Bright Lights

“The Blues had a baby and they called it Rock’n’Roll”. Blues booms have passed with their sonic wave reverberating behind them, with the first OGs less original gangsters and more hardworking geezers making a crust. The shock of 1960’s London dragging itself out of the oppression of Macmillan’s 50’s and into an electric world was fittingly a metaphor for the brave few “folk blues” practitioners washed up on those grey shores in that decade. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Son House came, sang and conquered the eager young men and women in coffee shop BoHo style turtle necks and pipes. Traditional folk music in England had its elements of hard times, hard scrabble existence and the ‘man’ in the Lord of the Manor and Droit de Seigneur. So southern folk blues resonated, as did the urban Chicago more swinging electric blues, whether you came for the picking or for the raw excitement you came and you were never the same.

I had the odd chance to share a beer with Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood fame, a band whose name was taken from a song of the 50’s made famous by Etta James. It was in the 80’s in a pub in Sydney and we were both a long way from home. Lee was still wearing that shitty white jacket and was dying of lung cancer, unknowingly. I was a lone Brit in a sea of youthful tanned Aussies who happened to love both his band from their glory years a decade prior and his chosen vocation.

He talked of being a teenager in Essex going up for a night to Wardour Street and watching the Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated sharing the bill with Hooker and Waters and never being the same. Now god bless Alexis, great DJ and spreader of the word of the Church of Blues but he was never that great a blues shouter but he did pick some amazing sidemen. So I asked Lee who had he seen back then who made the most impression and he replied the Wolf. Howling Wolf, Chester Burnett, was as Bill Graham once said of another great axe man, a ”devil, devil, devil of a man” he was big, very fucking intimidating, he had a voice that could be used in LOTR voice overs and he sang about working class life where whiskey was cheap and so was the price of a man’s life.

I hung around coffee bars playing table football and pinball as a kid and young teenager listening to the jukebox playing classics like “When My Left Eye Jumps”, “Hellbound Train”, “Black Magic Woman”. This complete genre of music was fashioned by white working class kids stealing riffs and in some cases – I am looking at you Robert Planet – the whole words of songs and making it their own. Mix in a pop perspective in terms of time signature and the benefit of guitar and amp technology and we have the original blues boom in all its glory. It spawned Cream, Zeppelin and from those blues riff and drums grew forth heavy metal and rawk, Merkan style. It always amazed me that most of US so-called rock’n’roll actually got its lead from those poor pale English waifs rather than the original inspirations. The men who started electric blues in segregated America, in the 50’s, that spread the word with those great early tours of England under the auspices of Mike Vernon’s apocryphal Blue Horizon label. It was almost as if the color bar in the US needed the transatlantic mutation for music via John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, The Yardbirds, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac and the like to then return to the land where the music had its roots to allow young white American kids to be able to access it. The Kings, Freddy, Albert and BB carried on regardless as did the originals, suffering near bankruptcy along the way other than Hooker who was smart enough to keep the songs and the copyright to himself. There was sadly an element of truth to the Cheech and Chong sketch about Blind Melon Chitlin being paid a “bottle of whiskey and a hooker” for a recording session.

Since that time only one black man has really spanned both worlds like Waters, Hooker and Burnett did and sadly he also had to do it in the UK to get a break first and that was Hendrix. He broke through with a band put together by the very astute former bass player of the Animals. Chas Chandler saw the young Jimi in the US when he was making his living on the Chittlin Circuit playing for Curtis Knight as a band guitarist but ripping the soul out of his cheap Fender through a wah-wah pedal. Took him to Swinging London, promised him and delivered unlimited white girls for pleasure, lashings of drugs and then put him in a studio with a very accomplished jazz drummer and a versatileguitarist who could also play bass. Jimi found his own path and his own band of gypsies to back him but still died in a damp hotel room in London.

So since that time African American artists have been great singers, great songwriters, great rappers, great dancers, a couple of brave outliers have been instrumentally outstanding but usually in the soft and preserved world of Jazz but nobody has taken the Blues for themselves as their culture, their word, their sound. I am sorry Robert Cray but you were just too easy listening to qualify.

