Category Archives: Reviews

V festival- live review V Festival Weston Park, Stafford live review August 20/21 2011 It’s all about the money honey… No kiddin’!!! After numbing the pain of the V line-up two years ago with more cider than a Wurzel could handle – I vowed to leave this long term friend to the people who it was gearing itself toward in latter years. But when I was offered cheap last minute tickets I thought we could spend the weekend hunting out new life and new civilisations in Weston Park. A tall order now for a festival with the sole purpose of bleeding you dry, pumping you with safe music and says bollocks to anything like a ‘fringe tent’ for up and coming bands. Continue reading →

JANICE GRAHAM BAND SINGLE LAUNCH NEWS AND GIGS Janice Graham Band myspace The Janice Graham Band were one of the first new bands tipped when LTW started towards the end of last year. There was already quite a buzz about them; they were about to self-release their first single “No Money Honey” while those in the know waited for the world to catch up Continue reading →

Cult Movie Releases on DVD – reviews by Ian Johnston Before The Revolution (Bernardo Bertolucci; starring: Francesco Barilli, Adriana Asti, Cristina Pariset. 12A cert, 106 mins Continue reading →

Interview with: Michael Monroe Interview By: Marija Brettle Photos by: Jadranka Jade Date of interview: 23.07.2011 The last time I had spoken with Michael Monroe was in Nottingham, January 2008, before the final break up of Hanoi Rocks . There and then, I was probably the first – witnessing the beginning of the end of the band, when he was enthusing already over his new project and new solo direction. Continue reading →

THE PURRING OF THE LANDSCAPE…In which Mr. Drake finds a new life beyond the Cardiacs Keyboard maestro and ex-Cardiacs tunesmith WILLIAM D. DRAKE writes songs that are timeless, bold and beautiful. Continue reading →

The Life And Death Of Marina Abramović represents a melding of the visions of the subject and Robert Wilson into beyond bravura performance theatre. Enhanced by Antony Hegarty ‘s holy terror and held together by the carny physicality of Willem Dafoe ‘s stage presence, the diamond-hard Manchester International Festival production at Salford’s Lowry Theatre offers a series of sublime tableaux, many preoccupied with Abramović’s monstrous mother Continue reading →

The Dylan Box Of Vision : I believe this will be published/released in March: it’s a beautiful package, in a large box, that includes the artwork from all Dylan’s vinyl albums, plus a book that gathers together reviews of each album from when each was new. I’m pleased to be able to say that a couple of my own reviews are featured – of Dylan and Blood On The Tracks – and in the latter case at least, I’m happy to stand by what I wrote more than 35 years ago… Meanwhile a couple of new URLs to draw to your attention. First, for anyone in the north of England who writes songs, wants to record demos, needs a music publisher, wants to learn studio techniques, or various other things, I can recommend the excellent people who have just launched www.lookatmedance.co.uk . And of course if you don’t need their studio, you don’t have to be in the north of England to find them useful. I shall be using their studio next month to record readings from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia . Obviously the book is far too big to make for an audiobook version, but we’re going to create a CD (and perhaps an mp3) comprising audio versions of around 15-20 entries, which will be available – I hope in March – and which I’ll have for sale at my March and April gigs in the US & Ireland and from this blog. The title will be Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits … Second, my old friend the writer Nigel Hinton now not only has a website ( www.nigelhinton.net) but has just created a new blog . Meanwhile later today I’ll be posting an updated list of all my Spring 2011 tour dates – talking of which: is there anyone out there in Berkeley or Carmel or Monterey or San Anselmo CA with a venue to offer for the night of Friday Feb 25 or Saturday Feb 26??? Continue reading →

It was dispiriting to read in The Observer last Sunday, in a generally negative review of Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan In America by Geoff Dyer – here – that in “the chapter on Blind Willie McTell…Wilentz has found out everything you could want to know about the singer on whom Dylan based his greatest song of the past 30 years.” Now Wilentz’s book credits me quite properly (also citing Sam Charters’ The Country Blues , Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning , and John Lomax’s The Last Cavalier ) and makes quite clear that he’s relying on the work of other writers and has done no research of his own on McTell. But there’s Geoff Dyer effectively denying the existence of my years of research and my resultant book Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes – despite its James Tait Black shortlisting just two years ago and its terrific reviews – because he hasn’t troubled to read any of Wilentz’s notes or acknowledgments. This might be too bad for me but an understandable carelessness on a reviewer’s part – except that when Geoff Dyer is the writer, he doesn’t find even small mistakes forgiveable at all. When Peter Schjeldahl, art critic of the New Yorker , made an error in reviewing Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice (nice title), Dyer published a whole screed of abusive protest on Saatchi Online Magazine . Schjeldahl mistook 2005 for 2003. This is part of Dyer’s diatribe: “I thought I’d take the opportunity to respond to the remarkable ‘reading’ of the Venice part by Peter Schjeldahl ‘or (to quote Philip Larkin on Hugh MacDiarmid) however the cunt spells his name.’ … as I point out in the notes at the end of the book – ‘2003 was the scorcher.’ 2005 was actually quite mild; it even rained a bit. Now, obviously, what’s at stake at this point is not Schjeldahl’s opinion of the book but something far more elementary: his fitness to proceed, his mental health. If he can’t get a simple thing like that right how can we have confidence in anything else he says? Or to put it more simply, just how stupid can a fellow be?” Indeed. Continue reading →

