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dmait

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    The Movie Quote Thread

    in Tongue-Tied Lightning

    Posted

    >My niece gave a report in class a few weeks ago on the JFK assassination. I told her I would love to see her standing in front of the class doing the "Back... and to the left!" scene from the Oliver Stone movie.

     

    You should have had her recite the Conspiracy A Go Go scene in the book store in Slacker.

    X Live

    in Someone Else's Song

    Posted

    >Random fact - Henry Rollins ranks them in his Top 5 live acts of all time.

     

    Unfortunately the same can't be said of his interviewing skills, but I like his show and he books great guests.

    The Grateful Dead

    in Someone Else's Song

    Posted

    >This was, of course, the first-ever Grateful Dead version of The Weight

     

     

    I was upper deck in the Philzone for this show. I remember hearing the opening chords and saying, "This couldn't be the Weight, could it?" It was a great song for them because Jerry, Bob, Phil, and Brent each took a verse, like they did in Let the Good Times Roll, one of the great openers. Spring 90 was a great tour, as was Fall 90, especially the six-night run at MSG.

    jazz - where do i start?

    in Someone Else's Song

    Posted

    Here's a great-sounding torrent currently on dimeadozen:

     

    http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=188878

     

    LOUIS ARMSTRONG & BAND

     

    Live at Musikhalle in Hamburg, 1962, April 14,

     

    Source: low Gen. RADIO MASTER>trade>Flac

    Sound: A+ (outstanding quality for that age!!, listen to mp3 sample)

     

    LINEUP:

    Louis Armstrong -tp,vo;

    Trummy Young -tb;

    Joe Darensbourg -cl;

    Billy Kyle -p;

    Bill Cronk -b;

    Danny Barcelona -d;

     

    TRACKS:

    01 WHEN IT'S SLEEPY TIME DOWN SOUTH 3.42

    02 INDIANA 4.36

    03 A KISS TO BUILD A DREAM ON 5.23

    04 MY BUCKET'S GOT A HOLE IN IT 3.22

    05 MACK THE KNIFE 3.53

    06 LOVER COME BACK TO ME 3.10 [Jewell Brown -vo]

    07 BILL BAILEY, WON'T YOU PLEASE COME HOME 1.46 [Jewell

    Brown -vo]

    08 WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN 3.36

    09 STRUTTIN' WITH SOME BARBECUE 6.27

    10 NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I'VE SEEN 3.13

    11 BLUEBERRY HILL 3.33

    12 DER TREUE HUSAR 5.27

    13 ST. LOUIS BLUES 3.56 [Jewell Brown -vo]

     

    Notes:

    1962 Feb 26 was a TV show in Berlin for US Army troups;

    1962 Feb 27 Stuttgart, Feb

    1962 Feb 28 Munich;

    The Grateful Dead

    in Someone Else's Song

    Posted

    One of the best parts of Phil's book is his honesty about the last years of Jerry's life. The band knew he was in terrible shape and needed time off, but the infrastructure was so large and supporting so many people (ticket office, sound guys, insurance costs, etc.) that they couldn't afford to take time off. I think he mentioned that Vince Welnick (Casio-boy, of all people) demanded that they continue touring. It's a good book from a personal perspective, but a previous poster is right: it could be 1000 pages and not get past the days in the Haight.

    Tweedy article in The Australian

    in Just A Fan

    Posted

    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...9-16947,00.html

     

    Wilco a sharing kind of band

     

    THERE'S something distinctly user-friendly about Wilco. Take their concerts, for example.

    No sooner had the Chicago-based outfit played in Sydney last year than a recording of the show appeared for free download on their website. Many of their other concerts from across the world have found fresh ears and new homes in the same way in recent years.

    Singer and chief songwriter Jeff Tweedy is proud of that: as proud of the gesture as he is of his band's songs. Why wouldn't he give them away to whoever wants to hear them?

    "It's an amazing way to reach people," says Tweedy, who arrives with Wilco in Australia next week for a short tour that includes the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival at Byron Bay, NSW. "I thought the whole point was to have people listen to you. If you have the opportunity to be heard by a lot of people by sharing, that's not such a bad thing. It's also bad karma as a musician to spend energy trying to stop people from listening to your music."

