Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

The lake was Lake Alice, on the campus of the University of Florida, in Gainesville. My parents moved there for work at the university in 1970, just before I was born, and we stayed until I was eight years old, living in a ranch house with a carport, a big backyard, and bright pink azalea bushes springing up in front of my bedroom window.

I’ve been thinking about those years a lot lately thanks to my discovery of Tom Petty’s “Gainesville.” The song was recorded in 1998 but not released until 2018, one year after Petty’s death from a drug overdose at age 66. Petty was born in Gainesville in 1950, twenty years and one day before I was, and lived there until 1974, when he left for Los Angeles with his first band, Mudcrutch. The song’s music video is full of shots of parts of the city he was known to have frequented. There are one-story ranch houses like the one I grew up in; red-brick university buildings; Griffin Stadium (“the Swamp”), where the Gators play; trees decorated with Spanish moss. And there’s Lake Alice and its alligators. As I watched the video, childhood memories surged from the back of my brain to the front, and I felt a sadness for my old town I hadn’t felt in years. Gainesville was a big town, Petty sings. It wasn’t really, but for a while it was the only one we both knew.

The video also has a shot of the mailbox at one of Petty’s childhood homes. It shows the address: 1715 NW 6th Terrace. I grew up on 16th Terrace, a 38-minute walk away (according to Google Maps). In 2019, after the video came out, someone stole the mailbox. (...)

Petty and I overlapped in Gainesville for just four years and obviously led very different lives. (I wasn’t playing in Mudcrutch; I was going to pre-kindergarten.) But it turns out we both transgressed at Lake Alice. Watching the “Gainesville” video sent me down a rabbit hole of research into Petty’s early life, savoring the chance to connect with my own story through his. I found a Gainesville Sun article about how, in 1966, when Petty was 16 and had just earned his driver’s license, he accidentally drove his mother’s old Chevy Impala into the lake. He was supposed to be at a dance, and his mom had to come pick him up in their other family car. (...)

Reading that Gainesville Sun article, I found myself wondering about Tom Petty’s mom. What was she thinking as she drove her son home from Lake Alice that night, unaware of the fame that would find him just a few years later? Did she try to teach him some kind of lesson? Or was she thinking, instead, of her own transgressions, perhaps invisible to her son? Did he—sitting, embarrassed in the passenger seat—still believe she was larger than life? Or was he already past that?

You’re all right anywhere you land, he would write 22 years later. You’re okay anywhere you fall. For both of us, that was Gainesville, for a while. And then Gainesville shrank, becoming something else: somewhere we used to live, somewhere we no longer know, somewhere we were all so young. Long ago and far away, another time, another day.  ~ Tracks on Tracks

[ed. Thought I'd heard most TP songs, but not this one.]

Open Reel Ensemble

Open Reel Ensemble Composes Ethereal ‘Magnetic Folklore’ Using Reel-to-Reel Recorders
via: Colossus (also feat. Electronicos Fantasticos).

Milcho Leviev

[ed. See also: Milcho Leviev & Dave Holland, album "The oracle", live al Suntory hall, Tokyo, 1986.]

Woodshedding It

[ed. Persevering at something even though you suck at it.]

Generally speaking, we have lost respect for how much time something takes. In our impatient and thus increasingly plagiarized society, practice is daunting. It is seen as prerequisite, a kind of pointless suffering you have to endure before Being Good At Something and Therefore an Artist instead of the very marrow of what it means to do anything, inextricable from the human task of creation, no matter one’s level of skill.

Many words have been spilled about the inherent humanity evident in artistic merit and talent; far fewer words have been spilled on something even more human: not being very good at something, but wanting to do it anyway, and thus working to get better. To persevere in sucking at something is just as noble as winning the Man Booker. It is self-effacing, humbling, frustrating, but also pleasurable in its own right because, well, you are doing the thing you want to do. You want to make something, you want to be creative, you have a vision and have to try and get to the point where it can be feasibly executed. Sometimes this takes a few years and sometimes it takes an entire lifetime, which should be an exciting rather than a devastating thought because there is a redemptive truth in practice — it only moves in one direction, which is forward. There is no final skill, no true perfection.

Practice is in service not to some abstract arbiter of craft, the insular juries of the world, the little skills bar over a character’s head in The Sims, but to you. Sure, practice is never-ending. Even Yo-Yo Ma practices, probably more than most. That’s also what’s so great about it, that it never ends. You can do it forever in an age where nothing lasts. Nobody even has to know. It’s a great trick — you just show up more improved than you were before, because, for better or for worse, rarely is practice public.

by Kate Wagner, The Late Review |  Read more:

The Last Good Thing

On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor’s front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn’t filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven’t held them in a while.