(This story ran in Denver Post in 2003) By Steven Rosen LOS ANGELES – Harvey Pekar is a very funny fellow, right? Well, yes and no. As depicted in the new “American Splendor,” he is a crabby, tragicomic antihero – a balding pessimist and borderline-manic loner constantly struggling to not be a loser at love. He is the ultimate nebbish. He also self-publishes “American Splendor” comic books about his life of quietly amusing desperation as a hospital file clerk in Cleveland, itself a pretty funny place. (In 1969, its Cuyahoga River actually caught fire – an event immortalized in a satiric Randy Newman song.) The movie, from directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, is an unusual hybrid of scripted biopic and documentary. While the real Pekar provides narration and makes occasional screen appearances to wryly comment on the proceedings, the veteran character actor Paul Giamatti plays him in the body of the film. Hope Davis plays his wife. Giamatti’s portrayal of Pekar is of an often-hilarious glum chum, wandering through the vast wasteland of pop culture with raised eyebrows and a strained voice, obsessing over his cranky search for meaning in a meaningless city – and world. It’s quite funny and sometimes profound – making “American Splendor” one of the year’s best movies to date. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, it has received subsequent praise and awards at the Cannes and Edinburgh film festivals. And yet, in real life, Pekar – like Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas” – may sometimes be funny, but he’s hardly a joke. He’s more than just a pessimist; he’s fought serious depression. Since “American Splendor” was made, he has been hospitalized for the illness, which followed a recurrence of the cancer he struggled with earlier. He has earned his cautious attitude toward life. “I ask myself what the hell do I want from life, and what can I reasonably expect,” says Pekar during a quiet afternoon private interview, where he munches on a sandwich in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. With his bushy eyebrows and gaunt face, he looks a bit like George McGovern. He wears a T-shirt and jeans, having little patience for the high-fashion pretensions of one of L.A.’s fanciest hotels. He is here with his wife Joyce and their foster daughter, 15-year-old Danielle Batone, on a publicity tour in support of the film. “I’m now 63 years old, I’ve had cancer twice, I’m more obsessive-compulsive and more depressed than I ever was before,” he explains, propping his feet up on a conference table. “I’m trying to pull out of it, but pull out of it to what? Pull out of it to give myself a couple more years and then to drop dead?” Pekar is a man of arts and letters; he sheepishly admits to the term “intellectual” to describe his many interests and concerns. A Cleveland native, he is also a self-described lifelong autodidact – someone who attempts to teach himself by reading others. To some extent, his working-class life has been a means to support his interest in reading and writing. Previous marriages failed as he pursued his life’s work. He penned reviews and cultural criticism before he started to write stories for comics in 1972, and began publishing “American Splendor” in 1976. (Collaborative artists, especially mentor and friend Robert Crumb, have drawn the comic’s panels, although Pekar first creates a “story board” using stick figures.) Pekar’s seriousness about the worth of his endeavor – of his life – is one reason why he got so famously mad at David Letterman in the 1980s, when he sensed that the talk-show host was using his guest appearances as comic relief. “American Splendor” re-creates that confrontation, partially using archival footage. Pekar sees himself as an artist, not an oddball. And to him, there is nobility in that – not derision. Even if he is from Cleveland. “I always thought that anybody’s life could be the subject of a great novel,” Pekar says. “And I thought I would write about myself because I knew myself best. And I wanted to write autobiographically because it’s a very direct way to write, and I could also write very easily about my friends, colleagues and my work, using that style. “My main literary influences were prose fiction,” he says. “Among the writers who influenced me were, going all the way back, a kids’ writer whose writing was very realistic – Eleanor Estes. She was a prize-winning children’s author who wrote a series of books about a family during the First World War, the Moffats. “James Joyce influenced me and Henry Miller – I liked the way he used the autobiographical form and how freely he used it,” Pekar says. “And as far as realist writers are concerned, there was George Ade. He started as a reporter for a Chicago newspaper in the 1890s. He wrote about Chicago growing – all the labor unions, the black people, the Jews, all kinds of stuff just being missed by all the other writers of that day. “Another writer who influenced me was Daniel Fuchs,” Pekar says. “He wrote three really good novels about the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the early 1930s. It’s sometimes called ‘The Williamsburg Trilogy.’ And there are a ton of other writers.” Curiously, Pekar was not influenced by comic books. He becomes angry when asked if contemporary super-hero comics such as “X-Men” or “Daredevil” or “The Hulk” qualify as modern literature or contemporary mythology. “That’s crap,” he snaps. His interest in using the comics form started when he met pioneering underground-comics artist Crumb in 1962. The latter had moved to Cleveland from Philadelphia to work for a greeting-card company. Both were record collectors and became friends. “I had given up on comics since I was 11 years old,” Pekar says. “I thought there couldn’t be anything good done in the medium. “But I was wrong,” he says. “They just didn’t have people who wanted to use them in the right way, or were curious enough to think of something different to do with them. They didn’t realize it was as versatile a medium as novels or film or anything else. “When I first saw Crumb’s work, I started theorizing about what could be done in comics. He had a graphic novel – it was novel length – called ‘Big Yum Yum Book’ and it was satirical. And I thought, ‘Why do you have to limit yourself to the superheroes?”‘ Pekar’s been at it, off and on, since the 1970s, creating comics that have attracted a devoted following and influenced all the literary “graphic novelists” who have come since. But he has never made much money from it, although he’s hoping the film will change that. “If I made $3,000 a year on comics I was doing good,” he says. “I’ve never had any kind of financial success with comics. So far the interest this film has generated has amazed me. I’m not used to that.” Steven Rosen’s e-mail address is srosenone@aol.com. (Harvey Pekar died this month at age 70.) (Photo: New Line Cinema) Continue reading →

