Jazz has lost its most important annual conference. The International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) declared bankruptcy this week and canceled its 2009 convention, which was scheduled to take place in Seattle. The loss of this organization is a crippling blow to jazz because the IAJE connected teachers, students and professional jazz musicians in a unique manner. This is the only music convention that is not about selling product but ensuring that future generations are aware of the music's history and practices.
It's ironic that this announcement comes as the jazz festival season is beginning to heat up, because these popular festivals will also be a thing of the past if young people aren't nurtured to continue producing it. With popular culture ruled by the seductive action of video games and the economic tyranny of the fashion industry, effective education programs are more important than ever.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
Music of New Orleans
I've been writing about the music of New Orleans for Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, Circus, United Press International, OffBeat, Gambit, Paste and other publications for more than 35 years. There's a lot that has gone by the wayside and a lot more that's never been published, so I'm starting this blog to offer some of my work in this genre to the outside world. The music and culture of New Orleans is a very endangered species right now, and not enough is known about it. Many music writers with national reputations are willing to dismiss it as "nostalgia" or simply party music for drunken Bourbon Street tourists. This is a simplistic and frankly ignorant read of a complex musical tradition with roots deep in the mix of what constitutes American music in the first place, the place where blues and jazz found its footing and still lives. Up until Katrina New Orleans was one of the last places in America where music was taught inside the family, secrets passed on from fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles to sons and daughters for generations.
The first entry is a piece I wrote about the songwriter Shannon McNally, one of many musicians who came to New Orleans looking for something deeper in the music than they were able to find anywhere else. This interview was conducted days before Katrina hit, shortly after a smaller hurricane had damaged but not crippled the city. It originally appeared in the "lost" issue of OffBeat magazine published on the very day Katrina washed away one the the grandest pieces of American history.
Shannon McNally
By John Swenson
A lazy, sun-dappled August breeze rustled the broad leaves of the maple tree shading Song Café on Chartres Street. It was a quiet Sunday at midday and only two people sat in the silent coffeehouse as Shannon McNally strode through the door, her shoulder length black hair pulled up offhandedly in a bun. After a warm greeting from a familiar face behind the counter, she ordered an iced coffee and a small cake and sat down with a broad smile. Shannon McNally, raised in Long Island and battle-hardened in Los Angeles, was home. Home to her bougainvilleas, the cypress tree she planted last year, her sage and wild flowers, her two cats and a dog, the crape myrtle split in two by Hurricane Cindy that leaves her backyard a riot of pink. But most of all, home to the artist’s life she’s nurtured with her husband and the drummer in her band, Wallace Lester, in the stimulating cultural environs of America’s most creative city. Song Café, nestled at the far edge of Faubourg Marigny by the railroad tracks that divide it from the Bywater district, is one of the more dramatic examples of the transformation this area has undergone in recent years following an influx of artists, musicians and students. Piety Street Recording, run by New York expatriate Mark Bingham, is a few blocks away, and McNally is one of many musicians from other parts of the world who’ve moved into the neighborhood in recent years, including Jon Cleary, Washboard Chaz, Jason Mingeldorff and Andy J. Forest. McNally returned to her New Orleans home after a six-week tour in support of her outstanding new album, Geronimo, a record that has topped airplay charts and won her critical raves in New York, Nashville, Austin and elsewhere. Her touring band, featuring the ever-astonishing Dave Easley on pedal steel and electric guitar, finished off the tour with a triumphant gig at Tipitina’s during which McNally commanded the stage, moving with an animal grace as she played guitar and sang her songs about defiant heroes, women who won’t accept tragedy as inevitable and her own quest for spiritual meaning in a world dominated by empty consumer values. But the following afternoon during a promotional in-store at the Louisiana Music Factory, McNally demonstrated how deeply nuanced her songs can be. The same material, with the same band, had a completely different edge. The well-rehearsed concert set was carefully paced and packed with dramatic gestures as McNally proved herself as a big-stage rock ‘n’ roll figure capable of the interactive intelligence only the greats possess, always giving off the sense that she was aware of everything that was going on in the room around her. On the cramped, lo-fi record store stage, singing through a creaky PA that couldn’t do her voice justice and left without Easley’s pedal steel to handle the solo chores, McNally cranked up her electric guitar and played fiercely throughout the set, often turning to lock in with Lester as she directed the pulse of the beat with her strumming. The songs took on a slightly harder edge, and her cocoa eyes appeared to make contact with every person in the room at various times during the set. Even the words, and her phrasing, changed for the occasion. Where she tossed away the line “How does it feel?” from the hard-rocking “Miracle Mile” the night before, this time she nailed it with an exclamation point. In the same song she changed a key line from “what they call quality” to “what they call pop music” and when she followed it with the cry “It sounds like bullshit to me!” the audience whooped like partisans at a political rally. The scene was mighty different than the last time McNally had been on that stage at Louisiana Music Factory, right after Jazz Fest, when she sat in the back playing behind John Sinclair, whose ever-evolving Blues Scholars band that day was McNally’s group. Sinclair said at the end of the gig that one of the requirements of being a member of the Blues Scholars was that you had to have a criminal record. “He gave me a pass on that,” laughed McNally. “I had never played guitar in a blues band before that. I played just before him that day and that was my band. There was no rehearsal. He just told us to play, we picked a groove and he went with it. John lived with us for about a year right before he left town so I’ve had a lot of time with him.”
A RENEGADE INGÉNUE
That kind of rapport between musicians is part of what made McNally choose New Orleans as her home. She met Lester five years ago at a time when she was struggling with her life as a renegade ingénue on Capitol Records in Hollywood. Exposure to Mardi Gras Indians practice sessions, Sunday second lines and meals at the legendary Bywater eatery Elizabeth’s were enough to convince her to make New Orleans her permanent home four years ago. In the interim she has found more than she bargained for, a place where she could fully realize her musical dreams on her own terms, surrounding by a support group of like minded people. “It’s very specific to the ground that the city’s built on,” she explained, “the energy that gets trapped here, that lives here, is very unique and it’s very powerful and I think that’s what we all feel. It’s transmitted in a million ways, that’s why the music is like it is. I believe music comes out of the ground. I don’t think it comes out of the sky or your head, it comes out of the ground and it has something to do with the vibrations of the earth wherever you are. The earth here, this plot of ground, it’s a combination of elements, the fact that it’s below sea level, the heat, its history as a port town and a porthole into the whole Western Hemisphere for Europeans and Africans, and then the millions and millions of people who lived here already. It’s like the Constantinople of the New World. Everything is exaggerated here, the beauty is exaggerated, the poverty in exaggerated, the brutality, the music, the food. If you’re a person whose senses are acute there’s no way of getting around it. You just feel it.” McNally definitely heard the reaction to the “pop music” line at the Music Factory. “That’s the first time that happened,” she said. “It just hit me. At Tipitina’s the night before during ‘Sweet Forgiveness’ I changed the line ‘Cause I don’t want a life that’s soft and high if it means that others must suffer and die for my country.’ At Tips that turned into ‘…if it means that 25,000 Iraqis gotta die for my country.’ “What happens is I’m living the songs as I’m singing, which is part of how you remember it. I’m not reciting something I’ve memorized, I’m having a conversation. You don’t memorize a conversation before you have it. One of the things Bob Dylan does that I like is that he’ll rewrite his own songs, it almost doesn’t matter. What I realized going to see that band live and getting to know Charlie Sexton, he told Charlie ‘You can listen to the records and learn all the chords and stuff but it’s not gonna help you.’ Can you imagine having to learn 500 songs that every night are played different? With different words? It’s brilliant because the songs are alive… I can do it a little bit, I can’t do it on that level. When the songs are about something, it keeps becoming clearer in my mind the more times I play them. It’s like people say to me ‘Why’d you call the album Geronimo? Why would you care about the Native American experience if you’re not a Native American?’ “To me, that doesn’t make any sense. I’m an American, therefore Native Americans are part of my history. Part of all of our histories. It’s an extremely poignant, old, textured history. The history of the Americas didn’t start in 1500. It was going on for 10,000 years before that. That was just the year the first lost white guy got here, that’s all. The genocide and slavery, that’s my history. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen. I’m expected to vote. It’s my history, regardless of where my blood originally came from, I’m an American citizen now. Geronimo, Sitting Bull, it’s part of my history as a citizen of this country. It’s about singing about the world around me and what I see and feel. It’s all part of it. Because I’m feeling it I can’t always explain it verbally. That’s where the tone of your voice when you’re singing comes in, the sound of your voice, the rhythm, it also communicates, it’s a multi-level thing, not just can you hear the lyrics. The songs get honed as they get performed. I’m really working to find the right words. That’s one of the big illnesses of society right now. Words have lost their meaning. People use words without thinking of what they mean. All day long you hear people use words like ‘God,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘war,’ but so few people really focus what those words actually mean. They get thrown out there and everyone’s supposed to understand the vague meaning of it. Maybe it’s coded, but I still don’t know what it means. When this administration uses the word ‘freedom’ I don’t have the foggiest idea of what they mean. What does the word ‘freedom’ mean? Geronimo was free. He woke up in the morning, he went about his day. He was the king of his universe. That’s freedom. Freedom isn’t waiting in lines and filling out forms and getting searched, or being lied to.”
