Category — Music

Luther Allison 1994: Feral intensity

When Luther Allison returned to American stages in 1994 after more than a decade playing in Europe and elsewhere outside the country, he was a lean blues machine, a charismatic, handsome figure in full blossom with an expressive, craggy voice, a sophisticated repertoire and a guitar style that made him easily the best performer on the U.S. festival circuit until his death in 1997.

Joining the raw power of his tutelage in Chicago with the rich experience of playing alongside jazz and popular musicians in Europe, Allison returned with an emotional intensity and command of the stage that reminded me of Bruce Springsteen. Difficult to describe unless you actually saw him perform during this time – you just let the music sweep over you.

Ruf Records has released a package that captures one night during that period. It includes a CD and DVD version of a set recorded July 4, 1997, at the Montreal Jazz Festival, and the DVD adds a short documentary and a couple of interviews. The DVD is especially intriguing and deeply poignant when you realize that Allison would be dead of cancer less than two months after this was filmed.

The set is heavy on songs from Allison’s last albums, musical vignettes and terse short stories that he calls “realistic songs” in one of the DVD interviews. “Move From the Hood,” “Cancel My Check,” “You Can, You Can” – all are all wonders of lyrical economy and ferocious musicality.

Has there ever been a more harrowing lyric about alcohol addiction than the sixteen lines that comprise “(Watching You) Cherry Red Wine?” The torment that settles over the singer as he watches his companion “asking the children to pour you a drink” is almost feral, his voice and Gibson Flying V shrieking together in deep pain and infinite frustration.

It certainly doesn’t hurt to have as talented a guitarist as James Solberg or his group backing you. Like the E-Street Band, these are guys ready to play upwards of three hours a night behind their charismatic leader. Allison gives him plenty of chance to stretch out, and Solberg’s tone and delivery perfectly complement Allison’s beefy chords, as the tension rises and then drops.

The DVD included with this package captures the Allison I remember, as charismatic and powerful onstage performer as I’ve ever seen.

Luther Allison
Songs From the Road
Ruf 1157

This review appeared in Stereophile magazine August 2010.

Anais Mitchell's Hadestown is a folk opera based on the Orpheus myth and set in the U.S.

As the title of this weblog suggests, I have this jukebox running inside my head. Always have. Songs, snippets, phrases, riffs, lyrics, lead breaks, intros, outros, middle eights, instruments and rhythm patterns are constantly striving to play on the jukebox inside in my head.

Sometimes it takes multiple listens to finally catch onto a song; other times I hit repeat after the first listen. Once there, songs can linger for days. They play in my head after the song ends. They run in a loop at night, when I wake up, and they won’t go away until I completely digest them. Often this take dozens of listens. The excitement of listening again and again is palpable, although sometimes I wonder how long it’s going to take.

What is it that makes me lift the needle back to the beginning of a certain song, rewind it on a cassette, replay a CD track or click to the beginning again in iTunes? What makes a song play in my mind over and over before I finally find another one to take its place?

I have been spinning the current song for a full week. “Why We Build the Wall” is by an artist I have never heard before. Anais Mitchell, says her website, is a songwriter based in Vermont who released Hadestown, her fourth album, in March. Hadestown is an ambitious effort, a folk opera based on the Orpheus myth with a decidedly American orientation, and it features Justin (Bon Iver) Vernon, Ani DiFranco and Tanya, Petra and Rachel Haden as characters. It was released in March on Righteous Babe Records, DiFranco’s label.

The first time I played “Why We Build the Wall,” I instinctively hit the replay button, since I was already singing the chorus by the time it ended. The melody and harmonies of the choir just overtook me.

“Why We Build the Wall” is recorded in classic call-and-response form, with the craggy voice of Greg Brown (Hades) asking questions and a women’s choir (Cerberus)  answering. Mitchell says she wrote the song as an archetype, and one of those is the contradictions in the arguments over illegal immigration along our Southwest border.

“Why do we build the wall, my children, my children,” Brown’s voice asks in a croaky, grandfatherly voice, and the chorus answers:

“Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free.”

