Archive for John Buckley

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Calexico Beams Border Radio From The 930 Club

Posted in Music with tags , , on November 14, 2008 by johnbuckley100

Cap-it-al Radio: Joey Burns and John Convertino set up the pirate transmitter not one mile from the White House last night, and beamed their cross-border cultural mashup to a 1000 anxious fans.  The brilliant Carried To Dust, which ranks high on Tulip Frenzy’s office playlist, was explored almost in its entirety, though they dipped into their saddlebags to pull out treasures from Feast of Wire and the whole arid ouevre. These guys are brilliant musicians, and Burns is a really good singer — his voice runs patterns inside the wide-out routes covered by Gary Louris.  The highlight, of course, was the way their Fear-And-Whisky-era-Mekons-meets-Herb Alpert sensibility added a mild salsa spice to an otherwise alt.country bowl of chili.

When you think that these guys were carved more than a decade ago from a stray mound of Giant Sand, and that in those days, they hadn’t even added the Sergio Leone horns, it’s a wonder.  The mathematical precision of the two trumpets playing in unison conjures visions of a sunburned Johann Sebastian Bach, stumbling through the salt flats with a mescal buzz, conducting the horn section with his sunglasses askew.  I’ve never before witnessed a whistled solo, but these guys did it, and you could hear the horse being slapped on its rump while Zapata rode til dawn.  Andale!

Joey Burns alternated between a white Palomino of an electric guitar and his acoustic built to scale for a Mexican teenager, and John Convertino put on a seminar on how to use brushes and the snare with little regard for the tom toms.  “Two Silver Trees” was a little flatter than on the album, but “Writers Minor Holiday” was like the soundtrack to a Roberto Bolano novel.  You could see why so many musicians have hired them to be their studio band, could understand why half of the I’m Not There tracks were recorded with these guys underneath.  And yet when it came time for Calexico to take a star turn, to stand astride their rising career like a bandito on the final quarter mile ride to the saloon, they were plenty comfortable in the moonlight.

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The Alejandro Escovedo Trio Is Heavier Than Motorhead

Posted in Music with tags , , , on November 10, 2008 by johnbuckley100

The protean Alejandro Escovedo formed his act into a power trio last night at the Birchmere.  Maybe when we say power trio you think of Cream, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience, or everybody’s favorite, Beck, Bogert and Appice.  And yeah, this amalgam was just as thundering, only it was just Al on acoustic, Dave Pulkingham on the same, and Susan Voelz, as always, on the fiddle.

It’s been a winter tradition in these here parts for Alejandro to show up with cellos and Ms. Voelz and Mr. Pulkingham, taking all these erstwhile rockers out for a chamber-music spin.  (Warmer parts of the year, at least since Al regained his health, are dedicated to him touring with his rock band.  Though Alejandro Escovedo manages his personnel they way Bob Dole managed his presidential campaigns, which is to say, when he can’t figure which team to ride — the rockers or the stringed quartet — he just makes them all work together.  For Alejandro, a successful approach.  For Dole, not so much.  And it is, of course –Alejandro’s rock bands every bit as much as Dole’s campaigns — a spectacle: the cellos choogling, Victor Munoz walloping the skins, one, no two, no three electric guitars fighting for air.)  But then last year at about this time he dropped one cellist and came to the Barns at Wolf Trip as a foursome. And then last night it was just the three of them, and damn if they didn’t put out just as much of a sonic hum, though without the cello for ballast, the whole thing seemed to ride higher on the waves.

“Drop a penny in the Indian Ocean,” he sang in the opener, the stunning “Way It Goes,” from 1992’s Thirteen Years, and quickly gone were any doubts about whether Al, playing in just a threesome, would be giving something up.  “Everybody Loves Me” was as great as it is on Room Of Songs, but that version’s performed by a five piece orchestra, and this version had just the three, so they tripled their effort and expended a precisely identical thermal reading.  Lots of songs from Real Animal, which does appear to have been something of a breakthrough, and not just artistically.  We got to hear about the “Chelsea Hotel ’78,” and yeah, it rocked.  And then there was the version of “Deer Head On The Wall,” with its opening interlude out of Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle,” quickly shifting into a song that sounds okay on The Boxing Mirror, really good when he has the whole rock band cranked up, but last night, with just the three of them, damn near levitated the roof into the Reagan Airport flight path.

Maybe a few people can tell anecdotes that mention Johnny Thunders showing up — it’s a pretty good name to drop — and it is possible there are others who, like Alejandro, will always mention Joe Strummer at their concerts (I don’t think I’ve ever heard him forget him, which tells you just about all you need to know.)  Anyone can play a Stones cover.  But who other than Alejandro Escovedo would take his trio into the crowd and play “Evening Gown,” from Mick Jagger’s best solo album?  Who else would even admit he listens to Mick Jagger’s solo albums?

