Musician • Producer • Engineer
We had dinner at the Gardner Ale House last night, and enjoyed music by Bees Deluxe. “Acid Blues” they call it, but it’s not crazy — understated if anything — but certainly not the same old boring blues you hear all too often. Loved Conrad Warre’s bare-fingers guitar work (PRS into a little Fender, with dollops of Uni-Vibe). Digging their latest LP, Voice of Dog, on Spotify.
Reading Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde by Lewis MacAdams. I want to see the 1961 film version of The Connection (directed by Shirley Clarke), Jack Gelber’s play originally staged in 1959 by Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre.
There’s an art to making a catchy pop song in an odd time signature — “odd” meaning something other than the vastly popular 4/4 and 3/4 (“waltz time”) meters. Despite the overwhelming popularity of those two meters, if a great song has time changes that flow naturally, no reason it can’t top the charts. Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” (1959) was the pioneer, a huge hit in 5/4 time (counted “ONE-two-three-ONE two” — listen for the kick drum on those “ones”). The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” shifts from 4/4 to 3/4 (or 6/8) in the turnaround (the phrase “Strawberry Fields Forever”), with a possible bar of 7 thrown in… Redbone’s “Witch Queen of New Orleans” (1971) is in 4/4, but adds in a bar of 2/4 — that little hiccup — after every other measure in the chorus: Marie Marie la voodoo veau She’ll put a spell on … Read more
Reading Greil Marcus’ The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs. I’ve read most of his books over the years (starting with the indispensable Mystery Train), and what I find thrilling about his writing is the way he seamlessly combines deep knowledge with unbridled imagination. The chapter on Buddy Holly (“Crying, Waiting, Hoping: 1959/1969”) is the best thing I’ve ever read on that artist. “1969” alludes to the Beatles’ attempt, in the studio, at playing the Holly songs that inspired them to start a band in the first place — as their band was falling apart. “A Day in the Life” has a big part in the chapter too. The whole ten-year story, as Marcus tells it, is heartbreaking.
Great interview in the new Tape Op (#129) with Teri Landi, curator of the huge ABKCO Records tape archives. Especially the info about Cameo-Parkway recordings, like how there was often gobs of reverb on the tapes that almost disappeared in the transition to 45s.
Hal Blaine’s drumming on “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” ❤️
Wanted a decent, inexpensive pair of powered monitors for everyday listening, so I got these Presonus Eris 3.5s. Very pleased! They’ll be useful for mix-checking, too.
Every time I watch this video from the Old Grey Whistle Test (and I’ve watched it many times over the years) it has the same effect — it just floors me. The band’s in total command, yet at the same time they seem possessed by the music — as is Stevie, for sure. The only word I can think of to describe her performance is “electrifying.” The sad part is — I can’t imagine anything like this taking place today. watch “Rhiannon” on YouTube
Listening to Schaun Tozer’s OST for Mighty Jerome. A lot of his stuff is jazzy, but this (like Intelligence) has an electronic edginess to it that I love.
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. the narrator of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco