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Primus at Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, 1030 15th Street, Suite 100, Sacramento, CA on Sep 14
Menomena at Showbox at the Market, 1426 First Avenue, Seattle, WA on Sep 10
Ratatat at Riviera Night Club, 4746 North Racine Avenue, Chicago, IL on Sep 10
The Black Keys at Verizon Wireless Music Center, 12880 East 146th Street, Noblesville, IN on Sep 03
Search results for: Denise Sullivan
Origin of Song: “Out on the Weekend” With Neil Young and Friends
A funny thing happened while I was looking for a clip to accompany our appreciation of pedal steel legend, Ben Keith, Neil Young’s trusty sideman since the days of Harvest: I found out that the album’s opening song, “Out on the Weekend”, is one of Young’s most-covered among the contemporary indie-folk and rock set. Who knew? Certainly not me, which is how I got curious to go in search of the origin of this song, or should I say the phenomenon it’s become.
Seriously, if you want to get your covers cred together and hang with Conor Oberst and that guy with the beard from Iron and Wine (yea, I know it’s Sam Beam but let me call him what I want)—if you want to be part of the Broken Social Scene—then I’m forewarning you: It’s time to learn the words and music to “Out on the Weekend.” Everyone is playing it these days—and I do mean everyone: The Neil Young songbook lists the chords as A-Bm-E-A, not that I need to broadcast that since the tune’s so often borrowed you probably know it by heart. Even Lady Gaga is doing it, using it as she does as an intro to her own “Fooled Me Again, Honest Eyes” with its emphasis on the phrase, “Trying to make it pay.” Lady Ga… What you say? That’s what I’m saying! Country Neil circa 1971 has gone viral—among the young and industrious, the young and Canadian, and the young and the reckless, too. Yep, that’s wily Pete Doherty you hear freelancing it, and if you haven’t gotten hip to this “Out on the Weekend” trip, then there’s the alarming possibility that you, like me, have fallen into the gap and can’t get up. Clearly, this is a generational thing, so if you will allow me, I’ll bring us all up to speed, while I drop some science on any Neil newbies out there who are willing to listen (though I realize there is little I can tell anyone under 25 that they don’t already know—LOL, ironically, of course).
Last time we went inside a Neil Young song it was in an effort to unravel the mysteries of the mid-‘70s period, Crazy Horse tour de force “Like a Hurricane”, but that was about two years and 28 columns ago, so I figured it was safe to go back for more. In an effort to plumb the depths of “Out on the Weekend”, we must take on the legend of the Harvest album, which mostly concerns its massive popularity: This was the time and place that put solo Neil Young into the stratosphere of success, with its hit single, “Heart of Gold”, and another top 40 seller, “Old Man.”
Book Review: Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love
Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love
By John Einarson
(Jawbone, 2010)
“The Doors looked at Love as the band they wanted to be like: Successful, mysterious, and profound,” says drummer Michael Stuart in Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love. “But the Doors were hard workers, and the other guys in the band had more control over Jim Morrison than we had over Arthur.” If you know anything about the habits of Jim Morrison and how the Doors suffered at his hands, then perhaps that gives you some idea about the crazy world of Arthur Lee. Some say he lived many lifetimes in his 61 years, any one of them as extreme as Jimbo’s, but those who dared to control him would find themselves confronted by a man with a formidable will—the sheer force of which worked against him more than for him. His and his band Love’s story is a rock tragedy of epic proportions.
From their earliest gigs at the Brave New World as the Grass Roots (named after the Malcolm X speech, Message to the Grass Roots), Lee and Love were anomalous in their field. Inspired by jazz, blues, and the Byrds, Lee was the original “black hippie,” a psychedelic rock pioneer and unreliable bandleader with an extraordinary bad luck streak. Out of the gate, he felt gypped when another group had already established themselves as the Grass Roots. But with his guitarist pal Johnny Echols, and Lee’s own signature one boot and harmonica, the newly christened Love and their collective style didn’t miss a beat when it came to capturing the spirit of the freewheeling times on the mid-’60s Sunset Strip scene where they were readily embraced by the teenage girls who made and broke the bands there.