    It would be hard to find fault with Tweedy's point of view, unless of course you worked for a major record company, where the idea of giving away music is rarely considered, particularly as internet piracy continues to deprive those companies of income they believe is theirs. Tweedy, however, has had run-ins with record companies through the years, so he's not exactly sympathetic about their misfortunes. Nor does he think piracy is altogether a bad thing.

    "I can't get behind any legislation for fighting it because I just think it's a fact of life, and for us ... if someone downloads our record and plays it to five of their friends, that's five more people who just might come and see us play. For us, that's how we've made our living. I guess if you're a band that can't play live it might be a really scary time, but for us it's fabulous."

    Indeed Tweedy, 40, seems to be in a fabulous place in 2008. During the past 14 years Wilco has grown from an alt-country indie band to a Grammy-winning rock ensemble. In the process they have been dumped by their record company, shed a handful of members (not all at once) and had a revealing documentary made about them, 2002's I am Trying to Break Your Heart.

    At the centre of it all is Tweedy, whose songs can be as hard to pin down to one genre as they are extraordinarily beautiful. Wilco's most recent album, Sky Blue Sky, merged the country ambience of the band's early albums AM and Being There with the more experimental elements of their biggest sellers, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) and A Ghost is Born (2004).

    The singer has battled depression and drug addiction in recent years. A lifelong migraine sufferer, Tweedy became addicted to painkillers and in 2004 entered rehab. He came out the other side a non-smoker and with an attitude that the other remaining original member of Wilco, bassist John Stirratt, says improved the focus of the band.

    "I feel like I live a charmed existence," Tweedy says in his good-natured manner.

    Wilco arrive in Australia a year after the release of Sky Blue Sky. They're not here to promote anything in particular, other than themselves. That's the way they like to work, going out on the road when it suits them, rather than as part of a marketing campaign.

    "We've been taking it easy for a while, so we're ready to get back on the road, but we'll probably take it a bit easier for most of this year because we have some new family members coming for some of the guys in the band," Tweedy says. "Babies are coming."

    The ability to operate without a long-term schedule is a freedom other bands don't enjoy or subscribe to, but Wilco's approach to music and a music career sits outside ofconvention.

    "There's never really any pressure on us to put a record out," Tweedy says. "Fortunately the world doesn't hinge on Wilco putting a record out. It's not going to save any lives or cause any financial difficulties for the gross national product or anything."

    Wilco was formed from the ashes of Tweedy's previous band, Uncle Tupelo, which fragmented when he fell out with the other songwriter, Jay Farrar, who went on to form Son Volt. Since then Tweedy and Wilco have collaborated with other musicians, most notably and notoriously English folk troubadour Billy Bragg. The Englishman and Wilco recorded two commercially successful albums, Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue II, that featured previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics presented to them by Guthrie's daughter, Nora.

    Friction arose between Bragg and Wilco over various aspects of the recording and, for Tweedy at least, it is clearly still an issue.

    When Bragg was in Australia in January he told The Australian that there were more recordings still to be released from the Mermaid sessions and that he was hopeful of presenting these as part of a boxed set and of setting up a tour with Wilco, something that never happened because of the acrimony that ensued. Tweedy, however, is fairly clear on this point.

    "Billy Bragg is so full of shit, man," he says, before pausing for a disturbingly long laugh. "That guy is full of shit," he manages again. "I don't know what he's talking about. If he has more stuff, then that's great, but I don't think there's any chance of us having anything to do with it."

    More laughter.

    "The guy's been saying that all over the place and I have no idea what he is talking about because he has never talked to us about it. There are no other songs that we have. Everything that we did was on the records. But I'm serious. He's full of shit. Nothing against Billy. He's just full of shit.

    "That's just what he's built his whole life on, so that's all right."

    As long as we're clear.

    If collaboration doesn't always work for Tweedy, he is quite happy to play - and work - on his own.

