The world lost another legendary music man last Saturday with the passing of Jim Dickinson. He was an infamous Memphis man. He played piano with the Atlantic rhythm section (not to be confused with the "actual band") and backed artists like Aretha and the like in the early 70's. Him being there in Muscle Shoals led to a guest appearance on The Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers" on "Wild Horses". Such stories are pretty trite when trying to describe a guy like Jim Dickinson. He had a wild personality that carried on that Sun Records legacy with him as he brought energy and inspiration to sessions that he produced for Big Star, The Replacements and many many more.
Jim was involved in music right up until his death and stayed surprisingly relevant and in demand making up to date albums with bands including Mudhoney and more in the past decade. He is another link in the chain that may well seem to be broken or faded if not for the fact that his two sons carry on the Dickinson name with The North Mississippi All Stars and with Luther, who is now a full time member of the Black Crowes as well. R.I.P. Jim
The many talents of the late Les Paul are probably some of the most underrated in the world of music. And by that I mean ALL music. His innovations in guitars and on recording equipment almost single handily changed the worlds of guitar driven music and all music recording in general. The inventions that he made are mind blowing. I'd have a hard time explaining to you how important this man was in so little words so you can read about him here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Paul
I'll just say that he invented the overdub and his guitar inventions eventually spawned the Les Paul model guitar seen to the right here with Paul McCartney and played by just about every professional guitar player at least once over the past 50 years. Everyone from Guns & Roses' Slash to George Harrison to Jimi Page.
The legacy he left was undeniable and he was also a very influential guitar player inspiring many musicians behind him aside from his inventing. Aside from pioneering a guitar style that became popular for it's surf reverb and echo as well as unmatched technical dexterity. he also could be found in New York City playing weekly well into his 90's. His songwriting and partnership with his wife Mary Ford also spawned many top 40 hits in the late 40's and 50's.
He will be missed for sure and anyone who loves any music owes a debt of gratitude to this genius of the music world.
There are words to describe what goes on here in 1974 on the German music television show Musikladen but you must see, first hand, for yourself what kind of freakish carnival ride this band was at that time. So entertaining - I'm even gonna assume for non fans or for those who have never heard of this band -on first viewing that I watched it 3 times in a row at first in absolute shock and awe at what exactly I was seeing.
All I'm gonna say is that these guys - all of them - were on something. I've had various discussions with other viewers and ultimately what it probably comes down to is that they were really, really drunk and on LSD. Possibly cocaine was involved but at that point, what's the difference.
That aside, the band was on fire. Probably a result of touring hard at that time. What's remarkable is that nothing looks planned here. Its chaotic madness but with rare precision from a band that resembles every rock and roll cliche or vision I've had of a band that are no strangers to indulgence. Most of the songs were written by the inimitable Shel Silverstein which lends perfectly to the imagery that this crazed bunch of lunatics were unleashing.
I know that top 5's and 10's lists can be spotty at best but I'd put this way at the top of the list of live concert material that I've seen in my years. I'd probably watch it over most other rock DVDs out there. It's short and sweet, massively entertaining and and a good time will be had by all. Even if you just know them by the Cover of The Rolling Stone song. Even if you've never heard of them at all. And even if you don't enjoy the music here, the sight of these guys doing thier thing will grab you. See it. You will not be dissapointed. I probably won't say that about many things.
Saw a 6 piece rocksteady band last night at the Hotel Utah. Thumbs waaaaaaaaaay fucking down for that place these days. What the fuck happened to the charming bartenders and friendly staff there. Not to mention that at $4.50 a beer it's a wonder anyone there was drunk. This spot has become a haven for 9to5-ers to"cut loose" after a hard day in the cubicle and it's quite uncomfortable if you know what I mean. Anyways... I got off track. The band was called The Titan Ups and they were great. It was rocksteady with a punk edge, teetering on the brink of completely losing it at any minute. But alas they didn't. Vocalist Bob Reed (Overwhelming Colorfast, Oranger) is a staggering presence and who knew he had the pipes for this sort of thing. A friend mentioned that it may be his calling and I agree. They have no website, no record, no nothin, just a killer live set (that was cut short by a 9 piece funk band?!) and a great energy. Which makes me like them even more because there's no hidden agenda.
Sonic Youth is playing the Independent on monday The 3rd following thier show on sunday at the Fox Theater in Oakland. While this closely resembles a wet dream, I won't see you there because apparently it sold out in about -5 seconds. Try your luck with a sneak in if you so dare. I happen to be crippled right now so I'm not very sly. Not that I condone sneaking in anywhere or anything like that.
Flakes and Th Losin Streaks tonight at El Rio as posted below and I will be there.
Also some very strange news: Black Francis is playing next Saturday and Sunday at the Hotel Utah (uuggghhh) which I only discovered after seeing a flier on the wall! lots of shit happening next weekend but I may revisit that dump on Sunday to catch this if I can stomach it again. So mad at the Utah right now!
Saturday the 8th: Gris Gris with Spindrift at Great American Music Hall. Enough said there.