I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.

Still, the second I saw the binder—containing “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years on DVD”—appear on my local Free Box Facebook group (where my neighbors give away everything from original artwork to half-empty bottles of shampoo), I wanted it deeply, covetously, like when you see someone wearing a wool sweater that is so entirely your style, you can’t believe it isn’t already yours. Ninety-two disks! Without a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Interested!” and pressed return. And the next day, I stood awkwardly on my neighbor’s porch to collect my prize.

At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.

In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.

Obviously.

That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.

“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.

Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?

To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.

“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”

Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.

An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.

If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.

Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.

For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.

It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.

It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?

It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences. (...)

Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”

But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.

A lot of things seemed inevitable then.

I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.

I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.

by Jess Love, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lamb

How Willie Nelson Sees America

When Willie Nelson performs in and around New York, he parks his bus in Weehawken, New Jersey. While the band sleeps at a hotel in midtown Manhattan, he stays on board, playing dominoes, napping. Nelson keeps musician’s hours. For exercise, he does sit-ups, arm rolls, and leg lifts. He jogs in place. “I’m in pretty good shape, physically, for ninety-two,” he told me recently. “Woke up again this morning, so that’s good.”

On September 12th, Nelson drove down to the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, in Camden. His band, a four-piece, was dressed all in black; Nelson wore black boots, black jeans, and a Bobby Bare T-shirt. His hair, which is thicker and darker than it appears under stage lights, hung in two braids to his waist. A scrim masked the front of the stage, and he walked out unseen, holding a straw cowboy hat. Annie, his wife of thirty-four years, rubbed his back and shoulders. A few friends watched from the wings: members of Sheryl Crow’s band, which had opened for him, and John Doe, the old punk musician, who had flown in from Austin. (At the next show, in Holmdel, Bruce Springsteen showed up.) Out front, big screens played the video for Nelson’s 1986 single “Living in the Promiseland.”

“Promiseland” joined Nelson’s preshow in the spring, after ICE ramped up its raids on immigrants. The lyrics speak on behalf of newcomers: “Give us your tired and weak / And we will make them strong / Bring us your foreign songs / And we will sing along.” The video cuts between footage of Holocaust survivors arriving on Liberty ships and of Haitian migrants on wooden boats. In Camden—two nights after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one night after the State Department warned immigrants against “praising” his murder, hours after bomb threats forced the temporary closure of seven historically Black colleges—the images hit hard. When the video ended, three things happened at once: stagehands yanked the scrim away, Nelson sang the first notes of “Whiskey River,” and a giant American flag unfurled behind him.

“Whiskey River” has been Nelson’s opener for decades. He tends to start it with a loud, ringing G chord, struck nine times, like a bell. On this night, he sat out the beginning and took the first solo instead, strumming forcefully, pushing the tempo. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I pick up a guitar,” Nelson said. He plays to find out, discovering new ways into songs he’s been singing, in some cases, since he was a child. “Willie loves to play music more than anyone I’ve ever met,” the musician Norah Jones told me. “He can’t stop, and he shouldn’t.” For Nelson, music is medicine—he won’t do the lung exercises his doctors prescribe, but “singing for an hour is good for you,” he says. His daughter Amy put it more bluntly: “I think it’s literally keeping him alive.”

Last year, Nelson didn’t make it to every performance. On those nights, his older son, Lukas, filled in. At the end of the tour, no one knew if Nelson would go out again; five months later, he did. I started following him in February, in Florida. In Key West, Lukas and Annie flanked Nelson as he sat and rested before going on. Annie had her hand on the small of his back and Lukas on his shoulder; they looked like two cornermen coaxing a boxer back into the ring. Nelson suffers from emphysema. He barely survived COVID-19. (He got so sick he wanted to die; Annie told him if he did she would kill him.) His voice is still inky, he struggles for air, but he stays in charge, or lets go, as the moment requires.

“I’m definitely following Willie,” Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, told me. “He sets the tempo. He picks the songs.” Raphael is tall, with dark, curly hair and the easy swagger of a man who has spent his life onstage. When he started with Nelson, in 1973, there was no set list. Every night was “stream of consciousness,” catch-as-catch-can. Now, even with set lists taped to the carpet, Nelson might switch songs or skip ahead, lose his way, or drop verses—things he did as a younger man, too. At the end of a number that’s really careened, he’ll look over his shoulder and cross his arms in an umpire’s safe sign. “We made it,” he’s telling Raphael on these occasions. “We’re home.” (...)