Brown asks more questions, and the chorus builds on itself in a kind of trancelike, circular motion. It’s so desperately simple, really, three chords and a cumulative lyric (think “Green Grow the Rushes” or “Alouette”), with each chorus building upon the last by adding a new phrase.

Simple, but more than enough to keep it in first place on the cerebral turntable for almost a full week now.

Here’s a link to the song as done on the album.

Here’s one of Mitchell performing the song with Erin McKeown live onstage.

I didn’t know much about the life of Nina Simone when I began reading Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, Nadine Cohodas’ biography of the classically trained precocious child who became one of the most unique and most troubled of American musicians. I had missed Simone’s career when it was happening and have been catching up after stumbling upon some of her recordings and Tom Russell’s fine tribute song on last year’s  Blood and Candle Smoke.

Cohodas’ book is an exhaustively researched accounting of Simone’s life, gleaned from reviews, reminiscences of colleagues, family and friends, published accounts of Simone’s performances and Simone’s own autobiography. Cohodas does an impressive job of setting the stage, so to speak, showing the transition from poor precocious Mississippi child to classical student paying for her education by playing secular gigs and finally a performer of great renown, able to mesmerize audiences with her improvisational as well as her classical skills.

Simone’s immersion in the civil rights movement, for which she became a fierce and outspoken advocate, is also well-documented, as is the effect that performing outspoken, political material had on her career.

Toward the end, as Simone’s mental illness took hold and she withdrew, Princess Noire seems repetitive, dominated by accounts of her eccentric behavior, and there are many of those. Cohodas seems uninterested in exploring Simone’s mental illness beyond accounting the mercurial instances, onstage and off, that dominated and diminished her career for decades. But Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about one of America’s most misunderstood artists.

Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (Pantheon Books), by Nadine Cohodas (449 pages)

George Na'ope, kumu hula: Feb. 25, 1928-Oct. 26, 2009.

I just read the obit in The New York Times of George Na’ope, kumu hula and the keeper of Hawaiian tradition, at his home in Hilo, Hawaii. He spent his life committed to keeping Hawaiian culture and traditions alive. We certainly didn’t know Na’ope, but Billie and I spent a fascinating evening in Kona with him during a 1990 vacation.

From my trip-notes:

We drive up to the ramshackle town of Kapaau on the northernmost part of the Big Island, and stop at the Puukohola Heiau, a holy place for Hawaiians built in 1790-91 by Kamehameha I. We walk up to the ranger station, where we are given a short talk, with a model, on the heiau’s history, including a story about part of it being made later into a fort. The ranger’s name is Paul Andrade, an engaging Hawaiian man, and with no one else to give the talk to, we spend a half hour chatting with him. A poster of what the heiau once looked like keeps catching my eye while I listen to his stories.

Billie asks him about a book on myths that she saw on the shelf and mentions that it says the author was a man who brought back the real hula, and Andrade said that it was, and that the author was a kumu hula, or a master of the hula.  I had recently written a story about Robert Mugge’s excellent documentary film Kumu Hula: Keepers of a Culture, for the Colorado Daily, which I mentioned to Andrade. When he asked who was in the film, the only name I could remember was George Na’ope.

“George Na’ope was my teacher for sixteen years,” Andrade says.

It is a nice moment, made even nicer when Andrade mentions that George would be performing that night at the Keauhou Hotel in Kona.

He speaks very emotionally about the hula, originally a worship form, and the loss of the original chants and traditions. Like Na’ope, Andrade represents an element of Hawaiian society that wants to retain its heritage, almost destroyed since the missionaries decided to “enlighten” the populace about the Lord and brought with them the diseases that would decimate the native Hawaiians in a short time. When I asked whether real kumu hulas were performed in the hotels today, he says, rather matter-of-factly, “we have to make a living, too.” But, he complained, it would soon be necessary to be bonded to even appear in the better places.

Andrade is eloquent and quite opinionated, and as we walked out on the front porch, he points south to the scrubby brush and volcanic rock, and says that construction would soon begin on a golf course for a nearby resort out of sight near the water. I imagine green, lush fairways, deep white sand traps and palm trees instead of the shrubby no-man’s land there today. “At least I won’t have to look at the resort,” he says somewhat cheerfully.

