Category: Field Recordings of the Future

We went to “The Human Touch” opening on the later side in order to still be downtown when Nod took the stage at Abilene around midnight. The Memorial Art Gallery’s new show features part of the collection of RCB Wealth Management, whatever that is. Their website says “The Human Touch reflects the rich diversity of our clients, employees and the people who make up our everyday lives.” And that it does, but the effort to be diverse became the show rather than the selection of art. I only went to their website after seeing the show so now I’m wondering. Did the diversity effort look so obvious on the wall because all other shows are so insular? I don’t know. I only hoped to see some good art and I did see some.

Robert Longo, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Peyton, Nan Goldin, Kehinde Wiley, Carrie Mae Weems, John Baldesari were all represented but I was more intrigued by Willie Birch’s black and white acrylic and charcoal on paper drawing of two women, Till Freiwald’s large watercolor on paper studies of a live model for even larger (8 feet tall watercolors) and Luis Gispert’s giant, Spanish tinged, animated photo, “Living Room” from his Urban Myths series.

Nod was fantastic, more energetic than ever in their twenty-fifth year. They are the perfect trio. Each part is internal to their sound. Joe’s guitar playing is unique as hell, one of a kind. And although you can hardly ever hear what he is singing you can always hear the sweetness the melody he adds to his angular guitar playing. Tim Poland is a really melodic bass player and he propels the band with his lines while keeping the train on he tracks. Brian is rock solid on drums, never ruffled by Joe’s adventurous turns, he can fill up a song with fills without getting in the way. Nod’s sound gets under you skin and goes to your whole body. If no one breaks the ice you are left dancing in your head.

Took a tour of the earth this afternoon, up through the arboretum and fruticetum in the park where everything is popping, and I came back with this picture. We plan to celebrate Earth Day later on at the Little Theatre Café. Pete LaBonne will be joining Margaret Explosion on the grand piano. If you’re not familiar with Pete’s work there is no better place to start than Chris Schepp’s review of Pete’s 20 cd compilation, “Gigunda.”

The Bop Shop used to host a musty old record show twice a year in the Village Gate atrium. The clientele got older and older and consequently dwindled as record sales plummeted. The Chesterfield Kings drummer, the first and best one, was always there. He passed away years ago and the Bop Shop was unveiling his collection yesterday on Record Store Day. We never made it over there. Those record fairs were fun for a while but they were pretty depressing on a nice day. Everything is different now. I have never seen more people at Record Archive. They even stationed Frank DeBlase at the door for some added muscle.

We didn’t get going until after noon so I missed the Captain Beefheart vinyl, “Rough, Raw & Amazing,” the House of Guitars was allowed. And I never saw the Bernard Herrmann, “Psycho” 7-inch. I found the Beefheart package at Archive but hesitated when I read the Joh Peel’s liner notes… “Although it takes intense listening in the early part of of the show owing to the recording quality …” It sounds like the microphone was in someone’s pocket while he was standing outside De Montfort Hall in Leicester while the Magic Band played inside. Songs are mislabeled. Beefheart’s pictured on the cover paying sax and plays it on four cuts yet he is only credited with sax and vocals but I’m still happy with my purchase.

I saw Beefheart on four different tours, in Cincinnati (with the Hampton Grease Band and the Screamin’ Gypsy Bandits) on the Trout Mask tour, Columbus, Ohio on the ‘Decals” tour, the Dome Area here in Rochester when he did that bone-headed project with Zappa and then at the Red Creek in 1977. I brought my little mono cassette recorder to Red Creek and placed it on the table in front of Brad Fox (listen for him). My recording (below) is infinitely better than the 180 gram yellow vinyl, gatefold, double lp. As they say. “For diehard fans only.”

One hundred and fifty years ago a train carrying Lincoln’s body stopped in Rochester on its way to his final resting place in Illinois. Thousands of mourners gathered at the train station to pay their respects. In our age of Clinton and Bush dynasties and ObamaHate the very idea of the presidency has changed. I’m thinking about a train rolling into town with Claire Underwood’s body on it.

The husband and wife team responsible for the House of Cards soundtrack met at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and they are back in town for a free concert of film music on Sunday night at Kodak Hall. They promise a half hour suite of House of Cards themes. He also scored Ed Harris’s dramatic creation/painting scenes in the “Pollock” movie. Jeff Beal’s brilliant theme, used behind the open credits, just sweeps you away with its dramatic subwoofer percussion and dark foreboding melody.