Music critic Ralph Gleason died on this day in 1975, aged only 58. He made an immense contribution to “the music”, being the first critic to make an American mainstream newspaper pay any real attention to jazz and popular music. (The photo shows Gleason interviewing Jerry Garcia & Phil Lesh; at the time, of course, they thought Gleason was the one with the stupid haircut… ) I knew him slightly, after he gave me a belated write-up of the first American edition of Song & Dance Man in Rolling Stone , calling it “the hidden Dylan book”. Perhaps with that he hoped to shame my American publisher, E.P.Dutton, for their non-marketing of that first US hardback – I certainly did – but it made no difference. In the short interval between then and Gleason’s death, we enjoyed some correspondence. I especially relished the grand, wide-ranging contempt his letters expressed for Jann Wenner, with whom he’d co-founded Rolling Stone . Anyway, here’s his entry in the updated paperback edition of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia : Gleason, Ralph J. [1917 - 1975] Ralph J. Gleason (‘the “J” was for Joseph, although we often joked that it stood for “jazz”’, said his son Toby) was an old-fashioned music enthusiast and journalist based in San Francisco, an influential American jazz and pop music critic in the 1950s who adjusted painfully to the decade that followed, but having done so, co-founded Rolling Stone magazine as an ‘underground paper’. The name Rolling Stone came from Gleason; co-founder and editor JANN WENNER wanted to call it Electric Newspaper . There was little love lost between the two. (See the entry Wenner, Jann and unloading heads .) Gleason was born in New York City on March 1, 1917, attending Columbia University before moving to the West Coast in his early thirties. He began contributing to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1950, and there introduced the first regular coverage of jazz and popular music in US mainstream media. He interviewed, among others, HANK WILLIAMS, FATS DOMINO and ELVIS PRESLEY, helped bring about San Francisco’s cultural flowering in the late 1950s and, as Joe Selvin notes: ‘At a time when there were practically no books on the subject, he wrote the history of jazz on the back of album covers, writing literally hundreds of liner notes in the golden age of long-playing albums.’ He was also a radical who spoke out in the McCarthy era, and later was named on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List. He became an earlyish supporter of, and copious commentator on, Dylan’s work, having been an early champion of LENNY BRUCE and Miles Davis; later he was similarly enthusiastic about San Francisco’s pioneering rock groups, and in 1966 wrote a paean to FRANK ZAPPA and the Mothers of Invention, ‘Those Mothers Can Really Play’, in the San Francisco Chronicle . Gleason continued to contribute to Rolling Stone until his death in 1975. He was also an associate editor and critic on Down Beat , and his weekly columns in the New York Post were syndicated in the US and in Europe. Gleason produced and hosted many TV documentaries, including a series of nearly thirty jazz and blues programs, Jazz Casual , featuring musicians from Dave Brubeck to B.B. King; a documentary on Duke Ellington; a series on the Monterey Jazz Festival; and several looks at San Francisco rock, notably A Night At The Family Dog , catching the Haight-Ashbury scene in one night’s performances from the GRATEFUL DEAD, SANTANA and Jefferson Airplane (1970). His books, compiled from articles and reviews, include Jam Session (1957), The San Francisco Scene (1968) and Celebrating The Duke, & Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy & Other Heroes (1975). He was writing for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1963 when Dylan, then a rising star, performed at the Monterey Folk Festival. Gleason slated the concert, telling ROBERT SHELTON: ‘It was an old Dylan concert and I didn’t dig it. The talking blues stuff was poor imitation GUTHRIE. He looked wrong to me and I didn’t like his voice. Although I didn’t like “Hard Rain”, I became haunted by it. Jesus, it was disturbing.’ (PETE SEEGER, THEODORE BIKEL and others wrote a protest letter in response to this review, and Gleason recanted: ‘I was deaf,’ he wrote.) From then on, Gleason’s advocacy of Dylan never faltered. His was a useful voice, since he was of an older generation and could address its doubts from the inside, as here, in 1964: “To the generations raised on solid Judeo-Christian principles, on the rock of moral values of our fathers, on the idea that cleanliness is next to Godliness, the deliberate sloppiness, the disdain for what we have thought of as perfect by Dylan’s generation is shocking. But we are wrong. Look where our generation has gotten us… a hard core of reality connects the music of Dylan, the best of jazz, of contemporary poetry, painting, all the arts, in fact, with the social revolution that has resulted in CORE and SNCC, Dick Gregory, James Baldwin and the rest.’ An aeon later, after the unenthusiastic response to Self Portrait in 1970, it was Gleason, in Rolling Stone, who came out with the now almost notorious claim in response to hearing New Morning : ‘We’ve got Bob Dylan back again!’ The Rex Foundation, a non-profit charity organization founded by the Grateful Dead and friends, established the Ralph J. Gleason Award in 1986, and 1989 saw the launching of the annual Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Awards, sponsored by Rolling Stone, BMI and New York University. Gleason, who died aged 58, in Berkeley, California, on June 3, 1975, after suffering a massive heart attack, was a catalyst and an enthusiast. He was not an especially good writer – as his widow said in 2004: “He was not a good writer. He wrote about interesting things.” Gleason had been an audience participant at Dylan’s classic San Francisco Press Conference of December 1965, and many decades later was named on the front of a technically enhanced DVD release of this riveting event, Ralph J. Gleason Presents [posthumously] Dylan Speaks – The 1965 Press Conference In San Francisco . [Ralph J. Gleason: 1st two quotes taken from Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan , p.170 & p.250; 3rd quote Rolling Stone no.70, SF, Nov 12 1970. A Night At the Family Dog, Sep 1970 , is DVD-issued by RED Distribution, 2005. Joe Selvin & Mrs. Gleason quotes, Steven Rubio’s Online Life , Dec 23 2004, seen 16 Aug 2005 at http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2004/12/ralph_j_gleason.html . Toby Gleason, e-mail to this writer, 3 Oct 2005. Ralph J. Gleason Presents - Dylan Speaks - The 1965 Press Conference In San Francisco , 3 Dec 1965, DVD, Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2007 (Executive producer Toby Gleason).] Continue reading →