DIDN’T WANT HER MTV
McNally, 32, grew up as part of the MTV generation watching her classmates become imprinted by such culture classics as Madonna’s “Dress You Up,” which created the charming fad of 12-year-old girls masquerading as hookers. The young Irish-American Long Islander was already in full rebellion at that point. “MTV just didn’t take,” she recalled. “In high school I liked U2, that’s about as much as I participated as far as bands that were popular. I didn’t like television itself, forget the quality of shows, its something about the box itself, I find it very jarring. I hated Madonna. I hated all of it. Even in the fourth grade I remember being 10-years-old and there was this huge radio contest where everybody wanted Duran Duran to come to their school. I couldn’t stand Duran Duran, I couldn’t stand Madonna, I couldn’t stand any of it, I just hated it, I thought ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ I didn’t participate well in the mainstream, I mean I went to school and classes and was on teams but I didn’t have much to do with most of my peers after school. I read a lot. I found dealing with my peers at school very stressful. “My uncle gave me a J.J. Cale record for my 12th birthday and a guitar. It was slow and simple and I could hear all the notes, what he was playing, so I was able to pick it up. Classic rock radio was big, too, on Long Island, so I heard that. And of course I heard Bruce Springsteen on the radio every day so there were things of substance. And being into U2, Bono wrote real lyrics… I was also very into Irish music in general. Live Aid made sense to me. I was 14 when Joshua Tree came out so that to me was sort of my Beatles experience. Those were the first live concerts I went to. I listened to Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, I saw them all at Nassau Coliseum and I heard a lot of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd on the radio and I read a lot. Naturalists, a lot of English women writers from the Victorian age. Jane Eyre... if I could go find that big window with the seat behind the curtain… that’s what I was into.” At college McNally was surrounded by peers ambitious to line up jobs in the corporate world, but music kept a strong hold on her. In her junior year she went to Paris as an exchange student, determined to return as a musician who could play and sing original material. She brought her guitar and a handful of Dinah Washington and Aretha Franklin records, took lessons and busked in the Paris subways. When she returned home for her senior year McNally was ready to become a professional singer-songwriter. “I didn’t know how you made money at it,” she admitted. “When I graduated I made a demo. For a year after college I played coffee shop gigs, there was a band in Pennsylvania called Once Fish, a Grateful Dead cover band, they played constantly and I opened up for them. I was doing Emmylou Harris stuff, I was listening to Ry Cooder’s Into the Purple Valley and Bop Till You Drop and the Los Lobos record Kiko. I kept playing and got better. I realized the other day I gave myself ten years, not exactly knowing what was supposed to happen in ten years, just that I was supposed to have some measure of success and if not then I’ll move on. And I think it’s … ten years. I was 22, I’m 32 now, it was in the summertime, I’d just graduated. “I had met this guy who managed the 10,000 Maniacs and the Cowboy Junkies, he’d heard my demo tape. He called me up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m playing coffee shops. Waiting tables. He was in L.A. and said I should come out there. I went out there, found someplace to start gigging and went from there. The guy had no idea how to make recordings, so I worked with these songwriter/producers. He got me signed to Capitol. He went on to manage Dido. He thought I should be making some kind of (British accent) ‘hip-hop, you know like the Sneaker Pimps.’ He would call me up after listening to something I did and say ‘It was en-TIRE-ly too country.’ What does too country mean, like the Grand Canyon? What was he fucking talking about, too country? It was horrible, the whole process was excruciating and sad and I got beat up all the time and I could only argue what I liked and what I didn’t like.” McNally arrived in Los Angeles just as Fiona Apple’s record was debuting, in the immediate wake of female stars like Alanis Morrisette and Sheryl Crowe. Capitol thought they had another canary in the cage, suggesting that McNally record with Morrisette’s band, but McNally had her own ideas. “I went through all these songwriters and producers and decided one by one that they were all assholes. I was clear minded about wanting to get this record made and I did but it took four years. I thought I’m just gonna do what I want to do and not even tell anybody. Alanis was huge, Jewel was huge, Sarah McLaughlin was huge. They wanted me to be like that so bad and I hated all of it, I thought it was all trite and shrill, horrible shit. I hated it. They wanted me to record finished tracks so I was constantly forced to prove myself. They never once proved anything to me, or gave me enough money to do it properly. We managed to get through the demo process. I had gone through the whole L.A. carousel, everybody who had worked with Sheryl Crowe, which was a lot of people, all of whom were assholes and all of whom took credit for her success. It was amazing. I’m not a big fan but I can see that Sheryl Crowe is the brains behind Sheryl Crowe.” McNally held out for the musicians she wanted, including drummer Jim Keltner, and made a solid but overproduced debut, Jukebox Sparrows. The label dressed her up as a sex kitten and put her on the road for eight months before abandoning the project. “TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT”“The record came out on Elvis’ birthday, and they pulled the plug on it on the anniversary of his death,” she recalled. “So I immediately got on a plane, went to L.A. and said ‘Now that you’ve killed this one I wanted to go make another one.’ I already had the demos, I knew how to do it at this point. But this was three record company presidents later, Andy Slater was president, I gave him a whole bunch of demos, got a new A&R guy and started the process which took from September to June to get everything OK’d and agree on a producer and have them release the budget. I cut the record, turned it in, two months later they called back and said ‘Change this, do that.’ I said ‘Take it or leave it’ and they said you can have $250,000 to do three songs with our bozo, or you can have half that to make the record with Charlie Sexton.” McNally had already determined that she wanted Sexton, then a member of Bob Dylan’s band, to produce the album. Once she moved permanently to New Orleans in 2002, McNally set about making Geronimo in earnest, traveling back and forth between New Orleans and Austin doing prep work, then recording in June 2003 in Lafayette. Capitol rejected the finished product and McNally asked for her release that August. She eventually signed with anther EMI affiliate, Back Porch Records. “I had to stay at EMI because Capitol wouldn’t negotiate with anybody that wasn’t part of the company,” she explained. “When I saw that J.J. Cale put out a live record on Back Porch I thought that would be a good label for me. By that time I had figured out that it was a waste of time trying to tell people in the record industry that an apple was an apple so I thought Back Porch, that’s where I want to go. Some place called Back Porch. I was sick of the front porch. Sure enough they liked the record and they made me an offer.” Geronimo is an impressive album that places McNally in the tradition of musicians like Bob Dylan and the Band. The Dylan influence is close to the surface—Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier played together with Dylan for a decade, and McNally seems perfectly comfortable referencing musical passages, words and even phrasing clearly inspired by Dylan. One of the most powerful songs on the record, “Leave Your Bags,” is an answer song to Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm.” “I wrote that after two things happened to me in the same week,” said McNally. “The first was I was out in Amagansett visiting my aunt and we went to see Rick Danko at the Stephen Talkhouse. I’d never seen him before. He was at the end and he was in really bad shape. He did ‘Long Black Veil’ that night and it made me wonder what the woman in the Long Black Veil, what did she think? Here he died so gallantly not wanting to fuck up her life but I thought she didn’t get off easy, she’s got to live with that, she’s got to visit his bones every night when the cold wind blows. That sucks. I wondered what she thinks. So I started to write this song, I was gonna name him and call it ‘Ezekiel John Brown’ because you never hear his name in the song and it was gonna be her perspective. “Somebody gave me a copy of Blood On the Tracks the same week. I had heard a lot of those songs, but I don’t know that I’d ever heard ‘Shelter From the Storm.’ I was listening to it and again I wondered what the woman in that song thinks. Why don’t we give her a name? I wonder who she is. So that all became ‘Leave Your Bags By the Door’.” Another song, “Weathervane,” is a powerful metaphor for the creative process. “That’s sort of how I experience it,” she said. “A creativity that passes from one person to the other person. There’s just kind of this group of people I keep coming back to that really help that channel, help me channel certain energy. When I think of that song I think of George Harrison, J.J. Cale and Bob Dylan.”
