only feature Gillian Welch content. (I don't. Really. Scroll down!) Also it's sort of lazy to let other folks write my blog for me.

All right, so here are a couple more guest entries. Emily Amey writes:

why i love gillian welch (you too david) in 100 words or less...

like most people responding to this post, i fancy myself somewhat of a music aficionado. but when it comes to gillian and dave, my appreciation becomes more fanatical.

i've seen them a hand full of times.. at the beacon in NYC.. at the
newport folk festival (emmylou's mom got sick, and gillian and dave sat in for her.. it was the highlight of the day!!).. and at a TINY little old opera house in bum-fuck ohio.. each experience has touched me in a different way.

seeing them live, and recognizing the unspoken synergy that takes
place, is mesmerizing. each time it's different, but they know where
the other is going, and constantly keep up and compliment. i own every album, every song i can get my hands on.. (ryan adam duos included)...and i never tire.

i'm going through a tough spot.. these two have seen me through many before.. i need a little something!! a little something until the next album hits the shelves.

It's like heroin, isn't it? And Lacy Garrison tells a great story about the night he met the dynamic duo:

I saw Gillian Welch play at Carnegie Mellon University a few years ago. My friend Rob and I drove from New York City to Pittsburgh to see the show. Needless to say, the show amazing. After the show, Rob asked if I wanted to meet Gillian and David. We stood outside and waited. I was extremely nervous. We waited for seemingly forever before they came out of the building carrying their guitars. Rob walked over to them and said hi. I was dumbstruck. I don't remember what Rob said but they agreed to take pictures with us once they put their guitars in their bus. I was beside myself. I could barely say my name when I introduced myself. Rob and I patiently waited. They emerged from the van. Gillian walked over to Rob and me. Without pausing, she stood between us and put her arms around our waists. David surprised me. I never thought of him as an extrovert until he took Rob's camera and started snapping pictures of the three of us. I have the pictures in a box. I love them. Especially the one that David took from arm's length. It has David's face, Rob's face, Gillian's face, and my beaming, smiling face pressed against each other check-to-check.

Thanks you two! More to come.

Eilen Jewell on Venice Beach busking

2007-11-13T07:36:00.000-05:00

On Friday I interviewed Boston-based singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell, and wrote a feature on her for HickoryWind.org, which you can read here:

Eilen Jewell Has Arrived

Her record Letters From Sinners and Strangers is I think my most listened-to new album this year. Although in my story I sort of decry this exact facile comparison, fans of Gillian Welch (readers of this blog, in other words) will take much pleasure in Eilen's sepia-toned phrasing, either on the new record or last year's impressive, mournfully toned debut Boundary County, which with its sleepy tempos and whispered regrets and wide-open-spaciness compares, I think, to early Cowboy Junkies.

Betsy and I attended Eilen's show late Friday night. She opened for the Two Dollar Pistols, of Raleigh, whom we did not stick around to see because I'd been up since 5:30am and had a 100-degree fever. Still, I wish Eilen had headlined, and I was not the only one in the sizable crowd who did. The set flashed by, finished far too quickly. The tension between Eilen's energetic rockabilly band and her wry smoky vocals makes for a really compelling live sound. Her guitar-picker Jerry Miller lights up his orange Gretsch Round-Up like a lightning rod.

(Note: a few weeks ago I e-mailed Miller to ask whether he's the same Jerry Miller guitarist from 1960s psychadelic rock band Moby Grape. He isn't. When I met him on Friday I learned that not only am I not the first person to ask, but that at least one journalist has gone to print with an incorrect assumption.)

Anyway, it's probably not nice to say so, but I can't help suggesting that another up'n'coming young-woman-led alt-country act whom I reviewed here not too long ago could take a few or twenty lessons from Eilen Jewell and her ensemble.

I detained Jewell for longer than we'd planned, but she was focused and attentive, and very nice. Some of my favorite parts of the discussion -- specifically, an account of her summer spent busking at Venice Beach, CA -- just didn't work into the already long HickoryWind.org story, so I am going to post them here, informally:

Since doing that [Venice Beach], I haven't really been able to busk anyplace else. I got spoiled.

You do have to vie a bit [for a spot to busk]. It's a cool scene, because it's one of the few places in the country where there are just tons of street performers doing ... anything under the sun -- you name it: juggling chainsaws, playing their guitar ... but yet you don't have to get a permit and there's just no restrictions on it. I think that's just the coolest thing, that they still have that some place.

The trick is you'd have to get there bright and early, like almost ridiculously early on the weekends. Crack of dawn sometimes. To get a good spot. 'Cause it was all about the good spot. And then if you got that, you were pretty much set. Unless someone came and set up right next to you with a much louder amp or something.

The good spots were the ones where ... There were some people that were in the same places every day. Like certain people. I remember one guy was selling incense, and he was always at that corner, and another guy had an "atheist awareness" stand he had set up, or something along those lines. And you wanted to be next to the people who were friendly to musicians. That was key, 'cause some of them weren't into it, they didn't want to hear your music all day long. ... Generally the crossroads of the bike path and some other main street was a good way to go.