By Steven Rosen (Originally Published: 04/30/2010, Sonic Boomers) The respect shown to Alex Chilton upon his recent death — from the press, blogs, fellow musicians, South X Southwest attendees, the pop world in general — revealed just how well-loved his work with the band Big Star had become. Not that Chilton, who was just 59 when he succumbed to a heart attack in March, had done nothing besides sing/compose/play guitar for the short-lived Big Star. He had been the teenage lead singer with the Box Tops previously, had a long and varied (and controversial) career as a solo artist after Big Star, and even occasionally played and recorded with an updated version of the band from the early 1990s onward. But it was the two albums that the youthful Memphis band Big Star put out on Ardent Records (and recorded at Ardent Studios) in 1972 and 1974 that are considered his classic, most enduring work. More, they’re considered rock classics, period — game-changers that pointed the way out of album-rock’s virtuosic excess and toward sometimes-quietly introspective, sometimes-celebratory, always-tuneful and intelligent alternative rock. They also showed at times an intimately disquieting, disaffected edge that rejected the braggadocio of the era’s strutting “big stars” in favor of the more intimate, maybe more melancholy, work of the Beatles of “Norwegian Wood” or “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” (A third album bearing the Big Star name but recorded under different conditions and with a different spirit, came out in 1978 after the band had ceased to exist.) The band’s legacy has now outlived Chilton, just as it has the band’s originator and co-writer/singer (on the first album), Chris Bell, who left before the Radio City album and died in 1978. And it seems a safe bet it will keep on lasting — Keep an Eye on the Sky, a four-disc retrospective with a variety of previously unreleased material, came out just last year. But Big Star’s ongoing power isn’t the result of the strong sales or radio play that accompanied 1972’s #1 Record and 1974’s Radio City, despite their deceptive titles. Both were ignored in the marketplace — partly because of problems that Ardent’s parent company, Stax Records, had with its national distributor, Columbia Records. Rather, the Big Star legacy is due to something that now seems quaint and even endangered in this Internet/download/“American Idol” age — the power of the print press, especially music critics, to champion and call attention to a band’s music at the time of its initial release. They made Big Star stand out — and while it took time, eventually the world noticed, especially other musicians who found themselves attracted to the same unpretentious values. In Big Star’s case, the initial press came as the result of an extraordinary one-of-a-kind event that once seemed comical but, as time passes, can now be seen as extraordinarily prescient and touching. It was the convention of the National Association of Rock Writers, sponsored by Ardent and held in Memphis over Memorial Day weekend in 1973. More than 100 — some sources say as many as 175 — rock writers descended on Memphis from all over the U.S. (and England) for the event. Among those who attended were Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Jaan Uhelszki, Lenny Kaye, Bud Scoppa and a teenage Cameron Crowe. On the final night, a three-piece Big Star closed a multi-act concert and wowed the attendees, resulting in many loyal champions and good press when their album Radio City came out the next year. The “comical” aspect was due to the fact that rock-writing was not a highly evolved “profession” at the time and a lot of the people who came didn’t have much money. That meant they were eager for the free food and drink made available by Ardent. (According to anecdotal reports, the writers angered Memphis hookers because — unlike other conventioneers — they had no spending money.) But some of the historical accounts make it seem like freeloading was all they were interested in. There was more to it than that — there was even hope of starting a union. “The context of the time was that music criticism was not taken seriously by mainstream anything,” recalls Billy Altman, who attended from State University of New York — Buffalo, where he had started an irreverent fanzine called Punk that had put the 1960s garage band the Seeds on its cover. “Nobody outside our little community thought anything we did had any validity. So what we were doing was to at least validate our own existence.” In retrospect, with Big Star they did. But it took time for the word to get out. “I felt after that convention that it wasn’t happening — rock critics were really powerless,” recalls Jon Tiven, who had started New Haven Rock Press and had become a writer for several national music magazines while still attending college. He had helped organize the convention at Ardent’s request. “Here we had Big Star and all the critics liked them, but rock writers didn’t have impact at all and it was very frustrating. But I proved myself wrong,” Tiven says. (As an aside, I supervised the pop-music section of the Harvard Coop’s record store when Radio City came out, and remember featuring and promoting the album because of its great press. I also tried to order in #1 Record but Columbia Records — Ardent/Stax’s distributor — wouldn’t fill requests. So I know first-hand how crippled the band was by distribution problems. I also saw them play the Performance Center in Cambridge on a short tour supporting Radio City and opening for Badfinger, although only Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens from the original line-up were left. I can attest they were indeed magical live.) John King III, who worked at Ardent Records and close friends with Ardent Studios’ John Fry, came up with the idea for the convention based on the good reviews #1 Record had received in the still-small rock press. The two believed in Big Star. But with Bell gone, Chilton, Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel were struggling to stay together. They’d recorded a few new songs but were undecided. “I wanted Big Star to stay together and have a venue where these writers who really seemed to like them a lot could come into town and see them,” King recalls. “I had hero worship. Here were these guys who were passionate about music, while sometimes I was more passionate about the business. So I had a fascination with their magazines. And at that time, I really did hope an association could be formed from the meeting because these people weren’t getting paid.” If the convention was dreamed up by King as a way to showcase Big Star, it became something more in order to get Stax approval. In fact, as Altman and Tiven remember, the event wasn’t promoted as a Big Star-headlining gig at all. Primarily a soul-music label, Stax had signed a journeyman British rock band called Skin Alley and saw the event as a way to announce its intentions to move into rock. (Skin Alley’s presence helped lure the British press.) Another act on the Stax family of labels, Larry Raspberry & the Highsteppers, were soulful rockers with a volatile live act, fronted by the former lead singer of the Gentrys (“Keep on Dancing”). They were beloved by Stax co-head Jim Stewart. By setting up a convention-ending show at a venue called Lafayette’s Music Room in Overton Square — featuring Don Nix (a Southern-rock singer-songwriter who was on Stax’s Enterprise label), Skin Alley, Raspberry and finally Big Star — King guaranteed funding from Stax. “That’s how the Rock Writers Convention squeaked through in getting approval,” King says. He estimates it cost Stax about $100,000. “That was a substantial sum, but I tried to protect Stax too, from things like long-distance calls from hotel rooms, without being a chintz ass,” he says. King turned to Tiven for help because he was among the first to herald #1 Record. His story on it appeared in Boston’s Fusion magazine, a rival to Rolling Stone, and was teased on the cover. “I remember how many thousands of Fusions we had with ‘See page 56’ on the cover,” King says. As a result of Tiven’s coverage, and before the Rock Writers Convention, Ardent had invited him to Memphis to see the studio, and then flew him to San Francisco to attend a Bill Gavin Radio Convention where the label was pushing Big Star. “They made me part of the team and I was happy to be part of the team — I was very happy to be part of the team,” Tiven says. Tiven, now Nashville-based and a record producer whose recent projects include new albums by soul-music veterans Howard Tate and Garnet Mimms, has complicated feelings about Big Star today. After befriending Chilton, he had a difficult time trying to produce his 1975 solo session that resulted in the 1977 EP The Singer Not the Song. In fact, during this interview, he told some horror stories about Chilton’s conduct during the period, both during the recording sessions and afterward. Also during the mid-1970s, Tiven moved to Memphis and got to know Bell. “I found out Chris Bell was what I liked about Big Star,” Tiven says. “His songs were great — the songs that had his stamp on it were the things that really had struck me the hardest. By the time I was interested in Big Star, everybody was pushing Alex because Bell had left and nobody wanted him to meet anybody.” There were some other events at the convention, headquartered at Holiday Inn — a screening of “The T.A.M.I. Show,” a bus trip past Graceland, a party on a Mississippi riverboat that featured music by bluesman Furry Lewis. And drinks did indeed flow. There was also a lot of talk, formally and informally, about rock writing. And there was the big show. However well the other acts on the bill played at the convention, Big Star’s show defined the event. “Their performance was really terrific,” Altman recalls. “It was a tough gig because they were doing a show for rock writers, but everybody was blown away. They were really doing more of their newer stuff — songs most of us weren’t familiar with, but they sounded really good. I do remember being impressed with how good a guitar player Chilton was, because in the Box Tops he was a singer.” (The band also threw some oldies into the mix, including a version of the Box Tops’ “The Letter.”) And that success convinced Chilton to stay with Big Star, at least long enough to record the great Radio City. The critics supported it — Altman still calls it “lightning in a bottle.” “They nailed it,” King says of Big Star’s performance at the convention. “And Alex was going to leave the band. I talked to him and said, ‘You’ve got all this publicity, it’s foolish to throw it all away. Do another album.’ That’s why they stayed together.” They didn’t stay together that much longer, actually. Just long enough to become iconic. As for the National Association of Rock Writers — it changed its name after the convention to Rock Writers of the World. Nothing much happened with that. But, all these years later, they have proved their worldwide influence by their support of Big Star. (Writer’s note for publication with story: I interviewed Altman, Tiven and John King III — the Ardent promotion manager who had the idea for the convention. I also used as resource material a variety of articles available at rocksbackpages.com, including Barney Hoskyns’ “The Great Lig in the Sky” and his 2000 Big Star article for Mojo. Bruce Eaton’s 33 1/3 book “Radio City,” as well as the pamphlet accompanying Stax’s 1992 re-release of the first two albums, were also sources. A caveat: Various recollections tend to be hazy, even contradictory.) — Republished: 04/30/2010 Continue reading →

