Chuck Johnson's 2013 long player Crows in the Basilica was one of the finest guitar soli excursions in recent memory. His latest release, Blood Moon Boulder, might just be even better. Gorgeously recorded by Trans Am's Phil Manley, the half-dozen tracks here showcase Johnson's powerful six-string mastery, as the guitarist rolls out one breathtaking composition after the next.
Like Daniel Bachman's recent become a member or log in.
Shell Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada. Early morning, August 15, 1967. Recently released from a mental hospital, 21 year-old Victor Hoffman randomly enters a sleeping farmhouse armed with a .22-calibre rifle. In what still stands as one of Canada’s worst mass murders, he shoots and kills nine members of the family inside (seven of them children), sparing just one four-year-old girl.
Learning of the tragedy, Manitoba country musician Irvin Freese immediately writes and records “Shell Lake Disaster” and a single (backed with a fine and faithful version of Wilf Carter’s “Fate of Old Strawberry Roan”) is . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
As one of the programmers of the annual DKTR Film and Music Festival, which is now in it’s 12th year, I have watched countless films on musicians, bands, regional music scenes, record stores, and significant characters who have been involved with music. One common denominator of these films is that the subject matter rarely stands alone. The fans, the places where they came from, the people who surround and work with them are all a very significant part of their stories and their music.
In Les Blank’s A Poem is a Naked Person, a film commissioned by and documenting Leon Russell’s making of his 1973 album Hank Wilson’s Back, we not only get to experience intimate recording sessions with the powerful piano genius Leon Russell, we also experience his fans, his interactions with fans, his friends, his fellow musicians and life in northeast Oklahoma in 1973. The film is as every bit as rambling, gritty, and passionate as our subject. There are very few staged interviews, the camera is left to capture all moments raw and objectively, from George Jones singing in the studio, to local residents catching catfish in the river. While there is an excitement every time you see Leon or one of the guest stars (Willie Nelson, George Jones, Mama Cass all make appearances) by the end of the film you find that the secondary characters are all just as impressionable.
While I've been a Leon Russell fan longer than I can remember, the film compelled me to really ruminate on who and what Russell’s music exactly is. An Oklahoma native there is no doubt that Russell’s music is deeply steeped in country and blues, but even in this film, where he is recording covers of country classics, you still wouldn’t really categorize him with the likes of country piano players or even that of blues or boogie woogie. Leon’s music is all of these things and more. While the argument has been made that rock ‘n’ roll stole from country and blues, it’s almost as if Leon has done the reverse, keeping his feet firmly planted in an authentic southern sound with the added swagger and momentum of rock ‘n’ roll, an approach that makes it all completely uniquely Leon.
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can now be heard twice, every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
The Lagniappe Session with Ought can be downloaded, here
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support. To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Summer, 2004–a hotel room after dark. Joanna Newsom weaves a plastic ribbon between the strings of her harp. She flicks a few chords that, muted as they are, sound like they’re coming from an 8-bit processor and not an instrument of the Baroque eighteenth century. She is slightly drunk, apparently in want of something to do for the camera. Beside the room’s furniture, the harp looks comically gargantuan.
Kevin Barker, the man holding the camera, hasn’t gotten much out of her so far. If she isn’t exactly shy, she hasn’t seemed interested in extroverting either, at least not beyond the muse-state that so animates her performances on stage. But here, whether by intuition or luck, Barker has gotten his timing right. From the other side of the room, a request–that new song, something “ultra cinematic.”
A jump cut, and it’s “Cosmia,” already sinuous and confident in wordless fragment. The folk-lyric trot that’s characterized Newsom’s work up to this point has drifted definitively away, enfolded in the vortex of something much richer: a canto, glimpsed here through the keyhole of a digital camera in bad lighting. Two years from now, a completed version of the song will anchor Ys, Newsom’s high modernist opus. Tonight, the bedside clock reads 3:42 AM. A moment of fleeting levitation. Somewhere in America.
It’s this scene, and a few others like it, that The Family Jams was made for. Barker’s documentary is a snapshot of the mid-aughts ‘freak folk’ movement in its nascence. Newsom, touring nationally for the first time, accompanies friends and sonic fellow travelers Vetiver and Devendra Banhart, just as critical attention and collective Internet fanfare is translating into sold-out venues for them all across the country.
That snapshot can feel sentimental or quaint, or both, depending on your perspective. Originally premiered in 2009, and now given the deluxe treatment by Factory25 this spring, The Family Jams reemerges at a time when the sound it celebrates is largely out of fashion. By now, groups with broader aspirations have drawn from the same well of influences and smoothed over the eccentricities. For those interested in anthems and arenas, the modesty and sometimes-painful intimacy of these artists (both then and now) has less appeal. Devoted followings notwithstanding, the movement’s major players languish in a middle-distance of cultural memory, their legacy for the most part unexamined.
