New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and for lots of folks that means... drinking. Plenty of drinking. And since there's no shortage of singers and songwriters who've had a little something to say about that particular topic, maybe some of the following tunes can serve as an appropriate soundtrack to your own joyous (or not?) imbibing of spirits. For example, there's... Jimmy Liggins with his succinct rendition of
Drunk, and there's...
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2011 -
67 comments
There's a new crop of Australian bands that take inspiration from old blues, but twist the music in a strange fashion. The trend may have started with
CW Stoneking (Jungle Blues,
Love Me Or Die), who channeled the old bluesmen despite being a
young man. Its continued on to Sydney's
Snowdroppers, who started out as a
house band for burlesque shows and kept that dirty sensibility up with songs like
Rosemary ,
Do The Stomp, and their signature tune
Good Drugs, Bad Women (lyrics NSW). Frequent Snowdroppers touring partners
Gay Paris add a Southern horror twist (
House Fire In the Origami District, My First Wife? She Was A Foxqueen! ) and an antic stage energy. Some of the bands relay on gimmicks, like Adelaide's
The Beards, who sing about how
you should consider having sex with a bearded man and point out that
if your dad doesn't have a beard, you've got two moms. The Beards recently performed at the
World Beard and Mustache Championships. Horror-country-rockers
Graveyard Train have picked up the torch dropped when Sydney psychobilly masters
Zombie Ghost Train (
Graveyard Queen) disbanded. Graveyard Train tunes like
Mummy,
Ballad for Beelzebub ,
Tall Shadow and
Dead Folk Dance combine cheerful Misfits horror theming with stompy country. Most of the singers from this loose scene are joining forces in Sydney this week to
pay tribute to Tom Waits.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Oct 4, 2011 -
32 comments
"I decided I wanted to buy the Dorsey Brothers’ mambo record. However, I did not have the required 39 cents." Over at
The Comics Journal, cartoonist
Kim Deitch (previously), son of animator Gene Deitch
(previously), has been posting a wonderful, rambling memoir about the music in his life.
Part 1: The Dorseys and Beyond "Watch for Russ Columbo playing some hot violin in
this one."
Part 2: An Early Education - Jazz, folk and the ’40s - Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton and jazz fandom
Part 3: Our hero stumbles on the birth of television, specifically,
music on televisionPart 4: Rock ‘n Roll - "
For a lot of Americans it was like the whole damn African jungle had landed in the middle of Ed Sullivan’s stage"
Part 5: Rocking Forward [more inside]
posted by mediareport
on Aug 7, 2011 -
3 comments
It’s maybe a
little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares:
we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley
on Dec 3, 2010 -
30 comments
Bobby Charles 1938-2010. Songwriter, musician's musician and cultural treasure, he died on last Thursday in Abbeville,Lousiana. In the 1950s, he wrote Fats Domino's
Walking to New Orleans, Bill Haley and the Comet's
See You Later, Alligator and recorded for Chess records. His
eponymous Bearsville album recorded in Woodstock in 1972 has been described as the best Band album released under another name.(Check out
Small Town Talk there.) He appeared as well in the Band's farewell concert filmed as The
Last Waltz. He made an enormous contribution to American popular music.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Jan 19, 2010 -
25 comments
Boys dared to grow their hair and girls dared to wear mini skirts and in Korea indecency officers patroled the street with scissors and rulers, publicly cutting hair too long and checking if skirts were too short. Shin Joong-hyung, was there with his 70s hit,
Beauty, as were other musicians and artists like
Sanullim and the
Key Boys.
[more inside]
posted by kkokkodalk
on Nov 5, 2009 -
12 comments
Dr. John Rudoff is a cardiologist in Oregon, but before he entered medical school, he was the staff photographer at
The Main Point, a coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, PA associated with the early 1960s folk revival in the Philadelphia area. His photographs of the Philadelphia folk scene include
unidentified local folkies, but also touring folk singers such as
Dave van Ronk and
John Hammond. Eventually, Rudoff got a press pass to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he took photos of
Mary Travers sharing a moment with Mimi and Dick Fariña and
Joan Baez with a pre-psychedelicized Chambers Brothers, but the most amazing discovery of all are the photos of
when Bob Dylan "went electric." And now you can see
Rudoff's whole collection, thanks to the magic of Flickr.
posted by jonp72
on May 7, 2009 -
13 comments
... After take seventeen, Dylan heeds the producer Johnston’s advice to start with a harmonica swoop. Crescendos off of an extended fifth chord, led by Paul Griffin’s astonishingpiano swells (“half Gershwin, half gospel, all heart” an astute critic later wrote), climax in choruses dominated by piano, organ, and Bobby Gregg’s drum rolls; Robbie Robertson’s guitar hits its full strength at the finale. Intimations of the thin, wild mercury sound underpin rock & roll symphonics. Johnston delivers a pep talk before one last take—“keep that soul feel”—and Gregg snaps a quick click opener, and fewer than five minutes later, the keeper is in the can.
Mystic Nights - The Making of Blonde On Blonde In Nashville An account of how the many strands of that thin, that wild mercury sound were woven. And the
annotation goes on.
Via email via St Urbain's Horseman
posted by y2karl
on Sep 28, 2007 -
36 comments
Aside from the usual crap, YouTube has a great selection of
one the
most
covered
song of all time:
All Along the Watchtower. Classics like Hendrix (
live and
studio), Neil Young (at
DailyMotion
with better sound) and
U2--and some great contemporary versions like Keziah
Jones' blazingly-fast
version,
Bradley Fish's 12-instrument (including Chinese Zither)
version, Michael Hedges’
reason-to-be-excited
cover, and
even a quite good version of DMB's much-maligned
cover. What doesn't really rank: Dylan's original.
posted by FeldBum
on Jul 2, 2007 -
43 comments
The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the 'Blonde on Blonde' album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.
Bob Dylan 1978
Blonde On Blonde--Seven mixes, four or five covers, four or five women,
some missing photographs and one leather coat...
(story within)
posted by y2karl
on Nov 19, 2003 -
26 comments