    "I enjoy that a lot," he says.

    Tweedy has toured solo on several occasions. A documentary about his 2006 tour of the US, Jeff Tweedy: Sunken Treasure, will be screened on SBS on March 21.

    Playing just with an acoustic guitar allows him to explore the roots of his Wilco songs. While the band has evolved musically through the years, Tweedy says that when he strips the songs down they still sound "like they came from one person".

    "The thing that strikes me more than anything when I play by myself is how little I've evolved over the years," he says.

    "As a band everything has evolved. I've gotten more comfortable singing. As the band has got more mature I think we have all got much better at being in a band together. When I play by myself is the time when I don't think about what I'm doing. When we play together, though, that's when I realise how much better it has become and how much I enjoy it."

    Oh, and just to show how user-friendly Wilco are, you can request songs to be played at their upcoming shows at wilcoworld.net.

    Wilco appear at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, March 18; the Tivoli, Brisbane, March 19; East Coast Blues and Roots Festival, Byron Bay, March 20; Palace Theatre, Melbourne, March 26.

    SNL!

    in Just A Fan

    Posted

    For what it's worth, after years of trying to convince a big music fan friend of mine to give Wilco a shot, the SNL appearance finally did the trick. He emailed me that he dug the songs and asked which albums to download from iTunes. We have a convert.

    Gary Louris Tour Dates...

    in Someone Else's Song

    Posted

    From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (sorry no link):

     

    Back in the early 1990s, when the Jayhawks backed revered songwriter Joe Henry on a pair of classic alt-country albums, Gary Louris was already contemplating a solo career that wouldn't come for another 15 years.

    "I remember having a discussion with Joe at the time, who was a solo guy and I was a guy-in-a-band," Louris recalls. "It was a classic case of the grass is always greener."

    "Joe was like, 'It must be nice being in a band, knowing who's playing with you, and having the camaraderie.' And I was like, 'Man, just to be free and not begotten to anyone would great. You can work with anyone you want.'"

    Finally, Louris knows what it's like on both sides of the fence. The former Jayhawks frontman's first solo album, "Vagabonds," gets its national release Tuesday on Rykodisc.

    Produced by Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson -- one of those people Louris always wanted to work with -- the disc is a shade grayer and noticeably mellower than his old band's blue melodic twang, but not so different that it needs to be filed in another section of the record store.

    Talking last week at a coffee shop in Minneapolis' Bryn Mawr neighborhood, the 52-year-old singer/ guitarist already knows some of the disadvantages of being a solo artist.

    "The record got pushed back a few months, so hiring the band I wanted has been a little more difficult than I thought," he admitted with a be-careful-what-you-wish-for laugh. The keyboardist he wanted for his tour was swiped by Robinson for the Black Crowes, the steel-guitar player was hired by k.d. lang, etc.

    Nonetheless, Louris took advantage of having a clean slate when it came time to make the album last April. He opted to record in Los Angeles with an all-new group of musicians instead of his Minneapolis cronies.

    "Without insulting the locals -- because I love them all and have played with many great people here -- I didn't want it to be Gary Louris & the Program," he said, referring to the group of musicians that his Golden Smog pal Kraig Johnson uses as backers. "I'll work with all those guys again, for sure. But in this case, I wanted to bring in some new people."

    Some of the L.A.-based musicians on "Vagabonds" also worked with Louris on a record he made with the Jayhawks' other former singer, Mark Olson, who quit the band in 1995. That album -- also produced by Robinson -- was in the can before Louris' disc, but it's not coming out until summer or fall.

    "A lot of those players came out of this jam session that I would go to out in Laurel Canyon on Wednesday nights, all night 'til 5 in the morning," he said. "They all knew each other and came in there with their own built-in chemistry."

    Louris and Robinson also knew each other well. The Black Crowes were signed to Rick Rubin's American Recordings label about the same time as the Jayhawks, and the two bands toured together in the early '90s.

