Old Timey Music for Howard and DC

howard · Post by **howard** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 6:52 am

DC47 wrote:I mean, I doubt that you could safely park a BMW on the street within a five block radius of Zucotti Park. The horror!

Sure you could; I parked mine on the street during Occupy all the time. (Irony? Me a limousine liberal.)

The electronic stuff NYPD was doing during occupy seemed generally of the nature of trying out new toys and techniques. Mixing old techniques of infiltration and surveillance with modern technology. This kind of shit:
http://gawker.com/5850025/right-wing-ra ... eet-emails" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The electronic jamming/interruption was not large scale nor tactical afaik, they did a little misinformation via twitter (was twitter around then?) and text message list. But there were some occasions when your cell phone would go all screwy in weird ways.

I had a patient who was a high up computer security guy for chase, who was involved with working with nypd on this stuff. He was quite loose lipped during his recovery from anesthesia, and was quite candid in answering my questions. But there were news stories about this stuff as well.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 3:00 pm

howard wrote:
DC47 wrote:I mean, I doubt that you could safely park a BMW on the street within a five block radius of Zucotti Park. The horror!
Sure you could; I parked mine on the street during Occupy all the time. (Irony? Me a limousine liberal.)

I meant BMW's without the official "Hang the 1%" hang-tag and the Tower of Power 8-track on top of the dash.

Fascinating stuff about the way the police et al. used electronic technology. I'm still baffled as to why they haven't developed something less lethal than guns to reliably render people immobile, both at close range and in cases where the opposition is at a distance or has cover. Tasers and tear gas have limitations. They can't do better?

I had a patient who was a high up computer security guy for chase, who was involved with working with nypd on this stuff. He was quite loose lipped during his recovery from anesthesia, and was quite candid in answering my questions. But there were news stories about this stuff as well.

Will this material come out from Greenwald or Taibbi soon? Or are you working on your own book?

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Fri Jun 19, 2015 2:13 pm

Not the typically stuff for this thread, but excellent funk/afrobeat from 1970.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Fri Jun 19, 2015 2:30 pm

Good stuff!

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Fri Jun 19, 2015 2:59 pm

and Crossroads at the "correct" speed.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Fri Jun 19, 2015 3:03 pm

This one gives me chills.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Wed Jun 24, 2015 5:55 pm

For a one off album, this is excellent.

howard · Post by **howard** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 2:01 pm

I see your Fuzzy Duck, and raise you a Chicken Shack. I love that 60s rock/blues stuff. Stan Webb is one of those little known guitar gods.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 7:37 pm

Thanks for posting that, Howard. And of course we all know Christine Perfect better by her later, married name, after she wed John McVie.

howard · Post by **howard** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:07 pm

The irony being, Fleetwood Mac was one of those kick-ass blues bands, before Christine Perfect joined up with them (though she bears a small share of responsibility/blame for what they became.)

Apologize if I've posted this one before, but I just love this tune. She may have been with the band when they cut this.

ETA: according to the wiki, on the Kiln House album, "Christine McVie was present at the recording sessions and contributed backing vocals and cover art, although she was not a full member of the band until shortly after the album's completion.[3]"

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 11:59 pm

howard wrote:I see your Fuzzy Duck, and raise you a Chicken Shack. I love that 60s rock/blues stuff. Stan Webb is one of those little known guitar gods.

You're going deep here. I haven't thought of Webb since bell bottoms were the norm rather than an ironic statement.

My recollection is that he was really good, but this band never really had a hit to drive them. Without that, I think it took a band that was really together and good management to manage to exist for many years.

There was a lot of movement between English blues bands. I can't think of an American parallel. John Mayall's band was obviously a way station for the great English blues guitarists, but others in his band moved on too. But this trend was much broader. Chicken Shack was part of it. Their personnel started shifting around between Savoy Brown and Fleetwood Mac, so much so that I couldn't keep it straight. It was like CS serving as a farm team.

I think Webb event went over to the Savoy side for a while. CS was really his band, like Savoy Brown was oriented around Kim Simmonds. I wonder if Webb is making a living doing Chicken Shack shows at festivals in England? Could be enough nostalgia for the English blues band era to pull that off.

I never, ever wore bell bottoms. But I still dig this music.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:07 am

DC47 wrote:Could be enough nostalgia for the English blues band era to pull that off.

I never, ever wore bell bottoms. But I still dig this music.