THE ORDINARY BOB DYLAN
McNally realized one of her dreams when she got to meet Dylan. “I was out on tour when Charlie was still with him and every night off that I had lined up with where they were I just went to the show over and over and over again. They let me stand on the side of the stage. I was practically sitting on Larry Campbell’s amp. Dylan gave me a guitar lesson. He wanted me to play a C chord and a scale. He was very specific about what he wanted me to do. He said ‘Play a major scale,’ and I played it, then he says ‘Play a pentatonic scale.’ I’m sitting and he’s standing over me, he’s totally backlit. The only light in the room is right behind his head. He’s smoking a cigarette and he’s in this black suit, ten minutes before they hit at Madison Square Garden, and he’s telling me to play more pentatonic scales. Then he goes ‘That’s the blues.’ So I said ‘That’s where we’re going, right?’ He goes ‘That’s where we’re goin’.’ He goes ‘Play me a song I might have heard.’ He was so ordinary, kind of inquisitive and not weird at all, just normal, but I didn’t expect him to ask me to play him a song. He wanted me to play something in C, and all I could think of were his songs, and my songs. I’m not gonna play him any of his songs and he’s not gonna know any of my songs, and I could not think of one, so I said ‘Can I play you one of mine?’ and he said ‘Well all right but just the first verse.’ So I played him a song called ‘John Finch.’ The first verse is ‘Hang down John Finch, hang down and cry, hang down John Finch, there’s an angry crowd outside.’ And he says ‘Sounds like the Kingston Trio. Know who they are?’ I was devastated. I’m like ‘Oh, man’.” Dylan is another musical visitor who was captivated by New Orleans. “New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it,” Dylan wrote in his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One. “The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing—spirits, all determined to get somewhere.” The mystical sense Dylan evokes from New Orleans sounds akin to McNally’s self-description of her roots-influenced songs as “North American Ghost Music.” “I don’t see how it would miss him,” she said, nodding her head. “If anybody would have picked it up, he would have. Everything he said, he talked about ‘that woman’s voice on OZ,’ and Tony Hall, Willie Green, and how air is just different here, how the heat and the air mix, the smell of the air…”McNally is part of all that now, part of a new generation of transplanted New Orleans artists who draw inspiration from the music of the city’s past but are playing something different. Some, like the pioneering violinist Gina Forsyth, arrived long ago, only to be joined by the likes of Mike West, Lynn Drury, Anders Osborne, Theresa Andersson, Susan Cowsill, Marc Stone and Jeff & Vida. Open sessions such as Marc Stone’s Monday night shows at the Old Point, which have featured nearly all of the above mentioned as guest stars including McNally, offer a process by which musicians can stretch out to test new material as well as favorite covers. “People are so used to doing long gigs and lots of bar gigs, and people have large repertoires,” McNally concluded, “so when I play with Marc Stone he says ‘Just come in, you’ll be the featured artist, we’ll do whatever you want to do.’ You just yell out the changes as we’re going, you just do it. The whole town is like that, it’s like anybody in town can come play. It’s not an expensive place to live, you can come down here and you can do it, you can eke out a living and play for the sake of it. “I think the most nurturing this about New Orleans is the quality of what’s here. You can see the Neville Brothers play, you can see Snooks play, just being in the presence of certain musicians is lesson enough. Just feeling them the way they are. New Orleans is unique because these guys are here. You can sit at Gatemouth Brown’s feet and watch him do what he does. When Pinetop Perkins comes to town you’re on the presence of a 90-year-old Delta bluesman. And the things that made him the way he is, many of those things are still here. In New Orleans you can still feel it, and you can watch it and get close to it.”
The first entry is a piece I wrote about the songwriter Shannon McNally, one of many musicians who came to New Orleans looking for something deeper in the music than they were able to find anywhere else. This interview was conducted days before Katrina hit, shortly after a smaller hurricane had damaged but not crippled the city. It originally appeared in the "lost" issue of OffBeat magazine published on the very day Katrina washed away one the the grandest pieces of American history.
Shannon McNally
By John Swenson
A lazy, sun-dappled August breeze rustled the broad leaves of the maple tree shading Song Café on Chartres Street. It was a quiet Sunday at midday and only two people sat in the silent coffeehouse as Shannon McNally strode through the door, her shoulder length black hair pulled up offhandedly in a bun. After a warm greeting from a familiar face behind the counter, she ordered an iced coffee and a small cake and sat down with a broad smile. Shannon McNally, raised in Long Island and battle-hardened in Los Angeles, was home. Home to her bougainvilleas, the cypress tree she planted last year, her sage and wild flowers, her two cats and a dog, the crape myrtle split in two by Hurricane Cindy that leaves her backyard a riot of pink. But most of all, home to the artist’s life she’s nurtured with her husband and the drummer in her band, Wallace Lester, in the stimulating cultural environs of America’s most creative city. Song Café, nestled at the far edge of Faubourg Marigny by the railroad tracks that divide it from the Bywater district, is one of the more dramatic examples of the transformation this area has undergone in recent years following an influx of artists, musicians and students. Piety Street Recording, run by New York expatriate Mark Bingham, is a few blocks away, and McNally is one of many musicians from other parts of the world who’ve moved into the neighborhood in recent years, including Jon Cleary, Washboard Chaz, Jason Mingeldorff and Andy J. Forest. McNally returned to her New Orleans home after a six-week tour in support of her outstanding new album, Geronimo, a record that has topped airplay charts and won her critical raves in New York, Nashville, Austin and elsewhere. Her touring band, featuring the ever-astonishing Dave Easley on pedal steel and electric guitar, finished off the tour with a triumphant gig at Tipitina’s during which McNally commanded the stage, moving with an animal grace as she played guitar and sang her songs about defiant heroes, women who won’t accept tragedy as inevitable and her own quest for spiritual meaning in a world dominated by empty consumer values. But the following afternoon during a promotional in-store at the Louisiana Music Factory, McNally demonstrated how deeply nuanced her songs can be. The same material, with the same band, had a completely different edge. The well-rehearsed concert set was carefully paced and packed with dramatic gestures as McNally proved herself as a big-stage rock ‘n’ roll figure capable of the interactive intelligence only the greats possess, always giving off the sense that she was aware of everything that was going on in the room around her. On the cramped, lo-fi record store stage, singing through a creaky PA that couldn’t do her voice justice and left without Easley’s pedal steel to handle the solo chores, McNally cranked up her electric guitar and played fiercely throughout the set, often turning to lock in with Lester as she directed the pulse of the beat with her strumming. The songs took on a slightly harder edge, and her cocoa eyes appeared to make contact with every person in the room at various times during the set. Even the words, and her phrasing, changed for the occasion. Where she tossed away the line “How does it feel?” from the hard-rocking “Miracle Mile” the night before, this time she nailed it with an exclamation point. In the same song she changed a key line from “what they call quality” to “what they call pop music” and when she followed it with the cry “It sounds like bullshit to me!” the audience whooped like partisans at a political rally. The scene was mighty different than the last time McNally had been on that stage at Louisiana Music Factory, right after Jazz Fest, when she sat in the back playing behind John Sinclair, whose ever-evolving Blues Scholars band that day was McNally’s group. Sinclair said at the end of the gig that one of the requirements of being a member of the Blues Scholars was that you had to have a criminal record. “He gave me a pass on that,” laughed McNally. “I had never played guitar in a blues band before that. I played just before him that day and that was my band. There was no rehearsal. He just told us to play, we picked a groove and he went with it. John lived with us for about a year right before he left town so I’ve had a lot of time with him.”
A RENEGADE INGÉNUE
That kind of rapport between musicians is part of what made McNally choose New Orleans as her home. She met Lester five years ago at a time when she was struggling with her life as a renegade ingénue on Capitol Records in Hollywood. Exposure to Mardi Gras Indians practice sessions, Sunday second lines and meals at the legendary Bywater eatery Elizabeth’s were enough to convince her to make New Orleans her permanent home four years ago. In the interim she has found more than she bargained for, a place where she could fully realize her musical dreams on her own terms, surrounding by a support group of like minded people. “It’s very specific to the ground that the city’s built on,” she explained, “the energy that gets trapped here, that lives here, is very unique and it’s very powerful and I think that’s what we all feel. It’s transmitted in a million ways, that’s why the music is like it is. I believe music comes out of the ground. I don’t think it comes out of the sky or your head, it comes out of the ground and it has something to do with the vibrations of the earth wherever you are. The earth here, this plot of ground, it’s a combination of elements, the fact that it’s below sea level, the heat, its history as a port town and a porthole into the whole Western Hemisphere for Europeans and Africans, and then the millions and millions of people who lived here already. It’s like the Constantinople of the New World. Everything is exaggerated here, the beauty is exaggerated, the poverty in exaggerated, the brutality, the music, the food. If you’re a person whose senses are acute there’s no way of getting around it. You just feel it.” McNally definitely heard the reaction to the “pop music” line at the Music Factory. “That’s the first time that happened,” she said. “It just hit me. At Tipitina’s the night before during ‘Sweet Forgiveness’ I changed the line ‘Cause I don’t want a life that’s soft and high if it means that others must suffer and die for my country.’ At Tips that turned into ‘…if it means that 25,000 Iraqis gotta die for my country.’ “What happens is I’m living the songs as I’m singing, which is part of how you remember it. I’m not reciting something I’ve memorized, I’m having a conversation. You don’t memorize a conversation before you have it. One of the things Bob Dylan does that I like is that he’ll rewrite his own songs, it almost doesn’t matter. What I realized going to see that band live and getting to know Charlie Sexton, he told Charlie ‘You can listen to the records and learn all the chords and stuff but it’s not gonna help you.’ Can you imagine having to learn 500 songs that every night are played different? With different words? It’s brilliant because the songs are alive… I can do it a little bit, I can’t do it on that level. When the songs are about something, it keeps becoming clearer in my mind the more times I play them. It’s like people say to me ‘Why’d you call the album Geronimo? Why would you care about the Native American experience if you’re not a Native American?’ “To me, that doesn’t make any sense. I’m an American, therefore Native Americans are part of my history. Part of all of our histories. It’s an extremely poignant, old, textured history. The history of the Americas didn’t start in 1500. It was going on for 10,000 years before that. That was just the year the first lost white guy got here, that’s all. The genocide and slavery, that’s my history. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen. I’m expected to vote. It’s my history, regardless of where my blood originally came from, I’m an American citizen now. Geronimo, Sitting Bull, it’s part of my history as a citizen of this country. It’s about singing about the world around me and what I see and feel. It’s all part of it. Because I’m feeling it I can’t always explain it verbally. That’s where the tone of your voice when you’re singing comes in, the sound of your voice, the rhythm, it also communicates, it’s a multi-level thing, not just can you hear the lyrics. The songs get honed as they get performed. I’m really working to find the right words. That’s one of the big illnesses of society right now. Words have lost their meaning. People use words without thinking of what they mean. All day long you hear people use words like ‘God,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘war,’ but so few people really focus what those words actually mean. They get thrown out there and everyone’s supposed to understand the vague meaning of it. Maybe it’s coded, but I still don’t know what it means. When this administration uses the word ‘freedom’ I don’t have the foggiest idea of what they mean. What does the word ‘freedom’ mean? Geronimo was free. He woke up in the morning, he went about his day. He was the king of his universe. That’s freedom. Freedom isn’t waiting in lines and filling out forms and getting searched, or being lied to.”
