(This post originally appeared on my other blog Strawberry Flats, which was dedicated to my love of roots music.)
Welcome to the first installment of “Gone Pickin’,” a monthly top ten of albums, singles, DVDs, live gigs, and an mp3 or two.
1. Michael Hurley at Harvest Records, Asheville, North Carolina, 12/7
Harvest Records is a beacon here in Asheville. It brings in great records and even better gigs. Hurley, one of the folk movement’s longtime mavericks, continues to awe the young indie folkies of the Arthur generation. A bunch of them sat cross-legged and soaked up the the guy’s hillbilly rock and roll and beatnik country-blues. His classic stoner humor is pure Bolinas, Arcata, Asheville, and any other town full of gray haired hippies who have maximized their eccentricities over the years.
2.
The End of the Game
In early 1970 Green turned Fleetwood Mac into epic jammers a la the Dead and Allmans — but with a twist. The Live in Boston series, recorded in February of that year, documents a group grinding out a quasi-metal, proto-punk blues rock built not from virtuoso noodling but from murky, minimalistic groove exploration. The guitarist then ditched his band and created The End of the Game, a collection of extended instrumentals delving into moody free blues and fusion. This LP is a must for anybody who worships electric Miles, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Tony Williams Lifetime, etc. Green’s playing is a vicious and stylish as the leopard on the cover.
3. Dick’s Picks Vol 23 9/17/72
Speaking of fusion, the Dead’s 1972-1974 period is blowing my noggin as of late: Mickey Hart is gone, Weir is spreading his wings like a clumsy but fearless young bird, and the band is gradually transforming its acid rock and hippie bluegrass shtick into drunken honky tonk, even drunker bar rock, and best of all, skull-fucking jazz-rock fusion freakery. Disc three of this Baltimore concert opens with a ragged Garcia crooning “He’s Gone” before the sextet dives into a 39-minute evisceration of “The Other One,” a concert staple since 1967. It’s not violent or necessarily raw, but it does reach psychic ground zero via zoned-out hypnotism. Blazing ensemble works melts into atmospheric gurgle and ominous effects-play. It often seems like drummer Bill Kreutzmann and new addition Keith Godchaux on keyboards powered the Dead during this phase.
4. Speed Of the Whippoorwill
Although CGL are North Carolina bluegrass to the bone, the group incorporates touches of American Beauty and The Band. In the process it avoids the strict traditional/progressive dichotomy that plagues modern American roots music. Chief singer and songwriter Dave Wilson sometimes yelps as if he owns a Devendra Banhart record or two, but for the most part he’s more Levon Helm/Rick Danko of the high lonesome. That said, the sample below features banjoist Chandler Holt on lead vocals. He’s not as good a singer as Wilson, but this tune, which he wrote, is just so honest.
5. Bobby Charles
Bobby Charles was a southern pop star in the ’50s and early ’60s. He then teamed up with Rick Danko and Band producer John Simon and produced this self-titled classic, which turns New Orleans R&B and Randy Newman-like pop into a kind of avant-roots music, where booze and post-psychedelic enlightenment cross paths. It sounds kind of like Souled American, especially the gnarled horn arrangements on “All the Money.” If you think the Band’s decline begins with Stage Fright, consider Bobby Charles an alternate history.
6. The Illustrated Book Of the Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia
Author Oliver Trager could’ve used a strong editor to cut back his cheeze, but all in all, Book of the Dead doesn’t leave the nightstand. This, however, says more for where I’m headed these days than the quality of Trager’s writing. The biggest discovery to date has been Old & In the Way, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s mid-’70s bluegrass outfit. Bluegrass culture from that era, when back-to-the-earth hippies infiltrated the music on its home turf (i.e., the South), is totally fascinating.
