3 posts tagged “blues”
If you're in LA, or if you're a "taste maker" elsewhere, our own local college radio behemoth, NPR's KCRW, is a must-listen. Music supervisors cull it's play list for the next hot movie/commercial/video/iptv tunes. In fact, several ex- and current KCRW programmers have become music supervisors in recent years. Nothing wrong with any of this, BTW; the station's taste is impeccable if narrow.
The flagship music show is called "Morning Becomes Eclectic." This listener of thirty years' standing remembers when the title truly fit: Under original host Tom Schnabel, Tchaikovsky segued into Miles into Muddy Waters into tribal chants and back, with no seeming theme or purpose. It was internet radio before the net - if you don't like what's playing now, wait a minute. (Schnabel still spins in this style on the weekend shift.) Schnabel eventually gave way to Chris Douridas, who was succeeded by current host Nic Harcourt. Harcourt, especially, has great radio chops - he's your hip uncle sharing that new batch o' wax that just arrived with his friend; y'know - the slightly seedy guy who is always working his way over the Atlantic on a tramp steamship but always has the best new records before anyone else. Harcourt has genuine enthusiasm for all things pop and poppy and groovy. Trouble is - no more Miles or Muddy, let alone tribal guys. If it ain't precious, or marketable to the media, it ain't on KCRW. "Eclectic" be damned. This show is built to showcase pure pop and, to some extent, dance and trance. "Groovy" is the keyword here and if you don't get that, just listen for a few days and you will. It's not something you can tell by the chord progressions or the instruments, but it's an attitude. Like porn, you'll know it when you see (hear) it.
I just don't know anyone my age that likes this stuff or responds to it in any visceral way. I agree that public radio should be about the new and adventurous, and not necessarily a reflection of listeners/donors tastes in all things. (Full disclosure here: been there; done that; read the donation promo; answered the donation lines.) I do wonder, though, how many of the paying audience for KCRW really listen to the music programming in more than a cursory way. I can hear the sound of radio dials heading right every morning at nine as "All Things Considered " yields to Harcourt's fifth-Beatle britpop. (Again, I really dig Nic's presentation and musical knowledge; just wish he'd take out his old pal's blues records for a spin once in a while...)
True this: I discovered Coldplay, Death Cab and Imogen Heap via Harcourt. But why no space in a self-proclaimed "eclectic" programming block for Miles, or Muddy, or Merle, or Johann, or Buddy Miller? Could it be that all these artists are more gritty than groovy; a little less accessible, a little less well-suited to being played as aural wallpaper for the cubicles at CAA and NBC-Universal?
This digg item got me thinking about Mick Taylor, and about the experience of seeing him first with John Mayall at the Whiskey, then with the Stones at the Forum. Taylor's playing was so jaw-droppingly intense, even as a teen prodigy who succeeded the might Peter Green with the Bluesbreakers. At the Whiskey, her was barely older than I, but fully formed. (Like me, he seldom moved with the music, saving his energy for the music. I was vindicated again-another awesome lead guitarist who saw no need to jump around like a spinning top!) Hed had a great feel for the blues, treating the songs with respect but not as museum pieces. That's not easy with the occasionally too-reverent Mayall, but Taylor pulled it off. Blues is supposed to be fun too. He had the widest, truest hand vibrato; it sounded almost as if he was playing slide, and his actual slide playinf was flawlessly in tune and creative, going beyond the usual cliches. His long notes hung and swung. His playing was always limpid and to the point. no rococo filigree for him. He came out of the same Buddy Guy/Pee Wee Crayton/Hubert Sumlin school as Clapton, but he got that a single note could sometimes stand alone and invite you in. No need to encircle every note with a protective riff.
(By the way, where were these skinny English guys getting all those great old sunburst Les Pauls? We could barely find them here and we spent every Saturday scouring the pawnshops and general stores. Someone was getting them, but not us.)
Not that he couldn't, and can't, wail with the best, which is clearly what the Stones needed and got from Taylor. On "Get Your Ya-Yas Out" he owns the rock solo style. Keith is tough, and a true original, but the Stones have always needed, and seldom had, someone who could just stand there and fuckin' play a single-string guitar solo. Taylor did, and the band has never and will never sound as good, but he obviously didn't fit the image as well as Ron Wood, who was a pretty fair soloist himself in his Faces/Gasoline Alley days, but has apparently decided as a Stone to take the (drug) money and run. Taylor's post-Stones career has exactly caught fire in a big-time way, but it's not clear that's what he was really after anyway. The records he made with Carla Olson are tasty, as are his solo albums, they're just not big-deal rock and roll records. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Better to make a perfect miniature, I think, than simply another large empty canvas.
I dunno. I'm thinking of a new blog here; something that would just be music, art, photography. No stuff about the kid (sorry, Sarah); no politics. Not like this.
Some possible threads: Chicago blues. Americana; twang; Knopfler; guitars and gear; Scorcese; John Ford; Woody Allen. Maybe tech stuff.
Do we need this blog?
