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Shilpa Ray :: Make Up (Lou Reed)

Northern Spy is set to release Shilpa Ray's next full-length, Last Year's Savage, in May. In the meantime you can pick up the covers cassette, Make Up, both on tour and online. Ray covers Dinah Washington's "What A Difference A Day Makes" and "Make Up" - track one off side two of Lou Reed's Transformer. Ray, on the inspiration behind the Reed cover, below...

I had an epiphany about this song . . .

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Codpiece Revisited :: Jethro Tull

From the very start there was something a little haphazard about Tull. In their initial incarnation they were a British Blues band who happened to be named after an 18th century agriculturalist (although this didn’t stop their first single from being misattributed to somebody named ‘Jethro Toe.’) Frontman Ian Anderson would show up at gigs–bird’s nest hair, dirty beard, dirtier coat–looking like a leftover Fagin from the previous night’s performance of Oliver!. It was a gimmick they kept up for years; where most bands would appear on stage like the rockstars they were, Tull would just stand around, doing not much of anything, before walloping everyone with a bombast worthy of Blue Cheer or Soft Machine. Anderson would stamp his foot and growl–a-one-to-three-two-two-three, the actual time signature didn’t matter–and in those seconds he would go from misbegotten tramp (chomping on a cigarette, mumbling to himself) to feral madman.   And if the shock of it hadn’t quite carried to the back row, you had that silvery phallic symbol that was his flute: spluttering and snarling and occasionally beautiful.

It was all so incongruous. Their first album This Was weirdly presented them in the past tense, with the band members dressed as old men on the cover, posed in front of fake woodland backdrop and surrounded by dogs. Listening to the album now, you hear the British Blues rubric being accosted. There’s such a punky, anti-purist disorderliness to the attack. In other words, This Was…not John Mayall. This wasn’t Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. This was not even Led Zeppelin. It was far too ramshackle, far too impish, far too everything-and-the-kitchen-sink. Take ‘Beggar’s Farm’–built around a demonic little riff, it gradually whips its languorous jazz-blues into a nightmarish gypsy stew. Three minutes into the song, the wheels come loose and we enter a zone halfway between Ornette Coleman and Freakbeat. Another great example is the first Tull single proper: ‘A Song For Jeffery.’ The song opens like a cocktail jazz band consisting entirely of angry drunks: an owl screech of flute, an a-rhythmic throb of electric bass. Intro complete, Clive Bunker’s drums begin to crash and thump in a way that isn’t so much rock and roll as Salvation Army band. If the harmonica and slide guitar do give the impression of anxious Anglo-Blues, then Anderson’s singing wants to push things even farther back, into the murk of Depression-era hotel room recordings, gin, and faulty microphones.

Jethro Tull :: Song For Jeffrey

The regretful image of Jethro Tull that persists to this day is one of prog-rock excess, of album-length song cycles, FM hard rock staples, of beards, of a crazy-eyed front man who wore a cod-piece and played flute one leg. Not even cool enough to make the Dazed and Confused soundtrack, the band is easy to dismiss as a joke, much as onetime fan Lester Bangs did when he caught them touring an album of continuous music with cerebral lyrics reputedly written by an 8-year-old-boy.

However, early Tull is something else entirely.

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SIRIUS/XMU :: Aquarium Drunkard Show (Noon EST, Channel 35)

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 377: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Arthur Russell - Love Is Overtaking Me ++ Amen Dunes - Spirits Are Parted ++ Loudon Wainwright III - Kick In The Head ++ Thin Lizzy - Running Back ++ Ian Matthews - Do I Still Figure In Your Life ++ Wings - Love Is Strange ++ Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Straight Into Darkness ++ Graham . . .

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Jim White Vs. The Packway Handle Band :: Israelites

In August of 2012, six months following the release of his last studio album Where It Hits You, Jim White was emailed by yours truly. I was reaching out to him to ask if he would be willing to participate in Aquarium Drunkard's ongoing Lagniappe Sessions series. "I'm just throwing this your way because we'd love to have you do the series and I know the results would be amazing," I said in the email, meaning every word.

Our love for Jim White . . .

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Father John Misty :: I Love You, Honeybear

“...the entire album is basically about him meeting his wife,” my buddy says about I Love You, Honeybear, the new album by Father John Misty.

I think back to April 2013, when I spoke with Josh Tillman, Misty himself, at Coachella. He was doing a record signing, greeting sun-baked fans, posing for photos, and being a smart ass. His shirt was open, his pants white. His ladyfriend Emma Garr was with him, and she nursed a beer, occasionally wincing at Tillman . . .