    "[Mark and I] didn't need a producer to show us exactly how to make a record; we'd done it enough," he said. "We needed a producer to bounce ideas off of and help us put a band together. Chris and Jeff [Tweedy] are probably the two biggest fans I know, guys who listen to tons of records and know everything."

    Robinson rounded up a few friends to sing backup on the album, including Rilo Kiley singer Jenny Lewis and her boyfriend, Johnathan Rice. Louris also brought in longtime friend Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles. The guests added high-reaching choirlike harmonies on a few tracks, including the bittersweet, Byrdsy gem "We'll Get By" and the gospel-tinged "To Die a Happy Man."

    Mostly, though, "Vagabonds" is an intimate affair, played largely on acoustic guitar and piano with spring-jacket-light layers of organ and pedal-steel. The latter half of the album is especially somber and hushed, featuring the road-weary, piano-fueled title track and a lightly plucked gem called "D.C. Blues," stripped to just acoustic and pedal-steel guitars.

    "Hand me down my walking cane/ Hand me down my shoes," he sings in "D.C. Blues," one of several tracks featuring some of his most vivid and poetic lyrics to date. "It's my game to win/ It's my game to lose."

    Louris admitted he "worked harder on the words than I ever have before.

    "I focused on the things I think I'm good at, which is singing and writing. Sometimes with the Jayhawks -- and this was totally my own fault -- you'd have trouble hearing me sing. I've never really made a quiet, intimate acoustic record. 'Rainy Day Music' was like that a bit, but not as much as this.

    "Some people were like, 'This is your chance to be more experimental, or to rock out more.' I'll probably do that a bit, but later."

    And anyway, Louris said he's not trying to get his solo career up to the level of notoriety and activity that the Jayhawks had. He has booked a few weeks of U.S. tour dates starting in March and a few more later in Europe, all with the San Francisco-based experimental folk band Vetiver as both his backers and openers.

    Following the Jayhawks' final tour in 2004, he said, "I settled into just hanging out and being Dad pretty easily," referring to his son Henry, 8. He seemed more eager to promote his wife Julie's new French-themed boutique store, Duetta, in southwest Minneapolis than his album.

    "I finally had the chance to tell her, 'You do your thing, and I'll carry the weight more at home,'" he said.

    Louris hardly became just a homebody, though. He co-wrote four of the songs on the Dixie Chicks' Grammy-winning album "The Long Road Home." He also wrote with Dar Williams, Susan Tedeschi and Carrie Rodriguez, and he produced the Sadies' last album, just nominated for a Juno Award (Canada's Grammys).

    The most significant project, though -- at least on a personal level -- was his two "From the Jayhawks" tours with Olson, featuring their first performances together in a decade.

    "Mark and I were close friends for a long time, so the nicest thing is being friends again," he said. (The two reunited again Sunday at the 400 Bar, Olson's gig to promote his own solo album, "Salvation Blues.")

    As for the record they made together, he said, "We're both very proud of it. The songwriting was always great between us. We fill in each other's blanks. I think we'll continue to do things together."

    In fact, when the idea of future Jayhawks outings was floated, he said "it'd have to be with Mark Olson. That's the biggest regret I have, Mark leaving. I'm proud of what we did afterward, but it would've been interesting to see what else we would've done with Mark."

    But no matter what, Louris expects to remain more a solo guy than a guy-in-a-band.

    "I expect I'll always be all over the board from here on out," he said. "I admire Neil Young, who can go out solo, or with the band, or with CSN. He keeps himself interested, which is what you have to do."

    Malkmus using Tweedy's place...

    in Someone Else's Song

    Posted

    >I don't really see that as dissing at all.

     

    >Yeah, I should have included the full excerpt.

     

    The article says the loft "was still not ideal to Malkmus. "They're totally into the ephemera of music. It's a boy shrine to vintage guitars and equipment.' Malkmus adds. "So we finished the vocals there and did some guitars and keyboards. But it's very self-contained. You have to stay within eight feet of the console, basically."

     

    I read the Paste article and also thought it was intended as a slight knock. He seemed genuinely thankful for the offer to use the loft, but seemed to find it unsatisfying, to the point they left for yet another studio.

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