Fortuitously #4

 

John Sebastian has been very much on my mind. And the way things work the more I have found myself thinking about and listening to John Sebastian the more I have come across his presence. So, for example, I recently stumbled upon footage from the Summer of 1984 of John onstage in New Jersey with REM performing ‘Do You Believe In Magic?’, complete with autoharp. The smiles on Michael Stipe and Mike Mills’ faces you just would not be able to wipe off, no matter how hard you tried. This was so astonishingly wonderful that I got into quite a frenzy, which was a bit daft as I was meant to be sitting quietly before heading round to the local GP surgery to have a blood pressure check-up. Needless to say, the reading was not good, and the nurse suggested I was feeling anxious. Ha! I was tempted to explain, but how the hell do you tell a stranger about …?

Fortuitously #3

 

I am no expert on the work of Lucy Sante, but one of my favourite pieces of music-related writing comes in her Maybe The People Would Be The Times essay collection, which I chanced upon. The piece I love is the first in a short story sequence which has at its heart musical fact and appreciation, with special loving focus on The Paragons’ ‘Florence’. I would never claim to be a die-hard doo wop aficionado, but I suspect there are few among us who have not succumbed to something in that musical sphere, and ‘Florence’ is for me as good as it gets. And the writing by Lucy on this occasion is exquisite.

Fortuitously #2

 

I still bumble blindly around on YouTube sporadically, and occasionally take an unexpected turning and strike gold, such as when I discovered a collections of clips of The Feelies performing live at the Peanut Gallery, a bar in their home town of Haledon, New Jersey, on May Day 1983, which sort of blew my mind as it was everything that I had dared hope The Feelies live might be. I wasn’t even aware The Feelies were active in 1983. And yet there they are, immortalised on film, in grainy black and white, performing a special commemorative Crazy Rhythms set which is amazing in so many ways.

Fortuitously #1

 

There’s a lovely line in Chronicles where Bob talks about a three-minute ballad that “made you stand straight up and stay right where you were. It’s like someone had pulled the cord to stop the train.” He wasn’t talking about ‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ by Margaret Lewis, but he could have been. Simultaneously sophisticated and raw, with Margaret’s phrasing a complete joy, if you can say that about a song that has such a bruised, brooding air about it: “It's a long, lonely road to travel and lose.”

‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ first appeared as the flipside of ‘Goin’ to St. Louie’ (“to get lost in a crowd, can't stand this silence, it's too doggone loud”), a 1959 single on the RAM label of Shreveport, Louisiana, run by Mira Smith who appears backing Margaret as Grace Tennessee, playing her electric blues guitar accompaniment for this rockabilly torch song. It is among many numbers composed by Mira with Margaret, something I first heard on a 1995 Ace CD Lonesome Bluebird, and with my limited knowledge of Margaret’s career I assumed it couldn’t be beaten. I was wrong.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Twelve)

 

Every once in a while, there is a particular piece of music that has been made specifically for you, and it feels like all roads have led to this point in time. This is very much the case with ‘Perseverance Flow’, composed by Joshua Abrams and recorded with his colleagues in the Natural Information Society. It is on record a 35-minute work, perfect as a single-track CD, and is essentially a cyclical rhythmic passage repeated throughout that time which, as you listen again and again, reveals infinite variations, imagined or real, with the percussion, bass, clarinet and wheezing harmonium working together to create patterns that are incredibly emotional, indeed spiritual and mesmerising. It is perfectly titled, as it is one of those recordings where it becomes impossible not to go with the flow, and before you know it you are dancing around the room, completely absorbed: “We dig repetition in the music, and we're never going to lose it.”

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Eleven)

 

There can be something oddly pleasant about being discombobulated. There sometimes is a certain pleasure to be found in having one’s conceptions challenged. This may be particularly true of the arts. It may apply to times when your understanding about a certain sphere of activity is turned upside down and inside out. Just take, for instance, Brenda Ray’s Walatta which is one of my most-played CDs over the past year-and-a-half. It is a record around 20-years-old, but it is only relatively recently that I have been aware of it, and that was all down to a seemingly random Spotify recommendation, which in true try-before-you-buyify style made me rush to track down a physical copy.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Ten)

 

You know, recently, out of the blue, I received a Bandcamp notification to let me know there was a new release from Stacy Epps, her first full-length recording since The Awakening in 2008, a record which was a pivotal and I guess totemic set from the very early days of YHO. Thinking about that record seemed to whisk me back in time to the formative days here, which perhaps with the benefit of rose-coloured glasses did feel like a time of awakening, of opening up, perhaps a period of relative enlightenment, with Obama headed for the White House amid a sudden glut of young cosmic soul adventurers sharing often abstract, spiritual, fiercely independent music. Ha. All the way from ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘Oh No You Can’t’. What was it the man sang? “Once there was confidence but now there is fear / Once there was laughter but now only tears / Once there were reasons for our optimism / But now we're all drowning in a sea of cynicism.”