DIDN’T WANT HER MTV
McNally, 32, grew up as part of the MTV generation watching her classmates become imprinted by such culture classics as Madonna’s “Dress You Up,” which created the charming fad of 12-year-old girls masquerading as hookers. The young Irish-American Long Islander was already in full rebellion at that point. “MTV just didn’t take,” she recalled. “In high school I liked U2, that’s about as much as I participated as far as bands that were popular. I didn’t like television itself, forget the quality of shows, its something about the box itself, I find it very jarring. I hated Madonna. I hated all of it. Even in the fourth grade I remember being 10-years-old and there was this huge radio contest where everybody wanted Duran Duran to come to their school. I couldn’t stand Duran Duran, I couldn’t stand Madonna, I couldn’t stand any of it, I just hated it, I thought ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ I didn’t participate well in the mainstream, I mean I went to school and classes and was on teams but I didn’t have much to do with most of my peers after school. I read a lot. I found dealing with my peers at school very stressful. “My uncle gave me a J.J. Cale record for my 12th birthday and a guitar. It was slow and simple and I could hear all the notes, what he was playing, so I was able to pick it up. Classic rock radio was big, too, on Long Island, so I heard that. And of course I heard Bruce Springsteen on the radio every day so there were things of substance. And being into U2, Bono wrote real lyrics… I was also very into Irish music in general. Live Aid made sense to me. I was 14 when Joshua Tree came out so that to me was sort of my Beatles experience. Those were the first live concerts I went to. I listened to Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, I saw them all at Nassau Coliseum and I heard a lot of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd on the radio and I read a lot. Naturalists, a lot of English women writers from the Victorian age. Jane Eyre... if I could go find that big window with the seat behind the curtain… that’s what I was into.” At college McNally was surrounded by peers ambitious to line up jobs in the corporate world, but music kept a strong hold on her. In her junior year she went to Paris as an exchange student, determined to return as a musician who could play and sing original material. She brought her guitar and a handful of Dinah Washington and Aretha Franklin records, took lessons and busked in the Paris subways. When she returned home for her senior year McNally was ready to become a professional singer-songwriter. “I didn’t know how you made money at it,” she admitted. “When I graduated I made a demo. For a year after college I played coffee shop gigs, there was a band in Pennsylvania called Once Fish, a Grateful Dead cover band, they played constantly and I opened up for them. I was doing Emmylou Harris stuff, I was listening to Ry Cooder’s Into the Purple Valley and Bop Till You Drop and the Los Lobos record Kiko. I kept playing and got better. I realized the other day I gave myself ten years, not exactly knowing what was supposed to happen in ten years, just that I was supposed to have some measure of success and if not then I’ll move on. And I think it’s … ten years. I was 22, I’m 32 now, it was in the summertime, I’d just graduated. “I had met this guy who managed the 10,000 Maniacs and the Cowboy Junkies, he’d heard my demo tape. He called me up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m playing coffee shops. Waiting tables. He was in L.A. and said I should come out there. I went out there, found someplace to start gigging and went from there. The guy had no idea how to make recordings, so I worked with these songwriter/producers. He got me signed to Capitol. He went on to manage Dido. He thought I should be making some kind of (British accent) ‘hip-hop, you know like the Sneaker Pimps.’ He would call me up after listening to something I did and say ‘It was en-TIRE-ly too country.’ What does too country mean, like the Grand Canyon? What was he fucking talking about, too country? It was horrible, the whole process was excruciating and sad and I got beat up all the time and I could only argue what I liked and what I didn’t like.” McNally arrived in Los Angeles just as Fiona Apple’s record was debuting, in the immediate wake of female stars like Alanis Morrisette and Sheryl Crowe. Capitol thought they had another canary in the cage, suggesting that McNally record with Morrisette’s band, but McNally had her own ideas. “I went through all these songwriters and producers and decided one by one that they were all assholes. I was clear minded about wanting to get this record made and I did but it took four years. I thought I’m just gonna do what I want to do and not even tell anybody. Alanis was huge, Jewel was huge, Sarah McLaughlin was huge. They wanted me to be like that so bad and I hated all of it, I thought it was all trite and shrill, horrible shit. I hated it. They wanted me to record finished tracks so I was constantly forced to prove myself. They never once proved anything to me, or gave me enough money to do it properly. We managed to get through the demo process. I had gone through the whole L.A. carousel, everybody who had worked with Sheryl Crowe, which was a lot of people, all of whom were assholes and all of whom took credit for her success. It was amazing. I’m not a big fan but I can see that Sheryl Crowe is the brains behind Sheryl Crowe.” McNally held out for the musicians she wanted, including drummer Jim Keltner, and made a solid but overproduced debut, Jukebox Sparrows. The label dressed her up as a sex kitten and put her on the road for eight months before abandoning the project. “TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT”“The record came out on Elvis’ birthday, and they pulled the plug on it on the anniversary of his death,” she recalled. “So I immediately got on a plane, went to L.A. and said ‘Now that you’ve killed this one I wanted to go make another one.’ I already had the demos, I knew how to do it at this point. But this was three record company presidents later, Andy Slater was president, I gave him a whole bunch of demos, got a new A&R guy and started the process which took from September to June to get everything OK’d and agree on a producer and have them release the budget. I cut the record, turned it in, two months later they called back and said ‘Change this, do that.’ I said ‘Take it or leave it’ and they said you can have $250,000 to do three songs with our bozo, or you can have half that to make the record with Charlie Sexton.” McNally had already determined that she wanted Sexton, then a member of Bob Dylan’s band, to produce the album. Once she moved permanently to New Orleans in 2002, McNally set about making Geronimo in earnest, traveling back and forth between New Orleans and Austin doing prep work, then recording in June 2003 in Lafayette. Capitol rejected the finished product and McNally asked for her release that August. She eventually signed with anther EMI affiliate, Back Porch Records. “I had to stay at EMI because Capitol wouldn’t negotiate with anybody that wasn’t part of the company,” she explained. “When I saw that J.J. Cale put out a live record on Back Porch I thought that would be a good label for me. By that time I had figured out that it was a waste of time trying to tell people in the record industry that an apple was an apple so I thought Back Porch, that’s where I want to go. Some place called Back Porch. I was sick of the front porch. Sure enough they liked the record and they made me an offer.” Geronimo is an impressive album that places McNally in the tradition of musicians like Bob Dylan and the Band. The Dylan influence is close to the surface—Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier played together with Dylan for a decade, and McNally seems perfectly comfortable referencing musical passages, words and even phrasing clearly inspired by Dylan. One of the most powerful songs on the record, “Leave Your Bags,” is an answer song to Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm.” “I wrote that after two things happened to me in the same week,” said McNally. “The first was I was out in Amagansett visiting my aunt and we went to see Rick Danko at the Stephen Talkhouse. I’d never seen him before. He was at the end and he was in really bad shape. He did ‘Long Black Veil’ that night and it made me wonder what the woman in the Long Black Veil, what did she think? Here he died so gallantly not wanting to fuck up her life but I thought she didn’t get off easy, she’s got to live with that, she’s got to visit his bones every night when the cold wind blows. That sucks. I wondered what she thinks. So I started to write this song, I was gonna name him and call it ‘Ezekiel John Brown’ because you never hear his name in the song and it was gonna be her perspective. “Somebody gave me a copy of Blood On the Tracks the same week. I had heard a lot of those songs, but I don’t know that I’d ever heard ‘Shelter From the Storm.’ I was listening to it and again I wondered what the woman in that song thinks. Why don’t we give her a name? I wonder who she is. So that all became ‘Leave Your Bags By the Door’.” Another song, “Weathervane,” is a powerful metaphor for the creative process. “That’s sort of how I experience it,” she said. “A creativity that passes from one person to the other person. There’s just kind of this group of people I keep coming back to that really help that channel, help me channel certain energy. When I think of that song I think of George Harrison, J.J. Cale and Bob Dylan.”
