Above: The Entrance Band (pictured: Guy Blakeslee and Paz Lenchantin; not pictured: drummer Derek James) in electric power trio formation at the Arthur Magazine benefit at Cinefamily in Summer, 2007. Photo by JENNIE WARREN
Here’s the opening psych-blues jam off The Entrance Band’s loonnnnng-awaited new LP, set to finally arrive September 1, 2009 from our friends at Ecstatic Peace! Records+Tapes of Massachusetts. Tomorrow, the Entrance Band embark on a North American barhopping tour supporting Nebula. Dates here.
“The extra cuts [California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger] made today took nearly $80 million that pays for workers who help abused and neglected children; $50 million from Healthy Families, which provides healthcare to children in low-income families; $50 million from services for developmentally delayed children under age 3; $16 million from domestic-violence programs; $6.3 million from services for the elderly; and $6.2 million from parks.” — Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2009
“Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself ‘perfectly fine,’ despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. ‘Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,’ Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, ‘I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lay back with a stogie.'” — New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 5, 2009
Punishing the weakest members of any society—poor, sick children—in a time of economic turmoil is simply immoral.
Californians should think deeply about what they have allowed to happen. Maybe this excerpt from a song on Wolves in the Throne Room’s Black Cascade, released earlier this year through Southern Lord Records of Los Angeles, will give them guidance and strength.
Sir Doug and Jerry Garcia, onstage in Austin. Photo: Steve Hopson
Our celebration of recently departed hippie-country music pioneer John “Marmaduke” Dawson of the New Riders of the Purple Sage’s legacy started a conversation about the history of “headneck” music: tunes beloved in equal measure to cowboys, hippies, bikers and all varieties of stoner hicks, country heads and longhaired rednecks.
Beyond the New Riders and the Dead, the consensus seems to be that Commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel and Doug Sahm (in his many incarnations, from dusty Texas boogie, accordion-flecked Tex-Mex and sun-dappled Mill Valley country) represent some of the pinnacles of this rowdy sound. After a bit of digging around in the Google crates, we found one of the holy grails of headneck history over at The Adios Lounge: a bootleg recording of an impromptu 1972 Doug Sahm, Leon Russell, Jerry Garcia and Friends show at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas.
On Thanksgiving weekend in 1972 the Dead were in Austin, on tour of course, and they joined Sir Doug and country-time piano genius Leon Russell — you know his rollicking keys from session work with The Byrds, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, his oft-covered song “Superstar”; and you really should seek out the riches of his 1971 solo album, Leon Russell and the Shelter People, as the psych-out cover art is just the beginning — on stage for a couple hours of once-in-a-lifetime country grooves.
Genuine Texas groover Sahm with spliff and brew
At our request, Lance — the gracious proprietor of The Adios Lounge — has re-upped the whole two-and-a-half hour jam session full of songs from Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, among many others. It’s a soundboard recording (A-/A for the tapers out there) full of Garcia’s lush pedal steel, Phil Lesh’s noodly bass, and fiddle duties handled by Marty Mary Egan and Thirteenth Floor Elevator (!?) Benny Thurman. Vocals are traded between Sahm, Garcia, Russell and what sounds like a room full of rowdy Texan headnecks having the time of their lives. “Holy shit” is right.
Now who’s got the hook up on some vintage Commander Cody bootlegs? And “muchas Garcias” once again to longtime Arthur compadre Michael Simmons for initiating my search for this music.
From Yo La Tengo’s forthcoming album Popular Songs, here’s a classy slab of orchestral pop that somehow merges Loren Connors deepstar guitar tingle with Curtis Mayfield keys-and-strings and typical YLT laidback vocal cool. Spacious, yet intimate! More info from Yo La Tengo’s record label, Matador Records of New York City.