Well Caravan still plays, and if there is demand for music of the Canterbury scene then there is room some British blues.

howard · Post by **howard** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 8:55 am

Let me note, I don't remember listening to Chicken Shack back in the day, I learned of them years later. Even those Fleetwood Mac albums I didn't discover until college, a few years after they were released (just before the Stevie Nicks era.)

I did see Savoy Brown a couple of times, but they played SF/Sacramento all the damn time, I thought they were local, didn't learn til later they were Brits.

It was Janis/Big Brother, and Pigpen/Grateful Dead that introduced me to these blues rock bands, leading to Mayal, Butterfield, and I know I'm leaving someone out, better scan my vinyl shelf.

Oh oh. Johnny Winter. That's the other one.

howard · Post by **howard** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 11:01 am

Like this. My fav Dylan tune (how could it not me, with the line, "…Ol' Howard just pointed, with his gun") by my fav albino rocker and producer of Muddy Waters records, may he r.i.p.:

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 12:01 pm

I think I've posted this before, but back in the late 80s, I saw Johnny Winter at the Warfield in SF (with guitar-god Robben Ford opening). Johnny seemed at death's door, as he was nearly blind and had to be led onto the stage by a handler, with no appreciable muscle tone in his body (hard to believe he still had 25 years left in him). But, then when he started playing guitar - oh my god could he shred!

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:45 pm

Man, this guy was the smoothest.

howard · Post by **howard** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:54 pm

We gonna start with the Reverend Al? The man who turned me onto the Talking Heads? Alrighty then! Guitar riff intro. Dedicated to all our gay brothers and sisters.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Sun Jun 28, 2015 10:21 pm

sancarlos wrote:I think I've posted this before, but back in the late 80s, I saw Johnny Winter at the Warfield in SF (with guitar-god Robben Ford opening). Johnny seemed at death's door, as he was nearly blind and had to be led onto the stage by a handler, with no appreciable muscle tone in his body (hard to believe he still had 25 years left in him). But, then when he started playing guitar - oh my god could he shred!

Johnny Winter is one that got away. I loved his music, but never saw him play. Amazing everything -- speed, tone, musicality.

And then, in a strange twist after many years as a rock god and pretty serious drug addict, he ended up in suburban Connecticut, recording the final albums of Muddy Waters life, with remarkable authenticity. This was notable because record companies and producers had pushed Waters towards 'marketability' starting in the seventies, resulting in mixed results. Muddy as a folkie, with horns, with the English devotees. You name it. Winter got him back in his Chicago groove, playing like he wanted to play with his band.

Robben Ford is definitely one of the greats. I've heard him, but too little. He doesn't tour much, as he is so successful as a studio musician in L.A.. I lived for a time in his home town, shortly after he left. But I did get to play guitar with guys who had played with Robben. There was much respect for him, which is not always the case for the guy who makes the big time and leaves the hometown musicians behind.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jul 01, 2015 12:34 am

I get new release CDs from the public library by the dozen. Almost any style. I play them in my office while I work. It's rare that I listen to any of them twice. Sometimes I hit eject after a few songs. But a few times every year I am surprised. Just a few.

I've been listening to Charles Bradley and the Menahan Street Band for several hours now, and I want to hear more. The album I've got was released in 2011. I'm stunned that I've never heard of this guy.

He's obviously old school. You can hear the Otis and James Brown in his style. The Memphis production. But he is the real thing, not an oldies act. He can really bring the emotion. Raw soul singing. I like this.

Just two guys -- Charles and a cool guitar player:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJmaSx4jg2I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpfMFhRGDGs

howard · Post by **howard** » Wed Jul 01, 2015 6:18 am

Yeah, he is pretty great. First heard him covering Neil Young's Heart of Gold on the Sirius radio. Seen him a couple of times, feels like a time warp. He didn't make his first album until five years ago, at the age of 61.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jul 01, 2015 1:16 pm

One of the links above is Bradley and a guitar player doing Heart of Gold next to the elevators in a hotel somewhere. The full band arrangement is on the album I've got, and I prefer it. But the setting for this jam session is so cool. It reminds me of the many times I've banged out that song in someone's living room.

I generally love covers, or at least the attempt at them, when they are done in a new style. As this is. But I actually like Bradley's originals and renditions of songs that are so obscure that they don't count as covers.

It's amazing that he was that old when he recorded his first CD. I mean, he's older than us. That's old. How often does this happen?