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 394: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ The B-G System — I Don’t Want To Be Your Man ++ Harvey Mandel — Wade In The Water Part I ++ Unknown Japanese Artist — Song Unknown ++ Toy Factory — Little Girl ++ The Rattlers — The Witch ++ Think — California (Is Getting So Heavy) ++ Spirit — The Other Song ++ Lightmyth . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
"Most of the guys in the band come from England and the rest of them come from South Africa - which is a wonderful place to come from..." Ronnie Scott chortles as way of introduction for Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath. The crowd knowingly laughs along while Scott enthusiastically introduces the band - a who's who of South African and English jazz. The joy and excitement nearly eclipses the truly unfunny nature of the joke. 1971 was a very bad time to be in South Africa . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
The year is just about half spent, but I feel safe calling Houndstooth's "Borderlands" the finest bittersweet breakup ballad of 2015. The gentle lilt of Katie Bernstein's voice as she sings of a "burned out love," the beautifully bent 12-string guitar break, the steady chug of the rhythm section -- it all adds up to a kiss-off that's also a goodbye kiss. Perfect.
The rest of the Portland, OR-based band's No News From Home doesn't disappoint either, offering plenty of pleasing . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Pedal steel ace Orville "Red" Rhodes (1930-1995) was one of LA's most in-demand session players during the late 1960s and early 1970s, lending his laid-back licks to hits by James Taylor, Linda Rondstadt, and The Carpenters. But Red was more than just a sideman. He was a band leader, fronting the house band at North Hollywood's legendary Palomino Club between 1966 and 1969. He was an . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
It's been five long years since Meg Baird's last solo album, but the singer-songwriter (formerly of the late/great Espers) is back with Don't Weigh Down the Light, a deeply satisfying effort that feels like an instant psych-folk classic. Baird relocated to San Francisco from Philadelphia recently and you might hear a little bit of Golden State sunshine in the grooves here, as subtle piano and electric 12-string textures fill out . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
With a career that stretches back to her 1979 self-titled debut, Rickie Lee Jones has been creating music that transcends the every day while wholly embracing every ounce of its being. Her emergence from the same scene that birthed Tom Waits, Chuck E. Weiss and others helped make her an instant success, but her albums have consistently been an evolving work, going from her early master-work Pirates up through the Walter Becker produced Flying Cowboys and the majestic The Evening of My Best Day. The Other Side of Desire is her 12th studio album of original material and is out this week. AD caught up with Rickie via phone to discuss the new album, her move back to New Orleans, the benefit and drawbacks of ego and how it's nice to feel like you've given something to the world.
Aquarium Drunkard: It's been about six years since you last put out an album of original material [2009's Balm in Gilead] and that's one of the longest stretches of your entire career. But a few years ago you did a covers album [2012's The Devil You Know]. You've talked in the promotional material for this album about waiting until you had the songs together you wanted to record. Was doing the covers album a way of sparking that creative process in some way?
Rickie Lee Jones: I don't think so. I think, to be honest, it was just to make some money. [laughs] It was just to keep myself working. You know, I was getting into a place where I wasn't working at all and was just touring. I had run out of money and had to just tour and tour. So to get myself into the studio - I had two songs that I knew I wanted to do. I wanted to do "The Weight." I was waking up every day singing "The Weight" and singing "It Never Entered My Mind" by Frank Sinatra. And then I added on this Rolling Stones song ["Sympathy for the Devil"].
And people said, 'you know, you do these 60s soul songs so well. You should do a record of those songs.' I didn't do a 60s soul record. But that's kind of how I went in the direction of the 60s generally speaking. But then I didn't have a group of songs from the 60s that moved me. So we ended up picking things like "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and things that had been suggested. I don't know if I should share this, but I struggled with that record. So I suppose, in a way, it told me the way to go. It was like: 'You have to leave here now. There's nothing left in L.A. for you. If you want to be a writer, you have to go somewhere else.' So I'm really glad I moved. It really helped.
You know, I know people don't like to hear 'I did it for the money,' But money has really told us what direction to go. When people are poor, they often do some of their best work. They want to make some money, right?
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can now be heard twice, every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 393: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ The Mekons - Where Were You?++ Landline - Wire ++ Carnivores - Pillow Talk ++ Deerhunter - Dot Gain ++ Tess Parks And Anton Newcombe - Friendlies ++ The Vaselines - No Hope ++ Lower Dens - A Dog’s Dick ++ Ought - Sisters Are Forever ++ Viet Cong - Static Wall ++ Kindness - Gee Up ++ Shintaro . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
Consider Shaft's Old Man: a soul jazz soundtrack to an imaginary black 60s spy film that never was. Our third in a series of ongoing collaborations with Copenhagen based DJ/record collector Peer Schouten. Split into seven sections, use your ears to follow our hero through all manner of classic spy thriller motifs. And then some.
Download: Shaft's Old Man: An Imaginary Soul Jazz Soundtrack - A Mixtape
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
One of two new Brazilian reissues coming out this summer via Sol Re Sol Records -- Alceu Valença's Molhado de Suor. Originally released on the Brazilian label Som Livre in 1974, the lp has been out of print on vinyl for the past 40 years. A cornerstone of the Brazilian Udigrudi movement found in Recife region . . .
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.
A tale of transfiguration, Candi Staton's rendering of "He Called Me Baby" was originally penned in 1961 as "She Called Me Baby", via country and western singer/songwriter Harlan Howard. Not the song's first r&b interpretation, Staton's take was preceded in 1968 by Ella Washington, courtesy of the Nashville, TN based soul label Sound Stage 7.
Candi Staton :: He Called Me Baby
Only the good shit. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support.
To continue reading, become a member or log in.