Music

Blues is what I love, and blues is what I always do.-Koko Taylor

Music is a huge part of my life., and I get so excited by discovering a good song or group, that I’m dying to tell people about it. Blah blah blah…

On my blog (discontinued last year), there are 571 references to music out of about 6000 posts. Maybe 150 of these are Youtube videos of songs.

It’s almost like a catharsis for me to turn people on to music I discover (or rediscover). Hey, check this out! But I realize not everyone is gonna share my enthusiasm — or musical tastes. Therefore, I won’t bother you with emails on each post here (other than this one).

Hereafter, I’ll put them in a column that you can check out if/when/ you want to.

I’m gonna throw things up here pretty frequently, so — without further adieu — here ‘s some random stuff:

“The Uncalled Four” at Lowell High School in San Francisco in 1952. Left to right: Lloyd, Bill Bixby (who later became a famous actor (My Favorite Martian, The Incredible Hulk, etc.), John Lodmell, Don (Whitey) Schaller. I played the ukulele (a Martin I’d refinished). We did songs like “Coney Island Baby,” “Five Foot Two,” “When You wore a Tulip“ — songs from the ‘20s. We performed at school rallies, and were on local TV (KPIX) — Bixby’s 1st TV appearance.

“It ain’t what you eat, it’s the way how you chew it…“ -Little Richard

I played the violin for 7 years, quit when I was 15. I don’t know what my mom was thinking — I do not have the hands of a violinist. (I fantasize I could have been a great drummer.)

Maybe 60 years after quitting, I picked up a violin in a hock shop and found out I could play it. I bought it for $50 sand brought it home.

I had never told Lesley I could play the violin.

She was making a pie when I came in that night, so I snuck the violin out of it’s case and played “Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy…”

It was a great moment.

“How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Round?“ - Buck Owens

Bob Dylan in 2nd appearance after he went electric at Newport. This was in Providence, Rhode Island on October 22, 1965. I told the cops I was a reporter and they let me get right up next to the stage with my Nikon loaded with Tri-X. The first half was solo folk, then guys came out with electric guitars (and about half the audience left).

“Johnny’s in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine…”

Years later I looked at my pics, hey, that’s Robbie Robertson, that’s Leon Helm, that’s (what later would be called) “The Band… —

Keith channelling Lou Reed about a junkie waiting for his dealer…

Who woulda guessed? Not only is Pavarotti incredible here, but James is in great shape.

RIP Marianne Faithfull, co-writer, along with Mick and Keith, of “Sister Morphine”

Went to see The Brothers Comatose 3 times. They’ve done a lot of great songs with guests, like Tom Quell singing falsetto here.

I just watched Sam and Dave in this. Wow! I can’t believe all this music was happening in 1967. Rock n roll — yeah —but this: the absolute real thing! How I wish I’d ‘a known.

And Otis and “Tenderness.!” I remember seeing him at Monterey and thinking he was the most beautiful MAN I’d ever seen. And the band here: Booker T., Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn!

I watch this every once in a while. She’s such a powerhouse. And so darn cute when (at about 2 minutes), she looks down and sees Dr. John and goes whoa! Dr. John kills it too…

“Everything I Do Gon’ Be Funky (From Now On)”…-Dr. John

Lastly, here’s an excerpt from Keith Richard’s surprisingly good book, Life, written in 2011, about the over-teching of music recording in the ‘80s and’ 90s:

“Very soon after Exile, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn't know what was really going on.

How come I could get a great drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones, I get a drum sound that's like someone shitting on a tin roof? Everybody got carried away with technology and slowly they're swimming back. In classical music, they're rerecording everything they rerecorded digitally in the '8os and 'gos because it just doesn't come up to scratch. I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all.

”And that's why it would take so long to do things. Fraboni has been through all of that, that notion that if you didn't have fifteen microphones on a drum kit, you didn't know what you were doing. Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles. And you're playing this enormous room and not using any of it. This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it. It's the sound they make together, not separated. This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it's just totally against the whole grain of what music should be.

”Nobody had the balls to dismantle it. And I started to think, what was it that turned me on to doing this? It was these guys that made records in one room with three microphones. They weren't recording every little snitch of the drums or the bass. They were recording the room. You can't get these indefinable things by stripping it apart. The enthusiasm, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it, where ‘s the microphone for that? The records could have been a lot better in the 8os if we'd cottoned on to that earlier and not been led by the nose by technology.

”In Connecticut, Rob Fraboni created a studio,…in the basement of my house. I had a year off during 2000 - 2001, and I worked with Fraboni to build it. We put a microphone facing the wall, not pointed at an instrument or an amplifier. We tried to record what was coming off of the ceiling and off of the walls rather than dissecting every instrument. You don't, in fact, need a studio, you need a room.…”