Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street
Great re-issue of a seminal album - you can argue about the sound quality (check the Amazon reviews for extended navel gazing by high fidelity neck beard types), but this is improvement over anything other than vinyl played on a high quality system.
Save Me
Janiva Magness: Devil Is An Angel Too
Nice bluesey vocalist
I rarely read anything Courtney Love has to say because, well, she's insane. At best. And boring. So you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw this quote from her and it was pretty funny:
"I have a 17-year-old; I know exactly how she feels. I'll never be cool enough for her. You can never be cool enough for your kid. Keith Richards isn't cool enough for his kids."
Another photo from the Healdsburg Guitar Festival. A beautiful Petros Celtic design. Brazilian rosewood back and sides and what looks like a cedar top.
Michael Chapdelaine demo-ing guitars in a mini-concert yesterday at the 2009 Healdsburg Guitar Festival. This guitar was built by Graham Hollingsworth & was particularly nice sounding - great tone.
My newest acquisition in creating the perfect Steampunk audio environment - a tube headphone amp.
"How do you know you have a drinking problem? When Keith Richards tells you to cool it with the booze. Just ask Ronnie Wood - the 61-year-old guitarist has reportedly been warned to quit partying ways or risk being axed by The Rolling Stones.
This comes at a time when the veteran band are planning an autumn US tour.
A source told Britain's Daily Express newspaper that 'all the band have to have a compulsory pre-tour medical to make sure they can get insurance.'"
Getting lectured by Keith Richards about drinking too much = FAIL.
We went to Saratoga (near San Jose) last Sunday to see Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks play at the Mountain Winery. The Mountain Winery is a really great place to see live music - it's a relatively small venue, I'd estimate maybe only 1,000 or fewer people, and the sound has been great at all the things we've seen there. We're going to see Jonny Lang play there this week.
I enjoyed the concert - it was OK, and I mean that in the way that your grandmother referred to the neighbor lady's cornbread. The sound was pretty good, although the keyboards guy was miked way too loud on several songs & he pretty much drowned out everyone else on those songs.
Opening for Tedeschi/Trucks was Scrapomatic - a duo that promises a fresh take on country & urban blues. The singer (on the left in this picture) might be annoying - their set was mercifully short so I didn't have to actually make a decision. Scat singing by anyone other than Ella Fitzgerald is just wrong. On the other hand, the guitarist is actually pretty interesting, alternating between a resonator guitar, a steel-stringed acoustic and a bluesy Stratocaster.
Tedeschi/Trucks are undeniably cute on the road - they had what looked like most of their family hanging out right offstage & Tedeschi was walking around before their set started with a baby on her hip. She's an interesting singer & her choice of material was excellent, ranging from her own tunes to some Ray Charles & Stevie Wonder covers to a pretty nice version of an Allman Brothers standard. Derek Trucks is simply amazing as a guitar player, although having seen him twice in the course of a couple of months I'll say that while what he does is amazing, you'd better like it because that's all he does. His solos tend to have the same structure (albeit really really good), but he sort of resolves every problem the same way. The thought that crossed my mind was "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Like I said, the sound was a little ragged on a few songs. They never played "You Got The Silver". And what's up with people going to a concert and talking the whole time? There was a group of 5 or 6 immediately behind us who didn't STFU during the whole concert, while getting progressively more drunk with every beer. Same thing happened to us at the Eric Clapton concert.
The concert was worth the money & very entertaining, but maybe not as good as I was expecting it to be. Oh well.
This is a follow up to this post from a while ago. It's hard to describe James Taylor's new fangled drum machine. Here's a picture of it from a recent interview he did:
Pretty amazing.
We went to see Eric Clapton play last Sunday in San Jose. When the tickets went on sale, I was torn between getting tickets for the Sacramento concert or the one in San Jose. As it turns out, I'm glad we went to the San Jose concert as it was the last one that Derek Trucks was playing slide guitar with EC - Trucks left the tour after that show to go back and tour with his own band.
