More to weigh in on tomorrow after listening to Together, The New Pornographers’ first new album in three long years. I mean, The New Pornographers fail to put out an album and by 2008, the whole world falls apart, know what I mean? So maybe things are now looking up?
And if you have not wanted to go through the hoops of buying Propeller Time, Robyn Hitchcock’s brilliant new one, directly from his website, yesterday it showed up on the iTunes store. No excuses now.
Yippee.
From a rather straight place, actually. The Dumbarton Oaks mansion that sits high above Georgetown, USA. A pretty swell place on a sunny day.
Leica M9, 35mm Summicron pre-Asph, V.4 — the King of Bokeh.
We have been listening to Stones bootlegs. To the many, many sets we have collected of shows between 1971 and 1973, spanning the era of the Exile band — the Stones with Bobby Keys and Jim Price, and the magnificent Nicky Hopkins. So let’s call it the bootleg span from Get Your Leeds Lungs Out — British tour, pre-release of “Bitch” and “Brown Sugar” — to Happy Birthday, Nicky — the Perth sets from the 1973 tour just before Billy Preston (unfortunately) replaced Nicky for that year’s European tour. And of course the best recording qua recording is the Leeds set from ’71, and we just realized why.
You know how when the Franco government refused to let “Sister Morphine” come out on Sticky Fingers, and rather than have it be a blank four minutes of vinyl they put on that version of “Let It Rock”? Well, that song came from the Leeds show. How do I know? Because it’s on the Leeds bootleg… from ’71. It was an official recording!
The set isn’t perfect. They haven’t yet figured out how to incorporate the horns on certain songs (“Street Fighting Man” is a botch.) But it is an official recording, from the Rolling Stones sound truck. And for that reason alone, it’s magnificent. Go track it down.
Leica M9, Summilux 21.
In the nick of time, just as my iPod was showing carpal tunnel effects from replaying Capsula over and over, those nice folks in Bilbao who run Bloody Hotsak sent the Ivan Julian & Capsula cd The Naked Flame by meth-jacked carrier pigeons. Man, if ever there were two musical forces meant for each other it’s the former Voidoid and these ex-pat Porteno savants.
If Jimi Hendrix had been born ten years later, if he’d arrived in the States fresh from London in ’77, not ’67, he’d probably have sounded like Ivan Julian. A big part of the Voidoids sheer propulsiveness came from Julian’s guitar (bisected perfectly by the unearthly skronk of that scruffy lapsed lawyer, Bob Quine, on the other ax(is), truly bold as love.)
Teaming up with Capsula for an album is so cosmically right it’s surprising; life doesn’t usually proceed along such lines as a perfect Ben and Jerry’s mashup. Okay, so The Naked Flame is lacking the pop tunefullness of Martin Guevera’s songwriting for Capsula, but what it does have is Julian, some years after the fact, perfectly channeling Lester Meyer’s vocals from back in the day. I mean, you’d be forgiven, once you located Julian’s guitar work, for confusing this for Blank Generation Repaired. The B side loses steam, or at least is spottier than the 6-song A-side, but damn, now we have something other than the two Capsula albums we can hum note for note in our sleep.
Tulip Frenzy 