Soulful Captain

Captain Beefheart - I'm Glad [buy]

Willie and Barbara

then the dam broke

It demanded to be posted. What a complete performance, starting with the host, presiding with a dignified ease sadly lacking in today’s racetrack world. And then there’s Merle Travis hanging out in a farmhouse telling you about Sixteen Tons. Besides getting to see Travis playfully in complete control - picking, practically showing off with his strikingly assured sense of time and rhythm, and using the guitar as a percussive instrument - we're treated to some brushed drums and (is that an?) an accordion, which help give this country song a very jazzy feel. And Mr. Travis twice casually lets go of the neck of the guitar to lean on a box next to him. Nice work if you can get it.

Medicine Show

My pal and workmate, Josh Kantor, got a call from former Dream Syndicate lead singer/tunesmith Steve Wynn to play keyboards for his Boston concert which went down this past Friday. Wynn and his band Miracle 3 plus Josh played the Dream Syndicate album Medicine Show (now back in print) cover to cover. Fortunately for those of us who could not attend, the show was taped and uploaded to archive.org. Enjoy!

something else all of his own

Apparently this was bound to be a Ray Charles day. Walked out the door, spun the dial on the pod, and found The Genius beckoning. By the time I discovered myself at the T some of Ray's early tunes - "Kissa My Baby," "Don't You Know," and his first hit for the Atlantic label "It Should Have Been Me" - had managed to make the dark sky day a little brighter. And then I let Blues and Chaos, the fairly new compilation of Robert Palmer's writing (the music critic and clarinetist, not that other Robert Palmer), fall open to any page it wanted to. The music gods turned the page to his liner notes for Ray Charles: The Birth of Soul. Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder and chairman of Atlantic Records, had this to say to Palmer about his working relationship with Charles:

Ray was never just another artist to us, he was always somebody very important. At first, we didn't know how to bring out of him what we knew was there and we rteally didn't hit our stride until we let him do what he wanted to do. In the first two sessions, we were trying to guide him into what was our formula, the Atlantic formula for making R&B hits. It took us a little it of time to understand that he had something else all of his own. When we heard him on the road, we realized we had a genius of sorts, an artist who had a lot more to offer than just writing a song and singing it. He had a whole conception of what his band should sound like, of what the track should sound like, and of what he should sound like.

Ray Charles - It Should Have Been Me [buy]

No Other

When the heavily produced No Other went absolutely nowhere commercially, the eternally stage-frightened Clark was practically forced go on tour with a minimal backing band in an effort to bring in some cash and remind the world that one of the greatest songwriters of the 60s and 70s was still crafting extraordinary songs. While the tour was hampered by Clark’s alcoholism, if Live 75 is any indication, there were many stirring moments when Clark’s beautiful tenor combined with the scaled back virtues of a 3 piece band to produce profound readings of some of the gems in the Clark songbook.

Gene Clark - Spanish Guitar [buy]

Gene Clark - Here Without You [buy]

The night these songs were recorded Clark shared the bill with Tom Waits. Here's a clip of Waits doing his drunk at the diner shtick from 1975.

Gene Clark

While still working within the boy-girl context (he had yet to absorb the Dylan school of abstract lyricism), Gene was far better equipped to express his emotions openly in lyrics than were the others in the group. “Gene was fairly mature in an emotional, romantic kind of male way that I wasn’t,” offers Roger, acknowledging Gene’s gift for penning emotionally charged love songs. “I couldn’t sincerely even sing a song like [“Here Without You”], much less write one. And Gene was like a latin lover compared to me. He was a handsome guy, very suave and cool with it. He was popular with the ladies.”
-from Mr. Tambourine Man

Gene Clark, latin lover, who knew. Maybe the key aspect to Clark’s emotional maturity as a songwriter, which colored so many of his best songs, was his vulnerability and refusal to give into resentment. An early articulation of this appears as the tinge of self-doubt in the famous “probably” in Clark’s “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better.”

