jff

Putin says that Trump is being impeached for made-up reasons. Huh, would you look at that. Another talking point the GOP shares with Putin. 

 

These shirts have been popping up at Trump rallies.   I'll bet these guys are hardcore Reagan fans.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russian-than-democrat-shirts/

 

 

One other note I jotted down was that Pat was more animated and engaged than I’ve seen him in a while. He had all his showman moves working during Random Name Generator, for example, holding his guitar up and away from his body and faux-windmilling at times. During Box Full Of Letters, he blazed through the solo and then even took a brief moment to strike a pose near the end. I heard that he had some family in attendance, so perhaps that’s what we can attribute it to, but it was still nice to see.

 

 

 

           

I thought that's how Pat always is, but I guess I"m basing that on seeing them mostly in Atlanta, where Pat's family is always in attendance.

I think it's probably safe to say everyone is just utterly exhausted.

If you want to keep up with political news, but don't want to deal with "the news," I suggest reading political historian Heather Cox Richardson's daily wrap-ups either on FB on on her blog.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/

 

In Atlanta I found out that a large contingent of people where I sat were season ticket holders at Chastain, and ironically the best show of the year there was Chicago. No wonder they were all constantly jabbering with their friends on the last show of the season.

Chastain is the kind of venue where the best show of the year is always Chicago.

The odd thing to me about my Chastain experience was that the crowd was much younger than the typical Chastain season ticket audience (wealthy people nearing or well into retirement.)  But despite the relatively younger crowd, the level of disinterest was exactly the same as the type of audience that feels they're at a wine tasting/business schmooze with ambience provided by a live band rather than at a concert. 

Whatever happened to Leroy?  Is he still involved with music is some capacity?

I don't know how current this is, but his website says he's a private music instructor, and lists some live dates as recent as last month (I'm assuming November means last month and not November from a year or more ago.)   http://www.leroybach.com/

I first saw him with Five Style.  I think he was also in Wilco at the time, but that before I ever saw Wilco.  Five Style were a terrific band. Leroy was the bassist. Between that group and WIlco, it really shows how versatile and talented he is.  

Sounds like the Chicago Theater audience is similar to the audience they draw in Atlanta when they play The Fox and Chastain Park.

Tinariwen's definitely been around longer than a decade.... i think i saw them in 2007 or so.

They go back to the '80s, but hit it pretty big as a recording band in 2004 with Amassakoul. 

Definitely one of the most interesting bands of the last decade, though not born in the last decade. 

Amazon Prime has some spectacular jazz docs for free right now:  

Rahsaan Roland Kirk:  The Case of the Three Sided Dream    https://vimeo.com/167097426

The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EheTr-wyLPg

They also have a Sun Ra doc that looks good.  I need to carve out a couple hours for that.

Switching genres, I also adored The End of the F***cking World on Netflix

it's been diminishing returns for me w/ Parker going into full dance mode... the 1st EP and Innerspeaker were great, I thought Lonerism had some great songs, and then the bottom fell out. 

 

I feel exactly the same.   One of the new songs seemed promising, so hopefully they'll be on an upswing, although the never-ending tease over the new album (going on SNL months ago, headlining summer festivals, slow drip of new songs) seems contrived.  

Yeah solo artist count go for it. I have the big theif album need to listen to it some more

I prefer the first two (Masterpiece, Capacity) to the ones that came out this year, but they all have their strengths.  

Omni

Big Thief 

Ohmme

Sam Evian (if by "bands" we include "music artists")

Flasher

Nels Cline 4

Wow,  that's frightening.

Glad everyone's ok, and I hope it will prove to be an isolated incident.

My library is bringing in Cohen's book in for me today - which should be a nice easy read while visiting the in-laws over the Thanksgiving weekend.

 

I guess it's entirely possible that the band were in their hotels by 9 pm -- I know the wanted to wait for the sun to go down before they played and since the show was in December I guessing the sun set by 5 pm or so. 

The WP article said they were on stage at 6:30. (Not necessarily that that's when they went on stage.)   So, even if that's when they started, they played 15 songs, plus several breaks for outbursts of violence.  So if they were on stage for 90 minutes, that still leaves them an hour to get from the stage to the hotel.

I guess I had never given it much thought, but I would have assumed the concert was much later at night than that.

I'd love to see Nels in a show like this.  Usually when I get to see Nels outside of WIlco, it's formless noise imrpovs.  I like that kind of thing, but I also like seeing Nels play more structured music.  I haven't seen him do that since the tour for the first Nels Cline Singers album.  I think this show will probably be a good balance of free and structured (or at least anchored to a groove) playing, based on what I've heard from Billy Martin and John Medeski.  

Are the Hell's Angels the Scientology of '6os/'70s rock stars?  I don't know why else there would still so much "God Bless the Hell's Angels" coming from that generation of music stars when the Hell's Angels is demonstrably infested with rabid scumbags. 

You all are debating this like they'll get in. I don't see it happening. They aren't popular enough. There is not a single artist in the HOF who hasn't had an arena tour.

Not sure if your'e serious, but this is not true.