So the baton has since been carried by the Vaughn Brothers, Roy Buchanan, the great Jack White and the Black Keys with no little commercial success. But look, what is that in the night sky? A new blues hero? A young amazingly talented African American who actually gunslings an axe and writes real blues songs? Really? YES. And lo his name is Gary Clark Jr and he is the real deal. He can sling as hard as anyone, out Stevie-Raying newcomers, with a voice that’s the perfect bridge between R&B and slow blues and oh, damn, he is cool looking like Jimi was so this dude is TV friendly too. At a time when the UK is enjoying a new blues boom with blues music being played in clubs again by young men and an amazing bunch of women (check out Chantal McGregor, Joanne Shaw Taylor and Jo Harman), there is hope yet for the US to wake up and acknowledge its own amazing blues heritage. And if they cant do that at least recognize the immense talent that Gary Clark represents. Listen to his update of “Bright Lights” or “When My Train Pulls In” and you have living kicking snarling guitar blues. By a young cool intelligent black man not some balding 60-year-old English guy.

So if you are listening to some hard ass blues by Gary what should you be drinking? My advice is a “Fucked Up” beer and shot a la Rio Grande Bar, which is on the edge of civilization i.e. near the Civic Center in downtown SF. So take a can of beer, Dos Equis works fine, dip the top edge of the can in salt, pop it, pour in two shakes of hot sauce, grab a Hornitos Tequila shot or Rye Whiskey, your choice and you are ready to get numb with Gary guiding you down that emotional path. If you go to the Rio Grande that will cost you $7 and worth every penny.

Like a drunken punch up at a wedding 1-17-10

"you’ve come here just to start a fight

you had to piss on our parade

you had to shred our big day

you had to ruin it for all concerned

in a drunken punch-up at a wedding"

I think that Charles Shaw has a lot to answer for, actually most of it positive like ensuring America has its own vin de table, like debunking the voodoo about wine being something you need a special qualification to be able to buy or enjoy. Like you’ve only got to plant vines and 5 years later become rich. 2 Buck Chuck may not be welcome at my house for dinner if I am serving great food and wine - I mean do me a favour, as much as you can drink it at home because its cheap, at least make an effort to bring something that shows you have some imagination! But, its what America likes - fruit forward, lots of finish, no tannins and lots of sweet alcohol - and its what they buy.

So why is it like a punch up at a wedding?

Because its low class, cheap and nasty and it ruins a party, but there is something perverse about us that we can’t stop taking a peak and watching it, we get some vicarious thrill out of a punch up, as long as its someone else involved. Watching people buy 2 Buck Chuck is a guilty pleasure. Makes us feel self righteously smug...and what wrong with smug every now and again, good for your self esteem.

Saint Peter in satin, he's like Buddha with mace - 1-26-10

The occasional wine song series continues; this time its Elbow. Partly because I think Guy Garvey would be excellent party company, wine and drinking are all common themes in his songs, a guy who is thinking and sinking the wine. So what to drink while listening to Forget Myself?

"Do you move through the room with a glass in your hand

Thinking too hard about the way you stand

Are you watching them pair off and drinking them long

Are you falling in love every second song"

We have all experienced the joyful meeting of meek and menace, the man at the velvet rope. Shaven of head, dressed or squeezed usually like a black pudding into a shinier than thou dark suit, earpiece in the cauliflower appendage. Someone to help the evening pass without pain, someone to keep the riff-raff out. A wine that has that mix of the rough with the smooth for me is Ed Meades Mendocino Zinfadel, it is North Coast so not as posh as its peers. Tannins are there like bruises on a bouncer, dark it is and it packs a punch but again not like a real heavyweight, the kind of guy on the velvet rope is never the best around.

Once you get to know Ed, as I have now gotten to call him as I use false bonhomie to try and get in ahead of the line, you appreciate the subtle strength as by now you know there is no real menace. You can forget yourself, so go ahead start kicking up mischief and feeding the fire....

New York - New Torque - 2-13-10

“Money has been here so long its a little decrepit. If one of money’s laws is that it can never buy taste, here is where it went after it failed, and here’s what it bought instead.” Chase Insteadman, the hero of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

Cat Power achieves the nigh on impossible, take a stone cold classic and make it your own and she does it with a song so old, so storied, so cliched, so peripatetic that even I have been known to karaoke it to a terrified room full of Singaporeans. Most people identify New York or New York, New York with Hoboken’s own little sicilian or his duet partner the perennially 45 year old Lisa Minelli, even Phish have had a go at this song. 

Cat Power’s New York is grubby, thrusting and ultimately the club you want to be a member of, she sings her way out of the little town blues and into the greatest city there is. London is a great collection of villages thrust side by side like a collection of strangers in a tube train on Monday morning, its not a city. Tokyo is the conurbation, the greatest continuous anonymous collection of concrete, glass and neon but its not a city. New York was built as a city and it is quintessentially American. To be at home in this city you must be drinking something equally Yankee, and its not Budweiser and its not Jack and Coke; it might be a Manhattan but really? Italian vermouth and Scotch whisky is hardly what you would call a natural marriage.