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Wax Wonders :: RIP Don Covay

As the years march on, it's only inevitable that we lose the musical heroes of days gone by at a steady and sad rate. Our most recent loss is the great Don Covay at the age of 76. While Covay's name was not well known outside of soul aficionados, the songs he had a hand in penning are stamped indelibly into music history. See: "Mercy, Mercy", "Sookie, Sookie" and "Chain of Fools" -- tracks that will forever be etched into the souls of music lovers everywhere.

Covay was a South Carolina native whose church upbringing (his father was a preacher) is obvious in his powerhouse vocal delivery. Beyond that, I've long been struck by the poetic simplicity and directness of Covay's lyrics which make his writing and recordings so appealing. Don's career began when he was just out of his teenage years, as he began working as Little Richard's chauffeur and occasional opening act. As an artist, Covay struggled as a performer and songwriter for six years until "Mercy, Mercy" became his first R&B hit in 1964. Not only did the track become a soul standard, but it is also notable for the appearance of young Jimi Hendrix on guitar in one of his first forays as a session man.

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Ural Thomas & The Pain :: Pickathon / Galaxy Barn

The third installment of an ongoing series with Pickathon, showcasing footage from the Galaxy Barn located at Pendarvis Farm in Oregon: Ural Thomas & The Pain's "I'm A Whole New Thing".

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Gruff Rhys :: The Aquarium Drunkard Session

In December we caught up with Gruff Rhys, during his last pass through LA, in support of 2014's American Interior - the Welshman's fourth solo release, beginning with 2005's Yr Atal Genhedlaeth. Recorded at Red Rockets Glare in Rancho Park, an unaccompanied Rhys laid down several tracks culled from his latest full-length. The session debuts Friday on the SIRIUS show - AD reader taste, below.

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Mark Eitzel :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

The inarguable, intangible greatness of Mark Eitzel is a slippery thing to articulate. To begin with, it appears by all available metrics not to be a well-known fact that Mark Eitzel is one of our best living songwriters. But Eitzel is indeed one of the greats - a crucial link in the chain between Cole Porter, Merle Haggard, and King/Goffin. As a lyricist there is no one more clever, devastating or capable of rendering a character sketch in a few choice words. Both as leader of the great American Music Club and as a solo artist, Eitzel has created transcendent music, ingratiating and experimental in equal proportions. In terms of underappreciated artists in our culture, there are few greater oversights.

This is on the one hand a strange thing, given the longstanding consistency of his brilliant work, and on the other not so odd owing to the particular brand of his anti-charisma. With his simultaneous obsession and revulsion towards show business, Eitzel in some ways resembles wrong-footing comedians like Steve Allen and Marc Maron more so than fellow musicians. He is not, strictly speaking, eager to please. If he claps along in a live setting to one of his best known songs, he will instruct the audience to please not follow suit: "you'll only screw it up". Eitzel's live persona uses as its jumping off point the bitter resentment and ambivalence implicit in Dean Martin's drunken gadabout persona, and follows those cues to their logical conclusion. Which is to say: he's unlikely to be headlining Coachella anytime in the near future.

Nevertheless, Eitzel's deeply moving work has periodically felt the tentative embrace of the mainstream. As far back as 1992 he was Rolling Stone's "Songwriter Of The Year", but something about that sort of approbation never seemed to stick; Eitzel has often made the bad career move of being interesting and unpredictable. His music alternately evokes Ellington and Erasure, Richard Thompson and The Rich Kids. The very name "American Music Club" simultaneously eludes to the abject, generic horrors of our strip mall times, while also delivering on its inherently more positive connotation. No contemporaneous band this side of NRBQ would prove so adept at weaving together country, blues, folk, rock and jazz into an ingenious and utterly idiosyncratic alchemy.

By the time American Music Club delivered its first inarguable masterpiece Everclear in 1991, the band had released three other records replete with passion, poetry and intermittent genius. Each of these records - Engine, California and United Kingdom - are fascinating documents of nascent genius, and well worth owning. But Everclear is a different animal altogether. Recorded during the peak of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, it is a perfectly pitched nightmare tour of human misery, refracted through, and redeemed by, Eitzel's remarkable capacity for rendering human tragedy with a wry, journalistic remove. Tracks like "Rise" and "Sick Of Food" are almost-too-painful exhortations to overcome the illness and fear that had hemorrhaged his adopted hometown. "Why Won't You Stay" and "Jesus' Hands" are still sadder acknowledgments of the inevitable casualties of an ongoing crisis. It is that unique capacity for crushing empathy that makes Eitzel's funny, angry, scabrous work so essential. Every bit as much as Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart and Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On, Everclear is a crucial document of an American catastrophe written from a bird's eye view.

We spoke to to Eitzel about his reflections on Everclear, the first in an ongoing series that will highlight a number of albums from his career.

Aquarium Drunkard: After a few AMC albums, which were received at various levels of acclaim, Everclear felt different; purposefully posed as a kind of statement record and a brilliant one. Did you feel that way about it while it was happening?