A 12-year-old trade magazine clipping has revealed that Barney Bubbles even played an (admittedly indirect) role in the formalisation of Richard Branson’s business interests, with one of his invoices setting in train the perma-grinning bearded entrepreneur’s journey to worldwide domination. An issue of US music industry weekly Billboard published in 1998 carried a special section celebrating Virgin Records’ 25th year. From Billboard, September 5, 1998. Among those interviewed was Ken Berry, seen by many as the architect of Virgin’s financial framework and by the time of the Billboard feature, president of EMI Music. But back in 1973, Berry was a 21-year-old drifter keen to break into the music industry. Berry recounted asking Virgin co-founder Simon Draper on his first day about the new label’s royalty payment system. “Simon said, ‘I don’t know but I’ve got something here,’ and he pulled a piece of paper from his desk. It was this yellow invoice from a guy called Barney Bubbles – he used to do the album artwork – and Simon had written various numbers on the back. These were the various royalties we were supposed to pay people.” 12in sleeve. Front cover, Marjory Razorblade, Kevin Coyne, 1973. This invoice was undoubtedly for the design Barney provided for Kevin Coyne ’s incredible double album Marjory Razorblade , one of Virgin’s earliest releases following its debut in May that year with Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells .  Artwork, Marjory Razorblade, 1973. Marjory Razorblade contains many of the late Coyne’s greatest songs, including his musing on his time as a psychiatric nurse House On The Hill , the single Marlene and the storming Eastbourne Ladies (championed a few years later alongside tracks by Peter Hamill, Can, Big Youth and Neil Young by Johnny Rotten on Capital Radio’s summer 1977 broadcast A Punk & His Music ). Another client of Barney’s, Wreckless Eric ,  recently played a set of Coyne songs with his partner Amy Rigby and Coyne’s son Eugene  in Germany; Eric says they might do some KC songs when they’re in the UK this spring – a must-see we reckon. And Coyne seems finally to be receiving the widespread recognition he deserves with the release of a I Want My Crown , an anthology of his work between 1973 and 1979 for Virgin. So, the next time you’re waiting for a Virgin Train, working out at a Virgin Active or checking your Virgin Mobile bill, think of Barney’s small part in the transformation of a scruffy hippie label into a global business empire . Continue reading →

