billy strings has been on the outside of my peripheral vision for about 6 months or so, but i hadn’t taken the time to explore his work very much, until now. as i have mentioned before, i get tips on new music from lots of places. when i had four different people send me something about him in the last two weeks, i figured it was time to devote more time to this young phenom.
my first glimpses of him were when i would see him sitting in with other bluegrass musicians i was following, and often it would be dead cover songs. he has cut his teeth on the jam band festival scene, and has gradually built up his following by offering two set marathon sessions where he and his band will rotate covers of bluegrass icons like bill monroe, the stanley brothers and doc watson, to jam band heroes like the dead and phish, to unconventional bluegrass treatments of artists like the stones and jimmy cliff.
billy (born william apostol) grew up in northern michigan, where his stepfather was a local bluegrass musician and taught him the instrument at a very early age. he turned to heavy metal at one point, but that changed one day when he ‘borrowed’ his mom’s 72 chevelle and went for a ride in the country with a bottle of vodka. he was curious about a tape that he saw in her tape deck and put it in. ‘rank stranger’ by the stanley brothers started to play, and he just pulled over and listened to the song. soon he was getting back with his stepfather and returning to the genre.
his guitar prowess soon started getting the attention of people like del mccoury and david grisman, and he started opening shows for fellow michigan residents greensky bluegrass.
his latest was released in september and it features all original music. i got it the other day and listened to it on a recent roadtrip (to michigan, no less). it is solid, all the way through – and not just the music, as his songwriting is also great. much of the material draws on his experiences, both bad and good, growing up in small towns in the midwest. ‘enough to leave’ is about losing two high school friends to heroin overdoses within a week of each other.
quite a talent, and worth putting on your radar. he will be opening for jason isbell this summer. check him out.
it is with a heavy heart this morning that i help share the news that neil peart has left us. neil and his music might seem a bit out of scope for my usual writings, but keep in mind that i have been listening to rock and roll for going on five decades now, and my formative years were definitely influenced by the prog rock genre. i think it is fair to say that at one time rush was my favorite band, and neil was by far my favorite drummer. i was a drummer (still am to a certain extent), my best friends in high school were drummers, and we all revered him. i saw them three times – the ‘2112’, ‘motion pictures’, and ‘permanent waves’ tours. the band was hugely popular in northeast ohio in the seventies, more so than other parts of the country, mainly due to getting considerable airplay on the dominant rock station of the time, wmms. wmms was not only the locally dominant fm station, it was considered one of the best fm stations nationally, winning rolling stone magazine’s annual survey of best station something like seven years in a row in the seventies. legendary dj kid leo was instrumental in bringing the canadian trio’s sound down across the border, much like he had helped bring springsteen’s music west from new jersey.
after my brother texted me last night with the news, i read a few articles about him before settling down with a tall cocktail and watching a few documentaries i found on netflix. all of them referenced the notion that he was one of the great rock drummers of all time. of this i think there is little doubt. his hero growing up was keith moon, but other than the fact that they both beat the shit out of their drums, i don’t think they were all that similar. keith had more of a wild and reckless style of playing, whereas neil’s style was more of a machine gun precision. stewart copeland of the police said he ‘was the most airdrummed drummer ever’, and i confess to being a part of that tribe. but very few could come close to his level of talent, and he was a wonder to behold.
on top of that, he was the band’s lyricist, and his writings often belied his personal philosophies. he was a big fan of ayn rand at the time – ‘2112’ was roughly based on her novel ‘anthem’, and was mentioned in the credits. now that i think about it, i am sure that is why i read ‘the fountainhead’ when i was in high school. that book influenced my young mind, and although i drifted away from her philosophy as i grew up later (as did neil), the individualism aspect of it still runs deep in the way i look at the world today.
i hadn’t thought about him for quite some time. i knew he had left the band a few years ago, citing the fact that he just couldn’t do what he once did physically. but it became clear last night that he had been battling brain cancer for three years now, finally succumbing on tuesday of this week. his death brought back a flood of memories, and i had to just get it all out. thanks for listening.