We made sure we had seats down front for Stephan Crump when he played with Vjay Iyer at Kilburn last year. We had heard him with his Rosetta Trio at the Bop Shop and were blown away. He is an amazing bass player. Incredibly sensitive, melodic and solid. He would sound great with anyone. As you can see in this picture he plays every inch of his instrument. In this duo setting, a project called “Secret Keepers,” he and Mary Halverson would start and finish each other’s phrases, odd phrases in odd songs because Mary Halverson is a most unusual guitar player. Seated and working one pedal with each foot she would clip and chew on notes as she picked them. She says her influences are horn players, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, artists she first heard on her dad’s records. This was something else.

I liked “Rubber Soul” but I loved “Out Of Our Heads.” One blew away the other and the partisan divide began for me.

Rolling Stones incite near-riot in ’65

When the curtain went up the night of Nov. 1, 1965, there were 120 officers, War Memorial security, and ushers — the largest such show of crowd-control force in the venue’s history — ready to keep the crowd under control. Maybe they needed a few more. That Rochester show before an estimated crowd of 4,000 was perhaps the shortest Rolling Stones concert of all time, shut down by police slightly after 9 p.m. after only six songs. It was only their second-ever tour of the United States, in support of the album Out of Our Heads.

“The ones down front — particularly the girls — caused most of the trouble,” Rochester Police Chief William Lombard was quoted in the Times-Union. “They really started to get worked up when one Rolling Stone took off his jacket.” But what actually shut down the show was the promise — and the threat — of even more skin. “I knew when this one fellow took off his jacket and waved it at the girls while wiggling around that the next number would be the last,” Lombard said. “That’s the one where he strips to his undershirt.” The story did not indicate which of the British Invasion louts Lombard was referring to. One can only wonder if the police chief in hindsight regretted that move, as audience members reportedly threw popcorn, candy boxes, shoes and other items at the stage and chanted “We want the Stones!” Detective Lt. Andrew J. Sparacino was hit in the left eye and was taken to Genesee Hospital. As the Times-Union reported, “Lombard said he thought someone swung a bag of caramels at Sparacino.” And the photo accompanying the T-U story shows a glum looking Sparacino with a patch over one eye. Years later, he told a reporter he remembered talking to Stones lead vocalist Mick Jagger about being careful because of the crowd and the rock and roller responding “with some of the foulest language I’ve ever heard.”

Sparacino wasn’t the only victim of the night’s wildness. One 16-year-old Rochester fan was taken to Highland Hospital with a leg injury. And police removed “several youths” from the building for disorderly conduct. Who’s to blame? Lombard told media the crowd was noisy but for the most part civilized. “I appealed to them once to help them enjoy the show,” he was quoted as saying. “But when some of them really started to get worked up and began charging the stage, I thought someone would get hurt.”

After the show, guitarist and backing vocalist Keith Richards reportedly trash talked Rochester to the police, saying “This is a hick town. They were twice as wild in Montreal. They won’t get hurt. You were too hard with them.” The Rolling Stones reportedly flew out of town that night, presumably on their way to Providence, Rhode Island, and the next stop on their tour.
– MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

I tried keeping the stage lights up at the Little Theater last night, not for the band but to light the six basketball players hanging on the wall behind the band. I close my eyes so it didn’t bother me. Bob had me turn them down before the second set. The month went fast. The show is over on Saturday and Richard Margolis’s goes up. I thinking about where to pile up the pictures I take down. Works on paper have a serious advantage when it comes to storage.

Our gig last week was melodic and expansive. Last night’s gig was dark and plodding. I found myself trying to apologize during the break but no one was buying it. We plan to see the Pulp movie, (A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets) tonight. Maybe I’ll learn some tips.

This tree is monstrous. It’s a Champion Oak tree and it’s out back of Jeff and Mary Kaye’s. Down by the river that is, just like the Neil Young song, the one that came up in our shuffled library a few days ago. That damn thing still sounds good. Speaking of good. We heard “Bandit” tonight in the car. It may be time to watch “Greendale” again.

I came across this 1920 Charles Burchfield watercolor in my Tumblr feed this morning. It’s called “February Thaw” and it is in the collection at the Brooklyn Museum. Burchfield spent a good deal of his life in Buffalo and this is pretty much the way things look around here now.

My brother and his wife are headed to Spain for Holy Week. We have been enlisted to provide tips. I wish I could do more that that and join them. Peggi and I were in Granada for Holy Week about twenty years ago and it was unforgettable. Palm Sunday, the start of the week, is still eleven days away but but we are getting in the mood by playing Miles’ “Sketches of Spain.” There is a song called “Saeta” on the record that I really love.

In Spain the “saeta” is an unaccompanied song where the singer shows his or her ardent devotion to a particular image of Christ or the Virgin. A Jewish tradition dating to the 16th century, the saeta is often performed outdoors during Holy Week (next week ) as local parishes’ prized statues are paraded through the street in long, winding processions. A saeta performed from the balcony of an apartment overhead can be a stunning emotional experience.

