June | 2020 | redeyegin

one of the fringe benefits, and really one of the dynamic aspects of writing this blog, is that people send me stuff all the time. i highly encourage this, and i try to give hat tips whenever i can. here are some things that people have brought to my attention in the last few weeks:

‘searching for sugarman’

my good friend tom m watched some of my music documentaries we covered at the beginning of the lockdowns, and told me i need to see this. it is an amazing story about a dylanesque figure from the slums of detroit who never connected in the states, but by a sheer fluke, became ‘bigger than elvis’ in south africa. i watched it last night, and promptly found his debut album and bought it.

john prine

from one of my musical soul mates, kevin sent this to me the other day. the last recording john prine ever made. ‘i will miss you in the morning light, like roses miss the dew’. god, i miss him so much. what a loss. look how he looks at the camera at the end.

george jones

tracy sends me a find from a bin at the cracker barrel, a rare recording from a session in the early seventies with george jones and roy acuff’s smoky mountain boys doing a bunch of bluegrass standards. you can find it on itunes to download for ten bucks. if you like the nitty gritty dirt band’s ‘will the circle be unbroken’ series, you will love this. same era, many of the same musicians.

‘laurel canyon’

kevin’s brother from the great white north brought this new documentary to my attention last week. what could be called a companion piece to ‘echos in the canyon’ that came out last year, this one covers more artists and doesn’t stop in the late sixties, which was one of my criticisms. this one is in two parts, and the second one covers artists that were completely ignored in ‘echos’ – joni mitchell, gram parsons, little feat, linda ronstandt, etc., and also spends some time on the genesis of the eagles.

american aquarium, ‘lamentations’

greg is one of my live music partners in crime, and told me about this album about a month ago. i saw this band open for turnpike troubadors a few years ago, but for whatever reason never followed up on them. if you want a high energy album to pick you up on your friday drive home, this ain’t it. but if you want an honest and insightful look at the decay of certain areas of rural america, this is very well done. as greg warned me, it keeps drawing you in. and the videos are great. they just cancelled their album tour, and i really would have wanted to see this tour.

keep them coming, friends.

steve’s twentieth studio album is the result of a project he was asked to write some music for that involved a mining disaster ten years ago. in april 2010 a coal dust explosion 1000 feet underground killed 29 miners. the mining company was found to be at fault. the idea was to go to west virginia and interview the survivors and the families of the victims, and turn it into a play. the play went into production early this year, with steve doing the songs here acoustic style on the stage with them. in the meantime, steve gathered his band and the mastersons and created a more fleshed out version of these songs.

‘ghosts of west virginia’ explores the hardships of the coal mining life and does so using a number of musical styles – gospel, folk, bluegrass, celtic, and rock. recorded at new york city’s electric lady studios, it has a gritty and authentic sound to it. the first seven songs are directly from the play, and two of the last three are directly related (‘black lung’ and ‘the mine’), while the third is only tangentially related (‘fastest man alive’, about chuck yeager, who was born in west virginia). many of the songs are dripping with despair and anger, like the centerpiece ‘it’s about blood’, where steve eventually calls out the names of all 29 deceased as the song gets more and more intense. but there are also songs celebrating the good things about their lives, like the infectious ‘union, god and country’.

steve is rather well known for his liberal political views, but in a number of interviews he has mentioned that he ‘decided to make an album that spoke to and for people that didn’t vote the way he did’. another way he explained it was that if we don’t have common beliefs with others, then we need to learn how to communicate better. how appropriate that sounds right about now. steve earle absorbed the material and the people, and has told their story well.