Grateful Dead hasn’t played a show in 16 years. Yet the band just sold through all 7200 individually numbered, limited edition versions of EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS in four days. Each box set sells for $450.
When you do the math, that’s $3,240,000. And this is merely the opening round. The band will continue to offer the 72-disc collection for $450, it just won’t come with all the cool packaging and shit.
“Well love is love and not fade away.”
The now sold out limited edition version comes housed in a replica steamer trunk reminiscent of the ones prevalently used at the time. Along with the music–a vast majority of which is previously unreleased–the travel chest contains tour memorabilia, a coffee-table book with never-before-seen photos and a comprehensive essay by noted author Blair Jackson. Both the limited edition and CD-only versions are set to ship in September.
EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS offers a snapshot of a band at the top of its game, still ascending in the wake of three straight hit albums—Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, and the live Grateful Dead a.k.a. “Skull & Roses”. It had been a year since the lineup had gone to its single-drummer configuration, six months since Keith Godchaux had been broken in as the group’s exceptional pianist, and this marked the first tour to feature Donna Godchaux as a member of the touring band.
I’d like to see the band makes other definitive tour collections. Europe ’90, for instance, would be one I’d make room for, given that I was in Stockholm, Essen, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Paris and London to hear every note.
Stax/Concord will release the appropriately titled, Man In Motion, from singer-songwriter and rock star Warren Haynes on May 10.
The new album is a snapshot of a creatively restless musician who is constantly in artistic motion himself. “Musicians are students for life. We have to continually take new approaches,” affirms Haynes.
Here are two tracks from the album, played live at Christmas Jam last December:
Man In Motion clocks in at over an hour, allowing for its ten tracks to breathe and develop. The studio band includes Ivan Neville on background vocals and organ, Ian McLagan on piano, Ruthie Foster on background vocals, George Porter, Jr. on bass and Ron Holloway on saxophone. Haynes recorded the album at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios to two-inch tape with vintage tube microphones and everyone playing together in the same room. “We recorded it live to capture the emotion, passion, and spontaneity.”
“Soul music was my first love,” says Haynes. “The first LPs I had growing up in Asheville were greatest hits compilations from Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, James Brown, Junior Walker, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, Wilson Pickett, and The Supremes.”
All CD, LP and Bundle pre-orders will receive an Exclusive Bonus DVD, featuring the Warren Haynes Band’s complete set from last December’s Christmas Jam in Asheville.
Host Courtenay Hameister’s conversation with Harvard-educated Rauch was, for me, the best part of the show. Rauch is an impressive man doing unbelievable work in Ashland. I’ve only been to one play in Ashland thus far, but I’m motivated to go back for many more. Rauch spoke eloquently about the need to support the arts and he’s right. Art creates culture. He also provided some perspective on the uniqueness of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which annually produces eleven plays on three stages during a season that lasts from February to October. OSF is the largest company of actors in the U.S. and Rauch reminded the audience that all classic plays were once new plays given birth in the nurturing environment of repertory theater. OSF is committed to the production of new plays under Rauch’s guidance and I’m excited to know that the power of live theater is alive and well in Southern Oregon (and that the ripples made there reach far out to other lands).
Here’s a look at Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 season:
To download past episodes of Live Wire! Radio, visit the show’s iTunes podcast catalog.
By the way, members of the audience are asked to submit haikus on pre-determined topics and the cast then chooses a handful of them to read aloud during the performance. Darby’s haiku was not chosen, but she’s got a talent for the short form.
Geek Love invites us
to hula hoops and freak shows
Please show me your tail
I did not turn a haiku on a given topic in to one of the designated haiku hotties, but maybe I can make up for it here.
Lucinda Williams’ new album, Blessed, has been out for two weeks. So there’s no excuse for you not to buy it and put it instantly into heavy rotation on your playback device of choice.
Martin Chilton, Digital Culture Editor at The Guardian is fully on board (if that means anything to you).
Although she has been performing for 37 years, she is still at the height of the song-writing prowess that prompted Time magazine to call her ‘America’s finest songwriter’.
The sad song “I Don’t Know How You’re Living” is about her brother, whom she admits she “hasn’t heard from in a long time”.
Bleak and haunting too is “Seeing Black” as she tries to make sense of the mind of a suicidal friend (the late songwriter Vic Chesnutt, who was recently the subject of an album of covers by The Cowboy Junkies called Demon).
Williams said: “Yeah, it was inspired by Vic. I should have said that instead of saying it was about him. It was inspired by his suicide, which happened during the time that I was writing. It was so sudden and shocking and stunning and sad . . . He had a wicked, wild sense of humor. And he had this sweetness about him.”
Elvis Costello, who sang a duet with Williams on 2008’s “Little Honey,’’ contributes searing guitar work on a handful of songs. Having admired his previous work in various genres, Williams chose Don Was to co-produce the album, and his touch is often “light and ethereal,” according to Boston.com.
The new Lost Highway album needs very little promotion, but the label produced a series of well-made Web videos anyway. Here’s one:
Here’s a video from Mayfield performing “Sometimes at Night” from her album, Tell Me live at the Kent State Folk Festival in her hometown of Kent, OH. The album, produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, is out now on Nonesuch Records.