“Willie means more to me than the Liberty Bell,” Jeff Tweedy told me. Tweedy and his band, Wilco, played a few dates with Nelson this year, as part of the annual Outlaw Music Festival, which Nelson headlined along with Bob Dylan. (Other performers included Billy Strings and Lucinda Williams.) Tweedy said he admires Nelson’s vision of America—“a big tent, and it should be”—and the way Nelson says what he thinks without rancor, always punching up. “He doesn’t aim at his fellow-citizens. He aims at corporations. He aims at injustice.”

Nelson has a knack for leaning left without losing the room. He stumped for Jimmy Carter, who was a friend, and for the former congressman and Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich; he co-chairs the advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; he has pushed for the use of biofuels, running his tour buses on vegetable oil and soybeans; he opposed the war in Iraq. In 2006, he recorded a Ned Sublette song called “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.” “I’ve known straight and gay people all my life,” he told Texas Monthly. “I can’t tell the difference. People are people where I came from.” (“Beer for My Horses,” a hang-’em-high duet with Toby Keith, has aged less well.)

In 2018, when the government began separating families at the southern border, Nelson said, “Christians everywhere should be up in arms.” That fall, he played a new song, “Vote ’Em Out,” at a rally for Beto O’Rourke, who was running for Senate. O’Rourke told me the point wasn’t only the stand Nelson took; it was the idea of Texas he represented. There was a temptation, O’Rourke said, to accept the caricature of Texas as “extreme, conservative, macho, tough-guy,” though for people like him, who’d lived there all their lives, “true Texas is kindness, hospitality, open hearts.” Nelson, he said, embodied “the best of Texas: you can be a freak, a weirdo, a cowboy, a rancher, a cello player, whatever. He’s the patron saint of that—growing his hair, rejecting corporate music, and just being a good fucking human being.”

At Nelson’s concerts, all of those types gather. They always have. In the seventies, when Nelson was still playing dance halls, ranch hands and refinery workers shared the floor with hippies who’d heard his songs on FM radio. It was a volatile mix. At the Half-Dollar, outside Houston, groups of long-haired kids sat in front of the stage as cowboys two-stepped behind them. The cowboys “would start dancing, do a little spin, and kick somebody in the back,” Steve Earle recalled. “Willie caught it out of the corner of his eye.” Nelson stopped the band in the middle of a song. “There’s room for some to sit and for some to dance,” he said, and, as soon as he did so, there was.

“People out there get to clap their hands and sing for a couple hours, and then they go home feeling better,” Nelson said. “I get the same enjoyment that they do—it’s an equal exchange of energy.” As a young man in Texas, Nelson taught Sunday school and considered the ministry. On the bus in Weehawken, I asked if he saw his work as akin to a preacher’s. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Nelson said. “I don’t try to preach to nobody.” Annie disagreed: “I think he’s a shaman.” Musicians like him draw strangers together, she said. “Let’s face it, we’re being divided intentionally. That’s part of the playbook—divide and conquer. It’s been around a long time. When somebody’s saying hello to somebody without knowing their political ideology, and they’re just enjoying music together, that’s church. That’s healing. That’s really important right now. Really, really important.” (...)

Nelson doesn’t mind doing two or three takes of a number. He bristles at four. Don Was, who produced Nelson’s album “Across the Borderline,” in 1992, told me about recording the title track in Dublin, where Nelson had a night off from touring. They spent an hour working out the arrangement—talking, not playing—then went for the first take. Halfway through the second verse, Was thought, Oh, man, this is unbelievable. Please, nobody fuck up. “He plays this incredible solo in the middle. Third verse, I’m really freaking out—please, nobody. And nobody did.” Kris Kristofferson added harmonies; that was the only overdub. Then Nelson rolled a joint and marked it with a Sharpie, about three-quarters of the way down. He told the house engineer, “I’m going to smoke this joint. When it gets burned down to the blue dot, your mix is done.” Forty-five minutes later, it was. “That’s the mix on the album,” Was said.

These days, Cannon cuts backing tracks with musicians who “get Willie and don’t look at the clock.” Nelson comes in later, as he was doing now, to play and sing. “He has no pitch issues,” Cannon says. “He’s allergic to out-of-tune-ness.” But Nelson plays odd tricks with rhythm—phrasing behind the beat while his guitar rushes forward. “Willie’s timing is so weird,” Raphael told me. “It’s like a snake slithering across the ground.” Nelson is one of the most imitated guitarists in the world, Cannon says, but, without his feel, imitators “sound silly.” When Nelson plays, “even the crazy shit sounds beautiful.” Cannon tries not to sand down the edges: “I love his music too much to screw it up.” (...)