The man is a national treasure.  Thank Heaven he is healthy and well.  And coming back to DC next weekend to play a show before a hundred people in the Mansion on O Street.  Special as last night was, could this upcoming show top it?

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Notional Velvet Underground: What The Late Show In Heaven Sounds Like

Posted in Music with tags , , , on November 1, 2008 by johnbuckley100

There are times when I listen to a song and it makes me think of the Velvet Underground.  Brian Jonestown Massacre.  Luna. Mazzy Star.  Jesus and Mary Chain.  You get that, right?  The Feelies, Modern Lovers.  That case is easy to make.  And then I’ll listen to a song like the version of Dylan’s “Most of The Time” that’s on the 3rd CD of Tell Tale Signs and it makes me think, swear to God, of the VU.  And then I go and listen to the Velvets themselves and they don’t sound anything like my notional Velvet Underground.  What is that?

There was a story going around in 1969 about the groupie in LA who would sleep with guys and say, “Well, he’s good, but he’s not Mick Jagger.”  And then she slept with The Mick and her take was, “Well, he’s good, but he’s not Mick Jagger.”  Myth and reality.  But in this case, the question is: was there ever a reality to the Velvet Underground?   Eno’s line that only 1000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but they all formed bands is, of course, on some level true. And not all the bands sounded like the Velvets, but they’re all connected, in some way, at some level.  But what does it actually mean to sound like the Velvet Underground?  

For me the quintessential VU sound came on the 3rd album, with songs like “What Goes On” and the delicate “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Beginning To See The Light.”  There’s a residue of folk and Motown and Farfisa organ-based garage rock.  And to me, this sound shows up everywhere from Van Morrison’s “TB Sheets” to the Talking Heads’ “The Good Thing.”  

Is it Sterling Morrison’s guitar sound?  That’s a lot of it.  That and the simple, propulsive drumming of Moe Tucker, the organ overlay.  Sterling Morrision’s echoes can be heard in everything from Luna (not just when he sat in with them) to William Reid of JAMC to the BJM for sure.  But how to account for the fact that when I put together a Velvets-sounding playlist, I put on it bands like the Warlocks, who are of a completely different school, who were beamed to Earth from a whole different constellation?

Here’s the playing order (bands, not songs) of my Velvets playlist: Pere Ubu, Modern Lovers, BJM, JAMC, Warlocks, Luna, The Darkside, Mazzy Star, Dylan, Neko Case, The Stems, Galaxie 500,The Feelies, Van Morrison.  Not a lot in common between them all, but they all plug in, in the songs contained therein, to the Velvets amp.  Who am I missing?

Another thing that’s weird: Lou Reed has a very distinctive song structure, or at least the solo artist Lou did.  And yet few, if any of the bands referenced sound like Lou.  It’s almost like the Velvets sound of mental myth is Lou-less.  Weird.

All I know is that, having never seen the Velvet Underground, but having seen the three fictional film versions — in The Doors, I Shot Andy Warhol, and Factory Girl — I have some sense of what the late show in Heaven sounds like.  Angus McLeish may sit in on drums for a song or two.  Peter Laughner will be there on guitar.  Mark Smith will curse and spit on stage.  Dean Wareham waits his turn near the amps.  And we’ll have a real good time together.

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Jesus And Mary Chain Go Back To The Vaults For A Postively “Negative” Outcome

Posted in Music with tags , , on October 19, 2008 by johnbuckley100

The only time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain, maybe ’93, the opening act was Mazzy Star.  While the romance between Jim Reid and Mazzy’s Hope Sandoval led to the interestingly soft-core Stoned and Dethroned album, the more interesting marriage may have been between Mazzy guitarist David Roback and Chain guitarist William Reid.  I’m not such a big fan of the fuzztone signatures from the Psychocandy early days, and while I love the danceclub hardrock of the middle years, it’s that Velvets sound the Chain had in common with Mazzy Star that I’ve always liked the most.

Comes The Power of Negative Thinking, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s new 4,000 song compilation of crumbs and wholly baked pies heretofore available only as B-Sides or on boots, and the full scope of one the ’90s greatest bands comes clear.  Yeah, you’ve got the fuzz-based rock which blended the Beach Boys and Ramones in puree of pure noise (these days preserved in Iceland as Singapore Sling…) You’ve got the propulsive punkrock powered by the drum machine, or a human playing like a drum machine (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, your royalty check to the Bank of Scotland is due.)  And then there are these softer gems in which the Jesus and Mary Chain genuflect at the altar of the Velvet Underground.