7. “Seeing”
Sundazed has finally reissued Moby Grape’s first five LPs. The band’s flawless debut is in my all time top five. The others aren’t nearly as good, but they do contain brilliant moments. “Seeing,” from Moby Grape ’69, a Skip Spence tune the band apparently recorded before he left in 1968, is one of them. It’s supposedly about madness, which sounds a little too mythical to be true (I’m going to decipher the lyrics soon). Regardless, it rages with desperation. Spence mumbles like a ghost before bassist Bob Mosley breaks in with his massive R&B wail, one of rock’s great voices. They trade on/off like this for a few verses while the Grape builds and builds: Piercing guitars and organ careen out of control; back up voices swoop in like weeping angels. It soon becomes an echo-soaked dream (nightmare?). Like those early Pink Floyd singles, it’ s hard to believe humans could make this music; it’s just so dense and otherworldly.
8. “Past or Beyond”/”Canaanite Builder”
I wrote a boner-happy review of D. Charles Speer’s album Some Forgotten Country, but the band’s best moment to date is the A-side of this single. “Past Or Beyond” is a morning drive across the high plains just after rain. There’s a slight chill as the sun burns away that gray blanket and the wipers begin to squeak. I didn’t even know modern rockers could still feel this way about the American landscape. Like Waylon Jennings and Fred Neil, Speer evokes a powerful sense of space and geography.
9. Lambert and Nuttycombe – At Home
Originally released in 1970, At Home is either the perfect morning album or the ultimate come-down record. It’s the Everly Brothers’ Songs Our Daddy Taught Us draped in handcrafted beads and shot up with smack. That’s an obscure reference, so look at it this way: Dennis Lambert and Craig Nuttycombe — like a lot of L.A. rockers in the early ’70s, including Gene Clark, David Crosby, and Neil Young — fled big-city smog for the redwoods of northern California, where they recorded hushed, acoustic introspection by crackling fires. I don’t know what personal issues these guys are weeping about, but their quiet harmonies sure are soothing and pretty.
10. “A Touch of Evil”/”Howling At the Moon”
I found this last summer while scouring the dusty singles bins at Used Kids Records in Columbus, Ohio. I hadn’t heard the Renderers since 1998′s A Dream Of the Sea CD, but damn, this is some good music. The band filters early ’80s cow punk and dream pop (X, Dream Syndicate, Long Ryders, Roseanne Cash, etc.) through a Velvet Underground-inspired brand of rudimentary pop. On “A Touch of Evil,” for example, the group builds a groovy post-punk rhythm before breaking into a cowgirl’s gallop. It worked, of course, because the Renderers are from New Zealand. Maybe Neko Case and Jenny Lewis should study this single.
Blossom Toes never amounted to anything more than an opening act during their brief career between 1967 and 1969. But when the headliners were the Move, Soft Machine, and a Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd, “opening act” wasn’t too lousy a slot. Reissues of the band’s only two albums, We Are Ever So Clean and If Only for a Moment, reveal Blossom Toes for what they really were: fearless psychedelic pioneers — just like all those groups they opened for. The quartet pumped fuzzy mod-pop full of circus music, careening harmonies, surreal effects, primitive drumming, and most important, LSD. “Look at Me I’m You” and “I’ll Be Late for Tea,” from 1967′s Clean, could pass for early Floyd outtakes — if they weren’t so intricate. Every song sounds like a mini-opera stitched together like a kaleidoscopic quilt.
Over the past 20 years Scotland has treated us to some of the very best power pop and indie jangle known to man. The Pastels, Vaselines, and Teenage Fanclub all hail from the land of kilts and haggis. You can add the Pearlfishers to that list. Since 1989, singer-songwriter David Scott and his ever-rotating backing band have crafted five albums full of Beach Boys-inspired twee. In the process, Scott’s songcraft has evolved from lo-fi interpretation of classic ’60s pop to basically the real thing. That’s quite a development in an era when most pop composers who dream of being Brian Wilson — from the Shins’ James Mercer to Kurt Heasley of the Lilys — can’t shake the lingering curse of punk: amateurish songwriting and ham- musicianship.fisted
“Every decade or so, a pagan-psychedelic scene sprouts that involves a bunch of longhaired hippies dedicated to a let’s-get-naked-in-the-mud ethos. For the past seven years, Finland has been the center of that scene, and Keijo is the main reason why. He’s a one-man band who plays guitar, percussion, and keyboards — venturing from subterranean blues (“Under the Stars”) to rickety, lo-fi folk weirdness (the title track).