Vic Chesnutt, who died from a muscle-relaxer overdose at age 45 on Christmas Day, 2009, was always too intense a singer-songwriter for many to take. A 1983 auto accident, when he was just 18 and driving after drinking, had left him wheelchair-confined and with limited use of his hands. Yet he persevered, fighting the pain and the medical expenses, to become a performer who addressed life frankly. That frankness could make some uncomfortable, so pointed could it be. But those who liked him felt he was a revelation. After recording his first album in 1990, Chesnutt stayed in touch with and improved his talents right to his end. Just since September he had released two albums – the rockin’ At the Cut came out in September on Constellation Records and the quieter Skitter on Take-Off, produced by Jonathan Richman, on Vapor Records in October. At the Cut had earned Chesnutt some of his best reviews ever. He was backed by a tough, muscular group including guitarist Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and members of Thee Silver Mt. Zion and God Speed! You Black Emperor. Picciotto and Arcade Fire’s Howard Bilerman co-produced the record in Montreal, where Chesnutt in 2007 had recorded North Star Deserter with the same musicians, but with close friend Jem Cohen producing. But that artistic acclaim could only go so far in helping Chesnutt cope with a difficult life. Cohen, a filmmaker/artist, addressed that an online statement: “Vic’s death, just so you all know, did not come at the end of some cliché downward spiral. He was battling deep depression but also at the peak of his powers, and with the help of friends and family he was in the middle of a desperate search for help. The system failed to provide it. I miss him terribly.” In 1995 I first saw Chesnutt at a South by Southwest showcase with Victoria Williams and Ani DiFranco. He was still a largely unknown quantity outside his home base of Athens, Ga. But the crowd, mostly music professionals and aficionados, was predisposed to like whoever came to the Austin festival with good buzz. Chesnutt’s early albums on the Texas Hotel label (the first two produced by Michael Stipe) had surely done that. And his own musical tastes seemed pretty sharp – he had written about listening to “Lucinda Williams” on one early album and gotten Syd Straw to sing on another. And he had a very compelling back story. Yet some at that show just hated him. I remember the angry, dismissive response of two Colorado writer-friends – they called Chesnutt a miserablist who used his choked-back voice, dark lyrics and ever-shifting, minor-key melodies to force his private misfortune on listeners. They responded to him like chalk on blackboard, and felt superior for resisting the “hype.” But others disagreed strongly, and discussions after the set were heated. Yes, the melodies meandered, but they evolved in a way that felt organic and free of pretension. And the lyrics, while they sometimes did appear to be secret autobiographical code, also had a daring and presciently haunting quality. He seemed out of the Southern Gothic literary tradition. It was like having life’s dark truths sorrowfully and angrily presented, Ten Commandments-style, in the middle of a raucous party. Not everyone could take it then – or ever after. But more should have – and those who did will treasure his best work. For instance, one of his finest early songs, “Gravity of the Situation” from 1995′s Is the Actor Happy?, now can be seen as foretelling America’s currently unending climate of war with its devastating opening verse: “We blew past the Army motorcade And its abnormal load haulage The gravity of the situation Came on us like a bit of new knowledge.” In retrospect, Chesnutt was a godsend for those who wanted attitude and edge with their folk or rock, but had grown familiar with – and tired of – the worn-out, generically rebellious imagery of post-Nirvana alternative-rock bands. Chesnutt was past that – he could be confrontational toward himself. And that is somewhere only the best older singer-songwriters, like Leonard Cohen or Loudon Wainwright, could go, and even then often only with considerable pain. His misfortune had given him the courage, wisdom and, sadly, pain of a much older writer. One listen to “Hot Seat” from his 1996 album About to Choke confirms that: “Ventolin and Vivarin and Primatene Secret tequila shots and a patch of morphine In mourning and in the throes What a great day to come out of a coma I’ve been in the hot seat sweating it out.” Yet he was also young, still close enough to youthful experiences to vividly draw on them with a Proustian sense of remembrance, as in “Band Camp” from 2002′s Silver Lake: “You was always cracking me up Messing with the band director Mocking the tuba parts In your upper register.” Yet this song also displays Chesnutt’s knack for idiosyncratic detail, which made him so singular a write: “Once you soaked a tampon in some serious vodka Wore it to school Second period science lab You fell right off your stool.” He also had a voracious attitude toward learning about the wider world. On 1998′s The Salesman and Bernadette, “Woodrow Wilson” managed to cleverly include presidents Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in its lyrics, while still being anecdotally personal. And on last year’s At the Cut, the song “Philip Guston” draws its lyrics from the writings and titles of that modernist expressionist painter. The record industry was a weird place in the mid-1990s, after Nirvana’s breakthrough, and major labels were willing to take chances with artists previously considered underground. In 1996, after that string of artfully designed