The fact that Lee and Echols were black at a time of local and national racial crisis was incidental in their immediate milieu, though in retrospect, it’s just another way that Love broke ground among their psychedelic peers. With his odd glasses and ability to shapeshift from crooner to rock ‘n’ soul shouter, Lee never bowed to prevailing trends or fashions, creating his own wild style and far-reaching compositions. None other than Jimi Hendrix took inspiration from him, a fact Lee felt ambivalent about, considering he counted Jimi as a friend and fellow traveler, as well as a competitor. But the kinds of business decisions Lee made (like opting out of the festival at Monterey because of a personal grievance he had with its organizer Lou Adler) were almost always to his detriment, based as they were on hot emotions and cold fear. Serving to impede Love’s progress, by 1968 the classic band was in essence, kaput, though Lee weathered other line-ups and a solo career of sorts.
What Makes a Legend: Los Lobos
Who: Los Lobos
Classic Track: “Will the Wolf Survive.” Los Lobos first emerged as a band from their native East LA neighborhood in 1973; by 1980 they were opening for PiL and the Blasters in LA’s punk clubs and by 1984 had reached a wider audience than ever before with their T Bone Burnett-produced major label debut album, How Will the Wolf Survive? Inspired by the plight of the wolf, the song encapsulates typical Lobos’ concerns like survival y la familia and the road to beauty and truth. Written by Louie Pérez and David Hidalgo, it’s sung and finger-picked by Hidalgo, with shimmering mandolin by Cesar Rosas. It remains an album rock radio staple to this day.
Career highs: Nabbing Grammy awards for their Mexican American inspired, “Mariachi Suite”, “Anselma”, and the album, La Pistola y El Corazon; playing the music of Chicano rock pioneer Richie Valens on the soundtrack to the biopic La Bamba, and earning a Number One record in 1987 with the title track; opening shows for the Grateful Dead, recording their “Bertha” for a tribute album in 1991 and connecting with a whole new dedicated fanbase; and performing at the White House in 2009. In September, new friend Robert Plant will lead off his highly anticipated solo album with the Lobos song, “Angel Dance.”
Career lows: Having to play “La Bamba” night after night to keep the customers satisfied (they rarely play it these days), and fielding similarly aggressive audience requests for “Bertha” at the insistence of gnarly Deadheads.
Dueling Critics: Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM
Jocelyn Hoppa and Denise Sullivan debate the merits of IRM, the most recent release by Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Denise: I’m wondering if you suggested we give IRM a listen since it seems like it didn’t get nearly the love you might expect a collaboration between French actress/singer Charlotte Gainsbourg and the almighty Beck would get.
Jocelyn: Actually, it’s two-fold. Right around July, lots of blogs gather up their “Best Of 2010 So Far” listings, and while going through them, I saw enough instances of Charlotte Gainsbourg being a contender to pique my interest. And then, when I learned of Beck’s involvement, I became very intrigued. That guy’s hands are in all sorts of pies lately, which is a great move at this point for him. He’s also perfected the art of wearing a cardigan.
Denise: Which could be perceived as a sign of going soft, but in this case, it’s not. Personally, I had no reason to have high expectations about this pairing, other than I find both Beck and Gainsbourg generally appealing and it sounded exciting on paper. Because he debuted as an innovator and a game changer, I admire and respect Beck tremendously and come to each of his projects with an open mind. But if I’m really being honest, I have to admit that the last album I truly enjoyed from front to back was ’02’s Sea Change—which is around the time he ceased to innovate and started to imitate (John Martyn, to be exact). As for Gainsbourg, primarily an actress, I’ve really enjoyed her movies, specifically Jane Eyre and My Wife Is an Actress directed by her husband, Yvan Attal. She seems pretty normal, considering her father was French national provocateur, Serge Gainsbourg (her mother is Jane Birkin). I didn’t hear her previous album, 5:55, and can’t say I really enjoyed her duets with her father either. But her last collaborator was Jarvis Cocker, and that’s the mark of someone who, for better or worse, is rock ‘n’ roll crazy.
Book Review: Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
By Nadine Cohodas
(Pantheon, 2010)
Gifted but troubled genius or merely talented mental defective is the main question posed by award-winning author Nadine Cohodas in Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, her dispassionate portrait of a rare artist, pianist-composer-singer Nina Simone. From her earliest years as Eunice Waymon, four-year-old church pianist in Tryon, North Carolina, to later days when she preferred to be titled Madame or Dr. Simone, music and the fight for black equality were the musician’s raison d’être: She once famously declared, “I am civil rights.” As a child, she delayed a recital until her parents were given their rightful seats in the front row, much to the shock of her town’s white folks. But her drive and determination were also like crosses to bear. “Music chose me,” she once said. “I’m learning to control this gift, but I hate it, too. It’s a tremendous responsibility…” But she carried that weight from cradle to the grave—with great cost to her personal stability—according to this harrowing account of her troubled life.