THE ORDINARY BOB DYLAN
McNally realized one of her dreams when she got to meet Dylan. “I was out on tour when Charlie was still with him and every night off that I had lined up with where they were I just went to the show over and over and over again. They let me stand on the side of the stage. I was practically sitting on Larry Campbell’s amp. Dylan gave me a guitar lesson. He wanted me to play a C chord and a scale. He was very specific about what he wanted me to do. He said ‘Play a major scale,’ and I played it, then he says ‘Play a pentatonic scale.’ I’m sitting and he’s standing over me, he’s totally backlit. The only light in the room is right behind his head. He’s smoking a cigarette and he’s in this black suit, ten minutes before they hit at Madison Square Garden, and he’s telling me to play more pentatonic scales. Then he goes ‘That’s the blues.’ So I said ‘That’s where we’re going, right?’ He goes ‘That’s where we’re goin’.’ He goes ‘Play me a song I might have heard.’ He was so ordinary, kind of inquisitive and not weird at all, just normal, but I didn’t expect him to ask me to play him a song. He wanted me to play something in C, and all I could think of were his songs, and my songs. I’m not gonna play him any of his songs and he’s not gonna know any of my songs, and I could not think of one, so I said ‘Can I play you one of mine?’ and he said ‘Well all right but just the first verse.’ So I played him a song called ‘John Finch.’ The first verse is ‘Hang down John Finch, hang down and cry, hang down John Finch, there’s an angry crowd outside.’ And he says ‘Sounds like the Kingston Trio. Know who they are?’ I was devastated. I’m like ‘Oh, man’.” Dylan is another musical visitor who was captivated by New Orleans. “New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it,” Dylan wrote in his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One. “The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing—spirits, all determined to get somewhere.” The mystical sense Dylan evokes from New Orleans sounds akin to McNally’s self-description of her roots-influenced songs as “North American Ghost Music.” “I don’t see how it would miss him,” she said, nodding her head. “If anybody would have picked it up, he would have. Everything he said, he talked about ‘that woman’s voice on OZ,’ and Tony Hall, Willie Green, and how air is just different here, how the heat and the air mix, the smell of the air…”McNally is part of all that now, part of a new generation of transplanted New Orleans artists who draw inspiration from the music of the city’s past but are playing something different. Some, like the pioneering violinist Gina Forsyth, arrived long ago, only to be joined by the likes of Mike West, Lynn Drury, Anders Osborne, Theresa Andersson, Susan Cowsill, Marc Stone and Jeff & Vida. Open sessions such as Marc Stone’s Monday night shows at the Old Point, which have featured nearly all of the above mentioned as guest stars including McNally, offer a process by which musicians can stretch out to test new material as well as favorite covers. “People are so used to doing long gigs and lots of bar gigs, and people have large repertoires,” McNally concluded, “so when I play with Marc Stone he says ‘Just come in, you’ll be the featured artist, we’ll do whatever you want to do.’ You just yell out the changes as we’re going, you just do it. The whole town is like that, it’s like anybody in town can come play. It’s not an expensive place to live, you can come down here and you can do it, you can eke out a living and play for the sake of it. “I think the most nurturing this about New Orleans is the quality of what’s here. You can see the Neville Brothers play, you can see Snooks play, just being in the presence of certain musicians is lesson enough. Just feeling them the way they are. New Orleans is unique because these guys are here. You can sit at Gatemouth Brown’s feet and watch him do what he does. When Pinetop Perkins comes to town you’re on the presence of a 90-year-old Delta bluesman. And the things that made him the way he is, many of those things are still here. In New Orleans you can still feel it, and you can watch it and get close to it.”
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Monday I got Friday on my mind
SXSW rolls on and the days gets longer and the nights shorter (or is it the other way around?) Friday began as a sprint and finished up as a forced march but I wouldn't have it any other way. After one last glimpse at the trade show (slim pickings this year -- I only landed two pens and how many damn key chains can one person use?) it was on to Stubb's and the Spin party. Having gotten my start writing for the underground press I always liked SXSW for the fact that it was sponsored by the nation's alternative publications, but the end of print journalism is bearing right down on us and as much as I hate it it's nice to know it was fun while it lasted. The SXSW bag had a copy of the soon to be disappeared No Depression magazine and with Harp going down as well there may soon come a time when there will be no place you can read a 10,000 word piece on Death Cab for Cutie without a single Vivian Stanshall reference in it. Well he's gone too (dammit) and soon so will the rest of us but what is making me write this way? Could it be that relentless Texas sun, those vultures hovering over me? Oh, those are just those talking talking heads again telling everyone how exciting and fabulous it all is. Time for a plate of brisket, then a retreat to South Austin, where a seat at the bar in the cool, cool Continental Club waits for me and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is buying the Tecate. Oh yeah, I didn't stick around the Spin party for this year's buzz band, Vampire Weekend, but nobody had anything good to say about them (could they be history even before the release of their debut album?) so I am happy with the decision to beat the heat in the Continental crypt. And, as it turns out, watching the cream of New Orleans music in action (at least at first), the coming-into-his-own Glen David Andrews, who is catching up to cousin Trombone Shorty and already past cousin James Andrews, the great songwriter Paul Sanchez and New Orleans' newest queen of song, Susan Cowsill, whose magnificent voice won her Female Vocalist of the year award at OffBeat's Best of the Beat awards, and when you can beat out Irma Thomas for such an honor you ain't just whistling "Dixie." Susan sang her own stuff then was joined by her older brothers for a Cowsills reunion (one of several during SXSW) to sing "Hair," a delight hard to categorize, especially to hear New Orleans' queen of song recapitulate her six-year-old comic cameo singing "spaghetti!" Demonstrating that even great progamming has its limitations some execrable group followed, a band so bad they must be related to Ray Nagin or managed by a Jazzfest organizer in order to have been included on the bill. Thankfully I have blanked this awful group's name from my memory and replaced it with the gleaming vision of an icy cold Tecate, which was still coming across the bar gratis at this point. No less a dignitary than Augie Meyers had joined me at said bar, although Augie was drinking tequila. Augie was in good spirits condemning the internet as the anti-Christ, telling political jokes and congratulating his son Clay for having the sense to get out of the music business. Thankfully Augie himself was less inclined to take that route, having set himself up pretty well in his beloved San Antonio with the occasional foray here and there to play that amazing Vox Continental organ sound. And of course, accordion. When I told him I'd been hanging with Billy Gibbons Augie said "Billy told me that 'Hey Baby Que Paso' is the national anthem of Texas!" Apparently they've met. We raised a toast to the recently departed Rocky Morales, tenor god of the San Antonio horns, and Augie updated me on the whereabouts of Joe "King" Carrasco, who is living and working in Mexico. "I got a call from Joe saying 'Come on down, I have 500 fifty dollar gigs!'," Augie related. "I told him 'Get me one $500 gig and I'll be there'." Augie was playing later that night at Jovita's with the Krayolas.
The Iguanas were up next to play the Continental's happy hour and the latest configuration of this great group had it Tex-Mex R&B chops down. It wasn't even dark and the night was already in full, full swing.
After a visit to the annual SXSW party thrown by Cory Moore at his restoration museum for priceless antique cars, the South Austin Speed Shop, it was on to Jovita's for the Krayolas, the San Antonio-based britpop band that took over where the Sir Douglas Quintet left off. One of Doug Sahm's greatest albums, a tribute to San Antonio's west side, was titled The Return of Doug Saldana, an iconic title. Though Krayolas leaders Hector and David Saldana were obviously not on Doug's mind when he made that classic, they are keeping the name alive. This reunion, with Augie sitting in on organ, was jaw droppingly amazing, all the bright, melodic power of Britpop combined with the twang, fuzz and sustain of Texas rock & roll played by a two guitar quartet. In addition to their own outstanding originals (check out Best Riffs Only on Box records) the Krayolas own the distinction of being the only live band I've heard play both Beatles and Dave Clark Five songs in the same set (the Radiators have done Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers in the same set which is also pretty amazing).
The Krayolas were so great that Shawn Sahm and the Tex-Mex Experience, good as they were, could not reach the same intensity level in the following set. No shame there because the Krayolas are my new favorite band.