So it has to be a Zinfandel, like New York a unique expression of italian roots in the new world and for that extra zaftig how about we blend it with Morvedre and Syrah? The French may have paid for the Statue of Liberty but they would never give you the liberty to screw with the noble grapes like that, only the new world libertarians would do that. So what would Cat hold in her elbow length gloves as she whips you with wanting to be in the very heart of it, and remember this is a gal who lived in bars?

Linne Calodo’s 2007 Problem Child is what she would spill on her vagabond shoes, very rich, lush, expensive and a little brash like the Upper East Side.

As Chase says she must “ abide with the life of Manhattan as it slakes itself on sundown pleasures, as it dines and it boozes, then.. tuck it in for the night and go on”.

Just another cover version - 3-1-10

"Whether the shock of hearing a favorite song abused by someone you hate or the surprise occasioned by a fundamentally annoying song getting a new and attractive coat of paint by someone you love  - the emotions are mixed but covers are a great way of getting more juice from an often over-squeezed lemon"

I love a great cover song, I hate covers bands, go figure that one out. I always loved the blues boom bands of the 60’s like the original Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, Taste, Canned Heat, Cream and in a way most of their output was ripped straight off the Chess back catalog, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page got rich squeezing Robert Johnson’s lemon, but as he sold his soul to the devil maybe thats ok? So if my musical taste has been inspired by covers much of my wine taste has always been intrigued by covers - wines from one region being produced in another with great results. This is not always the case as anyone who has drunk Paso Robles Pinot Noir will attest. For every Lily Allen’s cover of the Kook’s Naive or Jolene covered by the White Stripes there is Rod Stewart killing something by Sam Cooke or James Taylor throwing up over Summertime Blues ( I mean, really? really? Can you imagine that conversation : James ( for it is indeed he of bald pate and insousciant smile) “I think for my covers album I need to show the real rocking JT” Producer Pete: “ You are rock incarnate Jimbo, what did you have in mind, some AC-DC, some Metallica?” “I’m thinking Summertime Blues, I’m channeling Eddie Cochran right now, maybe a little Hound Dog too” Producer Pete: “Jimmy, Jimmy, outstanding choice, that will really have them tuning in to your next PBS Special, maybe we can get you a leather poncho to sharpen up the image too”).

Cover albums themselves are always a bit dodgy, the odd song thrown in live, the change of pace song on an album is one thing but a whole 10 or 12 songs is a challenge, although there is never a shortage of people ready to give it a good old thrash around the persian rug. The best ones are those that bring something new and interesting and great examples are the Easy Star All Stars Dub Side of the Moon which is a stoner’s dream or their Radiodread reggae covers of Radiohead’s perky pop posings. Beck is doing some great stuff as the Record Club project where a bunch of friends and he cover a storied album in a day, he posts the video of each song on the site http://www.beck.com/recordclub/

To date he has done The Velvet Underground and Nico, Songs by Leonard Cohen and recently Oar, the Skip Spence classic released originally in 1969  just as psychotic paranoia grabbed him by the throat, luckily Beck with help from Feist, Jamie Lidell and most of Wilco make some great sounds unlike the original which at best is a hard listen or as someone described it “teetering near the precipice of sanity”. So taking something that was originally not that great and adding to it, the perfect cover...

So what would I drink while listening to these Varshons? a great cover adds something and must stand or fall on its own merits whether or not still being recognizable as the original work. So to the great cover artist of Santa Cruz, Randall Grahm, and his tribute to Chateauneuf du Pape, Bonny Doon’s Cigare Volant ’08. More or less classic CdP grape types, depending on the vintage, but always harking back from the foggy mountains of Northern California to the banks of the Rhone and the summer hangout of the Popes. Its certainly bigger than some of its European relatives  but is not all bratty or brash, do yourself a favor and drink this..oh, and if you do need some Summertime Blues there is only one version - Who: Live At Leeds. Period, end of story.

Alison's starting to happen - 3-21-10

"It's so mesmerizing,

can't describe it, 

all that inside, hey.

No one's heard her last name,

I ain't asked,

So, who am I to blame?

An earthquakes started forming underneath my feet today..."