as my friend dave c. once told me a couple of decades back when i was getting all uppity about not being a country music fan, his reply to me went something like ‘i get what you are saying, but the best songwriting comes from that genre’. i now understand there is a lot to that notion. ‘three chords and the truth’ is a phrase from the fifties that attempts to describe the simple nature of a country song. i am not sure why country has such an underpinning of great songwriting – we could argue that it usually comes from rural areas and hard scrabble life, the rough nature of the honky tonks, and so on. ken burns’ recent documentary ‘country music’ spent a lot of time on this and i think got to the core of it. but at the end of the day i am not sure we really need to analyze it. it has always been true, and i see no sign of it fading. you could argue that country has gotten too commercial and there are a lot of bad songs out there, but that has always been true about country over time, and has been true of many other genres. i am not denying that aspect of country, but i feel pretty confident in saying that we are currently living in an incredibly vibrant period of access to great songwriting, and most of it comes from the americana/country/ folk universe.
if you find this topic compelling, i urge you to check out a new documentary about the bluebird cafe. i was familiar with its existence, and i have some albums recorded there, and i generally knew about the status as a songwriters mecca. but this movie goes into great details about its history, and offers some very good live playing from tons of artists – some you will know, and many you will not. when mrs. redeyegin suggested to watch it last night, i was intrigued by the prospect of learning more about this club, but i told her i was turned off by some of the names in the marquee – namely taylor swift, garth brooks, and faith hill. don’t let that scare you off. all three were discovered there, but they all play small cameos, and it is clear that they are not the true story that is being told here. this is a story about a hole in the wall joint in a strip mall outside of nashville, that somehow became the place to go if you wanted to get your story out. it is also about how songs get written in nashville, and how it is rather unique in the fact that it is not unusual when more appreciation is given to the songwriter, rather than the singer. getting to the bluebird is now on my bucket list.
my only small beef is that it spent most of the time showcasing how just about anybody can audition to play there, and have a chance at being a taylor swift. it didn’t spend much time on people who came there just to get their song heard, and be appreciated for that. songwriters who needed to tell a tale, and didn’t want to get ground down by the nashville musical industry. can you just imagine being there to see these three playing together?:
in line with my last post about musical releases from 2019 that went by without comment, i thought i would also do one reflecting on the output from the grateful dead over the last twelve months. say what you will about the band, but it is hard to deny that their fan base has not diminished much since they stopped playing in 1995, following garcia’s death. the band, and/or their crew, had begun recording their live shows almost from the outset, and most of the recordings from a total catalog of an estimated 2,500 shows are still around. the organization has been slowly and methodically releasing selections from the vault for nearly 25 years now, and this year was fairly typical in that regard. here is a brief summary of what they (including the garcia family organization) presented this year. it is pretty substantial.
of course, over the last several years the lynchpin of the archival releases are the quarterly ‘dave’s picks’ series.
volume 29 was the 2/26/77 show from san bernardino – essentially the first show of that legendary spring tour. i wrote about it more extensively back in february. they come out swinging, fresh off of recording new material for the upcoming ‘terrapin station’ album. indeed, they open the show with the title cut.
volume 30 takes us back to their first show of the seventies. on january 2nd of 1970 they played at the fillmore east in new york city, and this performance is pretty typical of the transition the band was going through at the time – still playing material from their heavier psychedelic sixties act, but beginning to sprinkle in more americana songs by robert hunter that would eventually be released on the ‘workingman’s dead’ album just a few months later. the transition was not working out well for organ player tom constanten, as his carousel style playing didn’t really mesh well with the new songs, and he would be out of the band within a month or so.
volume 31 takes us to the other side of the seventies, a december 3rd show in 1979 at the uptown theater in chicago. this one also showcases somewhat of a transitional period for the band, as they are hitting their stride after installing a different keyboard player. brent mydland had replaced keith godchaux earlier in the year, and the band had renewed energy, inspired by the different style of playing and brent’s gruffy vocals, and the new material they had just recorded.
volume 32 takes us back to march 24th of 1973, a monster show at the spectrum in philadelphia that clocks in at nearly four hours – 31 total songs. this was in the middle of an east coast tour that they had started a couple of weeks earlier, right after the passing of one of their original members, pigpen. as some of you have heard me argue, i think 1973 might be their overall strongest year, and this is very representative of that period.
a new format that they have been starting is revisiting their studio albums as they each hit their 50th anniversary. this year’s package was focused on ‘aoxomoxoa’, the last album of their earlier psychedelic period. it has the original 1969 mix, and then the 1971 mix that they decided to do for marketing reasons, and then a second disc of live material from the avalon ballroom in january of 1969. interesting, but i have to admit i am more looking forward to next year, when we hopefully will see something regarding the aforementioned ‘workingman’s dead’, and ‘american beauty’.
another new trend has been to issue something for ‘record store day’, and this year they revisited the ‘reckoning’ material and offered a two disc package with acoustic material from the warfield theater run in 1980. perfect soundtrack for a summer afternoon on my deck.
