Welcome to the sixth episode of AD’s Transmissions podcast , our recurring series of in-depth conversations. In this episode, Jason P. Woodbury sits down with Jesse Jarnow, host of WFMU’s The Frow Show , to discuss his recent book, Heads: A Biography of […]
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Blanks And Postage: Psychedelic Futures
For this month’s Blanks And Postage column, author Jesse Jarnow, explores the myriad worlds of psychedelic sci-fi pulp lit…and beyond.
Blanks And Postage: Like A Road Leading Home – The Elusive Sarah Fulcher and the Less Elusive Jerry Garcia
Of the many improvisers to regularly share a stage with Jerry Garcia, almost none were women. A new archival release from 1973 brings attention to one of Garcia’s least known collaborators, Sarah Fulcher, who was […]
Blanks And Postage: San Francisco Radical Laboratory and the Mysterious Moogist of Altamont
The Bay Area convergence of art, technology, drugs, and other disciplines is well-documented, but one mostly forgotten node is the San Francisco Radical Laboratory at 759 Harrison Street. The home base of composer Doug McKechnie and electrical engineer Bruce Hatch …
Neil Young and Crazy Horse :: Colorado
So we didn’t exactly get Year of the Horse, part II in 2019. But we did get another Neil Young and Crazy Horse album, Colorado, released a little over 50 years after Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere introduced the world to this extraordinary pairing. Amazingly, three out of the four musicians who made that epochal 1969 LP are still onboard – and together they still sound like no one else….
Blanks And Postage: News From the Silk Trombone / Delving into the Deadhead Tour Zine MIKEL
As Dead & Co. fire up the machine for their fall outing, a remarkable stash of the early ‘80s Deadhead zine MIKEL provides a DIY window into what life on Grateful Dead tour was (sur)really like in the early ‘80s, before 1987’s In the Dark blew the band into the top 10 and football stadiums…
Erik Davis on High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
High Weirdness is author Erik Davis’ most heroic effort yet: a more than 400-page immersion into the lives of Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson, figureheads of American weirdness. With these three serving as a psychic trinity to orbit, Davis is free to address the shifts in consciousness that occurred on the American West Coast in the 1970s: “I’m interested in the drift of the counterculture.”
Blanks and Postage: Bob Dylan, Totally Normal Buddy
(welcome to ‘blanks and postage’ — author jesse jarnow’s monthly column for aquarium drunkard highlighting the heady, askew…and beyond.)
Blanks And Postage: How To Weird Your Mind
Several recent books provide counterpoints to Michael Pollan’s best-selling How To Change Your Mind. “Psychedelics for normies” in writer Alison Hussey’s memorable phrase, Pollan’s 2018 book almost instantly transformed the dialogue around the substances with its clear and direct arguments about their miraculous power to heal trauma. Only on occasion, though, does it entertain a present or future in which psychedelics might be used meaningfully outside the medical model, or acknowledge the ways that’s occurred in the past. How To Change Your Mind is a skeptical book, and draws some of its power from this, an extension of Pollan’s role as a mainstream journalist, but its tone is also an act of erasure in other ways.
Why Rolling Thunder Revue is a Terrible Documentary But A Great Bob Dylan Film
There’s a lot to love in Scorsese’s film, which repurposes an enormous trove of backstage and concert footage into a representation of the fall 1975 iteration of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Considered as a traditional documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue is fairly embarrassing. Considered as a Bob Dylan movie in the tradition of the films the songwriter has had his hands in over the years, it’s a grand achievement. The project swerves from fact in similar ways that Dylan’s Chronicles swerves from traditional memoir, with fictional constructs serving the biographical needs of the moment, just as they have since the largely bullshitted notes to Dylan’s 1962 debut LP […]
From the Eagle Mall to Terrapin Station: A Skeleton Key to Robert Hunter
Dig this. Jesse Jarnow on “The Giant’s Harp,” Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter’s mysterious novel set in the expanded “Terrapin Station” universe and how it connects to a lost suite of 1968-1969 Dead tunes by Jerry Garcia.
Glenn Kotche :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
As anyone who’s ever seen him live can attest, Glenn Kotche is an inventive player, not beholden to typical rock & roll tropes and unafraid to interject left of center approaches on stage. The Wilco / On Fillmore […]
Transmissions Podcast :: Lagniappe Sessions/Lola Kirke/Irmin Schmidt (CAN)
Welcome to the November edition of the Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions podcast. It’s nearly the end of the year, and we’re looking back on 2018’s Lagniappe Sessions . Launched in 2011, the Lagniappe Sessions is an audio series […]
Wasn’t That A Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America
When you hear “Goodnight, Irene” and “Wimoweh” these days, it’s a little hard to believe that the Weavers were one of the most politically radical bands of the 20th century. But the pioneering folk-pop quartet […]
Sloppy Heads :: Useless Smile
One-third of Sloppy Heads literally wrote the book on Yo La Tengo , and YLT’s James McNew mans the boards for the Brooklyn-based band’s debut LP. So comparisons to Yo La Tengo are inevitable and apt, though they’re far from the whole story. Useless Smile […]