I also like this “official video” from Nashville duo The Civil Wars:
According to Twangville, the harmonies between Joy Williams and John Paul White of The Civil Wars “have a dark sweetness to them that grows even darker as gothic-folk arrangements envelope them.”
I’ve never purchased an album by PJ Harvey before, but today I did. And I have every confidence that the $7.99 I spent with Amazon.com is money well invested.
Here’s a video for “The Words That Maketh Murder,” track number four from the new album, Let England Shake.
Alexis Petridis of The Guardian says the new work is “a richly inventive album that’s unlike anything else in Harvey’s back catalogue.”
The music sounds muted, misty and ambiguous, which seems to fit with Harvey’s vision of England: “The damp grey filthiness of ages, fog rolling down behind the mountains and on the graveyards and dead sea captains,” she sings on The Last Living Rose.
Scrupulously avoiding the usual cliches that arise with self-consciously English music – Kinksy music-hall observations, eerie pagan folkisms, or shades of Vaughan Williams – the central sound is guitars, wreathed in echo that makes them seem as if they’re playing somewhere in the middle distance. Around them are scattered muzzy electric piano, smears of brass, off-kilter samples and musical quotations: a reference to Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues somehow works its way into The Words That Maketh Murder, while an incessant trumpet reveille sounds during The Glorious Land, out of tune and time with the rest of the song.
Harvey recently appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air. Take half and hour and listen to Harvey discuss her work. She’s hypnotic on record and on radio.
NPR describes the album’s topics are brutal and bitter. Soldiers, landscapes and limbs are yanked apart, “falling like lumps of meat / blown and shot out beyond belief / arms and legs in the trees.”
It took Harvey 18 months to compose the music for Let England Shake, a process she undertook only after writing all the lyrics. Many of the songs feature the autoharp, an instrument she began playing only four years ago while touring for her album White Chalk.
Last night at the Alladin Theater, Puddletown music lovers were treated to a feast of Louisiana music, care of Voice of The Wetlands Allstars, featuring Tab Benoit, Cyril Neville, Anders Osborne and other legends of the swampy sound. It was an interesting show, which became more interesting every time Osborne stepped forward to be heard.
As you can see from the video above, recorded just nine days ago, Osborne is an amazing talent. He’s also a troubled talent, and his latest latest album, American Patchwork, released last April on Alligator Records tells the story of his troubles.
It’s a powerful record. John Swenson of Offbeat certainly shares in this opinion.
American Patchwork is the album Osborne fans have been waiting for since Ash Wednesday Blues. The record is a triumph in several ways— as a coherent musical statement, as an account of one man’s struggle to transcend his own existential problems, as a tale of New Orleans loss and recovery, as a rumination on the entropic inevitability of death and a possible redemption by love. The back story is that it’s an album about recovery from substance abuse, but to leave it at that is like saying John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was an album about primal therapy.
Back to the Voice of the Wetlands Allstars show…between songs Tab Benoit, made passionate plea after passionate plea for help preserving the Louisiana way of life. He said they’re losing an acre of low-lying land a day to the Gulf due to man-made causes. I know some in the audience were looking for more music and less talking, but it’s hard to blame a man when the ground under his feet is shifting so radically.
Ah, the music business. Like all business, it can get a little hairy, especially where art meets commerce.
Letters of Note unearthed this old letter from Warner Brothers Records executive Joe Smith to Danny Rifkin, co-manager of Grateful Dead in 1967. In it, Smith expresses dismay at the band’s unprofessional studio behavior.
I love Smith says Phil was the main problem in the studio. The guy’s had an attitude for a long time! But he plays amazing bass, so it’s mostly all good.
I also love how someone from the band, maybe Phil, wrote “Fuck You” on the letter. Legend has it that the letter was then returned to Smith.
Recent episodes feature Spoon, The National, Band of Horses, Monsters of Folk, Jimmy Cliff, Roseanne Cash, Alejandro Escovedo and as you can see above, Robert Earl Keen and Hayes Carll in a Texas Troubadour throw down.
Go-Go Boots, the new record from Drive-By Truckers, will be available from ATO Records on Feb. 15th. In Europe it’s coming on the 14th from Play It Again Sam Records.
“It’s the album where we finally fully embrace the music of our original hometown area of Muscle Shoals, exploring the waters of country/soul and that mystical intersection between to two dominate poles of our shared musical heritage,” says Patterson Hood. “It’s also definitively a Drive-By Truckers album and an album that benefits heavily from the work we did backing up Bettye LaVette and Booker T. Jones a few years back.”
Here’s writer Rick Bass of Missoula, MT on the progress the band is making:
Something undefinable has changed within the Truckers. They’re still rocking on, but a few more strands of lightness of being, and happiness, have infiltrated their being. They’re happier. Do not hold this against them, nor worry that it will corrupt their blues and rock, their snarl and anguish. Instead, the happiness will continue to whet these things – the things for which their old fans love them. Theirs is an earned happiness, and therefore does not temper or weaken their sound. Indeed, this new light forges the sound – the rock. You can hear it in every chord. It’s their finest yet.
Okay then. I’m in!
If you’re not yet sure, check out some more of the Go-Go Boots Episodes on Vimeo. DBT will also be touring in support of the new album. Thankfully, they’re including a West Coast swing that includes San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Vancouver and Seattle.