New Riders of the Purple Sage, live at Fillmore East, April 29, 1971. Click here for the setlist, or to download the whole thing as MP3s
Dilettantes dabbling in the genre of country music have always had a hard time, from hippies like Gram Parsons to his modern day alt-country hipster inheritors. There’s almost always an inevitable anxiety over class privileges and the fetishization of working class experience by cultural elites. That combines with the classic rural versus urban divide and adds up to an awkward night sitting in a bar in Silver Lake listening to delicate, good-looking dudes in fancy vintage Western shirts singing about CB radios and old pickup trucks. It’s airless tribute at best, unaware cowboy drag at worst.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson was the lead singer and main songwriter for The New Riders of the Purple Sage, the best of the hippie country bands that emerged from the West Coast psychedelic rock and rustic folk scenes, and one of the only bands — along with Commander Cody, Doug Sahm and Asleep At The Wheel [thanks for reminding me, Michael!] — that managed to merge roper with doper without apologies to either camp. He died on Tuesday in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he’d been teaching English as part of the city’s established community of American expatriates. He was 64, and stomach cancer was the culprit.
Travel to Mexico is the subject of one of the New Riders best-known songs, “Henry.” Marmaduke often dedicated live performances of the song to anyone in the audience who “smuggles dope for a living,” and given that most of the New Riders best shows were during the early ’70s opening for the Grateful Dead, there were no doubt plenty of audience members who appreciated such recognition.
“Henry” is about the titular drug runner on his way down to Acapulco to find out why all the marijuana has stopped flowing to the United States. After navigating a series of twisty mountain roads, he finds his supplier’s farm and proceeds to get thoroughly obliterated on freshly trimmed crops. The song is about the drive back, as told from the perspective of an unnamed passenger, who is continually beseeching the seriously faded Henry to keep the brakes on as they careen through the mountain passes.
It’s a song that, like so many New Riders tunes, conveys a distinctly hippie experience using the language of country music. The band was an outgrowth of Jerry Garcia’s pre-Dead unit, the wacky bluegrass band Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. The Dead did plenty of country-leaning material, but Garcia still wanted an outlet for his pedal steel licks, and thus the New Riders of the Purple Sage came to be.
Excerpt from “Hall of Pure Bliss,” the second of the two lengthy pieces that comprise Greg Davis’s new album, Mutually Arising, just out on Kranky. Use as often as needed—it is impossible to overdose.
Title song from the debut longplayer from Philadelphia’s Cold Cave. Yeah, the mimicry here is pretty thick—New Order’s “Your Silent Face,” sung by Joy Division’s Ian Curtis—but the chorus achieves enough of a pop lift-off to make all the quoting worth it. It’s the mid-’80s, you’re a KROQ devotee on your way to Melrose with the other kids from high school that dare to dye their hair. The sun is brutal, the smog is thick, you’re wearing black and feeling like anything can happen but probably won’t. This is your song.
A warm, almost mournful slice of archetypal West Coast psychedelic guitar rock off When Sweet Sleep Returned, the new album by The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, which finds the now San Francisco-based quartet really stepping up their songcraft.
“Mind Herb Gardens” is a spooky beaut off Known Quantity by Philadelphia-based guitarist Willie Lane, which was glowingly reviewed earlier this year by Arthur columnists Byron Coley & Thurston Moore in Bull Tongue Top Ten No. 3. They wrote:
“Great new guitar record out by William “Willie” Lane, called Known Quantity (Cord Art). Willie lived up here in Western Mass. for a good long while and was involved in lots of weird musical shit. Not much of it got proper documentation, however, although Child of Microtonesdid issue a fine CDR, Recliner Ragas , a few years back. Anyway, Willie moved down to Philadelphia a couple of years ago, and we get a chance to hear him now and then when we’re down there, or he chooses to hit the road with one of the MV & EE traveling carnivals. But his solo work has always been amazing and rare. Well, not so rare this week. There’s this new LP, and it was recorded throughout 2006-2008, and is a total blast. Willie’s mostly solo (save for some licks by Samara Lubelski) and his playing ranges from Wizz Jones power-pluck at its cleanest to Michael Chapman electro-smear at its phasingest. But Willie knows his stuff cold and this instrumental slide through the gates of Neverland is one of this year’s great rides.
The album is available on vinyl only, directly from Mr. Lane. Email the good man at silversleeve@gmail.com to arrange delivery of a known quantity of Known Quantity.
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