I don't think Bradley has a great voice. He is not Otis or Sam re-incarnate. But I like the roughness and the passion. He's like a punk rock version of the guys with the magic soul voices. So too with the band. The guitar player is not Steve Cropper. But he's very good, and the other guys find the groove.

Given the mediocrity that I generally wade through when I get a pile of a dozen new releases, this album was a stunner. It must have been a whole lot of fun to see them in a small venue.

howard · Post by **howard** » Wed Jul 01, 2015 6:29 pm

first time was a free concert in Madison Square park. (Ironically, is a garden and is almost square.) I was sold and caught him at BB King's club not long afterward.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jul 01, 2015 6:54 pm

More ironic if you looked up front and saw Clyde and Pearl sitting on the aisle, digging the groove, with Bill working his way toward them carrying three beers.

howard · Post by **howard** » Sun Jul 05, 2015 2:26 pm

yeah, I dig the prog rock. My tastes ran toward Roxy, and Eno, and that guy Manzanera. Diamond Head and Listen Now by 801 are two albums that get consistent play over the decades in my house.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Sun Jul 05, 2015 2:31 pm

Phil Manzenera - one of my all time favourite guitar gods.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Mon Jul 06, 2015 8:53 pm

Marvin Gaye's recording of his song What's Going On is definitive. Classic.

But the first cut on this live album is a brilliant cover by the under-recognized Donny Hathaway. He plays electric piano, and is backed by a crack band. 1971 at the Troubador in LA.

howard · Post by **howard** » Mon Jul 06, 2015 11:39 pm

I used to walk around my lily-white high school, singing the second tune on that album. 'In the ghetto!' I was doing it ironically. Before irony was cool.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Mon Jul 06, 2015 11:53 pm

Well, there are different kinds of ghettos. I was pretty sure I was deep in a Mexican + Hillbilly ghetto in Lake County circa 1979.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 3:42 pm

This is a great song.

I am really bad at remembering lyrics (and not just cause I am getting old - same story on my 20s), but this phrase has always stuck with me:

I just spent 60 days in the jailhouse
For the crime of having no dough
Now here I am back out on the street
For the crime of having nowhere to go

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 3:48 pm

That's a memorable, timeless lyric from one of their best songs. Great organ solo too.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Thu Jul 16, 2015 12:42 am

I've been listening to a collection songs by Elizabeth Cotten tonight. She's best known as the author of Freight Train and Shake Sugaree, covered by so many musicians. Musicians don't come more authentic than this woman.

Elizabeth Cotten wrote the Freight Train when she was 11, living in North Carolina. Many decades later, after a chance meeting having to do with a lost child in a department store where she was working in Washington D.C., she was hired to work in the home of Ruth and Charles Seeger in Cambridge. This is a striking coincidence. The Seegers were leading ethnomusicologists; they were unaware that Cotten played music. Their son, Mike Seeger was instrumental in Cotten beginning to tour and record in the late 50s. Cotten made her first public performance when she was 65.

Another son, the now-legendary Pete Seeger fought to get Elizabeth Cotten the writing credit when Freight Train was recorded by other musicians.

Elizabeth Cotten performed into her 90s. She was a huge influence during the 'Folk Revival' in the '60s. Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt, among others, were big fans. Rhiannon Giddens seems to one today.

Here's a recording of Freight Train from early in her career. Note that she's playing left-handed on a right-handed guitar with standard stringing. Her unique style became known as Cotten picking.

Here's another recording, done near the end of her life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK8emiWabU

howard · Post by **howard** » Thu Jul 16, 2015 8:20 am

Watching her picking is mesmerizing, it is so weird. (I am not a picker, I'm strictly rhythm, I don't wanna make it cry or sing.)

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Thu Jul 16, 2015 4:11 pm

Freight Train was one of the first songs any respectable acoustic guitar player would try to play in the '60s and '70s. It's a beautiful song. But if you listened to the Cotten recording, getting all the little things right was pretty hard. For example, there's a subtle bend that I find beautiful.

Cotten was born in the 1800s. She developed her own picking style and wrote her own songs with no hope of ever playing as a professional musician. She is the absolute real deal -- someone who took the influences of her time and place (Appalachian and blues music of the early 20th century) and made something unique from it. If Ruth Seeger had not lost a kid in a department store in Washington D.C., most likely we would never have heard of Cotten.

Music stands on it's own. I liked Freight Train before I knew of the song's creator. I would like it if it had been written by a robot. Perhaps even by a Nazi robot. Maybe even by a Nazi robot that didn't realize how lucky the USA women's team was in the recent World Cup.