I tempted fate by returning to the Continental for the playout of the Ponderosa Stomp showcase. Though I caught a good portion of Michael Hurtt and the Haunted Hearts' set, Kenny and the Kasuals were a disappointing finale, one of the very few times the Stomp has let me down. But I was satisfied and walked back over the hill to South Lamar with the strains of the Krayolas rocking my mind.
The Iguanas were up next to play the Continental's happy hour and the latest configuration of this great group had it Tex-Mex R&B chops down. It wasn't even dark and the night was already in full, full swing.
After a visit to the annual SXSW party thrown by Cory Moore at his restoration museum for priceless antique cars, the South Austin Speed Shop, it was on to Jovita's for the Krayolas, the San Antonio-based britpop band that took over where the Sir Douglas Quintet left off. One of Doug Sahm's greatest albums, a tribute to San Antonio's west side, was titled The Return of Doug Saldana, an iconic title. Though Krayolas leaders Hector and David Saldana were obviously not on Doug's mind when he made that classic, they are keeping the name alive. This reunion, with Augie sitting in on organ, was jaw droppingly amazing, all the bright, melodic power of Britpop combined with the twang, fuzz and sustain of Texas rock & roll played by a two guitar quartet. In addition to their own outstanding originals (check out Best Riffs Only on Box records) the Krayolas own the distinction of being the only live band I've heard play both Beatles and Dave Clark Five songs in the same set (the Radiators have done Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers in the same set which is also pretty amazing).
The Krayolas were so great that Shawn Sahm and the Tex-Mex Experience, good as they were, could not reach the same intensity level in the following set. No shame there because the Krayolas are my new favorite band.
I tempted fate by returning to the Continental for the playout of the Ponderosa Stomp showcase. Though I caught a good portion of Michael Hurtt and the Haunted Hearts' set, Kenny and the Kasuals were a disappointing finale, one of the very few times the Stomp has let me down. But I was satisfied and walked back over the hill to South Lamar with the strains of the Krayolas rocking my mind.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
You're gonna miss me baby
Sometimes the events with the fewest people at SXSW are the most fun.
Thursday's noon showcase at the Park across from the Convention
Center (nicknamed Concentration Moon) did not draw many contestants
but provided more than a few delights. Hosted by New York's Bowery
Poetry Club, the gig offered attendees the chance to hear scruffy
young poets deliver gnarled observations about the New Jersey turnpike
in between some exhilarating music, especially by the outstanding
young band Fireflys, who closed their set with the dance
anthem "It's a Party."
That song could have been the theme for the week because behind every
club door, inside every parking lot, behind every chain link fence
somebody was having a party, showcase or music blast all over town. I
made my way over to the New West party but didn't stay long as the
music was less inspiring than it has been in the past and I didn't
recognize as many people as usual. South Austin beckoned. Up and down
South Congress there was one wild time after another. Hard to beat
the all day party at Yard Dog, the great art and curio shop with
bands in the back yard and free beer under the blistering hot Texas
sun. Toward the end of the day Black Joe Lewis played a transcendent
set at Yard Dog, which as usual was wall to wall people in the
backyard spilling out into the alleyway up and down the street. Lewis
is a young blues player with a great voice and an instinct for Texas
blues guitar. Working with a San Antonio-style horn section Lewis
plied his way through blues warhorses like a seasoned veteran. It's
great to see a new generation of Texas bluesmen (Gary Clark is
another) carrying the torch for this great music.
Speaking of Lewis and Clark, they were joined on the SXSW Austin
Chronicle Music cover by a real pioneer, Roky Erickson, and that same
day Roky was at the bottom of the hill at Threadgill's hosting his
ice cream social. At the end of Roky's set the crowd went wild as the
red bearded Billy Gibbons strapped on a guitar to join Roky for the
last four tunes of his set, including "Red Temple Prayer (Two Headed
Dog)" and an incredible version of "You're Gonna Miss Me," songs
Gibbons knew from Roky's days leading the legendary Texas psychedelic
rockers 13th Floor Elevators.
"I told 'em I'd do it if they ley me play the electric gong solo,"
joked Gibbons, who fit into Roky's tightly-knit band like he'd been
playing with him all his life. It was really interesting to hear
Gibbons back up a harmonic line, play a fill or just accent a single
note and recognize that unmistakable tone from a million Z Z Top
records. At the finale Gibbons finally cut loose after playing the
respectful backing musician, unleashing a fearsome solo that ended
with him playing with only his left hand as he let the neck slide
down through his fingers in a showcase move.
"I've idolized Roky all my life," Gibbons later explained. "When he
was 19 I was a 16 year old following his every move. As far as his
singing goes, it's like him and Little Richard, forget the rest. When
you have a voice like that you don't realize how you're doing it, it
just comes naturally."
Gibbons was in such high spirits that he jammed again later that
night upstairs at the Continental with the Mike Flanigin B3 trio, playing Albert Collins-style blues licks while Flanigin played his B3 and Chris Layton sat in on drums. It's good to see Gibbons hanging and playing in different settings. Could it be that this Texas guitar giant is paving the way for a solo project?
Thursday's noon showcase at the Park across from the Convention
Center (nicknamed Concentration Moon) did not draw many contestants
but provided more than a few delights. Hosted by New York's Bowery
Poetry Club, the gig offered attendees the chance to hear scruffy
young poets deliver gnarled observations about the New Jersey turnpike
in between some exhilarating music, especially by the outstanding
young band Fireflys, who closed their set with the dance
anthem "It's a Party."
That song could have been the theme for the week because behind every
club door, inside every parking lot, behind every chain link fence
somebody was having a party, showcase or music blast all over town. I
made my way over to the New West party but didn't stay long as the
music was less inspiring than it has been in the past and I didn't
recognize as many people as usual. South Austin beckoned. Up and down
South Congress there was one wild time after another. Hard to beat
the all day party at Yard Dog, the great art and curio shop with
bands in the back yard and free beer under the blistering hot Texas
sun. Toward the end of the day Black Joe Lewis played a transcendent
set at Yard Dog, which as usual was wall to wall people in the
backyard spilling out into the alleyway up and down the street. Lewis
is a young blues player with a great voice and an instinct for Texas
blues guitar. Working with a San Antonio-style horn section Lewis
plied his way through blues warhorses like a seasoned veteran. It's
great to see a new generation of Texas bluesmen (Gary Clark is
another) carrying the torch for this great music.
Speaking of Lewis and Clark, they were joined on the SXSW Austin
Chronicle Music cover by a real pioneer, Roky Erickson, and that same
day Roky was at the bottom of the hill at Threadgill's hosting his
ice cream social. At the end of Roky's set the crowd went wild as the
red bearded Billy Gibbons strapped on a guitar to join Roky for the
last four tunes of his set, including "Red Temple Prayer (Two Headed
Dog)" and an incredible version of "You're Gonna Miss Me," songs
Gibbons knew from Roky's days leading the legendary Texas psychedelic
rockers 13th Floor Elevators.
"I told 'em I'd do it if they ley me play the electric gong solo,"
joked Gibbons, who fit into Roky's tightly-knit band like he'd been
playing with him all his life. It was really interesting to hear
Gibbons back up a harmonic line, play a fill or just accent a single
note and recognize that unmistakable tone from a million Z Z Top
records. At the finale Gibbons finally cut loose after playing the
respectful backing musician, unleashing a fearsome solo that ended
with him playing with only his left hand as he let the neck slide
down through his fingers in a showcase move.
"I've idolized Roky all my life," Gibbons later explained. "When he
was 19 I was a 16 year old following his every move. As far as his
singing goes, it's like him and Little Richard, forget the rest. When
you have a voice like that you don't realize how you're doing it, it
just comes naturally."
Gibbons was in such high spirits that he jammed again later that
night upstairs at the Continental with the Mike Flanigin B3 trio, playing Albert Collins-style blues licks while Flanigin played his B3 and Chris Layton sat in on drums. It's good to see Gibbons hanging and playing in different settings. Could it be that this Texas guitar giant is paving the way for a solo project?
Monday, March 24, 2008
What goes up must come down
My experiences with SXSW have taught me not to expect too much and always ready to be surprised. In my first years at the festival I made a ridiculous effort to see everything, which is of course impossible. I developed a kind of holographic analysis of bands – listen to 15 seconds and project the entire sound of the group from the information at hand. In the case of strictly formatted genre musicians, which at this point make up well over 90 percent of the music content of SXSW, this method can be very useful at tossing out the truly incompetent and those who are there on adrenalin alone. Keys like – are the players in tune, does the rhythm section play as a unit, is anybody listening to other members of the band – are immediately apparent. If a band shows any penchant for melodic invention, harmonic architecture or individual personality it merits further consideration and I’ve found a lot of favorites, from the Duckhills to OK Go, using this method.
