My pal Lis caught REM in Scotland this weekend at T In the Park. She writes about the festival here with her usual wit and flair. You should go read it.
On a side note, I don't believe Lis was born when "Pretty Persuasion" came out on Reckoning. Just a guess. I wonder if they played that like they did in ATL . . .
I'm sitting here eating cold, leftover chicken nuggetty things of some sort, nursing a killer headache, and trying to figure out where the first half of the Summer went. Actually, I know where it went: it's scattered among little league baseball parks around the state of Georgia. My eldest son's all star team won the Dizzy Dean 10 Year Old Division B State Championship last week, thus concluding a baseball Odyssey that really started in February when we began the regular Spring season. It was an incredible, fun, humbling experience to watch these kids build the trust and stamina and friendship it takes to convert individual skill into a state championship.
But baseball is not what I meant to write about here. There are a few things I've meant to blog about but just flat-out haven't. One was a show I did on June 28th at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany. If you were there, perhaps you will agree it was just one of those shows where something indescribable happens and the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. Mickey Harte talked about this phenomenon in his book Drumming at the Edge of Magic as if the performers and the audience get caught up in some sort of spiritual vortex, participating together in a transcendent experience that neither truly controls.
That's a bit of hyperbole for my little corner of the creative universe, but the night was nice, and there were two absolutely fabulous opening acts: Barbara and Brandon. And my new friend Ron sat in here and there with a slide guitar, and Barbara played Jembe on "101 Degrees," and I just played what I felt like playing, and everything just rolled along. It was the kind of show that makes you want to quit your day job and just throw your fate to the wind. Until you remember that house payment and how you still have to feed and clothe and educate those three kids!
Speaking of great shows, the week before, on 6/21, Shelle and I saw REM at Lakewood Amphitheater. Holy Rock and Roll, Batman! What a show! They played 28 songs for the hometown crowd, and it was just absolute pure energy from start to finish. We had great seats with a good view of center stage, and the show was so good we didn't even mind so much paying $10 for crappy beer. There was a great mix of material from recent albums and old records, including some kickin' cuts like "Driver 8," "Rockville," and "Pretty Persuasion." Highlights included a hugely amped up version of "Harbourcoat," "Fall on Me" with the ex-Smiths (now Modest Mouse) guitarist Johnny Marr, and a beautiful acoustic "Let Me In" with mandolin and three guitars as well as organ (perhaps I loved that as much for hearing Shelle next to me singing harmony as for the performance). Really, though, it was a show of highlights.
On the recording front: I got bupkis. Nada. We haven't done any because we've been too busy with baseball. I have, though, been working on some new songs and making some scratch demos using a neat little digital recorder I borrowed from my neighbor, Dennis. In that same vein, I'm excited to be collaborating a bit with a MySpace friend Heather Fowler. Heather is a very talented writer -- novelist, poet, short fiction author -- who made the "mistake" of expressing an interest in my songs and in songwriting. A couple of emails later, we were swapping melodies and lyrics on our way to a co-written song.
And finally, one more note: My good friend Bud Buckley has had a couple of songs at the top of the Internet charts in the UK. Man, that just blows me away! You can go vote for him here at the Loneboy store. Let's get him back in the #1 slot!
OK, not really famous. Better to say "bootlegged in China," but I think this is kind of cool. Every now and then, I look at log files on the server where my mp3s reside to see if anyone is listening to the songs. Mind you, these aren't pretty charts or graphs; just raw server records that might look something like this:
xx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [17/Mar/2008:12:51:13 -0400] "GET /player/dep_noauto.xml
HTTP/1.1" 200 1336 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US;
rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12"
We had a really nice turnout for Saturday night's Java Monkey show, and it might just have been one of our best shows ever. At the expense of getting all left field on you, it was like we were lifted up out of ourselves by the audience's energy. It's something I don't really know how to describe; you just have to feel it. But if you could feel that all the time you'd just about get lost in it.
We did a lot of new songs, but we also did some old ones. And we did several traditionals, like "Moonshiner" and "A Rovin' On a Winters Night." I did Falling, which I've written about badly here. And I played a Townes Van Zandt song, since he's been so much on my mind lately. Of course we did the "Waves" and "She Walked Away" like we always do. One song that Shelle and I were particularly pleased with was "101 Degrees," so here's a new demo of that song, as recorded a couple of weeks ago:
Something I share with a great many musicians and songwriters is a love for Townes Van Zandt's songs. Something I may share with fewer is a love for a 2001 record called Townes Van Zandt Live at McCabes, based on an intimate concert that took place in Santa Monica two years before Van Zandt's inevitable early death. I have recommended this CD to friends only to have them come back to me and say, "did I get the right record? that was pretty bad."
By certain objective measures of good-record-ness, I suppose I can see why people don't like Live at McCabes. In fact, I often hedge my bets by saying it's my favorite "bad record." Bad because Townes sometimes sounds so weary, you think he might be too tired or too drunk to play. Like maybe he won't make it all the way to the end of the show. His fingers kind of scrawl and scrape on the strings and his voice scratches and waivers past the notes like a man trying to aim a pistol with a hangover. He'll start off a song, then seem to lose the beat for a second or stop altogether to bark off a laugh, maybe tell something funny he just thought of. And the audience's laughter at these times often seems a little forced, almost nervous.
