Category: Field Recordings of the Future

The lobby at Geva was packed last Sunday. We had tickets to the Son House play and they weren’t letting anyone into the theater. Cleavant Derricks, the lead, had lost his voice. We rescheduled and now that we’ve seen the play we can see how that might have happened. This was a powerful, moving performance. Son House had a raspy voice and Derricks puts all he has into convincing renditions of House’s blues classics.

Who’s that writin’, John the Revelator
Tell me who’s that writin’, John the Revelator
Who’s that writin’, John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals

Son House was a preacher before he was a performer so he had plenty of conflicting right/wrong material to work with. How could the blues, which sounded so good, be the devil’s music? The Seven Seals is a phrase in the Book of Revelation that refers to seven symbolic seals that secure the book that John of Patmos saw in his Revelation of Jesus Christ. John The Revelator, Death Letter Blues, Walking Blues, Preachin’ The Blues, Grinnin’ In Your Face. Son House wrote the book of the blues!

In 1943 Son House gave up music, left the Delta, and settled in Rochester’s Corn Hill neighborhood. He worked on the New York Central Railroad and drank. The production weaves history and and context into the Son House story and it has a terrific four piece band. Billy Thompson, who cowrote the music, is an astonishing blues player. Tad Wadhams is an incredible bass player. The are supported by Daniel Kelly and Rochester’s Fred Vine. I suspect/hope “Revival: The Resurrection of Son House” will hit the road after its run at Geva.

Fred Rogers was also a preacher. He founded a more fruitful ministry than any church by communicating with and advocating for children. I loved “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” I wish the whole world could see it.

We have this Margaret Explosion setlist called “Margo2Weed,” a working list that we add a few songs to each time we have a gig, the ones we thought were the best of the night. And then songs on that list get dumped if they don’t hold up. The ones that we still like after repeated listening get put on the website. I trim up the beginning and end, sometimes take a whole two minute section out of the middle and we call it a song. A few of our cds are songs that were pulled from this list.

Of course they aren’t really songs. There’s no verse/chorus/bridge, chord change pattern. But there is something to hang onto and I thought it would be fun to try to describe what that is.

We improvise but we’re not a jam band. There is no wanking and there are no solos. Not because we have rules but because we have found a way to construct a fabric, a weave that we can lost in. Jack Garner, writing in the D&C said, “The Explosion plays with a single-minded purpose and organic oneness that’s most impressive.” That line really nails it for me. A solo, with the others playing support, only puts all the focus on the solo and wrecks the fabric.

We stumbled on a method that works for us. The drums start with the simplest pulse and before a measure has been played, the bass has rescued the drums, established a key and offered phrasing for the sax or guitar to establish a melody. This is where the real magic happens. Spotting the beauty of the melody and giving it room to grow by playing something that compliments it, strengthens it or does it one better is all that matters, the “single-minded purpose .” The song is so fragile at this point. All energy must be focused on respecting that melody and nourishing it. This only works if the whole group does more listening than playing.

Lead lines carry us through the tune but they aren’t solos. It is an “organic oneness” with rhythms shifting and poking in and out. There are just enough focal points to get lost in. And if all goes well we back out of the song as quickly as we got into it, like we know what we’re doing, and then we start all over again.

I wish our batting average was higher but there are always a few pieces of magic in each performance. This song is from a gig a few weeks back and there are plenty more on the Margaret Explosion site. We’ll try to make it happen Wednesday night at the Little. Hope you can stop out.

We weren’t sure what to expect, which is always a good thing. We gathered in an art room at the downtown galley and were told to turn our devices off. They warned us that we could not leave the room for forty five minutes. Bill Frisell was to play a tone and we were told there would be ten minutes of silence after that. Then Bill played his guitar for fifteen (without any boxes) and then there was another ten minutes of silence before Bill struck the final tone. A morning meditation and a perfect start to the day.

We had seen Mary Halvorson on the street but hadn’t heard any of the configurations she was playing in until Columbia Icefield. They were loud and rambunctious. Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir went for emotion, Icelandic style, accompanying herself on piano. What a contrast, walking into Wadada Leo Smith’s solo trumpet performance. Not just a warm tone but a deep, soulful, bluesy tribute to Monk. 

Over to the Knoxville Art Museum for Nate Wooley, someone who is supposed to make us question our fundamental understanding of what a trumpet sounds like. His opening piece was so quiet I had a hard time chewing my peanut noodle and pickled cabbage dish without making too much noise. Long, meditative notes that got so long they required circular breathing.

Carla Bley played a very pretty set at the Tennessee Theater with her partner, Steve Sallow and a saxophonist. Amirtha Kidambi‘s Elder Ones at the church sounded like a middle eastern Art Bears or maybe Screaming Gypsy Bandits. Jack DeJohnette with Ravi Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison’s son was surprising. Garrison, on six string electric bass, comes across as the lead instrument in this all star trio. And did ourselves in with Abstract Black in the Old City, a solo sax with effects.

