4 posts tagged “music”
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.
Saw the great Solomon Burke at the Gibson a few weeks ago, thanks to Josh Lampkins for great tix and backstage passes. You gotta dig a 400 pound guy who comes onstage in a wheelchair, is loaded onto a throne -yes, a throne- and sings most of the show with his young grandson standing nearly motionless on one side and a nubile unidentified girl on the other constantly mopping his shaven head (what-quit show business?).
Still, the voice is just what you want it to be, even if most of the songs were done as fragments - the set seemed more like a long medley. All the hits - "Down In The Valley," "Got To Get You Off My Mind," "Everybody Needs Somebody." etc. Tight band,always alert to what seemed to be a turn-on-a-dime set list, but basically a chitlins circuit show with a bit of added jive and some tracks from the new "Nashville" album, produced by Buddy Miller, no less. Most of the pretty girls in the audience ended up on stage by invitation from the king himself or one of his minions, dancing or simply watching.
Went backstage but too late to greet the great man himself. The king had left the building, leaving us supplicants waiting for the next royal appearance.
The best show I saw all summer was Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler at the Gibson Amphitheater. The sound was crisp and real, the video screens worked, and perhaps best of all, the whole thing was being shot for a forthcoming DVD, which I'll be first in line to buy.
They did some Dire Straits, some Emmy, some songs from their collaboration "All The Roadrunning," and it was all breathtakingly good; it really was. So cool to see two mature artists (plus a great band of Nashville heavies) doing what they do unpretentiously and proudly. Cool too to see Knopfler fade into the band on Emmy's tunes, and Emmy segue into backup singer/duet partner as called for. It was more his night than hers if you count by whose tunes dominated, but their mutual respect and lack of spotlight-hogging made it all charming and low key, from "Romeo and Juliet" - still as powerful as it was in 1984 - to "Red Dirt Girl" which has the knack of drawing you in to its short sad reality almost before you realize it's over.
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?