“You never know exactly what he’s going to do,” Micah Nelson told me, describing the concerts he’s played with his dad. He went on, “You’re always present. Nobody’s phoning it in, because you never know where the spirit’s going to take him.” Nelson may sing a verse way ahead of everyone, when they’re “still on the first chord,” and the instinct is to speed up, to catch him, Micah said. “It’s, like, No, no, he’s waiting for us over there, three blocks away.” Nelson lets the band close the gap, then keep going. “He’s singing so outside of the pocket, there is no pocket. He’s obliterating any sort of timing,” Micah continued. Somehow, it works. Any number of times, Micah has thought, Oh, shit, he’s lost the plot. He always finds it again. Playing with Nelson is like performing with the Flying Wallendas, Micah said, or with Neil Young’s band. It’s the opposite of perfectly choreographed shows with backing tracks that all but play themselves. There’s never a safety net. “Obviously, it helps to have great songs,” he added. “Now that I say it, the songs are the safety net. You really can’t go wrong when you have good songs.” (...)

Amy recalled a time when she and her sister were trampled by fans trying to get to their father: “My mom said, ‘He’s not going to really know what that’s like, because they stop when they get to him. They will plow through you to get to him.’ ” Any hard feelings fell away when she thought about the alternative—years her father had spent going nowhere, the life he might have led had he not broken through. “Whatever resentment I had for his fans disappeared when I started looking at it from that perspective.”

by Alex Abramovich, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Danny Clinch
[ed. What more is there to say about Willie at this point? Well, this profile of a recent tour, is one example. Then there's this, by Bob Dylan:]

I asked Dylan about Nelson, and he wrote back with a warning: “It’s hard to talk about Willie without saying something stupid or irrelevant, he is so much of everything.” He went on:

How can you make sense of him? How would you define the indefinable or the unfathomable? What is there to say? Ancient Viking Soul? Master Builder of the Impossible? Patron poet of people who never quite fit in and don’t much care to? Moonshine Philosopher? Tumbleweed singer with a PhD? Red Bandana troubadour, braids like twin ropes lassoing eternity? What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it’s the last loyal dog in the universe? Cowboy apparition, writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed goodbye too soon or stayed too long. I guess you can say all that. But it really doesn’t tell you a lot or explain anything about Willie. Personally speaking I’ve always known him to be kind, generous, tolerant and understanding of human feebleness, a benefactor, a father and a friend. He’s like the invisible air. He’s high and low. He’s in harmony with nature. And that’s what makes him Willie.

Joni Mitchell

[ed. A Christmas song. Best to everyone.]

Jackson Browne

[ed. Also, These Days (feat. Luz Casal). Don't confront me with my failures. I had not forgotten them (written at 16). Excellent album. More (here).]

"Late For The Sky"

The words had all been spoken
And somehow the feeling still wasn't right
And still we continued on through the night
Tracing our steps from the beginning
Until they vanished into the air
Trying to understand how our lives has led us there

Looking hard into your eyes
There was nobody I'd ever known
Such an empty surprise to feel so alone

Now for me some words come easy
But I know that they don't mean that much
Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch
You never knew what I loved in you
I don't know what you loved in me
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be

Awake again I can't pretend and I know I'm alone
And close to the end of the feeling we've known

How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been dreaming I could make it right
If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might
To be the one you need

Awake again I can't pretend and I know I'm alone
And close to the end of the feeling we've known

How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been running for that morning flight
Through the whispered promises and the changing light
Of the bed where we both lie
Late for the sky

...of the bed where we both lie

Thelonius Monk
via:

Tedeschi Trucks Band

 

John & Yoko: One to One

A fire alert disrupts the Venice screening of One to One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ documentary about Lennon’s rambunctious post-Beatles heyday, when he and his artist wife Ono were first putting down roots in New York. Inside the hushed screening room, the flashing red lights and blaring alarm provide the second big surprise of the night. The first was how much I was enjoying the show.

Short of a documentary that unearths incontrovertible new evidence that he faked his own death, I’m not convinced that the world needs another John Lennon film. The medium, surely, has him well covered already. But Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have managed to find and mine a rich source of material, tightly tucked away amid all the other wildcat wells. Their film turns back the clock to the early 1970s and a benefit gig that occurred around the time of Lennon’s deportation battle with Nixon (see previous documentaries for details) and his extended lost weekend with May Pang (ditto). Crucially, too, it throws this concert against the maelstrom of the US political scene, with a channel-surfing aesthetic that skips from car and Coke commercials to the Attica prison riot and the near-fatal shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace.