There are many disappointments, most of them relating to bands I didn’t get to see, like Little Village the year I thought it would be too crowded, or Van Morrison this year, because I just didn’t make it over to La Zona Rosa in time for the show. This is the problem with scheduling at SXSW. You can sit down and map out your strategy of what you’re going to see until you’re blue in the face but your chances of getting to fulfill all of your tightly scheduled wishes go down the drain with that extra-long set, chance encounter with an old friend, distraction of a million possible varieties, transportation snafu or simple fatigue.
The greatest disappointments are the shows you make it to expecting something special that don’t live up to what you had hoped for. This year’s performance by Bonnie Bramlett at Pangea earns five stars in the disappointment department. I’ve been at some bad clubs at SXSW, but this one was the worst. I mean, Pangea is so bad it makes me wish there was some kind of official Department of Club Control formed to close places just for sucking. The fact that people were forced to stand outside for half an hour waiting to get into this place just to be herded like cattle into the back with no sightline so a handful of people sitting on couches in front of the stage could act like swells is enough to make me want to … well, go someplace else, or actually in this case to call it a night and try again the next day. Bramlett’s new album, Beautiful, produced by southern soul veteran Johnny Sandlin with a superb backing group of veteran R&B sessioneers, is Bramlett’s best solo effort and a cinch to make a lot of people’s Top 10 lists this year. The whole band was on hand for this showcase, which generated tremendous interest based on the extensive lines in front of the club. But the acoustics in Pangea were so bad Bonnie might as well have been Britney Spears. Couldn’t see her and what was coming through that echoing sound system was incoherent. I mean, maybe if you were in the VIP section you could hear the stage sound. What a joke.
On the other hand I thought the hotel bar at the Hilton Garden Inn was going to be a terrible venue and it turned out to be great – spacious, good sight lines, decent sound. I saw a terrific set from Jeremy Fisher there. Fisher is a talented young singer songwriter who has found more in life to write about than unrequited love, clearly doesn’t aspire to be Justin Timberlake and has a voice that makes you care about listening to what he has to say. Which makes him stand out among his peers in the young singer songwriter business.
This was the night when I wandered back and forth on Sixth Street without hearing anything special while I watched the heavily made up talking heads on every corner screech about how “exciting” everything was and how “fabulous” SXSW is. Yep, SXSW can be just as exciting as MTV’s most glamorous fashion show.
But that’s what I get for hanging around Sixth Street and going to places like Pangea. It’s not like I don’t know where the real fun in Austin is. It wouldn’t be long before I got back into the swing of things.
Correction: In the last post I wrote that Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters played at the Continental. Don’t know why I wrote that down because I was certainly aware of being in Antone’s and having a dancing good time. I would be getting to the Continental soon enough.
There are many disappointments, most of them relating to bands I didn’t get to see, like Little Village the year I thought it would be too crowded, or Van Morrison this year, because I just didn’t make it over to La Zona Rosa in time for the show. This is the problem with scheduling at SXSW. You can sit down and map out your strategy of what you’re going to see until you’re blue in the face but your chances of getting to fulfill all of your tightly scheduled wishes go down the drain with that extra-long set, chance encounter with an old friend, distraction of a million possible varieties, transportation snafu or simple fatigue.
The greatest disappointments are the shows you make it to expecting something special that don’t live up to what you had hoped for. This year’s performance by Bonnie Bramlett at Pangea earns five stars in the disappointment department. I’ve been at some bad clubs at SXSW, but this one was the worst. I mean, Pangea is so bad it makes me wish there was some kind of official Department of Club Control formed to close places just for sucking. The fact that people were forced to stand outside for half an hour waiting to get into this place just to be herded like cattle into the back with no sightline so a handful of people sitting on couches in front of the stage could act like swells is enough to make me want to … well, go someplace else, or actually in this case to call it a night and try again the next day. Bramlett’s new album, Beautiful, produced by southern soul veteran Johnny Sandlin with a superb backing group of veteran R&B sessioneers, is Bramlett’s best solo effort and a cinch to make a lot of people’s Top 10 lists this year. The whole band was on hand for this showcase, which generated tremendous interest based on the extensive lines in front of the club. But the acoustics in Pangea were so bad Bonnie might as well have been Britney Spears. Couldn’t see her and what was coming through that echoing sound system was incoherent. I mean, maybe if you were in the VIP section you could hear the stage sound. What a joke.
On the other hand I thought the hotel bar at the Hilton Garden Inn was going to be a terrible venue and it turned out to be great – spacious, good sight lines, decent sound. I saw a terrific set from Jeremy Fisher there. Fisher is a talented young singer songwriter who has found more in life to write about than unrequited love, clearly doesn’t aspire to be Justin Timberlake and has a voice that makes you care about listening to what he has to say. Which makes him stand out among his peers in the young singer songwriter business.
This was the night when I wandered back and forth on Sixth Street without hearing anything special while I watched the heavily made up talking heads on every corner screech about how “exciting” everything was and how “fabulous” SXSW is. Yep, SXSW can be just as exciting as MTV’s most glamorous fashion show.
But that’s what I get for hanging around Sixth Street and going to places like Pangea. It’s not like I don’t know where the real fun in Austin is. It wouldn’t be long before I got back into the swing of things.
Correction: In the last post I wrote that Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters played at the Continental. Don’t know why I wrote that down because I was certainly aware of being in Antone’s and having a dancing good time. I would be getting to the Continental soon enough.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Glaswegian bluesmen and Guitar Town brit-pop
In the early days of SXSW the convention hit Austin like a flash
flood. One day the town would be enjoying a relaxing spring day, the
next it would be overrun with frenzied record industry moguls on the
make. It was similar to what still happens in New Orleans when the
population of the city suddenly doubles on the first day of the Jazz
and Heritage Festival. But Austin has grown tremendously since SXSW
began and since the festival expanded to include the film and now
interactive portions everything is already humming by the time the
music festival starts.
As the years go by the crowds appear to be more and more
impersonal. One of the striking things about visiting Austin was
always how friendly most people you met were, but as the crowds of
attendees have grown most of them have begun to treat each other like
commuters on the New York subway system. But not all of them. There
is some kind of magic at work in Austin that allows you to meet
people, and make lifelong friends, in the unlikliest of
circumstances. With the festival as crowded as it is you might not
see close friends at any point, yet somehow I always seem to meet new
people who I end up standing next to at event after event. This
year's version of the unlikely new friend is Dave Arcari, a dark
haired, Bunyanesque figure with an impenetrable Glaswegian accent. I
had a hard time understanding Arcari, whose ready smile and
two-drinks-at-a-time conviviality made nonverbal communication easy
enough, but his merry partner Margaret proved an able conversational
go-between. Margaret provided me with an album, Come With Me... which
proved Arcari to be an excellent National steel finger picking and
slide guitarist playing unaccompanied blues in a style heavily
influenced by Skip James and Robert Johnson filtered through a post
punk sensibility. Oddly, his deep, gravel-throated singing is in a
perfectly articulated American southern idiom. Go figure.
I first ran into Arcari at the BMI kickoff party at Stubb's, always a
lot of fun if only for the chance of getting your first succulent
slabs of that tasty brisket. This year's show featured an unfortunate
performance by Kaki King, who should fire the advisor who convinced
her she should start singing, and the remarkable Mike Farris, whose
uncanny voice is nothing less than a gift from the heavens. Farris
does contemporary arrangements of gospel classics such as "Can't No
Grave Hold My Body Down." It's an old trope successfully negotiated
over the years by the likes of Joe Cocker, but Farris is something
very special -- he really inhabits this material, and is certain to
join in at the highest level of the current neo-soul movement.
From there I made my way to the Hole in the Wall for a peek at one of
my favorite SXSW events, Mike Hall's Swollen Circus. This year the
event was dedicated to the late Drew Glacken of the Silos and many
other adventures, a swell guy and sorely missed. Several of the
people who'd played at Glacken's tribute concert at Southpaw in
Brooklyn were on hand. And of course who do I run into but Dave
Arcari carrying a pint of beer in each hand and smiling broadly.
"Aargh yeergh aargh arrgh yer right, eh?" he said in greeting. I raised my glass in return.
Earlier in the day I was on line to register for my credential,
fumbling around for my ID, when I pulled out a car I had picked up
from somewhere advertising Billy Bob Thornton's backup band, the
Boxmasters.
"Hey, that's me," said the guy standing next to me at the
registration desk, pointing at the card. It was indeed Mike Butler, one of the Boxmasters, who was accompanied by bandmate J.D. Andrew. They were playing a run through of material from their upcoming album with Billy Bob that night at the Continental. By the time I got there the band was just about to go on and the place was packed. Having heard Billy Bob's earlier records I was completely unprepared for what I was about to hear. This was a no-holds-barred twangfest, five guitars rocketing along in perfect synchronicity, their cleverly arranged parts all interlocking in soaring sonic architecture. Nobody played more than an eight bar solo at a time yet every one of them was blazing away, playing fills, doubled solos and harmony parts with searing intensity. Billy Bob was the eye of the hurricane, standing in place, chain smoking and smiling as he gestured at audience members while he delivered his half sung, half spoken vocals with utter Dean Martin-like confidence. Thornton is a skilled writer with killer new material like the anthem "Shit List" and he spins terrific anecdotes between songs. "I wrote this song around the time my ex-girl friend told me to give up drinking," began one story, which ended up poorly for the girl friend when Billy Bob decided the compromise solution was to take up smoking pot.