Texas Hotel albums, he was signed by Capitol Records and released About to Choke. Two years earlier, a 30-minute Chesnutt documentary, Speed Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt, had been released by filmmaker Peter Sillen (the doc is reportedly due out soon on DVD with 60 minutes of extra footage; a trailer can be viewed at Sillen’s website ). And he was also the subject of a 1996 tribute album from the Sweet Relief organization, designed to help musicians in need of financial assistance. That was probably Chesnutt’s peak year for mass-media exposure — Sweet Relief II was on Columbia and had contributions from many of the day’s biggest acts, such as Hootie & the Blowfish, LIVE, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage and Madonna (with her brother-in-law Joe Henry). He didn’t last long on Capitol, and went through several other labels during his career. Yet he also kept working hard, releasing 16 albums including some in collaboration with such bands as Widespread Panic (under the group name brute), Elf Power and Lambchop. He additionally worked with the diverse likes of Bill Frisell and the Cowboy Junkies. And he contributed to various projects, like last year’s Sparklehorse/Danger Mouse album Dark Night of the Soul, and toured with such other respected singer-songwriters as Richman and Kristin Hersh. He even turned up in a memorable scene in the 1996 Billy Bob Thornton film Sling Blade, playing, alongside fellow Georgian Col. Bruce Hampton, a quirky musician type named Terence. It’s worth comparing the productivity of his career – and his lasting impact – with that of some of those who participated on Sweet Relief II. Chesnutt’s songs have been called death-obsessed, which is an undeniable part of his artistic whole. You can read it into a lot of his songs – even “Band Camp.” It has a jaunty, almost-jubilant feel, especially when Chesnutt and his harmony singers repeat the line “If I knew then what I know now.” What is he referring to? That the subject of his song – an older girl he admired – would kill herself? Or that his days of happiness would end in 1983? That mysterious dimension of meaning is present in so many of his songs. He could also be courageously unambiguous about it, which is what makes “Flirted With You All My Life,” from At the Cut, so powerful. The “you” of the title was death, ferociously stared down by Chesnutt: “When my Mom was cancer sick She fought but then Succumbed to It But You made her beg For it Lord Jesus, please I’m Ready’ o’Death … Clearly I’m not ready.” In an October telephone interview with Chesnutt for a Cincinnati CityBeat story, I told him the song seemed as wrenching a rumination on its subject as Ralph Stanley’s “O Death.” “My ‘O Death’ is an homage to his,” Chesnutt answered. He then explained the musical inspiration was a song by Exuma, a Bahamian-born musician whose Caribbean-influenced work dealt with mystical, magic-reliant religions, especially voodoo. “I was inspired to write a song based around one of his songs, and he was singing about zombies and shit,” Chesnutt recalled of Exuma. “I was trying to think of something I could sing with the same such conviction, and ‘O Death’ occurred to me – the Ralph Stanley song. I wanted to write my own ‘O Death.’ It’s basically a suicide’s break-up song with death. It’s a love song.” In an At the Cut-related interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Chesnutt went further, saying, “You know, I’ve attempted suicide three or four times. It didn’t take. I’ve flirted with death my whole life. Even as a young kid I was sick and almost died a few times. Sometimes I’d be angry that they revived me. I’d be like, ‘How dare you?’…But of course as the hours and days wear on, you realize, well, there is joy to be had.” In the wake of his death, those who knew or worked with him have issued heartfelt statements attesting to his impact: “We have lost one of our great ones,” Michael Stipe posted on R.E.M.’s site. Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel added, [sic] “in 1991 i moved to athens georgia in search of god, but what I discovered instead was vic chesnutt. hearing his music completely transformed the way i thought about writing songs, and i will forever be in his debt.” And Hersh, who is taking donations for Chesnutt’s widow Tina at her website www.kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/vic/ , said, “What this man was capable of was superhuman. Vic was brilliant, hilarious and necessary; his songs, messages from the ether, uncensored. He developed a guitar style that allowed him to play bass, rhythm and lead in the same song – this with the movement of only two fingers. His fluid timing was inimitable, his poetry untainted by influences. He was my best friend.” Chesnutt thought At the Cut was his best work yet, and it is very strong, but one shouldn’t sell short the Lambchop collaboration on 1998′s Salesman, or the focused folk-rock of 2003′s Silver Lake. But he was extremely enthused about At the Cut in our October interview. “I do feel it’s my best by far,” he said. “It’s a very adult album in many ways and it encompasses most of what I do in my singing and songwriting. And the musicianship and arrangements are incredible. I think it’s a very sophisticated album musically, and it’s very raw in some places but also very architecturally sound. I’m very proud of it.” Anyone who believes music can rise to high art without losing touch with the roots that make it populist should be very proud of Chesnutt’s accomplishments. And mourn his too-soon death. *** By Steven Rosen Published in Blurt www.blurt-online.com Jan. 5, 2009 Continue reading →