of course they usually put out some kind of box set each year, and this year they chose to focus on five shows from giants stadium in east rutherford, new jersey. one from 1987, two from 1989, and two from 1991. the 1991 shows have bruce hornsby on keyboards, and the second night is also presented as a full length blu ray disc in the box set. very well recorded and worth a look if you like this period of the dead.
their last output for the year was rather unusual. due to a number of reasons (mostly jerry), the dead never released a studio album in the nineties. but they were writing and playing new material, and so dead archivist dave lemieux put together what he found to be the strongest live versions of his favorite unreleased songs from that period and released it as such in november. again, if you like this period of the band (post brent), you may find this interesting. i don’t, and i didn’t.
in addition to the grateful dead organization’s output, i also pay attention to what the garcia estate is doing in a similar fashion. 2019 saw the release of two volumes that are reminiscent of the dave’s picks series, namely the ‘garcia live’ series.
volume 11 features the jerry garcia band in fine form on november 11th 1993 at the civic center in providence, rhode island. jerry was not happy with the super stardom of the dead at this time and hated playing in large arenas. but he sure found renewed energy when he went out on the road with his own band.
volume 12 goes back 20 years earlier to january 1973 when garcia and merl saunders played a three night run at the boarding house in san francisco. while two long time staples of the early versions of the band were there – john kahn on bass and bill vitt on drums – the other interesting component was a young r&b vocalist named sarah fulcher. different than any other garcia band recording i have heard, sarah is on many tracks the lead vocalist, instead of just a backup role. hers is a very improvisational, bluesy, and soulful style, and she can get a little over her skis sometimes. think donna on steroids. but the liner notes suggest that much of that may be due to the unstructured nature of the band, and she is just filling in space. jerry’s playing on the songs where she takes the lead is great, taking on the role of the rhythm guitarist like you don’t normally hear. his overall leads also have a more bluesy sound to them, totally different than his work with the dead at the time (compare it to the dave’s picks 32 described above). the band is tight, and their version of ‘that’s all right mama’ in the second set is just scorching.
and last, but certainly not least, we have the box set they released – ‘electric on the eel’ – which i reviewed in march. three shows from three different years (1987, 1989, and 1991) from a summer benefit festival at a camp near the eel river in california. of everything that i have talked about here, this would be one that i would point you towards, as well as that 1980 warfield album. i also thought this was an excellent year for the dave’s picks series.
once again, thanks for following me this year, and i look forward to another great year in music.
instead of the usual ‘best of’ articles we usually get around this time, i am going to go down a different route and give a list of albums that were released this year that i found interesting, but for whatever reason, i never got around to posting on. and instead of waiting till the last week of the year, i thought i would get this out before xmas so that maybe you could add a few to your wish list. all of these were worthy of a full rendering, but as most of you know, this blog is a side gig for me, and life and work just get in the way sometimes. so, here they are, in no particular order.
professor longhair, ‘live on the queen mary’
i found this in a great record store in new orleans during jazzfest. it is a recording of a private party on the queen mary, put on by paul and linda mccartney on march 24, 1975. it captures him in his prime, and the recording, produced by tom wilson, is very good. a good introduction to him, if you are not familiar with the legendary pianist. there was no one like him.
kelsey waldon, ‘white noise/white lines’
debut album from this west kentuckian, the first new artist signed to john prine’s oh boy record label in over a decade. much like margo price’s first album, the songs are in large part an autobiographical picture of growing up poor in a small rural town. she is quite a talent, and someone to keep your eye on.
marvin gaye, ‘you’re the man’
this was the follow up to his groundbreaking album, ‘what’s going on’. the single of ‘you’re the man’ hit the charts, but the album was never was released. the extensive liner notes tell the whole story, but essentially it came down to political and artistic freedom disagreements with his label. here we have the entire album, plus quite a few bonus tracks, including some christmas music. i actually think it would have been a more profound historical release if they had just packaged it without the extra tracks, as some of them are either corny or over produced. but the first nine tracks are some of the finest work from one of the most important artists to ever come out of the motown scene.
justin townes earle, ‘the saint of lost causes’
another solid release from this guy – i don’t think he has put out anything better (and i have all of it). one of the better singer/songwriters out there. and, as i have mentioned before, i think he may be more talented than his father, steve.
bob dylan, ‘the rolling thunder revue, the 1975 live recordings’
released in conjunction with martin scorcese’s documentary of the same name, this box set presents five of the concerts from this tour showcasing the then recently released ‘desire’ album, plus a few extra discs with outtakes from rehearsals and other shows. if you are a big bob fan, then this is interesting. if you want to get a full flavor of the power and quality of these shows without dropping $75 on this, get his bootleg volume five (‘bob dylan live 1975’) instead.