Mark Eitzel: We wanted to make a record that might sound good on the radio. All of our previous records had sounded pretty small in radio terms. Our pedal steel player Bruce Kaphan was a staff engineer at a large recording studio in East Palo Alto called The Music Annex and the idea was for him to help Tom Mallon make it sound bigger - bigger gear, whatever. So we started it with that idea. Bruce was probably the biggest factor in making the album what it was. It was about a year in the making  and involved much drama. Frontier Records had a deal that a larger record company that increased the recording budget that fell through just as we were beginning to make the record. Lisa Fancher from Frontier Records was wonderful and very committed — and after the money fell through allowed us to find another label — which is how Everclear ended up on Alias Records. Frontier, however, helped make my career happen. She put out a lot of great music. I'm eternally grateful.

Aquarium Drunkard:   There feels like a great sonic and emotional leap was achieved - a kind of total confidence and presence in the material. Did that seem apparent at the time?

Mark Eitzel: Well, we'd done a lot of touring for United Kingdom [the album that preceded Everclear] so we were a lot more confident on stage and maybe in general. For the first time we were successful outside of San Francisco, which was huge. And bringing in Bruce to help Tom make the record was a very big change, because he knows to make big sounding records. I can't overemphasize the role that Bruce played, both musically and with respect to the arrangements - he was both hands-on and hands-off in the best possible ways. And then we brought in Joe Chicharelli to mix it, and Joe added so much sonic drama.

Aquarium Drunkard:   Part of what is so crushingly moving about Everclear is the depiction of a distraught community in the Bay Area, devastated by the AIDS catastrophe. And yet for all of its rich dark humor and pathos, this is plainly a life-affirming album. In the face of wicked death, you're cajoling a community to rise.

Mark Eitzel: When you connect with people in a dark place enough to change the frame or change the picture, maybe you can help them get over it. But you have to understand where they're coming from and what they're going through. You try to write songs without being too sentimental about it. You try to tell a story and hope there is something interesting about it. Writing dark songs is an odd thing to do. Maybe that should be reserved only for people who are healthy. But then if they were healthy, how would they know? Anyway, we were a great band, which meant everything.

Aquarium Drunkard: In the best tradition of the Faces or the Kinks, American Music Club had a reputation as being a hit and miss proposition. Fans talk about it like the best and worst shows they've ever seen. Sometimes it's the same show.

Mark Eitzel: American Music Club as unit was always pretty damned dysfunctional. It depended on the night. There was never a night when we all thought "This is a great night!". There was no night where someone didn't say that the show sucked. Sometimes it occurred onstage, where there was a lot of indifference and anger being displayed in front of an audience. But even still, on many a night American Music Club was a great, great band. People we worked with, tour managers and folks, said we were very scary because we never spoke. It was not a fun-loving group of individuals.

Aquarium Drunkard: Everclear is a record with such geographic specificity that the Bay Area becomes like a character in itself. Do you think geography is important to the process of songwriting, or can you write the same record in any setting?

Mark Eitzel: I think it matters. 50% of writing a record is your own bullshit you bring to it. The other 50% is where you are. When I first moved to San Francisco, I was a punk rocker from Columbus, Ohio. I was used to a certain kind of punk rock scene. In Columbus it was very open and very friendly and I was really shocked by San Francisco. It was completely different — very dark and cruel and exclusive. It drove me away from making punk music. Years later we would go to the Mission Rock bar It was a biker bar, it was on the ocean, and they tolerated the young people. At that time it was kind of a crappy industrial area. We used to ride bikes everywhere. It was an important place for me and my friends. We used to hang out and drop acid on the bay. Romantic young people getting high. Anyway, the city is absolutely beautiful, and maybe beauty leads to expectations that aren't really there.

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SIRIUS/XMU :: Aquarium Drunkard Show (Noon EST, Channel 35)

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.

Zach Cowie (Turquoise Wisdom) guests today during the second hour on the show -- find the companion mixtape, here: Turquoise Wisdom: Floating / A Mixtape

SIRIUS 376 . . .

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15-60-75 (The Numbers Band) :: Animal Speaks

It doesn't really make sense that a group of weirdo-proto-New Wavers, experimenting in blues and rock, from the scene that culminated in Devo, would open for Bob Marley. But they did.

15-60-75 (The Numbers Band) were never poised to break out from the "Akron Sound," but there they were, the near-town heroes opening one of the most anticipated concerts in Cleveland during the summer of 1975. The recorded document of that evening, their debut, Jimmy Bell's Still In Town, is . . .

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Diversions :: Bloodshot Records on the Cramps and Beyond

Diversions, a recurring feature on Aquarium Drunkard, catches up with our favorite artists as they wax on subjects other than recording and performing.