“In his richly detailed study of 50 years of the city’s most important music history, music journalist Fletcher vividly recreates the birth and evolution of jazz, folk, pop, punk and hip-hop as the strains of these musical styles emerged from the urban cacophony of New York… Fletcher’s terrific music history captures the teeming life Continue reading →

First, I should have added to Positively Part 1 that there is another thoughtful and positive take on Christmas In The Heart from Roy Kelly – another long-term Dylan afficionado who doesn’t try to kid himself that everything in Bob’s garden is rosy – in the imminent issue of that other UK fanzine, The Bridge . Meanwhile, I’ve also been alerted to a comparably plausible, readable review of Dylan’s recent concerts that makes them sound good too. John Baldwin’s Desolation Row e-mail newsletter of a few days ago pointed me to Ken Cowley’s reviews of the recent New York shows on his blog here . Mr. Cowley even makes me wish I’d been there. Lastly, I’m pleased to say that since someone on that Expecting Rain discussion group disparaged the idea of anyone wanting to come to our forthcoming Winterlude Weekends we’ve now had someone step in and book the vacant place for the weekend of February 12-14. The discussion-group person wrote that he’d rather eat his own foot. He may as well, since he’s already put it in his mouth. Continue reading →

One can draw parallels between David Sylvian’s career and that of Scott Walker. Sylvian, who at age 51 is 15 years younger than Walker, also experienced early success as a handsome British pop idol – his New Romantic/New Wave band Japan enjoyed a series of Top Ten hits in the early 1980s, one of which, “Ghosts,” was remarkable for its ambient soundscape. Like Walker, Sylvian has a gorgeously smooth, sensuous voice – in his case, a tenor (that seems to have deepened into baritone) with a yearningly intimate vibrato. And after Japan, from the 1980s onward, Sylvian, like Walker, has moved steadily toward the avant-garde side of pop music with his lyrical and instrumental concerns, alone and with international collaborators. And both men have adopted new homelands – while Walker left his native U.S. for Britain back in the 1960s, Sylvian in the 1990s left Britain for the U.S. to pursue sadhana, enlightenment through the aid of a spiritual guru, first in Northern California and then New Hampshire. Divorced, he now spends time between New York City and New Hampshire, where his children live. “For people who leave their native country, you begin to feel you can’t put roots down anywhere else and yet you can’t go home because the place you left no longer exists as it once was,” Sylvian says, in a telephone interview about the release of his new album Manafon . “In a sense, the world becomes your home because one place doesn’t feel like home any more than any other. Yet there’s a freedom in that opening. Something is lost but something is gained.” Both men, in short, have become deep-thinking aesthetes. Yet if there’s been a major difference, Walker’s music increasingly has tried to match the despair and darkness of his subject matter. Albums like Tilt and The Drift are tough conceptual art. Sylvian, on the other hand, especially in his highly lauded 1999 album Dead Bees on a Cake, had been trying to find breakthrough beauty that contains a spiritual dimension – not conventional prettiness or religiosity, by any means. He’s become one of pop music’s great seekers. Manafon — named for a Welsh village and released on his own Samadhisound label – continues his search for peak musical beauty, in many ways. But the darkness that is life is starting now to surround him. Working with improvisational musicians over the course of several years at sessions in Vienna, Tokyo and London, he has created nine songs featuring hushed and muted soundscapes: breathy, restrained sax; careful guitar strumming; isolated cello shrieks; short, high-octave piano explorations; quietly commanding acoustic bass; occasional live electronic interventions or turntable scratches, and other sounds. Musicians include Evan Parker (sax), John Tilbury (piano), Werner Dafeldecker (acoustic bass) and Franz Hautzinger (trumpet). Sylvian relies on his voice, both soothing and foreboding, to provide the melody; the songs are all ballads, slowly and ruminatively sung with lots of space between words. But those words. For a man who seemed on the verge of achieving bliss on Dead Bees’ “Krishna Blue,” these lyrics often feel ominous. From “Snow White in Appalachia”: “There is no Maker, just an exhaustible indifference/ And there’s comfort in that so you feel unafraid.” “Random Acts of Senseless Violence,” which may be about the all-too-temporal scourge of terrorism: “The safety in numbers is just a contrivance/For the future will contain random acts of senseless violence.” A song called “The Rabbit Skinner,” which ends with Sylvian concluding “Here lies a man without quality,” has extra bite because the album comes with a portrait of a weathered Sylvian holding a dead rabbit. Sylvian used a process known as “automatic writing” in coming up with the lyrics. He had done that earlier with 2003′s Blemish , an at-times difficult album at least partly about his divorce. On Manafon , he was responding to the music that had (mostly) been previously recorded, sometimes a year ago or longer. It wasn’t completely spontaneous; he listened to the music studiously to find words that he believed organically fit the instrumentation. And he occasionally used notebooks to help when he became blocked. But he also let his own words surprise him, not editing or rewriting them for poetic cleverness. “I wanted to get to a certain subject matter that seemed unreachable, out of my grasp,” Sylvian explains, in a voice both erudite and confessional. “I wanted to push myself to those areas and see what would surface. In automatic writing, there’s not really a point where one reviews what one has written prior to recording it. [There's] a sense of possible revelation that can be quite exciting, because what’s revealed publicly is also revealed to myself.” So what’s being revealed? One comes up against a crisis in faith, a mourning for life as lived and its limits. It’s especially striking in that previously quoted line from “Snow White in Appalachia” – a beautifully haunting song that seems like a wiser, more sorrowful cousin to The Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” – about the absence of a “Maker.” “I’m not afraid of complete annihilation,” Sylvian says. “I don’t have a problem with this life being all there is, that things come to a full stop at the end of a lifetime. In fact, I find it quite comforting to think along those lines. I find it a beautiful thought that life can go on, but there’s no knowledge of what that life will consist of. Does the suffering of this life also go on into the next, as well as the joys? “Now my brother, who’s an atheist, finds that quite troubling, so we’re kind of at odds with each other. He would love to believe that life goes on. He loves life so much he wishes it were eternal.” In a way, perhaps, Sylvian is where Peggy Lee was at when she sang Leiber & Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?” back in 1969, but maybe not as resigned to it as she. “This whole album, in one sense, deals with disillusionment,” he says. “I think this is just where I find myself at this particular moment. It’s very much a document of a moment in time. “There are a lot of questions that show up in the course of writing the work, but there is no resolution because I had no answers at the time. Usually I write from the standpoint of having lived thru an experience and then I feel comfortable to write about it. I haven’t been doing that so much. I feel more comfortable with the process of questioning and not knowing.” As Sylvian describes it, his long, devotional search for sadhana lately has been meeting with obstacles. That’s not an unheard-of thing; sometimes an obstacle is meant to test someone and show a greater truth. But, he says, he can’t get around this one. “I came up against one of these obstacles and I found myself incapable of getting around the thing,” he says. “So I started to look at what was being shown to me, but I couldn’t grasp the nature of the lesson. That’s where I find myself. At the same time, my means of trying to comprehend it are part of my development.” Asked what specifically that obstacle is, Sylvian demurs. “That’s a kind of personal issue I don’t feel comfortable talking about directly,” he says, with a tone of apology. On the flip side, Sylvian notes, there’s a positive side to Manafon . “It’s dealing with the poetic imagination, the creative mind, which is enormously powerful and in some way is connected with the core of our being. If a life is given shape by one’s poetic acts, I think there’s great beauty to that and great significance to that.” So Sylvian’s struggle continues – as does his art. By Steven Rosen Blurt Magazine (www.blurt-online.com), Nov. 11, 2009 Continue reading →

I’ve not been listening to Christmas In The Heart : haven’t even bought it yet. I’m not prepared to play merry festive music in October or November, even when it’s Bob Dylan’s. But on the radio this morning my favourite DJ, Shaun W. Keaveny, said he thought it was only six weeks till Christmas… and bloody hell, on Friday it will be. So I suppose Bob will be bob-bob-bobbing along into our house very soon now. I wonder how we’ll like it. One old friend who has hated most of Dylan’s work in the 21st Century – but was a long-term devotee before that – has confessed to me: “The snippets were horrendous but the thing itself is rather endearing… find myself quite liking it.” On the other hand I had passed on to me this morning in the market another response, which was the admittedly illiberal question: “What the hell is he doing singing Christmas carols?”, followed by a quietly-expressed truth: “Bob makes it hard to be a fan, doesn’t he?” One of things that is difficult is reading this sort of supercilious guff in reviews of the album: “Bob Dylan’s new charity covers album Christmas in the Heart seems destined for a Scrooge-like reception from many of the pompous, self-appointed scholars who have clung to the singer’s canon like a ball and chain in recent years… This is probably heresy to admit, but Christmas in the Heart is actually better than Dylan’s most recent albums, the overpraised Modern Times and Together through Life .” (from The Times , I believe.) So (a) because we’re scholars, we must be pompous (b) worse, we’re self-appointed scholars, which after all is so easy: all we need to do is write books, get them published and know what we’re talking about; writing a quick jobbing review is more honourable and valuable to others. Such a thoughful metaphor, too, that ball and chain clinging to a canon. And lastly of course, you can absolutely bet that the same journalist was one of the first in line, three years ago, to do the overpraising of Modern Times . Bah humbug indeed. Continue reading →