The most surprising moments of the set, though, were awesome arrangements of British Invasion classics from the Beatles and The Who (would you believe Mott the Hoople?). The great Stephen Bruton came up on stage (as if five guitarists weren't enough) to help out on an apocalyptic version of "The Kids Are Allright," the greatest arrangement of this song I've ever heard. At the end all the guitarists were windmilling their way through the opening chords from "Baba O'Riley." Mayhem, Austin, style.
Oh yeah, right. Sitting at the edge of the balcony was Billy Bob's good buddy Billy Gibbons, who came onstage midset just to tell the crowd how much he was enjoying the show. Later that night, Gibbons, Thornton the Boxmasters and various friends closed the bar at the Four Seasons and then some, a celebration that spilled over into the lobby well after closing time. Billy Gibbons was just warming up, though, as we will see in our next chapter of the SXSW 2008 saga.
flood. One day the town would be enjoying a relaxing spring day, the
next it would be overrun with frenzied record industry moguls on the
make. It was similar to what still happens in New Orleans when the
population of the city suddenly doubles on the first day of the Jazz
and Heritage Festival. But Austin has grown tremendously since SXSW
began and since the festival expanded to include the film and now
interactive portions everything is already humming by the time the
music festival starts.
As the years go by the crowds appear to be more and more
impersonal. One of the striking things about visiting Austin was
always how friendly most people you met were, but as the crowds of
attendees have grown most of them have begun to treat each other like
commuters on the New York subway system. But not all of them. There
is some kind of magic at work in Austin that allows you to meet
people, and make lifelong friends, in the unlikliest of
circumstances. With the festival as crowded as it is you might not
see close friends at any point, yet somehow I always seem to meet new
people who I end up standing next to at event after event. This
year's version of the unlikely new friend is Dave Arcari, a dark
haired, Bunyanesque figure with an impenetrable Glaswegian accent. I
had a hard time understanding Arcari, whose ready smile and
two-drinks-at-a-time conviviality made nonverbal communication easy
enough, but his merry partner Margaret proved an able conversational
go-between. Margaret provided me with an album, Come With Me... which
proved Arcari to be an excellent National steel finger picking and
slide guitarist playing unaccompanied blues in a style heavily
influenced by Skip James and Robert Johnson filtered through a post
punk sensibility. Oddly, his deep, gravel-throated singing is in a
perfectly articulated American southern idiom. Go figure.
I first ran into Arcari at the BMI kickoff party at Stubb's, always a
lot of fun if only for the chance of getting your first succulent
slabs of that tasty brisket. This year's show featured an unfortunate
performance by Kaki King, who should fire the advisor who convinced
her she should start singing, and the remarkable Mike Farris, whose
uncanny voice is nothing less than a gift from the heavens. Farris
does contemporary arrangements of gospel classics such as "Can't No
Grave Hold My Body Down." It's an old trope successfully negotiated
over the years by the likes of Joe Cocker, but Farris is something
very special -- he really inhabits this material, and is certain to
join in at the highest level of the current neo-soul movement.
From there I made my way to the Hole in the Wall for a peek at one of
my favorite SXSW events, Mike Hall's Swollen Circus. This year the
event was dedicated to the late Drew Glacken of the Silos and many
other adventures, a swell guy and sorely missed. Several of the
people who'd played at Glacken's tribute concert at Southpaw in
Brooklyn were on hand. And of course who do I run into but Dave
Arcari carrying a pint of beer in each hand and smiling broadly.
"Aargh yeergh aargh arrgh yer right, eh?" he said in greeting. I raised my glass in return.
Earlier in the day I was on line to register for my credential,
fumbling around for my ID, when I pulled out a car I had picked up
from somewhere advertising Billy Bob Thornton's backup band, the
Boxmasters.
"Hey, that's me," said the guy standing next to me at the
registration desk, pointing at the card. It was indeed Mike Butler, one of the Boxmasters, who was accompanied by bandmate J.D. Andrew. They were playing a run through of material from their upcoming album with Billy Bob that night at the Continental. By the time I got there the band was just about to go on and the place was packed. Having heard Billy Bob's earlier records I was completely unprepared for what I was about to hear. This was a no-holds-barred twangfest, five guitars rocketing along in perfect synchronicity, their cleverly arranged parts all interlocking in soaring sonic architecture. Nobody played more than an eight bar solo at a time yet every one of them was blazing away, playing fills, doubled solos and harmony parts with searing intensity. Billy Bob was the eye of the hurricane, standing in place, chain smoking and smiling as he gestured at audience members while he delivered his half sung, half spoken vocals with utter Dean Martin-like confidence. Thornton is a skilled writer with killer new material like the anthem "Shit List" and he spins terrific anecdotes between songs. "I wrote this song around the time my ex-girl friend told me to give up drinking," began one story, which ended up poorly for the girl friend when Billy Bob decided the compromise solution was to take up smoking pot.
The most surprising moments of the set, though, were awesome arrangements of British Invasion classics from the Beatles and The Who (would you believe Mott the Hoople?). The great Stephen Bruton came up on stage (as if five guitarists weren't enough) to help out on an apocalyptic version of "The Kids Are Allright," the greatest arrangement of this song I've ever heard. At the end all the guitarists were windmilling their way through the opening chords from "Baba O'Riley." Mayhem, Austin, style.
Oh yeah, right. Sitting at the edge of the balcony was Billy Bob's good buddy Billy Gibbons, who came onstage midset just to tell the crowd how much he was enjoying the show. Later that night, Gibbons, Thornton the Boxmasters and various friends closed the bar at the Four Seasons and then some, a celebration that spilled over into the lobby well after closing time. Billy Gibbons was just warming up, though, as we will see in our next chapter of the SXSW 2008 saga.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Back to SXSW
I've attended nearly every renewal of SXSW going back to the very beginning, when I covered the nascent event for United Press International on my way back home to Brooklyn from the Grammy awards. Since then I've seen a bunch of jobs come and go and moved my tack to New Orleans for what has been a pretty mind boggling life experience there, but SXSW has been a constant touchstone throughout even as the city of Austin itself has gone through dramatic changes. Not to mention the music industry. At the earliest SXSW events I always looked forward to going home and listening to all the new bands who'd handed me cassette tapes of their work. Ponty Bone, Daniel Johnston, the True Believers, Brave Combo, Joe King Carrasco, Killer Bees, what a wealth of great tapes I always got. After a few years bands started handing out CDS, then organizations began really flogging those CD samplers.
The experiences of going to various events such as MIDEM and the Montreal Jazz Festival (if I never attend another Grammy it will be too soon) all have certain charms but aren't compelling enough to look forward to year after year. On the other hand SXSW never, ever disappoints and would be difficult to pass up any year. I no longer even care about who is listed in the lineup of bands before I attend because I know I will stumble across something unexpected that delights me. It has happened every year, often in non SXSW showcases or local bars. At this point the bustle of downtown and desperate industry networking sessions are the least interesting part of the event for me. But the people themselves continue to give me a reason to keep going. Every year I tend to stay further away from downtown to the point where I have become a denizen of south Austin. Instances of transcendence inordinantly cluster around the Continental, Yard Dog, Jovitas and Maria's Taco.
This year's SXSW had an even larger surprise quotient prepared for me than usual. I arrived in town two days before the music festival began and my host, local manager Gretchen Barber, had to hit the mall to shop for a computer. I'm not a shopper but I have been known to hold up my end of a barstool conversation and before I knew what happened I was drinking beer at the bar of the California Pizza Kitchen with Billy Gibbons, who was on hiatus from his endless ZZ Top world tour. Gibbons is a legendary conversationalist and as the beer tab added up (thanks Billy!) the subjects ranged from guitars to Apple computers, guys who write computer virus worms, space aliens, the Illuminati Trilogy, language, cigarettes (prompted by a visit from the Native American smokes perveyors, who fixed Billy up), vintage cars and the sound compression on MP3s.
Gibbons had been shopping for special shoes to wear through airport metal detectors that day, and while waiting to pay for them he spotted two skateboard-toting tweens giving him the eye as if to say 'That's that guy from You Tube.' Billy turns to the kids and says gruffly "What are you punks doing here?" They tell him they're waiting for their buddy to get off work. Noting the white i-Pod earbuds they're both wearing Billy asks "Watcha got there?"
"I've got 4,000," says the first kid.
"I've got 6,000," says the second kid, "but our friend had 15,000! We're fixin' to trade some with him."
Billy asks "You get those from CDs?"
The kid looks at Billy. Maybe he's being cute, maybe not, but he says "What's that?"
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