Lux Interior died six years ago today, so it's only fitting that the year's first installment of Diversions finds us catching up with Bloodshot Records' owners, Rob Miller and Nan Washaw. The Chicago label celebrated its 20th anniversary last year with the release of  While No One Was Looking: Toasting 20 Years of Bloodshot Records - a 38 track compilation comprised of artists paying tribute to the label's two decade history.

Below, Miller and Warshaw run through their own history with music, and in turn cite the artists that helped form what would eventually define the label's ongoing aesthetic - an unflinching amalgamation of country music and punk. Not surprisingly, the Cramps played a large role. RIP Lux.

The Cramps - Human Fly: Poison Ivy Rorschach's solo is a paragon of minimalism–an anti-solo that’d make a shredder fume, so simple I could have played it---but I didn’t. Besides, she could say more with her icy sneer and the snap of her gum; she was simultaneously the coolest AND hottest woman I had ever seen on stage–before or since. And, next to her, like a warm, breathy voice growling in your ear from behind in a dark room---alluring and forbidding, one half Elvis and one half Vincent Price, one half hillbilly and one half punk, Lux Interior, the showman, shaman, and rock and roll archeologist, led me willingly straight to the underbelly. Hearing “Human Fly” was an awakening, an unburying, a baptism in the waters of music’s continuum. Thanks to that pulsing, distorted, fuzzed-out song, the aural equivalent of a rusted mausoleum door opening, I have taken the road more weird and less popular, and that has made all the difference.

Mekons - Lost Highway: The Mekons' dismantling of the Hank Williams classic from Fear and Whiskey proved that lack of musical proficiency should never be a hindrance, that the "authenticity" debate is as boring as it is stifling---usually carried out by frightened, narrow-minded people craving the status quo, that revolution can sound like a ramshackle mess and that there are a lot of highways to get lost on. They taught me to respect your forbears, but don't revere them, that reverence is a form of murder, it puts music in a jar on shelf in a museum, it suspends it in amber. Monuments are meant to be torn down. After all, as Twain said, sacred cows make the best hamburger.

Oh, and you can still hold strong opinions without losing you sense of humor. Yes, Bono, you can.

Crass - Big A Little A: If only for the genius line "If you don't like the rules they make, refuse to play their game." A call to action that has to some degree or another, consciously or not, informed every aspect of Bloodshot's business model. When shitheads in high school were beating me up for being different, it helped give me the strength to not try and fit in and end up a shithead too, to stay different and fuck 'em if didn't like it. Without that sentiment, I don't think I ever would have had the wherewithal to start a label without knowing a fucking thing about the racket.

Flatt & Scruggs - Randy Lynn Rag: Like so many, I was in a dumb punk band in high school. Like so many, I swiped records from my friend's mom's record collection stashed under the hi-fi. Ha ha ha, I'll take this one, The Golden Hits of Flatt & Scruggs. All white suits and cowboy hats, dumb bumpkin grins and red string ties. Who hadn't done their best hee-haw overbite and sung along to the Beverly Hillbillies theme? Then I played this song. The dexterity, the musicianship, the SPEED hit me right between the ears. These dudes were playing music at a level of talent and sophistication I couldn't even comprehend AND could do it faster than our crap band ever could or would and not break a sweat. I was immediately shamed. And hooked.

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Kenny Knight :: Crossroads

Kenny Knight's Crossroads is an understated Colorado country rock gem, unknown and unloved since its release 35 years ago.  It's bound to get the  audience it deserves this May, however, thanks to a reissue from the Paradise of Bachelors label. Blending the dusty acoustic rambles of the Dead circa 1970, the world weary ache of White Light-era Gene Clarke and Knight's own brand . . .

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Catching Up With Elephant Micah :: The AD Interview

For 15 years, Indiana folklorist and songwriter Joseph O’Connell has recorded records under the name Elephant Micah. His latest, and first for Western Vinyl, is called Where In Our Woods, and it’s a gorgeous, sparse record. Built on a foundation of O’Connell’s weary, slyly funny words and nylon-string acoustic guitar, there’s subtle ornamentation, too: tom drums, pump organ, an occasional harmony -- O’Connell’s friend Will “Bonnie . . .

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Turquoise Wisdom: Floating / A Mixtape

Our ongoing collaboration with Zach Cowie, aka Turquoise Wisdom, returns in 2015 with a myriad of sounds ranging from Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt to the divinity that is Alice Coltrane's Rama Rama. Tune in and turn on Friday as Cowie guests on our SIRIUS show - channel 35 (XMU), noon EST.

Michael Stearns - M’oceanSteve Tibbetts - The SecretRobert Wyatt - GharbzadegiAlice Coltrane - Rama RamaEmmanuelle . . .

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