When did Booker T and the MGs do an arena tour?  Or Elvis Costello?  Or Leadbelly? Or the Velvet Underground?  Or many, many others?

I would agree they probably wont get in, at least not for a while.  But it's not because of their audience size.  It's more due to them showing how useless the traditional record business is.

Tough question.  Just about everyone I keep up with put out one or more record this year. So...

Kinks?

Nels Cline Singers?

I think I've read that the colored vinyl's are more likely to sound less than stellar. There's lots of discussions about this (and everything music and audio related over on the Hoffman forum. 

I find translucent colors to be consistently worse than solid colors.  The clear ones often have a fizzy sound, almost like the needle is scraping its way through the grooves.

I guess I'm of two minds on this one.  I still feel that this is an innocent use of technology.  The nature of prerecorded parts is that they are locked into a tempo, so Glenn has to use a click track on that one song, which is harmless.   

On the other hand, it seems the only backing track is some strings and string-like sounds during the first half of the song. IMO, the song would come across just as well in concert without those. Alternatively, I'm sure they could figure out a way to compensate for the loss of those sounds...for example, as far as I can tell, Jeff has two free hands during the part of the song with the tapes...he could maybe create something like those sounds using a guitar and effects, or trigger those exact recordings using MIDI.  So, while I generally prefer a band not to rely on backing tapes, I think this is perhaps the most minor offense of backing tape use possible.   

It’s the string sounding synth loop stuff that’s taped.

Here's another performance.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6du9Lg5Mjk

If your'e referring to the string section that comes it at around :45, and then again around 3:25, that seems more like a sound sample that someone in the band pushes a button or key to generate, so while it is a pre-recorded sound, it is being "played" by a band member.  Which is exactly how mellotrons work.

I don't see any kind of Ashley Simpson-esque sins being committed here.  It's not like there's a tape running throughout that they're using as a crutch.  The strings could go away entirely and the song would be fine.

If they had to play to tape with it then they should never play it. Completely inexcusable for a band of Wilco's skill to admit that. Surely the SIX of them can pull off that song to a decent enough degree without going Memorex on us.

I don't know what the "tape" is, but it could be a loop of some sort that Glen or Mikael trigger.  It's really common for drummers to do that these days with electronic drums, and isn't really the same as playing to a tape.  It's more similar to some of the things guitarists do with some of their pedals, or what a lot of synths do.  But that's just a guess, and I'd be curious to know exactly what that means. 

Here it is from Letterman:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpe_AYaIDSc

I don't see or hear anything in this performance that suggests they're playing to a tape, but I hear a number of loops and/or repeating synth passages (I don't know the correct synth terminology), particularly during the first couple of minutes.

I wouldn't say I missed it, but it's absence was noticed.

This tour sort of strikes me as a minimalistic production, and Art of Almost seems like a pretty maximalist, hi-tech piece of music.  Maybe that doesn't make any sense to anyone but me.  But, for example, there's no stage decoration at all this tour except for a screen.  There seems to be less equipment on stage than they typically have.  Most of the new music is very sparse and low-tech (maybe deceptively so).  I can see how they might feel Art of Almost doesn't fit in with what they're trying to present on this tour.  Rhythmically, at least, it is the exact opposite of what they were going for with Ode to Joy.

I like how you can sort of date when they taped this by Jeff's facial hair growth. Not quite carbon dating, but still...

 

(If I had to guess, they did it Oct. 14 — the day after the Brooklyn Steel show — though that seems like an awful long time for the Late Night show to sit on it. I just don't see when else they would have taped it unless it was the actual day of one of the NYC shows.)

Isn't the typical late night tv show format to tape a complete show in the afternoon and then air it that same night?

Is the Seth Myers show pre-taping music performances and piecing together shows from different dates?  So the only thing you can be sure is current on his show is the monologue?

I've listened to the first half so far, and really enjoyed it.  (Somehow it's really difficult for me to listen to a whole cd these days.)  I need to pick it back up, starting with Impossible Germany. 

So far I've enjoyed it all except for the Parquet Courts.  Kudos to them for doing something totally different with their contribution, but I think I'll skip that one when I listen to this cd in the future. 

Winners for me so far are Whitney and Kurt Vile.  I thought the Whitney take on Far Far Away really played up one of Jeff's best melodies in a really nice way.   I'm not really a fan of Kurt's solo material, but his voice is perfect on Passenger Side. If you didn't know anything about Wilco or Kurt Vile, it'd be easy to think this is the original version of the song.    

Tweedy's full quote regarding rock music being boring from the article (the whole paragraph):

He found some inspiration in unlikely places - namely, hip-hop records.  Not that Ode to Joy sounds much like Chance the Rapper.  Rather, it was the spirit of that music that moved Tweedy:  "Hip-hop records are almost uniformly invigorating for me.  There's a mindset in the way people go about making those albums. If you're doing something that was done four months ago, you're a loser. They're not concerned with legacy or status quo. On the other hand, rock music has become almost universally boring to me.  It's becoming similar to older music like jazz or blues, where it's really far away from self-invention and promoting some idea of the future.  It's not liberating.  It's preserving. And when you're trying to preserve something, to me that's rooted in fear of losing it."