‘the highwomen’
this is a side project of four individual artists – brandi carlisle, amanda shires, maren morris and natalie hemby. presumably a take on the ‘highwaymen’ super group of the eighties (willie, waylon, johnny, and kris), these women share the singing and songwriting throughout. many times compilations like this underperform, but this one exceeded my expectations.
neil young and the stray gators, ‘tuscaloosa’
another release from his ‘archive’ series, this one is a selection of cuts from a performance in february of 1973 at the university of alabama. he was touring on the recently released ‘harvest’ album with the musicians who did most of the recordings in nashville. most of this tour was a disaster, but this show finds the band in fine form, and the recording is crystal clear. maybe the strongest song is ‘alabama’. even though it was a gutsy selection to be playing in front of this crowd, they gave it all they had. play it loud.
sturgill simpson, ‘sound and fury’
this was not what i was expecting. i very much have enjoyed his last few albums, and i was looking forward to this. i was given hints on a radio station that this was a small divergence from his previous work, so i should have been warned. but this is just a total left turn. it almost has more in common with ‘eliminator’ era zz top or synth pop from the eighties, with some ‘dark side of the moon’ nods as well. plus it was released with its very own anime movie:
very good, but not really my cup of tea. but he gets points for poking his finger in the eye of the music industry and not really caring what they think. he is on record saying that his next record will be blue grass covers of his wife’s favorite classic rock songs.
the mavericks, ‘play the hits’
first saw this band on a small stage on the last day of jazzfest, and i was highly impressed. one of my favorite shows of the year. this just came out about a month ago. they did a whole album of cover songs by artists that had influenced them during their thirty years as a group. a few of them, like ‘swingin’ and ‘are you sure hank done it this way’, are uptempo rockers more indicative of their live shows. but just as many are ballads that sometimes are more laid back than the originals. a good introduction to the band if you are not familiar with them. plus, this a damn funny video:
van morrison, ‘three chords and the truth’
this dude just keeps pumping them out. all new original material, revisiting many of his usual themes – musings on the unfairness of the music industry, fondness for the early days of rock and roll, and odes to celtic mysticism. the various musicians include jay berliner, who played on ‘astral weeks’ with him. there really isn’t a bad cut on this one. one of those that just seems to get better the more you listen to it.
ryan bingham, ‘american love song’
speaking of repeated listenings, i think i gave up on this one too soon. for whatever reason, i only gave it one shot, and didn’t come back to it for awhile. a couple of these tracks (‘jingle and go’ and ‘pontiac’) are still getting heavy play on the ‘outlaw country’ station, and they keep sounding good. produced by charlie sexton, there are some nods to the stones and zeppelin, but mostly this is just a good alt country rocker with some blues thrown in. one of his best.
grateful dead, ‘the warfield’
released by the dead as their contribution to april’s ‘record store day’, this is a little hard to find but well worth it. if you know their ‘reckoning’ album, then this will sound familiar, as it is taken from the same set of acoustic shows at the warfield in san francisco in the fall of 1980. i will be doing a post in a few weeks highlighting the entire output from the dead archivists and the garcia family this year (which has been substantial), but i thought i would throw this in here anyways.
calixeco/iron and wine, ‘years to burn’
i love both of these artists (hard to call them ‘bands), and their collaborations seem to be productive, even though their styles are quite different. this is certainly a good version of their teamwork, and i wish i had been able to catch them on tour this summer.
robbie robertson, ‘sinematic’
his first album of new material in years, this is a guy who continues to push the envelope and doesn’t rest on his laurels. i wasn’t entirely smitten with this one, but there is a decent chance that was in my head and not necessarily fair to the material and production. i love his first two solo albums, and i want to compare it to them, but that really isn’t the right thing to do. the first cut is a duet with van morrison, ‘i hear you paint houses’, which is the name of the book that is the basis for scorcese’s current movie ‘the irishman”. the second cut is ‘once were brothers’, which is about the rest of the guys from the band. many of the songs are rather lush and the backup vocals are fantastic. writing this post has convinced me i should probably give this one a few more tries.
hopefully you found something here that you find interesting and go out and give it a try. thanks to all of you for following this little project of mine, and please consider sharing with others.
redeyegin 