While Lennon claims that he spent his first year in New York mostly watching TV, One to One suggests otherwise. Instead he hit the ground running, hurling himself at the action to become the standard bearer and figurehead for whatever progressive leftist cause was doing the rounds that week. The film blends archive footage with a trove of previously unheard phone conversations to show the ways in which he and Ono leveraged their celebrity status and surrounded themselves with a crew of colourful upstarts, from Allen Ginsberg to Jerry Rubin. The oddest of these, perhaps, is the activist AJ Weberman, who is tasked with a mission to raid Bob Dylan’s bins in order to prove what a “multimillionaire hypocrite” the singer has become. Ono pleads with Weberman to apologise, explaining that they need Dylan to perform at a planned “Free the People” concert in Miami, but AJ is unrepentant and initially won’t be budged.

In the event, the Free the People event was cancelled. But Lennon promptly finds a new focus with the One to One benefit for disabled children from the Willowbrook state school. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have remastered Phil Spector’s muddy original recording so that the footage now plays with a fresh, bullish swagger. This was Lennon’s first full-length concert since the Beatles performed at Candlestick Park and, it transpired, the last he would ever play.

If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again. It catches him like a butterfly at arguably his most interesting period, when he felt liberated and unfettered and was living “like a student” in a two-room loft in Greenwich Village. He’s radioactive with charisma, tilting at windmills and kicking out sparks. 

by Xan Brooks, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: One to One/YT

[ed. Haven't seen this yet, but the link above about May Pang and her relationship with John was fascinating. Didn't know Yoko set them up to take pressure off of John's straying, and that, after a couple years (and an alleged affair of her own), became jealous and reeled him back in.]

Scenes from the “This Is Spinal Tap” Cutting-Room Floor

In 1982, I began shooting an almost entirely improvised film,“This Is Spinal Tap,” which also happened to be my first as a director. It transformed my life and the lives of my three friends, co-writers, and co-stars: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.

We also decided that it was time to tell the full story of the making of the original “This Is Spinal Tap.” What you are about to read is a short excerpt from that account.

Early on in editing “This Is Spinal Tap,” it became obvious that some of the film’s plotlines would have to be thrown out altogether. For example, Spinal Tap initially had an opening act, a New Wave band called the Dose. The guys are against having the Dose tour with them. They feel that the group’s punky music isn’t a good fit with heavy metal. But then, during a sound check, they catch sight of the Dose’s lead singer, Stellazine, played by Cherie Currie, the former lead singer of the Runaways—a beautiful, sexy, young blonde in a skintight, metallic-blue catsuit.

After a deliberation of about an eighth of a second, the band does a one-eighty and insists to Ian (Tony Hendra) that it’s critical the Dose be their opening act for the entire length of the tour. Ian obliges and books the band. But there’s a problem: Stellazine is what one might deem a “free spirit.” After a scene in which Nigel (Guest) is seen making time with her, he turns up with a herpes sore on his lip. Next, we see David (McKean) pairing up with Stellazine, after which he, too, sports a herpes sore. Stellazine then hangs out with Derek (Shearer) and then Viv (David Kaff), both of whom subsequently also display the herpes badge.

A band meeting is called: Should the Dose remain on the tour? The four herpes-afflicted Tap members vote the Dose out. Mick (R. J. Parnell), who is clueless and herpes-free, votes for the Dose to stay.

Currie’s scenes were terrific, but the travelling-herpes show took way too long to play out. So, unfortunately, the sequence had to go. There is, however, a remnant of this subplot in the scene in which Nigel and David defend the “Smell the Glove” album cover to Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher). Nigel has a sore on his lower lip, and David has one on his upper lip. Conspicuous as these blemishes are, they go unexplained. Depending on your take, this is either a complete non sequitur or an ambiguous “What the hell is going on?” moment. Regardless, it always got a laugh—which surprised me. (...)

There was also a subplot about Derek going through a painful divorce. We filmed a number of scenes of him on the phone, getting the latest bad news from his lawyer. In one scene, he learns that his soon-to-be ex has taken out a full-page ad in the New Musical Express laying out her settlement demands. In another, he is seen saying, “She can’t have the Lamborghini. . . . O.K., she can have the Mini.” Again, it slowed the momentum. So the audience would never learn of Derek’s crumbling marriage.

Parnell, who had no background in acting, delivered an incredible performance in a scene we cut. The setup was that Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer) had succeeded in getting the band to do an early­morning radio-station appearance. What Artie didn’t know was that, on that day, the station had changed its programming format from sports talk to rock and roll. One caller, who wasn’t aware of the change, asks the band, “Can you settle a bet I have with a buddy of mine? I think Ferguson Jenkins had fifty shutouts with the Cubs. He says he had forty-four. Who’s right?” Just as the radio host is about to brush off the question, Mick—shades on, cigarette in hand—answers, “Actually, you’re both wrong, mate. Ferguson Jenkins has had forty-eight career shutouts, and not all of them were with the Cubs.”

