The other night, as my older son Alex packed up his stuff for the next day’s trip back to school, this played on his computer—over and over and over.
The Mountain Goats, “This Year”
#1: recording (The Sunset Tree), 2005
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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#2: live, Iowa (Ames), 2006
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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art beat
Lee Friedlander, New York City (Self-Portrait), c. 1960(?)
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More Son Seals
Last night I discovered that two of the sets Son played at the Bottom Line in January of 1978 can be heard here and here. The second features a guest
artist—Johnny Winter.
Back in the ’70s, when I was at Alligator Records, I worked with this guy—coproducing albums, booking live performances, traveling to New York for a series of “showcase” performances (little pay, big exposure) at the Bottom Line (opening for Buddy Guy & Junior Wells). But I was a fan before that. In college I had a weekly radio show, where I often played his first album, released in 1973. Now, like so many others I worked with (Hound Dog Taylor, Big Walter Horton, Fenton Robinson, Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, et al.), he’s gone.
Son Seals, August 13, 1942-December 20, 2004
“I Think You’re Fooling Me,” live (TV broadcast), 1987
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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“Your Love Is Like A Cancer” (The Son Seals Blues Band, Alligator, 1973)
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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reading table
for . . . Son Seals, who left to work a better room
Lil’ Ed & The Blues Imperials, “Find My Baby,” live
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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mail
In response to yesterday’s post, a reader writes:
No, you were right the first time, the movement to bebop was immense progress. . . . To deny progress in art or politics is bad politics, tho there are clearly eddies and flows as we know from being currently enmeshed in a backward eddy.
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reading table
They don’t live long
but you’d never know it—
the cicada’s cry.
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Awake at night—
the sound of the water jar
cracking in the cold.
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Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.
Mixing a record, as I learned when I worked at Alligator Records (back in the 1970s), involves a seemingly countless number of decisions. After a few hours, everyone starts to get a little punch-drunk. By the end of the night, for instance, this track had morphed—in the warped warble of engineer Freddie Breitberg (AKA, in his personal mythology, Eddie B. Flick)—into “Serve Me Rice For Supper.”
Jimmy Johnson, “Serves Me Right To Suffer” (Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 1, Alligator Records, 1977 [Grammy Nominee])
. . . Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist . . . Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.—Andrew Motion, The Guardian (11/21/09)
Once upon a time this music was all over Chicago. Going out to hear this guy, for instance, was about as hard as going out for a hamburger.
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replay: clips too good for just one day
The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip . . .”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Hound Dog . . . . [would] play things that are technically wrong, and [he’d] . . . make people like it. . . . [He’d] just get up there and go for it.—Elvin Bishop
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When I saw Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers as a three-piece, I said, ‘There it is. There’s your future right there.’—George Thorogood
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Hound Dog Taylor is one of my favorites. He used this raw dog blues, you know.—Vernon Reid
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A Facebook page devoted to Hound Dog, who died over 30 years ago (1975), currently lists 434 “Fans” (now over 1,000) who come from, let’s see, Orlando and Indonesia and Cedar Rapids and Sweden and Austin and Australia and . . .
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When I die, they’ll say ‘he couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good!’—Hound Dog Taylor
music clip of the day 