It was a lot of rolling with the punches, 'cause the first time you got there, you don't know what you're doing. Maybe you don't even have an amp 'cause you don't even know you're supposed to have one or that you're gonna need one, you know? It's just a learning process. You find out what makes you the most money, what doesn't work, who yells at you, who kicks you out of their spot 'cause you're just supposed to know it's their spot all the time. And it's full of characters too. Venice Beach is just ... it's just like ... I don't know if you've ever seen The Doors movie ... It's all like a big trip basically.

Well there's the chainsaw juggler. He always kind of kept things interesting. You know, when you say, "Oh yeah, there was a person just right down the street juggling chainsaws," you get kind of an idea about, "O.K., that's the kind of place it was."

I made friends with a lot of people who essentially just lived on the beach, and slept in the sand. And one of them was this great guy named Rollin [/Rowlin/Roland]. And I don't know if that was his real name, or if they called him that because he was always on a bicycle. Every day he would wake up, it must have been in the middle of the night practically, and he would go around the neighborhood and pick all the flowers he could, and he would cover his bike with flowers, and cover his head with flowers. He was just like a walking flower garden. And he would ride around on his bike, just the sweetest person ever.

One of my most vivid memories is standing there with my guitar in the middle of some song, and there's a small crowd kind of watching me, and Rollin rode by on his bicycle, and right as he rode by me he threw this huge basket of flower petals up in the air, and they all came raining down on me. It was one of the coolest things ever. I saved a lot of the flower petals, 'cause for some reason they dried really well. So for the longest time I had them in my guitar case as like a good luck thing.

Eilen plays Atlanta tonight, and then she's on to Florida, and finishes the year out west. Catch her when you can.

Gillian Welch ... Speed Demon: "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #3 & #4

2007-11-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

I'm slow at thinking up stuff to post between them, and so I'm falling behind on the Gillian Welch guest entries. So today I'm going to double up.

Annie T. of Ape Kabuki writes:

last night there was an out of the blue, kind-of-secret-in-that-it-wasn't-really-advertised and only 40 people were there, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings concert at Tangier in Los Feliz. they usually make it out to L.A every October, but they usually play at the Avalon, which is a much bigger venue. when they came out dave said, "welcome to the world's most informal gig."

the show was totally awesome. they did dylan covers and "tired eyes" and a beautiful robyn hitchcock cover "luminous rose," and they sang the same mysterious song they never put on a record plus i guess a new song of theirs called "knuckleball catcher," which was phenomenal. at one point dave was singing along with his playing under his breath just like glenn gould, and at another point he surprised himself with his genius and yelled, "jesus!"

i have decided that they are not alt-country or neo-country, they are modernist country. they take any song--even cindi lauper's "girls just wanna have fun"--and with their precision they distill it to its aching american essence, honing in on it like they're driving straight for it on a flat highway in texas. but shy and adorable at the same time. and so rangy.

but here's a spur of the moment poem for you;
red hair, cowboy boots
looking out past the screen door
into a field, a desert,
into stage lights,
quiet evening creeping
into our held breath
waiting, listening,
she bends her head
and his voice joins hers,
witchy from the darkened kitchen.

and an anecdote gillian told at the concert:
they were driving around l.a in their rented charger and some guys in their own classic car (i can't remember the make) pulled up next to them and kept on trying to get them to drag race. so over a couple of blocks out the window she learned they were scottish guys from aberdeen. and she said, "i woulda done it too, but if i get another speeding ticket, i lose my license."

Can't you just hear Gillian telling that story? Love it.

Carolyn Fryberger, who co-runs a Dave Rawlings Machine group over on the Facebook, shares with us a Cultural Event paper she wrote for one of her classes:

Why We Do What We Do:
Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and my Quarter Life Crisis

Tuesday April 24, 2007 marked a very important anniversary for me. Driving home from Nashville at 3 in the morning, as my mind drifted along the fuzzy edge of reality, watching east Tennessee farms fall away to the side of the road, I thought about how much has happened since the first time I saw Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in concert. Gillian and Dave’s music has become a medium through which I understand many of the experiences of my life; my choice to transfer from back home from what most would consider to be a prestigious school, the love that has come in and out of my life. She is able to take any experience, no matter how distant from my own, and make it understandable to me; in the process making the place of my own experiences more understandable in the world. She has changed the way I understand the feeling of home and the feeling of being myself.

Last year, going to Merlefest with my best friend Ginger marked the end of my first semester at UNCA, my first semester back in the area that I love. I was reeling with the weight of recent decisions, trying to figure out how to understand them as just a part of my life, rather than a definition of myself. It was at this festival that we both saw Gillian for the first time, a dream of ours since first being exposed to her music through friends and family. I had no idea at the time how much this show would change the feeling of the ensuing year, my understanding of myself, my motivations, and my friendship with Ginger. Since that first taste, I have traveled to seven Gillian Welch and David Rawlings shows, logging countless miles with my friend Ginger by my side. My understanding of Gillian and Dave’s music has deepened in ways I never knew possible, bringing with it a fuller understanding of myself and my goals. They bring me back to the deepest beauty of this world: the bittersweet experience of loving. Gillian and Dave have made me fall deeper in love with this world, and I have become wholly addicted to the experience of their shows.

