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Rock Art Rock
The Decemberists
September 19, 2009
Terminal 5, New York, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "The Decemberists played a special one night 'lottery show,' where the songs played were picked at random by a master of ceremonies, played by John Wesley Harding..."
Ra Ra Riot
April 4, 2009
Webster Hall, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "This show was, at the time, the biggest one Ra Ra Riot had sold out as headliners, and it was clear to me after watching it that the band is destined for even bigger and better things..."
Florence and the Machine
October 28, 2009
Bowery Ballroom, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "Florence Welsh and her backing band delighted and mesmerized a sold-out crowd at Bowery in her first official NY headlining show..."
Dirty Projectors
July 19, 2009
Williamsburg Waterfront (Brooklyn, NY)
By Amanda Hatfield "I was skeptical about how well Dirty Projectors' gorgeous, complex vocal harmonies would carry over outdoors, standing under hot sunshine..."
See more in the Rock Art Rock gallery.
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Search results for: patterson hood
Rock Art Rock: Issue 3.18b
Drive-by Truckers
Bourbon Street Ballroom, Baltimore, MD
June 3, 2009
By Kevin Ruppenthal
This was a shockingly free gig for a new venue in Baltimore. DbT are a phenomenal live band, and the chance to shoot them was one I could not resist. Here is Patterson Hood, raising the devil horns as he sings ‘but I sure saw AC/DC, with Bon Scott singing ‘Let There Be Rock’ in their tune, ‘Let There Be Rock.’’ Am so thankful to have captured this moment—it’s a highlight of their sets.
Check out Kevin Ruppenthal at his music site
Questions and Answers with Jim Musselman
How do you start out as a progressive Washington lawyer working alongside Ralph Nader and end up as a record label boss? Just ask Jim Musselman, founder of Appleseed Recordings, who is celebrating his label’s 100th record release this month. Musselman may have left his lawyering days behind, but he’s remained remarkably committed to social justice and a host of progressive causes. Indeed, Appleseed Recordings has a distinct political identity, fostering a kind of liberal ideology that hearkens back to the 1960s. The label has released recordings by influential artists from Pete Seeger to John Wesley Harding, garnering nine Grammy nominations and notching a Grammy win along the way. By offering artists full creative control, Musselman has managed to recruit some musicians who gave up on recording for years: Folks like Roger McGuinn, Donovan, Tom Rush, and David Bromberg. The label counts albums of Underground Railroad songs and a fundraising CD to combat homelessness among its first 100 releases. Musselman is a true believer in the ability of a song to change the world, a remarkable rarity in today’s music business. We caught up with Musselman to congratulate him on his label’s milestone and talk about putting the message over money, writing songs with the Boss, and bringing music to the masses.
Crawdaddy!: First of all, congratulations on the release of your 100th record. Did you ever think when you started Appleseed Recordings that you’d reach that kind of milestone?
Marriage and the Beast of Burden
Wedding season. Isn’t it grand? About $28 grand per wedding, actually, according to statistics. With its long days, fair weather, and customary time off work, summer is by far the most popular season for the taking of vows so sacred only 40-50 percent of people break them. It’s the time of year in which every other song piped into housewares department aisles nationwide will be “Chapel of Love”, the quintessentially brainless yet infectious carol of marriage season, written by a trio of marital train wrecks: Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and Phil Friggin’ Spector. The latter, needless to say, has three ex-wives and is slated to die alone in prison for the murder of his latest fling. As for the other two, Barry married Greenwich in 1962, not long after having his first marriage annulled, and then they too divorced in ’65, about a year after “Chapel of Love” first hit the airwaves.
As lots go tying knots with gay abandon (so to speak), another typical treat for us all is Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight”, virtually ubiquitous on the mainstream wedding scene. Clapton wrote it for model/photographer Pattie Boyd, with whom he’d fallen in love while her marriage to his good friend George Harrison was headed down the crapper. He wrote the song while courting Boyd after she split from Harrison, and the two got married in 1979, exactly one year after the single was released. “I feel wonderful because I see / The love light in your eyes,” Clapton wrote, back when they were single and swooning. Nine years later they were divorced, after Clapton had fathered not one, but two separate children in different extramarital affairs. Then came his album Journeyman, and the following singles in chronological order: “Bad Love”, “Pretending”, “Before You Accuse Me”, “No Alibis”, and “Run So Far.”