To be given talent is something we all assume is a blessing yet torments and trials seem to trivialize many god given gifts and that moment in the sun that seems destined passes by and like a ship without a rudder they drift out of our collective consciousness. Every parent hopes their children have something to give them that little kick start, the pushy mum meets the precocious little poppet, the star struck singing tot and the preternaturally precise pre-teen preening through her piano recital.  The results of this post modernist desire for our offspring to brighter, smarter; no longer the wish for the bigger, faster, stronger child that is the mark of the survivor of “not enough times”. Breastfeeding to build better brains, no-one wants their child to become someone’s drug buddy. Rest assured though much of the great music comes from kids who ultimately failed to meet mainstream society’s benchmarks, Morrissey, Adams and Stipe did not spend their teenage years being driven from soccer practice to piano lesson to SAT coaching, they were not the outdoor types.

Most productive environment for future royalties income? Smarter Preschool, Unlocking Your Child's Intellectual Potential? how about the great big no of being locked away in a bedroom over a garage on a yellow button cloth couch with a bong, two battered Fender copies and the back catalog of the Velvets blasting the pattern off the wallpaper, now you are talking.

Evan Dando bounced out of Skidmore to spend his time with other young whelps in Boston and founded the Lemonheads. He wrote songs that were sweet on the outside and sour on the inside about life in the louche lane, girls, drugs and hanging out. A handsome lad he balanced acceptance of his jangly pop-rock and good looks into the arms of Mrs Robinson and her friends with admissions of smoking crack and hanging out with Oasis and the Manc moron brothers. And just when the hits and videos did a rockin stroll young Evan went out on a long limb and the moment passed.

If you were to pick a role model who would pick Rick James? Evan did and bless him, he actually got Rick to sing about not wanting to get stoned but wanting to get stoned. But Evan is not a quitter and he is still making great music, the voice is still there unlike, say, Ian McCullough and he still has a great ear for melody and harmony. But, and this is why the Knoxville girls and I still love him, his music always kicks on, noisy enough to still upset the neighbours and make you drive faster than is good for you while singing your head off.

So what wine makes you feel like that, what wine deserves to be a bit part in your life? Au Bon Climat Pinot Noir 2007 Santa Maria Valley, Clendenens’s entry Pinot is everything you want from a New World Pinot, fruit and delicious yet it still tastes like Pinot rather than a Syrah/Pinot blend, it drinks like your favorite T shirt. Its got Evan’s pretty boy feel but still has a heart and style that is not pretentious, this wine is topsy-turvy, and it is mine to eat, its “the pebble in my mouth and underneath my feet.

its the puzzle piece behind the couch, made the sky complete”. This wine is definitely starting to happen.

The flattened fifth is also known as the sharpened fourth - Another low end theory

"“Jazz music is not dead, it just smells funny”

Jazz music by its very nature is as about as exciting as finding an old and unwashed pair of socks under the bed, yes its familiar and has its uses - think really bad Italian restaurants or elevators - but there is just something unsavory about being caught in possession of it. I think all of us have at times tried to be slightly more hip and cool by trying to get into Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis or Coltrane or - here you can fill in the blank- and I have the virtually unplayed Kind of Blue and Birth of the Cool CDs at home to prove I am not immune. I did stop short of the black woolen roll neck jumper, thick rim glasses, skinny black jeans ( well that’s a lie I do have those) and winkle pickers, Kerouac under arm and too much espresso in stomach. Jazz is music that if you have any ounce of grey matter you should prefer over pop or country, after all it has variety, beats, great playing and yet it sits there quietly festering in the corner, the aging relative, that now incontinent, is no longer involved in the post Thanksgiving lunch game of Monopoly or Bin Fa.

I am a big fan of NPR but the local KCPR station plays so much blather jazz that I feel like fire bombing the station; hearing Neal Losey smoothly ejaculate “that was the inimitable Dave Brubeck and now for some Diane Krahl on your Morning Cup of Jazz”, I mean seriously, that show is emetic. Why is that? Because they confuse the crappy no-risk elevator music for what jazz can really be which is not soporific or smooth or sly or subtle but challenging. Get atonal occasionally, harmony is only ever improved by discord.

Jazz can move you emotionally but the emotion does not have to be one of an overbearing sense of nausea or ennui. It can move you by making your brain work, it should move your feet if nothing else because in jazz you are free from standard 4/4 time structures, it should make you smile. Now doesn’t that sound like the same problem with Merlot, ennui rather than smiles? Both very popular in the 60‘s and 70‘s, still loved mainly in obscure places like Japan and Holland, both have been pushed sideways and out of popular culture.