Then, in his sleepy drawl, he proceeds to deliver a complete statistical breakdown of Jenkins’s career. But since we ended up losing the radio-station scene, we lost with it Parnell’s eloquent Ferguson Jenkins soliloquy.

I not only cut scenes we had planned. On any given day, brilliant stuff would spontaneously fly out of someone’s mouth. A lot of that stuff had to go, too, to keep the film’s motor running. In particular, I remember a dissertation that David delivers to Marty (as played by me) about slime molds:

Slime molds are so close to being both plant and animal that it’s like they can’t make up their mind. And they’re thinking now that maybe this is who’s been running the earth all this time: these layabouts who can’t commit.

’Cause there’s more slime molds than any other form of protoplasm on the planet. And if they wanted to—if they finally made up their minds to commit to being either plant or animal—they could take us over like that. You’re walking down an alleyway. You slip and twist your ankle, maybe. It wasn’t an accident. It was an attack...

It’s easy to become self-indulgent. You fall in love with things that make you laugh, and you want to leave it in, even though it doesn’t help sculpt the elephant. But you have to be ruthless. If you indulge, you lose the audience.

So we sculpted away. Originally, the scene in which the band gets lost trying to find the stage had more dialogue between the band and the maintenance man who gives them directions (played by a terrific actor named Wonderful Smith). We had a bit in which Nigel positions himself in a fixed spot, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” so that the other guys would have a reference point to prevent them from getting even more lost. But this took away from a more important bit, the band’s efforts to amp themselves up for the crowd. (It was in this spirit that Harry shouted out a line that became one of the film’s most quoted: “Hello, Cleveland!”)

The “Australian’s nightmare” scene, in which Ian ridicules Jeanine and quits, used to include a series of filthy comebacks improvised by Chadwick, with Jeanine calling Ian a “bumbling, dwarf-willied prick,” a “fucking twit full of shit,” and an “impotent bat ’n’ balls full o’ crabs.”

As tempting as it was to leave these moments in, all they did was give the elephant a second trunk. When it came to the scenes we shot depicting the seamy sex-and-drugs side of rock and roll, we made the decision to play that aspect down. There is a fleeting moment in which you can see some groupies sniffing powder. But we cut the other scenes showing drug use, and one in which Nigel has his arm around a topless girl. We felt it went against the tone of the film.

For me, looking back after forty years, all I see are the flaws that stayed in the movie, such as the continuity mistakes that I would have been able to avoid in a scripted film. With an improvised film, there are times when you just have to live with the mismatches. For instance, in the scene in which the band reacts to the all-black cover of the “Smell the Glove” album, you’ll notice that Nigel’s position keeps changing from shot to shot. First, we see him standing to the right of Ian. Then, after a cut to David and Jeanine, we go back to Nigel, who is now standing to Ian’s left as he observes, “It’s so black. It’s, like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is: none. None more black.” Normally, you want to avoid that kind of gaffe. But it was the only take in which Chris said, “None more black,” so we lived with it.

Few viewers pick up on this stuff. The editor Bob Leighton, with whom I worked on this and many of my other films, has always said that it’s more important to make the audio work smoothly than the visuals. A jump in sound is much more jarring than a jump in picture. 

by Rob Reiner and Spinal Tap, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Embassy Pictures / Everett

Loggins & Messina (Single Version)

Lukas Nelson on His Favorite Song

Lukas Nelson Reveals His All-Time Favorite Song and No, He Didn’t Pick It for the Reason You Think

Competing for the same Grammy Award with someone who wrote your all-time favorite song is one type of daunting challenge. Competing against a close loved one, let alone a relative, is another. Lukas Nelson is one of the few musicians who can say they’ve experienced both. The eldest living son of country music icon Willie Nelson has enjoyed a prolific and successful music career himself. That has inevitably put him in the same ring as his father, who remains busy as ever well into his 90s.

Both Willie and Lukas Nelson received a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Country Album for Oh, What a Beautiful World and American Romance, respectively... During a 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lukas discussed what it was like competing against his father for a Grammy. “Against is a strong word,” Lukas said with a smile.

“Alongside is better,” he continued. “I mean, the Nelsons have a 40% chance of winning, which is pretty good.” Later in the interview, Lukas cited “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” as his favorite song. Once again, he pointed out the irrelevance of his relation to the track. “That’s probably my favorite song,” Lukas said. “The fact that it happens to be written by my father is mind-blowing.”

Willie Nelson wrote and recorded “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” for the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose, in which Nelson plays country singer Buck Bonham. Lukas Nelson, Willie’s second son, wouldn’t be born until eight years later on Christmas Day, 1988...

“Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” is a beloved addition to the songwriter’s catalogue—and not just because of the rogue performance at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas when Willie’s guitarist, Bee Spears, put on tights and a tutu and strapped himself into a harness from an earlier performance of Peter Pan. “He was having a terrific time swooping and sailing and doing his impression of an angel flying too close to the ground,” Willie wrote in his autobiography, Willie. “It was the funniest thing I ever saw onstage.”

Of course, the song also has plenty of opportunities to be reflective and sincere. Willie has often used the song as a way to pay tribute to his eldest son, Billy Nelson, who died by suicide on Christmas Day, 1991. His younger brother, Lukas, was only three years old. The grieving father told a friend at the time, “I’ve never experienced anything so devastating in my life,” per People.

by Melanie Davis, American Songwriter |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Willie had some chops.]

Multi-Talented

Orchestral Job Interview
[ed. "I'll play anything"! Don't know her name unfortunately.]

Will West Coast Jazz Finally Get Some Respect?

Will West Coast Jazz Finally Get Some Respect? 

[ed. From me, certainly. In the late 50s and 60s East Coast jazz seemed all about pushing experimental boundaries, and some of it just became too effortful to listen to (Bill Evans an exception). I'm thinking about later Coltrane and especially the burgeoning 'free jazz' movement, as typified by artists like Ornette Colman, Cecil Taylor and others. Just beeps, squawks, honks and atonal solos that didn't seem to have any clear grounding or destination. West Coast jazz on the other hand sounded cool, laid back, and melodic, and projected a sense of style and energy that I found much more appealing (complex but still accessible).]

Music, Forest, Body

The Musical Instruments Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk across Central Park from Lincoln Center, reveals the tangled relationships among local ecologies, colonial trade, and the craft of instrument making. At first, the galleries seem like mausoleums for sound. Silent instruments sit illuminated behind sheets of plateglass, reliquaries for the remains of music whose spirits have flown. The glass, polished wooden floors, and long, narrow dimensions of the galleries give the sound of footfalls and voices a lively, clattery feel, unlike the expansive warmth of concert halls, reinforcing the sense of isolation from musical sound. This initial impression evaporates, though, when I let go of the idea that this is a space for direct experience of sound. Instead, we can marvel here at stories of materiality, human ingenuity, and the relationships among cultures. (...)

Precolonial instruments often used indigenous materials. Walking through the galleries is an education in the many ways that humans have sonified matter from their surroundings. Clay, shaped then fired, turns human breath and lip vibrations into amplified tones. Rocks turned to bells and strings reveal metallurgical connections to land. Plant matter is given voice in carved wood, stretched palm frond, and spun fiber. A bestiary of animals sings through taut skins and reshaped teeth and tusks. Each instrument is rooted in local ecological context. Condor feathers in South American pipes. Kapok wood, snake skins, antelope horn, and porcupine quills on African drums, harps, and lutes. Boxwood and brass in European oboes. Wood, silk, bronze, and stone in se, shiqing, and yunluo, Chinese percussive and stringed instruments. Music emerged from human relation- ship with the beyond-human world, its varied sounds around the world revealing not only the many forms of human culture but the diverse sonorous, reverberant properties of rock, soil, and living beings...

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonizers picked out the material most pleasing to their ears and most useful to instrument-making workshops. A few European materials made the grade and were retained, even as “exotic” woods and animal parts became more readily available. Spruce and maple, especially, remained the favored wood for the bodies of stringed instruments and the soundboards of pianos. Calfskin topped tympani. These European materials were joined by ivory, favored for its workability and stability, and tropical woods whose density, smoothness, elasticity, and tones met musical needs: mpingo’s tight, silky grain; Pernambuco’s extraordinary strength, elasticity, and responsiveness; rosewood’s warmth and stability; and padauk’s resonance. These tropical woods all belong to the same taxonomic family, tree cousins to the beans, and have tight-grained, dense wood from slow-growing trees. Most take seventy or more years to reach harvestable age. On a concert stage, we hear the voices of tree elders. (...)

The tropical woods and ivory most favored for instrument making are now mostly threatened or endangered. Nineteenth-century exploitation has turned to twenty-first-century ruination. Demand for materials for musical instruments, though, was not the primary cause of many of these losses. The volume of ivory used for violin bows and bassoon rings was dwarfed by exports for tableware handles, billiard balls, religious carvings, and ornaments, although piano keys consumed hundreds of thousands of pounds of tusks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pernambuco was extirpated from most of its range not by violin bow makers, but through overharvesting for dye made from its crimson heartwood. The country Brazil gets its name from brasa, “ember” in Portuguese, for the glowing-coal color of the wood whose trade was so important in the founding of the country.

