#fridayreads ‘Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music,’ a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) annual award in criticism–I’m always good for some rockin’ music essays. Also, ‘The Disposable Man,’ one of Archer Mayor’s superb Joe Gunther police novels set in Brattleboro, VT. Great cop, great story.
With indie record labels now routinely making downloads of music available to buyers of vinyl LPs, I’m heartened to see a similar strategy taking hold among indie publishers too, with regard to ebooks and printed books. . . . With the print book and ebook initiative announced today, Coach House has demonstrated their continuing relevance, if it were needed–and that of publishers like them– in the burgeoning digital age that publishing has entered. I wonder how long it will be before big, commercial houses are also routinely making ebooks available, or some digital product, available with purchase of a new book. Meantime, congratulations to Coach House Books for leading the way. // more. . .
Neil Young, who has for quite awhile been vocally decrying the sound of much recorded music nowadays said this at a tech conference today: “Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous,” Young said. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl (albums),” as reported by the AP.
In other Neil news, a recently recorded 37-minute Crazy Horse session is burning up the Internet, http://www.neilyoung.com/. For now, we’ll have to listen to it in a compressed digital file, but it still sounds pretty great. I bet this will be part of a new Crazy Horse release soon, and available on vinyl.
On the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I’ve lived for 20 years I used to see this big man with a scratchy looking goatee. He seemed somehow familiar, and interesting, like if each of us hadn’t been hurrying we could’ve had a good conversation at a neighborhood diner. Eventually, a neighbor pointed to me who he was–“That’s Alan Lomax, the song collector.” Of course, that’s why I recognized him.
Before I moved to New York, I ran Undercover Books, a Cleveland, Ohio bookstore that also sold recorded music. We used to handle albums from such venerable labels as Folkways, Nonesuch, and Rounder. I had seen Lomax’s picture on the liner notes, as he had for decades been recording field hands, convicts, laborers, and other bearers and keepers of musical traditions. Leadbelly was only one of his great discoveries. I admired Lomax, just as I admired the Englishman Ralph Vaughan Williams, who earlier in the 20th century, even before he would become a brilliant composer of orchestral music, had ventured into the fields, docks, and sheep-shearing paddocks with early recording equipment to hear and record the tunes of local folk.
I never did get to have that sit-down with Alan Lomax, who died in 2002. But I was delighted to read tonight, via this article in the New York Times, that the vast archive he left behind is soon going to be accessible in a digital storehouse that will be widely accessible to scholars, musicians, and the public. Hooray for Alan Lomax, and the Association for Cultural Equity, the project under the hands of his daughter Anna Lomax Wood that is making these treasures available. When you read the Times article, don’t miss the interactive feature with recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bessie Jones, and other greats.
Enjoy this really sweet cover of The Band’s The Weight” performed backstage after a recent Wilco-Nick Lowe concert in Chicago. Magnificent Mavis Staples takes the lead vocal, and superbly plays the role of bandleader. What sweet sounds! Video provided courtesy of Yep Roc Records, Nick Lowe’s label.
“Clearly, this has been years in the making. The Canadian indie scene has been in ascendance ever since Feist’s old band Broken Social Scene put ‘sprawling collective’ into the music-critic lexicon with 2002’s ‘You Forgot It in People’. . . . But Canada’s combined musical might this year is still a revelation.”–Joshua Ostroff in Spinner //more
The show at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom last Friday featuring The Weakerthans with Rah Rah was special in many ways. Before anything is even said about the music and the performances, consider that it was the seventh night of what by any measure must be considered an extraordinary bi-coastal residency that The Weakerthans had undertaken over the previous two weeks. Talk about ambitious! / / more . . .
So glad for my friend, Grant Lawrence–host on CBC Radio 3, who last year published the Canadian bestseller Adventures in Solitude, winner of the BC Book Prize–signing a deal with Vancouver publisher Douglas & McIntyre for his next two books. The first book will be a rock ‘n roll travelogue of “Grant’s life through the gritty […]