Well, the good news pop-pickers is that I have both to share - jazz that will make you feel good and some serious Merlot smacking you around the face saying “Respect Me, Sonny Boy!”  Bonobo - the musical act rather than the dwarf chimpanzee - is primarily Simon Green plus some cool people like Andreya Triana and Jack Wylie from the Portico Quartet. His new album Black Sands is the perfect soundtrack to the coming spring, great beats, good songs and musically diverse in a way that rewards repeat listening rather than losing your interest. And if you do like it then check out Portico’s Isla which features the Swiss vibes like instrument the Hang - if that’s not a compulsion to download it right now you are not drinking enough!

I have recently survived two wet weeks in the monsoon of London and the Dordogne and have just tasted what Merlot should be like, bold, fruitful both in attack and finish and its name is St Georges St Emilion. Up on the hill behind St Emilion the village and the main vineyards just before you get to Montagne St E is the small AOC of just 8 producers. Its the same underlying soil and elevation as the best of Pomerol but like we purists prefer our wine, women and music - beautiful yet understated and contrarian. I tasted the fabulous ’08 Chateau la Bergere with Camille Benoist its personal Svengali, and it is not only fabulous but it will make you respect Merlot again, maybe you will actually admit it to your friends that yes, you do like Merlot and frankly that Pinot you keep raving about tastes like Syrah, Madame!

And maybe even seek out a Napa Merlot like they used to drink back  in the day like Duckhorn  or, or maybe not, that’s too close to getting back into the elevator with Neal and Marian McPartland.

The unmagnificent lives of adults - 5-19-10

"....but your kisses aren't enough

to keep your kids in line

so you better straighten out yourself

and give your baby time

cause if you don't give her what she needs

she'll get it where she can

she's lonely man"

Sad songs, sad moments, sad sack. The range of emotions evoked by music, movies, books, stories all, range from the elation of smiles and laughs to the throat catching, the tears stuttering out and smearing vision. The depth and response to the emotion is amplified and fueled by wine, that perfect late night moment of listening to the troubadour’s tale after that one glass too true. You know that moment when you play that song again and louder and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and its always a song that takes several listens to get under your skin. The perfect auteur of these sad songs for dirty lovers is Matt Berninger and his band of brothers, The National.

Intense, brooding songs of broken promises and lost loves are the canon of these guys and as they have aged the concerns and causes have matured and aged. As the corners have been knocked off, life has been chiseling away at their youthful heart of hearts, tugging on their sleeve of sleeves. Wars taking place behind doors in squalor and apartments in Brooklyn, being mistaken for strangers and getting lit up, this is the urban cowboy’s new pasture. The girls have grown up from wistful teens, the lust has moved on from trophy wives looking for a younger man, the relationships have life-cycled through mix tape to brutal break up, settling down and growing up.  Matt’s baritone is the perfect tone and pitched as half spoken half sung, these are the standard for the late night soliloquy. He is always leaving us with a last line thrown away, being consigned for ever as a middle brow screw up, losing his breath, cause he is evil.

Matt exhorts us “Dear, we better get a drink in you,” before we start to bore him. So what do we drink while we toast the fake empire, while we raise our glass to the mansions on the hill and the life that could have been but that never was? Something big enough for an emotional crutch, something mature enough to have stood the test of time’s changes, something that we have grown used to, watched develop and deepen with each passing vintage. T-Vine’s Gregg Brown has been hand making wines quietly in Napa since the mid 90’s and I was lucky to be introduced to them back then by John Rittmaster at Prima Vini in Walnut Creek. Gregg’s wines are hand made in the true sense with a preference for gut feel over technological tricks and his T Blend is as lush and seductive as a Napa Valley cab can be without the pretension, and being a blend it changes every vintage. T Blend ’06 has Primativo blended in and its fruit caresses the palate and the finish will encourage you to keep drinking, this is not a dapper sipper. This will get your good mix on and listening to the High Violet you will quickly enter the dark but never drab world of the National, sing, cry, smile; the whole unmagnificent life of us adults is there for the submerging.

Its King Biscuit Time! - 7-27-10

"“I suddenly realised I was bored of pissing around with drum machines, and all that stuff. Just that immediate thing, where you can actually perform a song with a guitar – it seems really obvious, because I’ve done it loads in the past – but I’d forgotten it was possible. You can actually create some really beautiful magic with just that instrument and a voice. So I started writing lots of stuff like that again.”

Its always a real personal joy to discover someone who you really liked, who brought you much pleasure, whose creativity defined a moment in time reappears with great new work. We get used to certain people never going away, always being on the edge of our perception, continuing to work their trade, some just do their thing like Neil Young who is touring solo again this summer. Some like Dylan re-energize themselves every few years with new collaborators and there are of course those who decide they will enliven our days with orchestral workings of their canon, like his royal highness Sting, a generosity of spirit that I am always impressed by. I mean if you can’t fill your boots with lute madrigals then Englishman in New York with cellos, maybe?