Mpingo woodlands are in decline, driven by export for instruments and flooring, and by local uses for carving. Compounding the problem of overharvesting is the twisting, gnarled form of mpingo trunks. Carving straight billets for oboes and clarinets from such wood is challenging, and often less than ten percent of the cut log is usable. Rosewoods, often used for guitar fingerboards, are mostly exported for furniture, with more wood in one bed frame or cabinet than in any guitar shop. Although trade in many rosewood species is restricted by international law, the wood is now so valuable that financial speculators and luxury goods manufacturers drive an illegal market worth billions of dollars yearly.

The sound of contemporary music is therefore a product of past colonialism and present-day trade, but, with very few exceptions, it is not a driver of species endangerment. Indeed, the relationships between musicians and their instruments—often built over decades of daily bodily connection—serve as an inspiring example of how we might live in better relationship to forests. An oboe or violin contains less wood than a chair or stack of magazines, yet this single instrument yields beauty and utility for decades, sometimes centuries. Contrast this with the culture of overexploitation and disposability that pervades so much of our relationship to material objects and their sources. For example, we threw out more than twelve million tons of furniture in the United States in 2018, eighty percent of it buried in landfills, most of the rest burned, and only one-third of one percent recycled. Much of this furniture was sourced from tropical forests, often supplied to the United States through manufacturing hubs in Asia. Such trade is increasing and the World Wildlife Fund states that the “world’s natural forests cannot sustainably meet the soaring global demand for timber products.” If the rest of our economy took as much care of wood products as musicians do of their instruments, the deforestation crisis would be greatly eased.

Driven to action by a desire to honor the materials with which they work, some musicians and luthiers are now at the forefront of seeking alternatives to the exploitative use of wood, ivory, and other materials from threatened species. This is especially important work because musical instruments are now far more numerous than in past centuries. More than ten million guitars and hundreds of thousands of violins are made annually. Such volume of trade cannot be built on rare woods. It is therefore now possible, with some searching, to find instruments made from wood certified to come from sustainable logging operations. The Forest Stewardship Council, for example, puts its stamp of approval on several new lines of instruments. The Mpingo Conservation & Development Initiative in southeastern Tanzania promotes community-based forest management where local residents own, manage, and benefit from mpingo and other woodland species, managing forests sustainably to help the local economy. Instrument makers are also introducing new materials, relieving pressure on endangered woods. Until the late twentieth century, only twenty tree species provided most of the wood for guitars, violins, violas, cellos, mandolins, and other Western stringed instruments. Today the variety of wood sources for instrument making has increased to more than one hundred species. Alongside this diversification of natural products, manufactured materials like carbon fiber and wood laminate are substituting for solid wood.

In the decades that come, unless our path changes, it will not be the overharvesting of particularly valuable species that challenges our sources of wood and animal parts for instruments. Instead, the loss of entire forest ecosystems will remake the relationship between human music and the land. The forests from which we now draw our most precious musical raw materials are in decline...

A few old instruments—carefully tended by musicians—now evoke the memory of the departed or degraded forests. On the stage at Lincoln Center, we hear woods from past decades and centuries. Sherry Sylar plays on oboes whose woods were harvested decades ago in the early twentieth century. Each one has a “passport” documenting the wood’s provenance, showing that it was not obtained through recent cutting of now-endangered trees. When we talked, she described how some colleagues scour the country for sales of older oboes, hoping to find instruments with good wood from ages past. The music of Sylar’s violinist colleague, Sheryl Staples, comes from a Guarneri violin. Its woods are at least three hundred years old, harvested from spruce and maple forests that grew on a preindustrial Earth. Although wood for instruments still comes from the Fiemme Valley forests in northern Italy that supplied Guarneri and Stradivarius, springtime there now comes earlier, summer is hotter, and winter snowpack is diminished compared with that of previous centuries. This yields wood with a looser, less sonorous grain than the tight woods of past centuries. In another hundred years, it is likely that heat, droughts, and changed rainfall will push alpine forests off these mountain slopes. Music often now speaks of the Earth as it was, not as it is, a memory carried in wood grain.

by David Haskell, Orion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Booker T. & the MG's

 

[ed. w/ Steve Cropper.]

Radio Garden

Radio Garden invites you to explore live radio from around the world.

By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.

Radio Garden

[ed. Awesome world-wide radio/music finder using 3D Geospatial tech to zoom in anywhere in the world.]

Ry Cooder & Manuel Galbán

 

Mambo Sinuendo (full album)

[ed. Good stuff. Rare.]