The upholstery in the Ford Focus was all cracked. That’s the first thing I noticed and once our Uber pickup was confirmed the driver played “Only the Good Die Young” through the tiny speaker in his phone. I hate that song. He must have called up Pandora’s Billy Joel station because before we arrived downtown “Still Rock n Roll To Me” was playing “through a cheap pair of speakers.” We were in Knoxville for the Big Ears Festival.

We started with a few short films by Beatrice Gibson. We sat on the floor in the UT Art Gallery and marveled at the sound system. It might be time to upgrade our home system before we loose our hearing. We had a salad in a bistro near the gallery and  spotted Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan walking by. Frisell is playing all four nights in a different configuration each night. In Saint John’s Cathedral we heard the cellist, Peter Gregson, play lush reinterpretations of Bach concertos. We stuck our heads in the Mill & Mine to hear someone who has apparently played on every Animal Collective album. Mercury Rev is playing here tonight and Spiritualized tomorrow. This is a very walkable city.

Joan La Barbara started with something she called “a real time composition.” She made a sound with her voice and followed it. She did a composition of hers that was used in the movie, Arrival, and told us she is working on an opera based on the life of Virginia Woolf and Joseph Cornell. She reimagined what Woolf’s voice would be like in setting based on Cornell’s journals.

Artifacts Trio, cello, flute and drums, have steeped themselves in the AACM, ancient to the future, tradition. This trio played so well together and covered so much rich musical terrain, they are going to be hard to top.

Amidst an extraordinary confluence of natural phenomena Margaret Explosion will perform two sets of original music at the Little Theater Café this evening. The atmosphere will be conducive to creativity. Join Steve Piper and Scott Regan (and the band) who are regularly seen sketching while we play. Oscar was there, on a school night, and drew this picture of Ken as an octopus playing bass.

FFThe only bobblehead doll we have is Barry Bonds, back from before the controversy, when he was chasing Hank Aaron’s homer record. I’m not counting the plastic, solar-powered, Trump bobblehead that someone gave us for Christmas. I plan to throw that away. I was thinking about bobbleheads long before the article in Sunday’s paper on the bobblehead museum in Milwaukee. Amy Rigby’s “Bobblehead Doll,” from Eric and Amy’s 2009 double A side single, has been stuck in my head for weeks. The 45 has been on heavy rotation our house.

I still visit “So Many Records, So Little Time,” even though it is not getting the attention it deserves – from its owner. Kevin called around New Year’s and Peggi helped him reclaim the domain name after it had expired. The website is still a goldmine. If there is nothing new on the front page I just scroll down the long list of artists in the right hand column, like I did this morning, and get lost in Kevin’s spin on Bootsy, Alan Vega and Heart.

I’ve been cleaning house myself and am in the process of moving the Margaret Explosion site to PopWars where all the content now flows from the database. I’m re-building the virtual 45 page with live tracks from our performances. In honor of Peggi’s birthday here is a song from those vaults. That’s a photo of Peggi on the cover.

These elements just fell together, a dreamy, hypnotic Margaret Explosion song from a performance at the Little Theatre Café last year and some blurry photos I took a few years apart on train rides from New York to Rochester.

Peggi Fournier plays soprano sax, Ken Frank plays bass, Phil Marshall plays guitar and I play drums.

I played drums with both of the bands on the poster above. I made this poster for a gig at Scorgie’s. I’m not sure how it works today but in the early eighties bands were given the door and if the club owner didn’t make enough over the bar you were not asked back to play. So bands made posters, had them copied or printed, and then plastered them all over town. You had to watch out for cops and it was sort of a nasty job, wrestling with tape in the freezing cold, but a good poster paid off.

It wasn’t always like that. When New Math started playing in the late seventies we were booked through management companies. I remember someone named Jim Armstrong who got us into the Orange Monkey and the Penny Arcade and some gig at a college. There was someone named Howie who booked us into a club on the river. He went on to manage Poison in LA. Somehow we got into the Electric Circus and Big Daddy’s. But the music scene was changing. And so were the clubs. Everything, even the song writing, was DIY.

I wish I had a copy of every poster I made in those days. I tried to keep a copy of each. The Hi-Techs came together at the very end of the seventies and we broke up in the middle of 1981 so it was a short ride. Three of us went on to form Personal Effects and we played gigs from ’81 to ’86 before falling apart and then getting back together for the Planetarium gigs and a few reunions. We took cell phone shots of the posters we have and Bob sent us scans of the ones he has.

Here are links to the Hi-Techs posters and Personal Effects posters.