Naturally, some of the best songs can only be gotten downloading the whole 9,000 song compilation for a round $6 million, but go try out “Shimmer” and see if it doesn’t roust Sterling Morrison from his resting place.  If you don’t want to download all 9,636 songs, available for 11 million Euros, go check out the Bo Diddley homage, interestingly titled “Bo Diddley Is Jesus.”  If you don’t have a Swiss bank account, take your 99 cents and check out the softer version of “Psychocandy” here, in which the fuzz was scraped off by a merciful scythe. 

The Reids may have dissolved like the warring Kinks did, may have busted up the way someday the Brothers Gallagher of Oasis will, but as it happened The Jesus and Mary Chain went out on a musical high note.  Munki was mysterious and straight ahead at the same time, and in classic vaudeville form, it left us want something more.  They’ve come back for festival shows and they keep threatening to put out a new album.  If, like me, you grokked on what they were doing in that period of great ferment between about ’93 and ’98, fork over the $39.00 it costs to get the whole download of 82 songs.  The Power of Negative Thinking has a lot of positives, from the Roky Erickson covers to alternatakes of their hits.  I counted out 33 songs on the playlist I culled from the whole thing.  That makes this vast trove a bargain.

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The Clash Live: Too Late To Save Shea Stadium

Posted in Music with tags , , , on October 17, 2008 by johnbuckley100

Given how great the Clash were live, and how terrible is the only live album they ever previously released, it’s somewhat bizarre that 26 years after they opened for the Who in the rain in Flushing Meadows, the only single-show archive we have is Live At Shea Stadium.  

As a live album, it has great dynamic range, and it was clearly an inspired set.  The problem is that it was recorded past the band’s peak, without Topper Headon on drums, and in that sad twilight when Mick Jones’s songs were garnering commercial radio play.  The Who Sell Out was the famous title of an early album by the headliners.  The Clash, Conflicted, Try To Sell Out might more properly have been the title of this one.  If only they could have released it in time to beat Cheap Trick to the Buddokan bank.

How many live albums have been released by the opening act? (The only one I can think of is The Allman Brothers Band At Fillmore East, and clearly Johnny Winter was a more generous headliner, as he gave Duane and Dicky time to stretch on extended jams.  This following The Elvin Bishop Group’s extended jams.  Those were smoky, lazy days.)  The inherent structural problem of an album like this is the band’s set is perforce short, and the emphasis was on songs like “Train In Vain,” “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” and “Rock The Casbah.”  Each had gotten radio play, and on one of those 17  evenings in the summer of 1981 when The Clash played at Bond’s in Times Square, the pop songs were tolerable as de rigeur run throughs in what were otherwise sparkling, extended sets.  (I went to six of the shows, including the Sunday matinee.)

Here there’s a great version of “London Calling” to begin the set, and “Police On My Back” follows nicely, but if this album is true to the evening — I wasn’t there — then having Paul Simonen follow Mick Jones to the mike and sing “Guns of Brixton” brings to mind that final awful Creedence Clearwater album where John Fogerty sang “Sweet Hitchiker” and let the rest of the band carry the vocal chores from there.    The idea of Joe Strummer singing only one of the first three songs tells you just about everything you need to know about this late period in the greatest band of the ’70s’ story arc.

In late summer 1982, I’d gone to see the Clash down in Asbury Park plus or minus two weeks from the Shea Stadium set.  It was dispiriting.  Their debut in America at the Palladium in February ’79 — the one depicted in the cover of London Calling, where Paul is smashing his bass against the stage — remains the single greatest performance I’ve ever seen.  Those of us who lived in the New York clubs of the day had just a little bit of a superiority complex, believing — mostly accurately — that our bands, from the Voidoids and Ramones to Talking Heads, Heartbreakers and Fleshtones — could blow away most of those limey “punks” any time, anywhere.  We also knew the Clash were in a different league, and on that night in ’79, as they burst onto the stage with “I’m So Bored With The USA” and bounced against each other like ping pong balls in a lottery drawing, it was pretty clear that these guys were the real deal. Through their return tour later that summer, just before the release of London Calling; their extended stay in 1980 while recording Sandanista; by the time they moved into Bonds in ’81 — only to have fire marshalls force them to double the number of shows in order to honor the (oversold) number of tickets — they had effectively become a New York band.  One of us.  But by the time they returned in ’82 with Terry Chimes back on drums — Topper having been brutally dumped because of his heroin addiction — it was over. They went through the motions in Asbury Park, and they were, after all, THE CLASH, but we didn’t want to hear “Rock The Casbah.”  We wanted things to be the same as they’d been in the brief moment when the Clash replaced the Rolling Stones as the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band In The World.

Live At Shea is a better than fair artifact.  If Joe Strummer’s widow were to have found instead tapes that could comprise Live At The Palladium, we’d have gotten something of far greater value.