This Saturday! The Flakes return to El Rio With Sacramento's Th' Losin Streaks. Glad to see these guys both rocking again.
Speaking of good to see ya again. SF psych dears Gris Gris are fooling no one with their "last shows" and "broken up"-isms anymore and will be playing next Friday the 6th at The Great American Music Hall. That combo of band and venue is likely to be synergy of the best kind and shouldn't be missed.
Today another B-Day wish saluting George "Buddy" Guy. The legendary guitarist turns 73 years old today.
Buddy guy was born in Lettsworth Louisiana in 1936. He learned guitar the same way many other poor black musicians did in his day by nailing a string to the wall of the shotgun shack he grew up in. At 17 his father bought him a real guitar. In 1957, at 21 he moved to Chicago, also in the same way that many other southern black musicians did throughout the 40's and 50's in search of work and to escape the haunted past (not to mention present) of the south.
There is not enough that can be said about Buddy's talent, innovation, performing, and influence that he has had over blues and rock & roll. He has been called the bridge between the two forms and rightly so. Buddy was at the forefront of the new Chicago blues movement of the late 50's and early 60's, where wild and loud single note guitar playing was fast replacing the harmonica and slide guitar as the main emotive instrument fronting the blues at the time. While it was B.B. King and T-Bone Walker who wrote the book on this style, players like Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy himself were expanding it. Buddy Guy's playing though, was wild and imaginative playing with furious speed as well as dynamic tenderness that set the standard for ALL guitarists to come. Not everyone was impressed at first and the legend has it that his label boss Leonard Chess called his playing "noise" and demanded he turn his amplifier down on studio sessions for them but later apologizing in embarrassment and crediting guy with foresight after the blues rock boom of the late 60's and bands like Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience were enjoying massive success. Still Guy's records are packed with fiery playing and ecstatic singing and his live performances were fast becoming legendary and influencing. Jimi Hendrix, in fact, was an early pupil and would sometimes cancel his own shows if he knew Buddy was around to catch him in the small clubs that he was electrifying. Guy would walk into the crowd mid-show, play one handed, flirt with women up close and do it all in stride. Never missing a beat. Tricks that he has said he learned from Guitar Slim whom he would follow around in Louisiana as a young man.
Buddy's career was not perfect and for a while he suffered the same fate as many other bluesman like him in the 60's and 70's, ironically struggling in a time when rock guitarists like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and many more who owe a debt to Guy's style, flourished. Unlike many other peer artists of his sort he did in fact enjoy a rather fruitful resergence in the 80's and 90's when, ironically again, blues music was at it's most homoginized and polished state. But with glowing praise from Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn and others', attention was once again brought to him which revealed not only that he certainly hadn't gone anywhere but that he had only improved with time.
I've seen Buddy 3 times now all in this decade and they have been highlights of my showgoing career. He's still going at 73 and showing no signs of slowing. I had a cassette tape recording of the video below when I was 17 and I was blown away several times daily by it. I'm also delighted to see it here on youtube because it may be my favorite performance by him, which is rare for me to decide on for any artist. Also I should point out that it is from a 1970 movie entitled "The Chicago Blues" and shows (though not in this clip, unfourtunately) and enchanted and bewildered Jimi Hendrix in the Crowd of this tiny club where class, most certainly, was in session.
Today Mick Jagger turns 66 years old. Let's take a minute now to talk about the O.G. MJ and just what it is that makes this guy who he is.
Lot's of people won't admit to liking Mick. Some genuinely don't. I've heard a few people say that they didn't even like the Rolling Stones because of Mick. Which makes me think; Does anyone out there like the Rolling Stones BECAUSE of Mick? Aside from teenage girls in 1965 I'm not sure that the appeal of the Rolling Stones is due to old MJ. The coolness of the Stones -to me- has always laid in Keith who's riff-making and general disposition has spawned about 5 million imitators to date. There's Charlie and Bill too who, together, might as well both be seen next to the word "square" in the dictionary. Brian Jones certainly had an appeal but if you look at any footage of him with the Stones he always sorta looks like he wishes he were somewhere else. If a statue could play guitar you'd have Mick Taylor. And then along came Ron Wood who finally injected some needed liveliness and personality into that second guitar job.
And so we have Mick. I won't get into how these guys are old as dirt and still rocking because I'm mostly indifferent about that topic. It should be said now that his songwriting and singing are outstanding. He could make "row row row your boat" controversial if he wanted to. But he's also about the fruitiest loop to ever prance around in front of a band. Making it hard for all men out there to not wince when watching the stones live sometimes. But then again he seemed to be doing it just for the ladies anyhow (or was he?). Of course he also had imitators. Not sure what the New York Dolls would have done without him. What Mick does for me is make me laugh. His posturing, his turns of certain phrases (Angie, pronounced: Aiyngehh), and last but not least, his outfits. he truly is an anomaly. A guy could go on about how he seriously HATES Mick Jagger and everything about him but yet in the same breath say that the Rolling Stones are his favorite band. Now that's no easy feat is it?