When its someone who has struggled with the fame and attention that the pop world thrusts on the successful and have since disappeared into obscure side projects where their defining talents are hidden in a welter of techno or grime and they come back with strong songs sung in the voice of the past its time to smile. When its a collection of songs perfect for the swelter of summer days, music to eat lunch on the terrace with a glass of chilled Bandol to, a soundtrack to long drives to the lakes and beaches then its time to celebrate. 

Steve Mason was the voice behind the songs of the Beta Band who blew everyone away with their first 3 EPs which became the first album and they were name checked by all and sundry in the late 90’s. There is a great scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack boasts to Jack Black that he can play a song that is guaranteed to impresses a cute female customer in his record store, he does, she is, head’s bob in the store and in the movie theatre... and the song is Dry the Rain by the Beta Band with Steve Mason’s lead vocal.

The Beta Band were maybe too eclectic for their own good and they never found the magic mix of beats, loops, grooves and melodies in the same way in the next record (although the final two albums were great they were commercially also rans). Mason was both depressed by the weight of expectations placed on him after the success of 3EPs and an extreme perfectionist to the point having delivered their first proper album they then described it as “f*cking awful” and “the worst record made this year”, which did not exactly endear them to their record company.

Happily I can say the his new solo album Boys Outside is “f*cking great” and my vote for the best record of the summer.

So while you smile along to Understand My Heart or Stress Position what should you be drinking? If you can’t find a chilled Bandol it still must be a Rosé and what better option for the money than the 2009 Rosé from Jas d'Esclans, its a Côtes de Provence vineyard about 12 kms from the Mediterranean so it is as close to being in Provence as you can get in a glass.

Caribou and other wild meats - 9-26-10

"If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they  don't work there, you may live in Canada.

If you've had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number, you may live in Canada"

I like Canadians. They are spread around the US quietly passing themselves off as natives with the only giveaways the occasional “eh”, or the correct pronunciation of Basil and vase - correct being the way its said in our shared Mother country. I like them because they have made some great friends over the years and because they have the shared chip on their shoulder that comes with being from a small country and so share in the basking glory of any minor Canadian triumph as do the Brits. They also produce a disproportionate amount of great music, creativity springs from having unique seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction. If you are not one of the lucky hockey super stars what else is there to do but learn how to play guitar and write songs. As soon as they can, they then use that talent to get them on a plane and into the sun of California.

The list is a long and storied one Joni Mitchell, the Band and Neil Young from the hippy era, Bryan Adams, Rush and Celine Dion from the 'over the top' pop era, Cowboy Junkies, Crash Test Dummies and Alanis Morissette the darlings of the alternative 90’s. The list literally goes on for pages and pages so there is something to be said for getting snow bound for long periods. There is also another interesting dynamic in the way they make music which suggests that its not about isolation but rather about working together. Broken Social Scene, Feist, and Most Serene Republic have produced some of the consistently interesting and changing music of the last 10 years and all work in large collaborative efforts with changing members and producers.

My current favorite Canuck is Dan Snaith, who manifested his music for many moons as Manitoba which suffered for being yet another clever electronica based muso amongst a sea of quasi techno bands and individuals. Dan is a maths PhD but he sees mathematics is an intuitive fun thing and his love of patterns and complexity drove him via his piano teacher into Yes and ELP. Luckily for all of us his music sounds nothing like that. 

I liked Manitoba though because it had that great mix of analog instruments amongst the synths, like Keiran Hebden with Four Tet there actually is a guy strumming a guitar building the songs as much as noodling on ProTools on his Mac. I also will confess to a total bias for fat analog drums in amongst the digitally sampled soup which Snaith always does, a fabulous example is Brahminy Kite from Milk of Human Kindness.

Snaith is prolific in output and his recent releases have been in the form of Caribou. His latest opus is Swim and it lifts the spirits in a way that reflects how he takes the best of many influences and percolates them into great songs not just keyboard and loop noodles. He aims for and achieves the sound of liquids and flowing in Swim. 

So if you are going to be stuck in a cabin in Dundas, Ontario waiting for the next hockey game what wine would you want to be sharing while listening to Caribou? Something complex yet not taking itself too seriously, dance music never can be taken too seriously, something with lots of different things going on? My choice would be the C Cubed or C3’s 2007 Tempranillo, big jaunty and very approachable yet lots of flavor and overtones cascading over themselves. 