Personal Effects – “Nothing Lasts Forever”

Working with Duane Sherwood in 1984, Personal Effects started planning a multi-media show for the Community Playhouse on South Avenue where Swillburger is now. We had seen Emmy Lou Harris perform there and a few other shows and the small playhouse with the big deep stage was perfect for back-projecting on a scrim. From up in the balcony to way back behind the stage Duane worked both sides of the band with dramatic lights, psychedelic liquid light and projections, silhouettes thrown on the scrim from the front and the back where Jeanne Taylor was dancing behind the scrim. There is a photo of Jeanne on this 80’s Polaroids page. As creative and production manager, Duane had a brilliant idea for every song even dropping an overstuffed man from the ceiling for our song “Big Man.” Don Scorgie brought his bar to the lobby. Russ Lunn videoed the show and Duane took Polaroid stills of the video. We used them on the back cover of the album we recorded later that year titled “This Is It.”

Which brings me to the behind the scenes documentary of Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for what was to be his last tour. We watched “This Is It” last night with the sound jacked up. The band, an orchestra, sounded incredible. The production of this thing is mind-blowing and you get to see quite a bit of that along with the performances. Where other performers hire dancers to make them look good, Michael Jackson hired the best dancers and still danced better than all of them. You can’t take your eyes off him. Still transitioning at the end, he appeared to be in great shape. “This Is It” is exhilarating and sad.

Listen to Big Man by Personal Effects

Fall is still out there but it was rudely interrupted with this snow.

Speaking of interruptions, We just learned of Mike Kaplan‘s circumstances. I didn’t know him, he was a good friend of our bass player’s and we were asked to play at his memorial this afternoon. We did it as a three piece and played incidental music at four points in the service. The sound in the room was just perfect and we were able to push our minimal sound to the furthest extremes, somewhere close to pristine emptiness. It was an honor to play for his family friends.

It seems a little cruel that these decorative squash are called “Lunch Ladies.” I don’t make the rules, I just look at the signs.

Peggi made a couple of cherry pies the other day and brought one down to our neighbor, Sue, who just celebrated a big birthday. Today Sue brought a beautiful bouquet of flowers, all from her garden, up to us. We will never be even.

I swallowed an olive pit. I usually have a few olives with a boiled egg, toast and olive oil in the morning and I wasn’t quite awake. It felt like it was stuck in my esophagus but that may have just been the sensation. I’m hoping it doesn’t get stuck in some crevice of my intestines colon.

I bummed that we missed the one night premiere of the Joan Jett movie. We were playing in the cafe that night. Here is a song recorded at that gig.

Listen Margaret Explosion’s Alicia.

Last year when we were working on Civilization Arpad played us a few tracks that he had recorded at Nod’s rehearsal space. We were finishing mixes for our cd and they were just starting work on a new album. The tracks we heard were rough. Nod is rough. I was anxious to hear the final results and asked about it whenever I saw one on them. I learned Joe Tunis was going to release it on his Carbon Records so I preordered it. The vinyl arrived this afternoon.

Nod has been around for twenty five years or so and this is their best album yet. Most bands go in the opposite direction. Think how good the first Talking Heads lp was and how each album after that got worse and worse. Nod is a three piece. They’ve sometimes worked with other musicians but no matter how good they are they take the edge off of Nod. Three letters, three players, Joe Sorriero, Tim Poland and Brian Shafer.

No one sounds like Nod; rhymes with odd. Imagine “No New York” with Can, an underground sound. Live, they are loud, they get the party started, but mostly because they are raw like the Stooges. And angular so you want to dance like an idiot. My favorite song on “So Much Tonight” is “Go For a Ride,” a classic Nod piece. “Rollin Around” nods to Exile on “Main Street” and “Whatchya Doin” is sweet. Nod is in good form.

Check them out. Highly reccomended.

“Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda” played last night at the Little and it will be shown one more time, on Saturday afternoon at 3pm before it leaves town. It is a slow, beautiful movie. Slow only in the sense that you must stop talking, walking, texting to observe, to see, to listen and to hear. Like Tarkovsky, whose movies were highly influential to Sakamoto and are excerpted in this film, Sakamoto is focused on the yin and yang of equilibrium. He confronts the nuclear disaster in Japan in work, he says because if we were able to damage the earth we are able to fix it. While thumbing through a book of Tarkovsky Polaroids he says Tarkovsky was a musician because of the way he uses sound, rain, wind, footsteps, movement.

The creative process is beautifully laid out in this film as we see Ryuichi in early settings with his Yellow Magic Orchestra and in the studio working on soundtracks for “The Sheltering Sky,” “The Last Emperor,” “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” and “The Revenant.” He battles cancer in the film and when pushed to explain how he felt when he received the diagnosis he says it feels like it is a joke. He says Bernardo Bertolucci asked him to rewrite some music on the spot. He said it would be impossible and Bertolucci told him, “Ennio Morricone would do it.” So he did it and an orchestra performed it a half hour later.

In a nod to the Fringe Fest, which will start tonight and be happening all around us, Margaret Explosion will be performing without a setlist! Wednesdays Little Theatre Café 7-9pm