So there's a roughness to the whole thing that's more than the ordinary lack of polish for a live record. I guess it's this rawness that turns people away from it. Why I like this album so much better than any mere collection of Townes Van Zandt songs is, I suppose, as much of a personal matter as it is something intrinsic to the disk.
At some point, I became aware that Townes Van Zandt was "important" and "influential." The way you come to realize you should listen not only to Bob Dylan but to Woody Guthrie too, even if you suspect in the heart of your heart that listening to Woody Guthrie will make you want to put a rock through your radio. I had started to recognize Van Zandt's songs and name all over the place: My wife and I had learned his "Tecumseh Valley" off a Nanci Griffith record, and I'd heard various versions of a Steve Earle anecdote declaring that Townes Van Zandt was the best songwriter ever. Then there was Willie Nelson singing Townes's "Pancho and Lefty" and the Cowboy Junkies covering "To Live's to Fly" and all that kind of thing. I decided I needed to go to the horse's mouth, as it were, and get hold of some Townes Van Zandt albums to listen to.
When I take a mind to get to know about something, my first stop is usually the library, and our local DeKalb County Public has a pretty good CD collection for what it is. So I figured to check out all the Townes Van Zandt CDs I could find. But the thing about that CD collection is, it's made up of donated records, which is to say, chiefly stuff people bought and didn't like. It turned out, therefore, the only Townes Van Zandt album on the rack was this one, Live at McCabes. I checked it out and took it to work the next day to listen through headphones while sitting in my quasi-efficient, open-backed cubicle with its pilled side fabric, florescent lighting, and overhead storage like a Greyhound bus.
At first, I was kind of put off by those things I have described, the creakiness and the sort of wild playing and all that. But soon I was also getting pulled in by the sound in my headphones, the scraping chairs and throats clearing in the quiet parts. And the exposed rawness in the voice, creating a feeling almost of embarrassment, like sitting too close in somebody's living room when he's playing you a song and you don't know quite where to look. At one point, the singer jokes, "boy, if it gets any quieter in here, I'm going to preach a sermon." Another burst of nervous laughter. There's a sense in these moments that the audience is witnessing a kind of struggle, some profound wrestling match between the man sitting before them and something unseen. Or maybe I'm just describing my own reaction, because somewhere along the line I crossed over completely from my nondescript beige cubicle. Fell right through in my imagination into the fidgety, small-room audience witnessing this balancing act between revelation and self-destruction.
Toward the end of the record, there're a couple of light, jokey numbers with Kelly Joe Phelps sitting in on Dobro, and then a hushed, long, mostly spoken new song, "Marie." A dirge of a song, a homeless man's desperate resignation to his lover's death and his own impotence in the face of it. By the end of "Marie," I was surprised to discover I was weeping. Not misting over, you understand, but sitting at work, slacks and buttondown, expensive laptop and all, and crying like a beggar in the rain. I'm hoping to hell no one will try to talk to me because my eyes are full up and my throat is hot and tight, beyond speech. The shock of it brought me back to time and place, and I got up and went to wash my face and so forth. No harm done to my day job.
Since then I've listened to a lot of his records, and frankly very few of them are great beyond being good gatherings of exceptional songs. Live at the Old Quarter is very good, and if I remember correctly, I really like High, Low and In Between. Ultimately he's a songwriter who's songs are greater than any single collection of them or any single recording or performance of any particular one. There's a new release of Live at McCabes out that starts out with a different song ("The Hole" rather than "Pueblo Waltz") and swaps out a couple other tracks here and there. All-in-all, the new one feels a bit slicker, lacks a little bit of the rawness that I responded to on the initial release. On the other hand, this one is missing a studio demo that follows "Marie" and mars the end of the original. I don't know which record most closely resembles the actual 1995 concert; for me the performance took place inside my head ten years later in a bland office cubicle in Atlanta.
Wow, long time no post! My real job (the one where I actually get paid for writing) has been mighty time-consuming of late, and Spring little-league is upon us, with all that that implies.
Anyway, thought I'd write up a quickie about what little bit we've got going on musically. I'm still trying to squeeze in another date with Jimmy E. to finish up the EP. It's all on me, basically; he's usually Delta -- ready when we are. Performance-wise, Blake Guthrie invited me to join him at 4:00 on Sunday, March 18th at Aurora Coffee in L5P (next to Criminal Records) for an afternoon songwriters gig. I've done a similar show he hosted at Java Monkey, and it was great, so I can't wait.
Also, the big Northwoods Spring Carnival is coming up. This is a fundraiser for my kids' Montessori school, and it's become traditional for me to put together a band to play in the parking lot. It's also traditional for me to wait until the last minute and then throw it together badly! So I'm right on track with that. Matt's already on board to play bass (of course), so I'll probably just scare up a drummer and do it as a three-piece. It's huge fun because we play a lot of covers, which I rarely do at my shows.
Finally, I have a couple of house shows brewing, and I'm talking to Bill at the Redlight about another show there either in April or May, so of course I'll announce on my events page when any of that comes to fruition.
Meantime, watch here for some new downloads. When I get the time, I'll post some more advanced material from the EP, just to prove I'm not making it all up!
Peace,
Patrick