Falling From Grace - 10-28-10

I bought the ticket on line through one of those trading sites, paid twice the face value and managed to pogo my way through the throng to get into the sweating moving mass and as my ears rang and buzzed afterwards I thought it was one of the best live gigs I had been to. It was August 2008 and the band was the Kings of Leon, they played for 2 hours and they played everything the ecstatic noisy throng wanted with an immense Knocked Up prior to the 2 encores.

I was ambivalent to the ensuing 4th album, Only by The Night, it was good and crawled into many people’s hearts, it was not a wasted time but neither would it make my bucket list. So I was intrigued to see what new delights the Come Around Sundown album would deliver, I recorded it off their own streaming site and went off to run the trails to use it as my soundtrack for the Fall footfalls in the local forest.

Schadenfruede is that sickening guilty pleasure at other’s misfortune but what do you call the sickening sense of disappointment at a hero’s fall from grace, the total displeasure at their failure? Arguably a subtle but gentle lack of excitement over some time might be a better way to fall but the new offering is such a complete bitch slap to the face, a WTF shock to the system like falling off your bike or catching an edge on your snowboard while half a sleep on a flat transition.

Now the Followill brood are never going to be picking up prizes for the prose of their pop but this plumbs new depth of putrid punk pronouncements. Mi Amigo, which should be banned as a song title unless  its by a Mexican equivalent of Abba, contains references to getting drunk - thats novel - and how large his ( Caleb?) manly weapon is. Pick Up Truck, again song naming not their strength here, is quoted above and is only surpassed in its inanity by Mary, a cod doo-wop styling that actually does say “We'll go to the disco....I'll dance like your boyfriend”, I shit you not.

So in a way its unfair to criticize the boys on their lyrics, after all they are poster children for home education, what they somehow managed to have was a mix of hard driving rock beats and enough hooks to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. That was until Sundown.

Now the sound is just a pastiche of their earlier albums, twice its just a recycle of early songs ( Beachside and Pyro) and the most typical and least annoying song Radioactive just sounds like a remix of Arizona from Because the Night. We have ‘yee haa’s’ and cheery mentions of the old south plus now we have backing singers. But their biggest crime if not against humanity at least against their fans is to take a sound that was a cross between Exile era Stones and an alt-country version of Heaven Up Here Echo & The Bunnymen and to turn it into radio friendly dirge rock. It plods, it grunts, it limps like a two-hundred and fifty pound woman weaving through the frozen food section at Walmart. They seem to be channelling Eddie Money or Van Halen, this is rock ballad country with slow burning drums and non existent bass, I can see people reaching for their lighters now, the bad videos are flooding in flashback now. Someone needs to tell these guys that the late 80’s was a terrible time for rock, we dont want to go back there...nurse, more medication please.

So what should you be drinking while listening to someone commit critical hari-kiri? The temptation is to go with something that also fails miserably to deliver on its promise but in this case I think something strong and robust to help us forget our sorrows and disappointment. So I am going with Oren Swift’s The Prisoner 2008, meaty, big and bouncy. As Dave Phinney has sold out this wine brand it may never be the same again after the 2009 vintage so use the money you would have spent on the new Kings of Leon album and concert tickets and invest in getting hold of the ’08 while you can...

"But when he pulled in & revved it up, I said "you call that a pickup truck?" 

And in the moonlight I throw him down, all kickin' screamin' and rollin' around, 

A little piece of a bloody tooth, just so you know I was thinkin' of you" 
indeed....

Blues Gaen Oot'o fashion - 2-14-2011

Blue may not be in fashion anymore, especially around the feast of St Valentine where by common consent we can all pink it up but I seem to have those old folk blues again. The appearance of Mumford and Sons on the Grammys last night marks a commercial high point of Folk Music’s wash against the bastions of pop not seen since Bob first outraged the denizens of the finger in ear and bad jumpers at the Newport Folk Festival. When Dylan showed up with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, with electric bass and drums to boot, and proceeded to make the first public union of noise and old traditional song forms it started a trend that has refused to die away, fittingly he joined the Mumford’s on stage last night.

The rise of the Mumfords with girlfriend Laura Marling, Bon Iver and Noah & the Whale over the last 2-3 years has been a guilty pleasure and reminds me of when Zep and the progressive rock boom of the 70’s was always a counterpoint to the folk tradition, Bron-y-Aur Stomp anyone? 

Why is it resonating with todays popsters? maybe its the contrast from the obvious machinations of the studio and the slick costumes and dance excitement of pop’s current queens going gaga over autotune. Maybe strong songs and vocals over the stripped accompaniment of acoustic guitars and cellos elevates the listener in a different way than raps rumble and roar, princesses and platitudes over pimps and ho’s.