Despite the heightened sense of injustice, Eunice proved to be self-possessed and promising enough at the keyboard to be nurtured by a piano teacher and sent to the Juilliard School. But following the disappointment of not being admitted for further study at the Curtis Institute (she blamed it on a racist admittance policy), as the years went on, Simone moved further away from her dream of becoming a groundbreaking African American classical concert pianist, and ended up doing music as a way to earn her wages. This seems to be the compromise she never forgave herself or anyone else for, and it points toward her lifelong difficulties with finances as well as an increasingly bitter, angry, and at times untenable edge that had found even those who loved her recoiling in frustration.
What Makes a Legend: Ben Keith
Who: Ben Keith, steel guitarist, dobro player, and multi-instrumentalist known primarily—though not exclusively—for his work with Neil Young and most recently, Pegi Young.
Classic Tracks: “Old Man” and the rest of the album, Harvest. Keith first came to play with Neil Young in Nashville on a call as a session man for that album in 1971. In an interview for Dutch television in 2009, Keith explained he and Neil had never met at the time Harvest was recorded. And yet, 35-plus years later the album remains his best-ever studio moment with Young. “It was the first time we worked together, and it just came off so good, it just kinda stuck with me,” he said. And with us too: It’s hard to imagine “Out on the Weekend”, “Are You Ready for the Country”, “Heart of Gold”, “Alabama”, “Words (Between the Lines of Age)”, and the album’s title song without Keith’s graceful guitar echoing Young’s own crying tones. Keith left a giant footprint not only on Harvest but on Tonight’s the Night, Comes a Time, On the Beach, and Young’s mid-life masterpiece Harvest Moon as well. In later years he was involved in literally all of Young’s recording and touring projects, from Silver & Gold to Chrome Dreams II.
Bennett Keith Schaeufele was born in Fort Riley, Kansas and grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky. According to Neil, Keith’s first guitar was made from a piece of wood and old guitar parts. He began his career in the ’50s as a member of country singer Faron Young’s band and went on to play at various Nashville sessions, including the notable steel guitar part on Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” Through the years he contributed to records by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Crosby & Nash, Warren Zevon, and to other branches on the family tree of American roots music.
Origin of Song: Bittersweet Tales of “Isn’t It a Pity”
From its humble beginning (“Isn’t it a pity? / Now, isn’t it a shame?”), to its bitter end (“What a pity, what a pity”), “Isn’t It a Pity”, by notorious spiritual seeker and light-bringer George Harrison, offers no hope or relief from bleak truths its narrator comes to speak. The song’s dark matter came to my attention recently when I heard a new version of it by Bettye LaVette, who’s added her voice to the distinguished chorus that’s chosen to interpret the song. Which set me wondering: How is it that a dour little lament—offering no respite from life’s shadow side—became one of Harrison’s most reinterpreted and beloved rock classics?
It was 40 years ago this summer that Harrison took to the studio with Phil Spector to cut his solo debut masterwork, All Things Must Pass, on which two versions of “Isn’t It a Pity” appear. As if fans of the quiet one had any doubt, Harrison and his number one triple album proved he was no third wheel or little brother in the Lennon and McCartney hit-making partnership; rather, he was a self-sufficient songman, capable of executing his own luscious melodies with depth-filled themes to spare. Harrison had been saving up his Beatles rejects from at least 1966, from which it is supposed “Isn’t it a Pity” dates back. According to Richie Unterberger who scrutinized the band’s demos in his book, The Unreleased Beatles, “Isn’t It a Pity” shows up in the logbooks for the first time during the January 1969 Apple Studios dates for Let It Be (also known as the Get Back sessions).
Unterberger writes, “[Harrison] also reveals that ‘Isn’t it a Pity’ was about three years old at this point, but had been cursorily rejected by John Lennon.” Lennon famously mocked Harrison again upon the release of All Things Must Pass in 1970, but public response to Harrison’s work told the tale in the end. As the last Beatle to weigh in as a solo act, Harrison’s album, as well as its devotional first single “My Sweet Lord”, was more successful than any other Beatles solo effort to date.
What Makes a Legend: Gil Scott-Heron
Who: Gil Scott-Heron
Classic Track: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” So nice it was recorded twice, first on his debut recording, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, and again as the opening track to 1971’s more music-based Pieces of a Man. Scott-Heron’s “Revolution” has been sampled, synthesized, digitized, and name-dropped more times than we can comprehend. Like a gospel in the Bible of hip-hop, it’s what helped earn him his rap as one of the music’s founders.