Contrary to the smarmy, snarky review by Joel Selvin in the SF Chronicle, in my opinion the concert was great, Clapton was in good form and is enjoying the fruits of his labors over nearly 45 years in his own way.
First off, Robert Cray opened for Clapton, playing a 30 to 35 minute set. I've seen Cray probably at least 50 times over the years, maybe more. He's from Tacoma and about my age, so when I was underage, so was he. Growing up in Seattle, there weren't all that many places for under-21s to hang out, one of them being a roller skating place in Lake Hills, east of Bellevue. Most NW bands eventually made their way to Lake Hills and Robert Cray played there often, probably once every 6 weeks or so. Interesting trivia - Heart with Ann and Nancy Wilson played there about as often. This was 1972 - 1974 or so, so well before Barracuda, etc, when Heart's career took off.
Anyway, Cray is an interesting guitarist, especially in contrast to Clapton. He's definitely old-school hard driving Chicago Blues. Even on rippingly fast solos, he attacks each note, with huge string-bending vibratos. His strat must be a bitch to keep in tune because he's often bending notes up 3 tones or more. Cray's got classic blues style, not complicated but true to its roots. But he doesn't venture out of his style. That said, he's achieved huge crossover success over the years.
Clapton's style is unpretentious - when he came out, there wasn't any announcement, a few band members wander out on stage in the dark, followed by Clapton, who starts to play as soon as he enters the stage, before the lights are even up. Clapton's style is almost the exact opposite of Cray's. He's amazingly fast, but rather than a huge attack on each note, his fingers glide over the neck and it looks almost like he's barely touching the frets for each note. Hard to describe, it's almost like his hand is falling across the neck. Similarly, his right hand work is light and precise.
Clapton arranged the songs to give Doyle Bramhall and Derek Trucks plenty of room to show off. Bramhall is a decent guitarist, but he suffered from being on with Derek Trucks, who's probably the best guitarist under 40 years old right now, and without question the best slide guitar player in the world. Trucks is amazing - beautiful control, brilliant improvising. His right hand technique is really strange - he plays without a pick, playing the lower strings with his thumb, but plucking the string - definitely pulling the string out and snapping it back. The upper strings he plays with a fingerpicking style that looks like a two-finger bass playing style - his hand is virtually 90 degrees to the strings instead of the 45 degree or so angle that fingerpickers use. He's simply amazing - I could see why Trucks was on the cover of Rolling Stone recently as one of the new guitar gods, what's not understandable was why John Mayer was on the cover with him.
Here's my rebuttal to Selvin's review of the concert. While Clapton was one of the original guitar gods of the 60s (after the memorable graffiti that "Clapton is God" in London in the 60s), he never really assumed the mantle in the way that, say Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page or, later on, Eddie Van Halen did. It was defintely more thrust on him than he reached out for it. Maybe he was never comfortable with it. I don't think his music was ever really about straight rock and roll, he incorporated updated blues motifs and specfically covers of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters songs from his Yardbirds days forward. In the 70s he reached out to incorporate reggae elements (I Shot the Sheriff, etc.). In the 80s he turned everything upside down to going acoustic - MTV's Unplugged really owes its existence to Clapton's early Unplugged show - and a true return to his blues roots (actually maybe not a return to his blues roots, but someone's). His most recent projects have been the CD covers of Robert Johnson and his newest CD collaborating with JJ Cale.
I'm positing that it's never really been about being the guy at the center of the stage, it's really been about his love for the music. He's shown a lot of confidence in his own skills to surround himself with people like Cray and Trucks, both technical players who are headlining other places. And maybe now in the last few years (who knows how long EC will play, but he's definitely in the last 1/3 or 1/4 of his career), he's satisfied with playing music he wants to hear with people he wants to play with, exposing those people to a wider audience than they might otherwise see at this stage of their careers, and exposing audiences to roots blues that they otherwise not hear. And maybe that's enough.