But any art created by someone who wasn't part of the commercial machine, and who in meaningful ways did things in her own unique way, takes on extra luster to me. I like Van Gogh's work a bit more for knowing this about him. So too with Elizabeth Cotten.

Here's an interesting fact. Or at least my understanding, from long ago. I believe the credited co-authors of the legendary Shake Sugaree are Cotten's great-grandchildren. The song was developed over the years as she played it at their bedtime; each would sing verses that he or she made up. Cotten recorded a set of verses that became codified as the singular Shake Sugaree, and made sure that they got writers credits. This is way beyond just 'cool' on multiple levels.

MaxWebster · Post by **MaxWebster** » Thu Jul 16, 2015 11:42 pm

seriously mesmerizing. i see this and it makes me want to quit playing. i had to go back when i heard her do the bendy during the bridge *as* she's picking away. incredible.

howard wrote:Watching her picking is mesmerizing, it is so weird. (I am not a picker, I'm strictly rhythm, I don't wanna make it cry or sing.)

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Fri Jul 17, 2015 1:13 pm

Is the 1990s old timey enough for this thread? I know you aren't necessarily country guys, but I do know you appreciate good instrumental work, so maybe you can enjoy this one.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Fri Jul 17, 2015 11:40 pm

This is just great.

Keen can tell a tale, and he's got a crack band. They must stack great pickers up by the dozen in a warehouses in Nashville and Austin, breaking them out when someone who can front a band wants to tour. I would have been glad to hear a version with instrumental breaks that were twice as long. Keen's voice is an acquired taste, but I've been slowly acquiring it over the years.

The song tells a story that has the ring of truth, though I suspect Keen wasn't the one who lived it. However, there at the end, is a mystery. The reference to a story on the radio, all those police cars, the copter -- and then the guy in the suit letting them go. Something is going on here that's not made clear.

I just searched for a particular event; I won't spoil anyone's fun by spelling it out.

But here's a clue: check the state and the month and year in the song.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Sun Jul 19, 2015 11:36 pm

That's a great catch, DC. I never made that connection!

A_B · Post by **A_B** » Mon Jul 20, 2015 7:08 am

Ah man. Me neither! Kinda kicking myself!

That's one of my top 5 favorite REK songs.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Mon Jul 20, 2015 8:13 pm

Except for the Christmas song that is clever, but gets old after a few times, I don't think there's another Keen song I've heard more than once or twice. But now that I've heard this one, I wonder how many clever aspects to his songs went right on past me. I don't expect unstated surprises in any country songs. Or really any songs at all. I can't actually think of another right now. Surprise endings, yes, a few. But not an embedded mystery that can get right past the listener. Unless hearing Lola for the first time when I was 13 counts.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Tue Jul 21, 2015 11:52 pm

I've been listening to the Howlin' Wolf sessions in London, done during his 1970 tour. Great stuff. It's fun to hear Winwood, Clapton, et al. playing with a man who was their idol as schoolboys, not that long before this material was cut. Also, the great guitar player Hubert Sumlin, playing rhythm behind Clapton here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Tq4Gxiz70

I just found the remarkable clip below. It starts out with three Brits talking about Howlin' Wolf, who then comes on stage and does a great version of a blues classic. But not before Brian Jones tells Mick Jagger and/or the MC to shut up so that Wolf could come on. A priceless moment. They were fans. I think one version of how the Rolling Stones came to be was that they all wanted to play Howlin' Wolf songs in their schoolboy days.

But what an odd setting for Howlin' Wolf. This clip is from the Shindig TV show that typically featured mid-60s American pop acts like the Beach Boys and McCoys ('Hang on Sloopy.') The show did visit England, where the Stones, Yardbirds, Beatles and Who famously performed.

But despite the Brits doing the intro, I think this is in LA. The usual LA Shindig house band is having a great time backing Wolf. That's James Burton -- guitarist for the mid-period Elvis, and after this show was broadcast, the Burrito Brothers, Emmylou Harris -- picking and grinning like he's in heaven. Bass player Larry Knechtel was a studio legend as part of the Wrecking Crew. And the omnipresent Billy Preston on piano. A strange setting for Wolf, surrounded by teenyboppers and no one from his band behind him. These tiny English kids, Mick and Brian sitting at his feet, grooving to their idol. But he absolutely kills it.