The Byrds - I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better [buy]

On his album with the Gosdin Brothers, Clark wisely takes a long-view of the ups and downs of relationships with “Tried So Hard” and “Think I’m Gonna Feel Better.” Both songs have someone walking out on the singer, but Clark feels that not only will he get through the loss, but he’s mature enough to hope that the one leaving him will “see the sun” as well.

Gene Clark & The Gosdins - Think I'm Gonna Feel Better [buy]

Fast forward to the the Byrds last studio album and even after 8 years of walking off the plane, Clark’s “Full Circle” once again gives evidence to his being, at least in song, the emotionally mature Byrd. This time instead of the rising sun bringing emotional renewal, Clark employs the image of a spinning wheel to express the cyclical nature of love and loss -- in a way it’s Clark’s own version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

The Byrds - Full Circle [buy]

But for me it’s with the The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark cut “Out On The Side” that Clark, writing from what feels like a space of great pain, pens his most powerful song on the necessity for openness and refusing the easy charms of self-righteous pride.

No I'm not looking to find any holes
From what I think has been denied
That's not the feeling of love when it flows
I hope I can lose that much pride

Dillard & Clark - Out on The Side [buy]

slide that note right thar

In the midst of interwebbing to gather words about Hazel Dickens, I found Mike Seeger (younger brother to Pete) and Alice Gerrard traveling the rural roads with some gorgeous film stock to make a short film about old-time music. Tommy Jarrell teaches Gerrard a fiddle lick, Roscoe Holcomb talks about wanting to be a working-man again, and Lily May Ledford sings about biscuits - and that's just in the first 15 minutes. Take your digital self out to the backporch and catch a little Homemade American Music. There's plenty more where that came from over at Folkstreams. Here's a clip with Holcomb to whet your appetite.

RIP Arthur Penn

Maverick film director Arthur Penn passed away today. While Bonnie and Clyde usually gets most of the attention when talking about Penn, he made a number of other fine films, including the all too rarely screened The Chase, the 70s film noir classic Night Moves, and Alice's Restaurant, starring Arlo Guthrie. Alice's Restaurant suffers from its drifting, episode-driven narrative, and for my particular cinematic tastes its satire strays too far from realism to adequately ground the film in contemporary political questions (it was 1969 after all). But the snowy funeral scene, with Tigger Outlaw singing Joni Mitchell's "Song to Aging Children," has always struck me as a deeply moving portrait of fading 60s countercultural hopes - in its own way just as powerful as the murder of Wyatt and Billy the Kid at the end of Easy Rider.

at least one more round

Hello again. While I was snoozing on the job, someone swooped in and grabbed the bluebirdsing domain name from me. And the external hard-drive flew the coop and left me without the digitized songbook to draw from. But with a little help from some friends (notably the now 40 Cardonia) I've got most of the tunes back, and now there's a tavern in the sky (a hat-tip to Michael Hurley, who would never sleep on the job). So let's serve up a few!

Back in 1974 on Phases and Stages Willie tried to tell everybody to pick up the tempo - just a little. But while he may have been wanting to take it on home, the song just wanted to slowly find its own way to the door.
Give him a few years and he puts the ramshackle shuffle on it when doing a starring role in Honeysuckle Rose, but even with Dyan Cannon and Amy Irving to get home to he's still he's not barnstorming it like he does on, say, "Whiskey River" or "Good Hearted Woman."

Willie Nelson - Pick up the Tempo

And then we have the Jerry Jeff Walker, Lloyd Maines, and Co. kicking down some doors to get home version.

"We were doing country, but it was pretty aggressive country." - Lloyd Maines

Maines is talking about the music he was making with his brothers, Steve, Kenny, and Donnie in the late 70s/early 80s as The Maines Brothers, but his words do a pretty good job of describing the Rock & Roll thrown down he and Walker put on "Tempo."