Marriage is a sticky phenomenon, to say the least. It comes in as many forms as there are cultures and lines of tradition; sacred to some, a sacred cow to others, and to others still, a patriarchal sham rife with injustice and discrimination. It’s easy to poke holes in the wealth of outdated traditions related to weddings, which is why a lot of ceremonies these days maintain only slight and subtle vestiges of the absurdities of yesteryear so as to not tarnish those genuinely magical, emotional moments of love’s proclamation. The less traditional a wedding is, the more universally beautiful it has the potential to be, and yet, with so much planning and organizing involved, one area where people feel safe with old standbys tends to be the music. At the same time, it’s funny how much wedding season music has in common with the stodgy civil institution it’s come to be associated with; so pretty and so popular, yet with so many complications and extenuations behind the scenes deemed counterproductive to focus on, lest it distract from the prettiness. Even the stately wedding bedrock march we call “Here Comes the Bride” is not without its shadow. The tune, more officially titled “The Bridal Chorus” (“Treulich geführt”), comes from Wagner’s 19th century opera Lohengrin. In it, a woman ostensibly marries a complete stranger whose identity remains secret until after the wedding, at which point the new husband deserts the wife and she instantly dies from grief. In real life, Wagner’s first wife, Minna, ran off with an army officer only a few weeks after they got married, although the officer then abandoned her and good ol’ Waggie took her back. Twenty years later, Minna caught the composer having an affair of his own, and the couple split five years after that. Ya gotta hand it to them, though—they really did their best to stick it out.
Questions and Answers with Patterson Hood
Here in the Smoke-Filled Room, we often find ourselves bemoaning the dearth of political activists on the scene these days. Not today. Today we extend our heartfelt birthday wishes to a man who has largely shaped our very concept of the protest singer. That man, of course, is the incomparable Pete Seeger, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday in high style with a star-studded concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Not surprisingly, all the proceeds from the event went to a good cause—the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a non-profit organization created to defend and restore the Hudson River. Among the dozens of A-listers who showed up to pay tribute to Seeger were Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, and a good friend of the Smoke-Filled Room, Ani DiFranco. Most importantly, for our purposes, was the involvement of Patterson Hood. Hood, who is best-known for leading the powerhouse Southern rock group Drive-By Truckers, is a formidable activist in his own right, and his new solo record, the delightfully titled Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs), is due out later this month. We caught up with Hood to talk about sharing a stage with the Boss, what to expect from Obama, and the cause closest to his heart.
Crawdaddy!: First of all, congratulations on the release of your new album, which comes out next month and will mark the end of a very long process of writing and recording. Are you relieved? Sorry to see the end of it?
Patterson Hood: Very relieved. It’s been an extremely long process. I’m very proud of the album and have wanted to see it come out for a long time. It also clears the way for me to do other things, too.
Spindrift
Spindrift
The West
(Beat the World, 2008)
Spindrift is the vehicle of singer-songwriter Kirpatrick Thomas, a man who’s been dreaming of riding across the dusty, wide open spaces of the desert on a sway backed cayuse while strumming his Mexican guitar since he was a wee tad. Dressed in black and looking like a cross between a preacher and a tin horn gambler, Thomas walks the walk and talks the talk of a cowboy suddenly waking up in the wrong century. His obsession was cemented after spending long childhood afternoons immersing himself in the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, the squint-eyed soul of Clint Eastwood, and the musical mayhem of Ennio Morricone. The music got into his soul and he taught himself to play guitar by strumming along to the sounds of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West.
When he was older and ready to start a band, he knew he wanted to play psychedelic spaghetti Western music, not a genre that would guarantee success, but he was answering a higher calling. He started the band back in Delaware, not exactly a hotbed of Western lore, and thinking that California might be a more likely home base, he set out on his journey. He stopped along the way at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he fell in with members of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. The band enlisted him for their touring unit and made good use of his prowess on guitar and keyboard.
Eventually, Thomas landed in LA. By that time, the East Coast version of Spindrift had fallen apart and he put together a new unit with various BJM alumni and other seasoned vets of the indie scene. The West Coast version of Spindrift toured relentlessly, slowly building up a following for their expansive, cinematic sound. He met a filmmaker named Mike Bruce in 2005 and together they created The Legend of God’s Gun, Thomas’ very own spaghetti Western starring himself and his band. The movie played at Cannes in 2008 and impressed Quentin Tarantino so much that he borrowed one of Thomas’ tunes from The Legend of God’s Gun soundtrack for his own Hell Ride. All of which brings us to The West—not a soundtrack, but cinematic in its own right—a moody, twang-driven opus full of dark overtones and sun-drenched hysteria.