In a wine context its the triumph of simple Merlot in a traditional style, yes that includes tannins and tastes of terroir without the autotune of vanilla oak and sugar, the folk style of 12% rather than the bling of 15%. Wine to enjoy with old friends over a languid sunday lunch.

Several people, me included, responded to a recent Greg Dal Piaz article for Snooth about Merlot making a comeback in an outraged manner, like old crusties hearing the electric shrill at Bob’s 1963 Newport gig saying how can you write an article on Merlot and not mention St Emilion or any of the right bank Bordeaux’s! His lame excuse was that the majority have a small blend of Cab and Cab Franc in them so he considered them more meritage than Merlot.

So to correct that oversight when you are listening to the excellent Mumford’s collaboration with Laura Marling and the Dharohar Project drink Chateau L’Enclos’ Classique 2005 and feel the traditions envelop you, and have some farmhouse cheese with it!

As the newness of the year feels bright and inspirational the desire to get something down on paper wells up after nearly two weeks of slow life in the mountains. Even though there were periods of very fast descents punctuated with flat lander lungs grasping vainly for air and thighs straining under the remorseless pummelling of steep hard-turning slopes of snow, time still passed slower in the Sierras than in the City over the holidays.
The desire to share in the seasonal joys leads me each year to find new Christmas music, in part a personal quest but also in part a reflection of the upbringing in England; dominated each December by familiar if standardised and repeated Christmas hits and a shared manic national fascination for discovering which would be the new Xmas Number One.
This is a uniquely British institution due to the dominant radio stations being multi format or style compared to the US where everything is subdivided by genre to a point where true Pop or 'popular' music does not really exist outside maybe of X-Factor.
Growing up in the 70's I witnessed the first full frontal assault on the pop charts by a Xmas song to start the craze for the highest sales for a single song being the week prior to Christmas Day, with Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody". The process went into overdrive for the next 20 years although the Brits have a long seated penchant for an odd novelty, charity inspired or plain sappy seasonal pop nugget, which we can probably sing with more commitment and confidence than many can the National Anthem.
According to our friends at Wikipedia, who I trust nearly as much as the BBC, The Beatles are the only act to have four Christmas number ones, three consecutively starting from 1963. On two occasions, 1963 and 1967, they had both the Christmas number one and the number two, the only act to have achieved this. As part of two acts, George Michael repeated the feat with Band Aid and Wham! in 1984. Paul McCartney has been top eight times with various acts.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, which reached the number one spot at Christmas 1975 and 1991, is the only record to have reached the top twice. "Mary's Boy Child" is the only song to be Christmas number one for two entirely unrelated artists (Harry Belafonte in 1957 and Boney M. in 1978) and I hated both, although "Do They Know It's Christmas?" has been Christmas number one for three generations of Band Aid. The original version of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" is the second best selling single in UK history, regardless of the fact that its lyrics were written on a napkin in the back of a cab by Midge Ure after a boozy lunch in Soho and, not surprisingly, are patently ridiculous as well as patronizing at least half of Africa.
Since 2002 the Christmas number one has been dominated by reality television contest winners and so my interest has been below subliminal. So a great musical tradition has been hijacked by the evil forces of commerce yet again, or at least Simon Cowell and his minions.
As I said earlier though this usurping of the Christmas music commercial grail has not prevented me from continuing my journey musically following a Christmas star in the heavens or at least downloading a new piece of snappy seasonal nonsense from the ever-giving ether.
So what was my selection for 2012? Those smooth operators of the land between soulful rock and southern charm the Rosebuds and their Christmas Tree Island collection of newly written songs just for the Holidays. Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp are the core of the band and were a married couple for 10 years of the band's existence based out of Raleigh, Tobaccoland. As sometimes happens they have split up but the band happily continues, Kelly has now moved on to be yet another cool musician based in Brooklyn. So they built on their sound scape used for the track by track recreation of Sade's Love Deluxe to create a great Christmas album, all original songs that will become classics, regardless of the gratuitous yet totally welcome use of sleigh-bells.
So what was the preferred tipple to accompany such a lush yet traditional slice of yuletide jollity? how about real egg nog, as in the old Tom and Jerry cocktail, long on cream and egg white batter and of course lashings of rum and cognac. What better way to maintain the warm glow from those songs of celebration, the wood burning stove, the Christmas lights, the joys of gifts received and given? and now back to the real world for another year of opportunities.