Here are some of my favorite Mick moments in no particular order, followed by a video that just about says everything I have here and more. 1. His vocal in "Monkey Man" 2. All of his singing on "Beggars Banquet" he turned much more soulful and embraced a sort of country-ish style around this point 3. A moment in the 40 licks documentary when either Mick or Keith is describing how their live show had changed from the early days and that they had to do more performance-wise to entertain the crowd. The shot goes from Mick just kind of standing there doing a little James Brown dancing in the sixties, to him in a football jersey and tights in a full on sprint across a massive stage in the 80's. 4. The video for "Angie" 5. Any video from the 70's or 80's
And of course there's much more that makes me love and laugh about this man. His band changed my life after all and I'm thankful everyday for The Rolling Stones.
You may have heard Muddy Waters. You may have heard Howlin Wolf. I hope you've heard of Bo Diddley and there's no reason for you to be on this page if you haven't heard Chuck Berry. But Willie Dixon was the man behind them in their formative years. Be it songwriting, bass playing, producing or just generally coaching these superstars into the hardened professionals that they became. Dixon was a jack of all trades employed mostly by Chess records out of Chicago to do all the things that Co-owners and brothers Leonard and Phil Chess couldn't do. Which basically meant everything that didn't involve paper (aside from songwriting that is). He was A&R man, scouting out local talent at shit-house jukes on the South Side of Chicago. He was a songwriter, so empathetic that often he wrote songs from the point of view of and matching the personality of many blues men and women and often supplying the artist with their signature smash tunes. Muddy's "Hoochie Coochie Man", Wolf's "300 Pounds of Joy", Diddley's "You Can't Judge a Book By It's Cover" and many, many more. He was also a producer an arranger and a bass player. He famously rearanged Chuck Berry's "Maybeline" which bordered on a country and western tune and revved it up with a slapping, driving bass line putting the engine in the song, so to speak and essentially driving Berry to the top of the R&B charts and superstardom. What "I Am The Blues" co-written with former LA Times critic Don Snowden gives the reader though, is the too often told tale of a man overworked and underpaid. Though literate and often more educated than his black peers around him, Dixon was the unfourtunate victim of being sheltered from publishing knowledge and the general ways of the music business at the top by his boss Leonard Chess. As a result, financial circumstances led him to keep quiet about it all in order to keep his job which he no doubt loved and preferred to other means of survival in 40's and 50's Chicago. Dixon pulls no punches here on the topic of Chess and his business techniques offering up tales of his Boss pulling money out of pocket to show what a good guy he was but then taking so much on the back end that by the time Chess had to close it's doors they were worth millions. A millionaire is something Dixon sadly never became. What this book tells us though is the story of a good natured, nurturing, patient and humble man whose poetry moved millions and whose legacy will no doubt be carried on through his songs that are now in the highest tier of blues standards.
If you have seen the film DiG! Or have known about The Brian Jonestown Massacre before then you know what kind of maniacal circus that band has been over the years and that also they are probably one of - if not the best - independent rock and roll bands of the 90's. Chrurning out great albums on dental floss budgets and at ridiculous paces despite massive bouts of drug addiction and all around personality problems that threatened to de-rail the band for good on more than a few occasions.
And if you've seen the film, you may have noticed a dainty young lady at one point playing and singing alongside Anton Newcombe named Miranda Lee Richards. Well, this Miranda has gone on to become a great singer songwriter in her own right and I should probably be ashamed that I even had to put that assossiation together for this story because she's well capable of being recognized aside from all of that.
But here's what's really out there to me. This morning I got a phone message from Miranda (whom I've never spoken to or known before) saying that she needs a guitar player for her show at Cafe DuNord TOMORROW! I finally pieced together the peices and found out that someone had put in a recommendation for me. So, I'm doing the show even though I'm crippled at the moment and I'm nothing but thrilled to back this wonderful singer up. She'll be playing Monday July 20th at Cafe DuNord as part of the Mission Creek Music Festival and she's a very nice person with great songs to boot.
Monday, July 20th - Miranda Lee Richards Emily Jane White Helene Renaut Chloe Makes Music
Cafe du Nord 2170 Market St. San francisco 8:00pm $10-12
This is great news for me and the Franciscans. Not so great for the Oaklanders who have housed this fest for the past 2 years at The Stork Club. The Line-ups are fucking Carazy! with one night alone housing The Oh Sees, Dan Melchoir, Gris Gris, The Fresh and Only's and more. Wipe yer mouth cause it's not till October but wipe your calendar too!
The world lost another legendary music man last Saturday with the passing of Jim Dickinson. He was an infamous Memphis man. He played piano with the Atlantic rhythm section (not to be confused with the "actual band") and backed artists like Aretha and the like in the early 70's. Him being there in Muscle Shoals led to a guest appearance on The Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers" on "Wild Horses". Such stories are pretty trite when trying to describe a guy like Jim Dickinson. He had a wild personality that carried on that Sun Records legacy with him as he brought energy and inspiration to sessions that he produced for Big Star, The Replacements and many many more.