“The Isle of Lost Souls” opens the album and sets the tone with its carnivalesque atmosphere. The opening bars sound like they’re coming out of an abandoned radio sitting behind the counter of a ghost town bar, then the bass guitar saunters into the song like a stranger looking for trouble. In the next two minutes, the band’s all over the map—country twang, sci-fi effects, distorted rock guitar, Eastern European rhythms, and surf music clash for a wild ride.
“The New West”, a tune from the soundtrack to The Legend of God’s Gun, keeps up the sinister mood. It’s an echo-drenched epic full of larger- than-life guitar and a vocal from Thomas that alternates between a wailing falsetto and a mournful world-weary bleat. “Ace Coltrane” is another twang-heavy instrumental, the theme song for an imaginary western TV show accented by some nice mariachi trumpet work, or perhaps a synthesizer approximating the same. “The Wind” changes the pace a bit; it’s the kind of psychedelic blues Howlin’ Wolf might have played, a minimal jam with honking harmonica and an incomprehensible, echo-drenched vocal from Thomas.
“Frozen Memories” is a waltz that calls to mind the morose melodies of Wall of Voodoo, a tune that creeps up behind you and smacks you with a blackjack full of feathers. “The Klezmer Song” blends Jewish, gypsy, tex-mex, and surf music into a slap-happy pastiche full of effusive energy.
“La Noche en Mas Oscura” is a sultry tone poem. Minimal Farfisa, percussion, and guitar intertwine at a mournful tempo. Keyboard player Julie Patterson delivers a spoken word vocal that’s drowned by the martial drumming, the dramatic clanging of the guitars, and ululating lamentations of the backing vocalists. “If You Don’t Like It (Get the Fuck Out)” is modern rockabilly with an abrasive edge, “Goin’ Down” is a delta meets Chicago blues in outer space type thing, and “The West” is a slow, moody piece of funeral music.
The West is definitely influenced by the sounds of Morricone and the late Bruno Nicolai, Morricone’s conductor and arranger and master of his own noirish oeuvre, Thomas imbues the music with his own skewed take on the genre. The West is a sprawling, expansive work, a soundtrack for an as yet unmade film that moves from murky urban side streets to desolate, sun-blasted landscapes inhabited only by sidewinders, insects, and the bleaching bones of unknown sinners. The mix allows instruments and vocals to float freely through the soundscape, making the human voice just one element in the album’s mysterious ambience. Thomas put the album together over a three-year span and obviously poured his heart and soul into it. His attention to detail shows on every track.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Read more articles like this:
Album review: The Brian Jonestown Massacre, My Bloody Underground
The Hold Steady
The Hold Steady
Stay Positive
(2008, Vagrant)
“In the five years since forming, the guys in the band have gone through a bunch of typical thirtysomething stuff,” writes the Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn of his apparently aging colleagues. “[B]abies born, family members dying, relationships started, relationships ended, health problems, joy, struggle, life, etc.” But on the band’s new album, the excellent Stay Positive arriving in stores via Vagrant, it’s not just the bandmembers facing the challenges of growing up and getting older. Indeed, on Stay Positive, Finn’s protagonists suffer largely the same fate—progressing from the usual Springsteen-esque tales of suburban misbehavior and excess to markedly darker territory. Take “One for the Cutters”, an expansive rocker that starts out innocently enough but ends up as a class-conscious narrative of lies and violent crime. It’s the type of tale that pervades the record—sad and discouraging but highly relatable.
Stay Positive’s not all doom and gloom of course; there’s plenty of mischievous fun to be had in “Sequestered in Memphis” and the anthemic sing-a-long chorus of the title track. But one gets the feeling that Finn’s creations may be beginning to reap what they’ve sown, with stories that often veer off into the farthest reaches of despondency and despair. And while the record’s title belies its general mood, it starts out hopefully enough and with the best of intentions on “Construction Summer”, wherein our heroes boldly declare, “We’re gonna build something this summer.” But things turn south in a hurry, as Finn and his compatriots are moved to “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer / I think he might have been our only decent teacher.”
Drive-By Truckers: Whiskey, Tears, and Dixie-fried
Not every band with alt-country/rock roots successfully defies expectations to the extent that the Drive-By Truckers do. For eight records now, this Georgia-based outfit has chugged their way through career crises that would have derailed a lesser band.
With the release of Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, the Truckers have yet again dealt with internal turmoil and regrouped to record this sprawling epic. Most bands are lucky to have one gifted songwriter on board, but these guys have three strong contributors. They wrote and recorded over 50 songs for Creation’s Dark, eventually whittling them down to 19 for the disc.