The processions there are usually accompanied by a rag tag band and the band always stops for the spontaneous performance of a saeta. This song recorded last week at the Little Theatre and now entitled “Saeta” is in the spirit of those bands.

I was living with Peggi in a small rented house on the outskirts of town. We set up our bedroom on the porch. It was enclosed with wrap-around windows. We converted the bedroom to a band room and I was playing drums in there one night when someone knocked on the door. I opened the door and three guys were standing there. I was in my early twenties and these guys were old, well into their thirties. I was certain they were there to complain about the noise but they said they’d been outside listening and they wanted me to join their band. Apparently “Frank Canada” (listed on the card) had left the band and these guys were desperate. They had two gigs coming up that week.

This was Bloomington, Indiana I could tell by looking at them that they were talking about a kind of music I knew nothing about. I tried my best to talk my way out of this but a few days later I found myself out in the country, rehearsing in the living room of a trailer. Black velvet paintings on the wall and strange people sitting in the living room while we played songs I had never heard of. They kept asking, “You know that song called such and such?” and I would go, “No.”

Somehow we got through the gigs and rehearsed the next week in the bass player’s barn without the lead singer. Turns out the bass player, who had a sweet voice, and the rhythm guitar player, who loved Waylon Jennings, were conspiring to give Butch Miller (the cad) the boot and start their own band. They found a young guitar player with slicked back hair who worked at the Bloomington hospital and sang just like Johnny Cash. The three of them traded songs and we were booked every weekend and holiday for the next year and half in Eagles, Elks, Moose Clubs, American Legions, VFWs, coon hunts and anywhere cigarettes were smoked and Falstaff Beer was served.

I fell in love with the stuff, Classic Country by today’s definition. Eric and Amy’s version of Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” was stuck in my head for a week after their recent “Homemade Airplane” concert so I decided to get serious about making a digital copy my “Stop The World and Let Me Off” compilation. Over the years I had picked up vinyl copies of the songs we used to do (by the original artists) and during the Napster craze I downloaded low res versions but it was time to do it up right. Ripping vinyl is a real-time exercise. It took me a few days but I assembled the collection with three versions of the title song. Now, it is time to plan a Honky Tonk party.

Amy and Eric got right into it last night. They rocked the Aerodome until the wheels did fall off. They played some great new songs about home remodeling and Sysco trucks on the interstate. They started “Astrovan” in three different keys before settling on “A” and they delivered a stellar version of “Do You Remember That?”

To my ears, Eric and Amy sound best the more stripped down their sound gets. Last night’s songs with Eric on acoustic and Amy on keys were brilliant. Amy Alison, Mose’s daughter, was the surprise guest and she sounded great. We’re going out of our way to avoid the Super Bowl today.

Ideolectic speech, the speech of the unique individual. I had intended to dive into my Christmas book, “Kansas City Lightning, The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker,” by Stanley Crouch but Louise brought over a book to borrow called “Speaking of Art, Four Decades of Art in Conversation” and that has been hard to put down. Artful interviews, conversation about art, as art, “Audio Arts” fits nicely in my “Field Recordings of the Future” category.

“Inmate Improv,” an editorial in today’s NYT was the perfect New Year’s gift for me. Anna Clark runs an improv workshop for prisioners in Detroit’s Macomb Correctional Facility and she she says she is more afraid of improv than she is of the prisoners. Improv makes the world go ’round.

Margaret Explosion will try to keep the world spinning tonight at the Little Theater Café. I’m thinking of bringing my djembe for the first number and I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to strap up my aging laptop so we can project some movies on the wall behind the band. The song below is an improv, an optimistic toast to the New Year. Here’s hoping we all find our ideolectic voice in the new year.

There are a lot of bands out there doing their Christmas songs this week. Watkins & the Rapiers have been doing them all month. But nobody does a better batch than Bobby Henrie and the Goners. We caught their annual Xmas show at Abilene on Saturday night and didn’t leave until it was all said and done. Jingle Bell Rock, Baby, It’s Cold Outside with Jimmy playing sleigh bells on the intro and outro!

A few years ago they were especially tight, knocking out songs in rapid succession. I think they had a string of Christmas parties that year. This year they were especially loose taking five minutes or so between songs. They tear it up either way. Jimmy, reliably late with the snare, Brian right on and Bobby, as always, an incredible player with a great voice and an explosive, live wire. The band, in their thirtieth year as a trio, is equal parts rock and roll. Most bands today have dropped the roll and I miss it. It allows the Goners to mix country, jazz and blues with their old fashioned r&R.

The five day forecast in these parts is all grey. I kind of like the mood. Margaret Explosion will provide a soundtrack to the weather tonight at the Little Theater Café. We promise not to play any Christmas music. Here is a song from a few weeks back.