Career highs: His album collaborations with flautist Brian Jackson from 1974-1976 are foundational to Scott-Heron’s fusion of funky jazz with black-powered poetry and contain some of his best work, from the ghetto lament, “The Bottle” and the national confusion depicted in “Winter in America”, to the anti-apartheid solidarity anthem, “Johannesburg.” Scott-Heron has joined his music with activism, whether opposing nuclear power (“We Almost Lost Detroit”) at the No Nukes fest, or speaking out against Reagan’s presidential credentials (“B-Movie”).
Career Low: Drug addiction led to time served on possession charges.
Essential listening: The early works: 1971’s Pieces of a Man and ‘74’s Winter in America.
And if you like those: The even earlier coffeehouse style and live percussion driven Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. After a 12-year hiatus, the comeback album Spirits, especially its “Message to the Messengers”, directed at all the young mcs out there, still sounds pretty fly, in a ‘90s way.
What he’s doing now: Wowing the kids at Coachella this year with songs from his latest, I’m New Here. The Richard Russell-produced collection on the XL label includes songs penned by Robert Johnson, the singer-songwriter Smog, and spoken-word clips of Heron’s own vintage poetry.
Quotable: “You ain’t insane, you have got a brain, you haven’t gone lame, you have got your game. Remember: Keep the nerve.”
Watch the action then: “The Bottle”
And now: “I’m New Here“
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Dueling Critics: Sun Kil Moon, Admiral Fell Promises
Jocelyn Hoppa and Denise Sullivan debate the merits of Admiral Fell Promises, the new release by Sun Kil Moon.
Jocelyn: The thing I keep thinking about when listening to the fourth record of Mark Kozelek’s Sun Kil Moon project is that I’m not sure I can name many other musicians on the scene for the last 20 years who are this consistent. Can you?
Denise: Well, I can hardly think of another artist so fully committed to one unified style of song presentation, album after album. Even if he is doing one of his frequent covers—like when he did (gulp) “Send in the Clowns”, it sounds just as you’d expect Mark Kozelek doing “Send in the Clowns”: Contained and void of melodrama. I guess that would be consistent, eh?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I think so. But how does he make it not boring then? It makes me wonder if he writes albums, or has a bunch of songs in his repertoire for awhile that he’ll gather together to make a particular album.
Denise: Well, not knowing a thing about him (he seems fairly private) nor his process (always a mysterious and varied proposition with artists), it’s probably safe to say he likes a good theme: He named Sun Kil Moon after a boxer and then proceeded to include a few odes to other boxers on the album. I happen to like boxer songs. Do you?
Jocelyn: Boxer songs are good… a lot of these songs seem like a travelogue.
Denise: Indeed. A number of songs on Admiral Fell Promises are named after landmarks or points on the map: “Alesund” (Norway), “Australian Winter”, and “Third and Seneca”, which begins in Seattle, moves around the Northwest region, then goes south, to the Southwest, Texas, and onto NYC, where it finds a particular sweetness.
What Makes a Legend: Country Joe McDonald
by: Denise Sullivan
Who: Country Joe McDonald
Classic track: “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.” “Country Joe” McDonald’s early ’40s baby diapers couldn’t have been redder: Legend has it his activist parents named him after Joe Stalin. Honorably discharged from the US Navy in 1965, Joe made the move from El Monte, California, where he’d schooled himself in R&B and old time music, to Berkeley at the height of the Free Speech Movement. As a budding editor and publisher of the alternative magazine, Rag Baby, he was inspired to put his political ideas into a song for a “talking” edition of the paper. The result was the first pressing of the “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” EP and the birth of Country Joe and the Fish (with Barry Melton) in the fall of 1965. Transitioning from the coffeehouse scene to the stages of the Fillmore and Avalon, complete with pioneering electric light shows, Country Joe and the Fish would become synonymous with all things ‘60s and San Francisco, while staying true to their speechifying Berkeley roots.
Career high: Grabbing a guitar and jumping up for an impromptu set following Richie Havens at Woodstock, a Fish-less Country Joe McDonald asked 300,000 hippies to give him an “F,” before delivering an unforgettable version of the “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.” The band performance at Monterey Pop is also indelible.
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by: Denise Sullivan
published: August 27, 2010
in column: What Goes On, What Makes a Legend
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