Creation’s Dark touches on all of the band’s familiar themes, from subverting Southern stereotypes, exploring blue-collar, character-driven song-stories, to juggling their three-guitar attack. Their self-deprecating lyrics often underscore what it means to grow up in the South and still retain that identity through adulthood. The trick is they do this without resorting to the easy platitudes of Southern pride that would only demean their home region beneath the Mason Dixon line. The songs range between rave-up boogies, country soul numbers, and gutbucket balladry.
Tom Waits: Swordfishtrombones
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock muisc: the musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll have an excerpt from a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now this column will exclusively featuer the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
Town with No Cheer
“When my wife heard that for the first time she said: ‘Oh gee, you must have loved her very much.’ So I said: ‘Wait a minute. This is not a love song. This is about a guy who can’t get a drink!’ It’s about a miserable old town in Australia that made the news when they shut down the only watering hole. We found an article about it in a newspaper when we were over there and hung on to it for a year. So I said: ‘Ah, I’m going to write something about that someday,’ and finally got around to it. That’s a freedom bell upfront just trying to get a feel of a ghost town, tumbleweeds, and that kind of thing. It’s basically a folk song.” –Tom Waits
This is Not a Love Song
Critics rarely comment on Samuel Beckett’s influence on the ’60s television Western The Big Valley. There are two likely reasons for this: first, there is no such influence; second, they exhausted their notes on Theater of the Absurd reviewing The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner. (Seriously, didn’t you finish No Exit and think, “Well that was like a crap episode of The Twilight Zone”?) While I agree that The Big Valley owes little to Ionesco, there was this one episode. I only have vague memories of it; I may be misremembering it entirely. Audra (Linda Evans) is kidnapped by a troupe of traveling actors led by Leslie Nielsen and held captive in a ghost town. The action and the dialogue play out exactly like some half-assed beatnik off-Broadway play. Everything is bleak and absurd and oblique and menacing. It had that paranoid Manchurian Candidate strangeness that constantly recurred in ’60s pop culture with all the Pinter-damaged playwrights making the rent with Westerns and thrillers.
Bettye LaVette: When the Blues Catch up to You
I’d certainly heard of the battle of Bettye LaVette, a struggle that lasted for decades and ended with the singer’s triumphant comeback, but I hadn’t really heard Bettye LaVette until one day fairly recently. The morning started with me putting on The Scene of the Crime, LaVette’s latest disc on which she’s accompanied by the Drive-By Truckers. It ended with me hunched in a chair, sobbing into my hands.
LaVette is a seamstress of song, ripping up the compositions of others and tucking and tailoring them until they’re customized to fit a dynamo. The ability to pinch syllables here, personalize language there, and slip inside a song the way LaVette does is at the heart of her artistry. The moment I grasped how much power she packs into a song came somewhere in the middle of her remodel of “Talking Old Soldiers”, an Elton John and Bernie Taupin tune she’d rescued from the ’70s. As she told of graveyards and memories, LaVette sang, “It don’t seem likely I’ll get friends like that again,” and Taupin’s words about a soldier became not only a ballad of a sole survivor but the story of a woman’s life. I think it was LaVette’s tough but tender declaration of the idea that where there is life, there will also be loss that got to me. But I’m not sure… I don’t think very clearly when my rational thoughts are mingled with the primal stuff. When I was done listening, I knew I wanted to ask her about how she prepares to go that deep into the world of song, night after night.
Of course, LaVette’s heard that query and others like it plenty of times before. It’s probably safe to say that LaVette has heard everything. “Like about recording, they’ll say, ‘Was it very difficult to do this?’ and I’ll say ‘No, they’re just songs. It isn’t surgery. Basically, they’re just like “Happy Birthday”, you just rearrange them!’ she says excitedly. And yet, without her 40 years of dark nights packed into them, the songs she sings in Scene of the Crime would hardly be the same at all.
White Rabbits: From Missouri to the Big Time
by: Ben Westhoff
“It’s a little exhausting to always be going on all cylinders,” adds singer/guitarist Greg Roberts.
I spoke with the pair at a Williamsburg bar one sunny afternoon a few months back, and they were joined by the act’s singer/pianist Stephen Patterson. Drinking a Bloody Mary and smoking a cigarette with his Ray-Ban sunglasses propped atop his mussed blond hair, Patterson plays the part of the rock star, while Levinson is more casual in a hooded sweatshirt. Roberts, meanwhile, looks preppy in his blue sweater, white collar, and slicked-back hair, and offers up intellectual tidbits every now and then. “We have graduated from the ‘anxiety of influence’,” he says at one point, quoting Harold Bloom. read more
by: Ben Westhoff
published: November 5, 2009 in column: Feature Story
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