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Byrne and Eno’s “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” Is A Remembrance of Things Past

Posted in Music with tags , , , , on October 12, 2008 by johnbuckley100

When David Byrne and Brain Eno last collaborated, there were no Pro Tools, no digital recording, no Internet to email files back and forth across the cyberpond that separates New York from London.  This ghost of an album in this late age of Bushes bears little resemblance to their last outing,  My Life In The Bush of Ghosts.  That one was a really interesting meld of Byrne’s musicianship, Eno’s studio genius, and found sound snippets, from a pentecostal preacher (“Help Me Somebody”) to an Egyptian folk singer (“Regiment”.)  It was the beginning of the ’80s and both Byrne and Eno were in prime form, as the Talking Heads reached their critical and artistic peak and Eno was about to embark on his collaboration with U2.

It’s not that the years haven’t kind to them both.  Byrne’s resisted the reformation of the Talking Heads and, for more than 20 years, continued an interesting, if suboptimal solo career.  Eno’s never lost relevance, and his published diary from a few years back (A Year (with Swollen Appendages)) showcased a life as peripatetic as a character in, well, an Eno song.  But still.  Byrne’s albums made you miss the Talking Heads.  Eno’s collaboration with John Cale tilted heavily in the latter’s favor, and his recent solo album produced one song, “This,” that was worthy of his ’70s masterpieces.  In fact, one could be forgiven thinking the best Eno song since Before and After Science was Robert Wyatt’s “Heaps of Sheeps.”  No matter how wealthy, or fulfilled, each of these multitasking brainiacs may be, as solo rock musicians, each of these guys could use a comeback album.

And they utterly pull it off.  The best way of describing Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is that it’s a great Talking Heads album in which Byrne and Eno have cut out Jerry and the Tom Tom Club. Melodic and sweet, like an Eno album, jaggedy shards and glee club choruses, the hallmarks of past work by each. All songs sung by Byrne, gloriously produced, of course, and utterly contemporary.  30-year old lightning caught in a Smart Water bottle.   It makes rumors of that Roxy Music reunion, with Eno collaborating with Bryan Ferry, all the more enticing.

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Iron & Wine’s Great Gift

Posted in Music with tags , , , on September 28, 2008 by johnbuckley100

Sam Beard may have the most pleasant voice in contemporary music, and with his sister’s harmonies adhering to it like a remora on some sleek shark, it falls from the surface to murky depths with unerring certainty.  Iron & Wine may be as descriptive a name for the actual music created as any band since, well, how about The Clash?  

Last year’s The Shepherd’s Dog made Tulip Frenzy’s Top 10 list, and it was a genuinely great album, some weird amalgam of Whiskeytown and Simon & Garfunkel, with hints of Alejandro Escovedo’s chamber pop and Steve Reich’s gamelan minimalism.  What brought me to listen to them intensively in recent weeks has been my fixation with all things Calexico, triggered by their soaring new album, Carried To Dust.  It sent me back to the collaboration between Beard and Calexico, the magnificent In the Reigns EP from 2005.  And as often happens, when I began to pull on the fishing line, great things arose from the depths, in this case the discovery that Beard has enabled us to purchase first-rate MP3s of Iron & Wine’s live sets over the past few years.

A link from ironandwine.com takes one to playedlastnight.com.  Wise is the reader who goes to it and downloads the show Iron & Wine played in Edinburgh last October 29th.  (October 29th is a date that has peculiar resonance for us Americans right about now…)  Why pick that set?  Well, they helpfully feature it, and brother, we can see why.

I’ve never seen the band, and would have figured its live sets to be comprised of delicate, folky acoustic guitar and the singer/songwriter with maybe his sister on vocals.  From the sounds of it, the touring band Beard fielded a year ago — don’t know who’s on their current tour — was as complete as Alejandro’s big band — pedal steel, electric guitar, piano, bass and drums.  All that’s missing is the string section.  If you have loved the band’s three albums, you will find that great rarity: a live album that renders the familiar songs fresh and more memorable than what was captured in the studio.

A few years ago, Pearl Jam started the practice of beating the boots at their own game by releasing every show as a near instantaneously released live album.  It’s an act of generosity and wisdom to do so.  It’s an interesting choice for a band like Iron & Wine to follow suit.  I’m glad they did, and if you download the Edinburgh show, you will be too.  

Last point: if you have not bought any of the band’s studio albums, you’d be well served to start here.  It’s that good.

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The Morning After Girls Say “Hi”

Posted in Music with tags , , on August 5, 2008 by johnbuckley100

This washed in on the morning’s email tide…


thank you all for your patience. though our silence has been long, it has not gone unnoticed or without due cause. we have made a record we are very pleased with. 

further details will be available in the upcoming weeks-

for now, a small taste…please click here

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