The incredible emotional response they evoke from me makes the experience of their shows a kind of touchstone for other emotional experiences in my life. The meaning of most anything can be spun through their songs. This, I think, is the definitive purpose of artistic culture. At its best, art should be a medium through which we make sense of our experience in the world. We should allow ourselves to be changed both by the content, as well as the feeling of experiencing that content. There is no place in this world that I am as sure of myself as when I am riding home from a show in the middle of the night, overly caffeinated and preparing for a day of classroom delirium. This is the place where no questions need be asked, as I listen to the next tune on Ginger’s aptly named “why we do what we do” mix CD and revel in the overwhelming emotion drawn out of me by Gillian’s melancholy lyricism, and Dave’s euphoric guitar playing.

As I write this, it is 3 in the afternoon now, and I’ve yet to take a nap or eat a real meal. Running on fumes, these thoughts strike me as the most beautiful creations of my mind. I’m sure I will later read over them and think myself silly and overly dramatic. But I know that when Ginger reads this, she will understand.

Thanks Annie and Carolyn. More on the way!

2007-10-31T09:04:00.000-05:00

TRICK OR TREATING DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS
by Richard Brautigan
from Revenge of the Lawn

As a child I used to play at Halloween as if I were a sailor and go trick or treating down to the sea in ships. My sack of candy and things were at the wheel and my Halloween mask was sails cutting through a beautiful autumn night with lights on front porches shining like ports of call.

Trickortreat was the captain of our ship, saying, "We are only going to be in this port for a short time. I want all of you to go ashore and have a good time. Just remember we sail on the morning tide." My God, he was right! We sailed on the morning tide.

* * *

All right so this isn't a music post exactly, but all arts aspire to music, yeah? And Richard Brautigan's drunken wee-hour memoirs summon, as well as any prose I think, the same tasty melancholy you hear in a familiar sad song. Lots of songwriters could take a lesson or three from Brautigan's prose.

I sort of worshiped Richard Brautigan when I was in college (R.B. the prose writer; R.B. the poet not as much). When I was about 20 I found his story "Corporal" in a Flash Fiction anthology, and its last sentence felt like a wrecking ball to the chest. In all my reading since that two-page-long story I've mainly hoped to feel again the same pure stunning pain. It's olympian, the emotional acrobatics R.B. pulls off with his bone-naked prose. On a dime he pivots from quirky bitter funny to universally fucking devastating. Devastation is Brautigan's gift, and he smuggles it in a birthday cake, the more unexpectedly to shatter your whole heart. But, you know, to shatter it beautifully.

This little bit of R.B. above is not devastating, but it is sad. When I was 20 I didn't know it was sad. Now I'm 30, an old man, an ancient artifact practically, and reading it for the first time in years I feel this sigh at the end, which I never felt before. It's small and bittersweet as October burning leaves. You can almost inhale it.

Here's more Brautigan stuff for Halloween. I like "Halloween in Denver." The mental somersault ending doesn't work perfectly, but it shouldn't work at all, and that it does as much as it does blows my mind. It sneaks up on your blind side and pinches you a little bit, and it hurts. It reminds me of the many similar disorienting turns in David Lynch's inscrutable but occasionally stunning Inland Empire.

Anyway, happy Halloween folks. More Gillian Welch entries posting soon.

The First Concert Ever by Gillian Welch in Sweden: "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entry #2

2007-10-16T18:19:00.000-05:00

Pär Nilsson writes:

I had talked my wife into coming along to the first concert ever by Gillian Welch in Sweden. It was the end of summer 2007, which hadn't been much of a summer really. To get good seats we had to order concert tickets and a dinner, which really doubled the price of the concert. To make matters worse we hadn't been informed where we were to have the dinner, but we found out two hours before the concert. Anyway, the place where the meal was served is a rather famous spot in Stockholm and the food was a mixed Asian plate, quite delicious actually. We had barely found our table before I noticed that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings sat only two tables away in the sparsely populated restaurant. I told my wife they were there, but in the shy Swedish tradition we didn't wave, shout hi or try to get autographs. We just enjoyed our food and let them enjoy theirs.

The concert was all I had hoped for and more. While the songs, Gillians voice and her harmonies with David are all wonderful, what really knocks me out is David's guitar work. It's both beautiful and bold. My wife mainly enjoyed David's looks, but together with my neighbour to the right at the concert I totally overawed by the his guitar playing. They didn't play April the 14th, which is one of my favourites, but I got to hear "The way it will be/Throw me a rope" live. i hope they put it out on a new album soon. In the mean time...

Ja! In the mean time, Pär can enjoy a fine MP3 of "Throw Me a Rope." How can you enjoy such an MP3? Write something about Gillian for us, just as Pär did.

Thanks Pär! More soon...