He also explains about how George Na’ope would berate him when he didn’t live up to his expectations. How once Andrade had appeared at some live performance without a proper instrument or something, and George had showed up and given him holy shitfire for it. Andrade backs off when I asked if he was kumu hula because he didn’t want us to think he was cocky and he felt that too many cheap kumu hulas were around these days.

Later that evening we drive to the Keauhou Hotel and walk into an open-air bar right on the sea where a couple of women are playing instrumental music. A waitress informs us that George won’t start for another hour.

So we drive back down to Kailua for fish and chips and a walk through Kailua, which is deserted tonight, the complete opposite of last night. When we return, George, immediately recognizable from the film, is playing to a crowd that consists of only three or four tables of people in a room large enough to make it conspicuous. At the next table is an elegant, well-dressed Japanese couple, and there are two women at another table behind us. A couple over by the bar are talking, and an older Archie-Bunkerish-looking man is talking to himself down by the stage.

George, who must be less than five feet and 100 pounds, is one of those charismatic performers (Willie Nelson and Ruben Blades are two others that come to mind) that can make you believe that he’s always singing directly to you. His fingers are covered with rings, and I wonder how he can play the gorgeous six-string custom ukulele he’s strumming. There is a guitarist and bassist backing him up.

Soon Archie Bunker is up, talking and harassing the shit out of George, who has obviously seen this hundreds of times, making cracks back at him between songs and grimacing when he interrupts a tune. Although Archie is drunk, it’s obvious he is knowledgeable about Hawaiian music. “George, he’s the best,” Archie is slurring, twirling around in a kind of stupor. “And look, there’s no one in here. Nobody knows.”

I turn away to the bar just as the woman sitting there falls off her chair. Her companion tries to revive her, and the waitresses all run over. Archie tells George that he’s been watching him perform for twenty two years, and he asks George about old singers I’ve never heard of and requests various numbers.

Onstage, George asks us where we’re from, and what we want to hear. I just want to hear whatever he wants to play, I say, and he does a few more songs. The woman is still on the floor, and Archie is moving over to our table, repeating that that George is the best musician in Hawaii and nobody knows it. We try to be tolerant.

Sometimes Archie cries as he sings along with a song George is doing. George says he feels sorry for “the Colorado couple,” but it goes right past Archie, who is explaining to us how he “messes up” a lot. “Am I messing up?” he asks the two women behind us as George struggles through another song. “You want to hear the truth?” one asks back, but Archie is beyond the truth. You don’t know whether to smack the guy up the side of his head or humor him because you feel sorry for him.

He drags George over to our table, and George sits down while Archie tells him again that he is the best singer in Hawaii and look how few people have turned out to see him and isn’t it a shame. Like a 45 single repeating itself over and over.

It turns out that the Japanese couple are hula students of George, and they speak no English. So Archie is trying to tell him that he’ll teach them the language while we talk with George.

George says he considers himself an American first and a Hawaiian second, because, at age 64, he has always lived in the islands under American control. He spends his time recording and transcribing the old hula chants that he even used in his set tonight. He loves studying the history of his people.

All through our trip we have heard stories of the resentment of the Japanese invading the islands, this time with piles of cold cash. But as George explains, there isn’t much Hawaiian music left in Hawaii. All of the real Hawaiian music is now in Japan, and the Japanese are the true audience for real hula today. Most “hula” in Hawaii is done for tourists and bears no resemblance to the original chants and dances.

Later, as if to prove his point, the Japanese man at the table next to us plays along with a chant that George does while his partner, responding to George’s chant, does a hula that is stunning and incredibly sexy in her muumuu.

George smokes tiny cigarettes that fit his hand size perfectly. He says he doesn’t make a lot of money, but he is comfortable enough. He makes one or two trips a year, in three-week spans, playing music in Japan. During those excursions, he doubles his income for the 46 weeks he is in Hawaii, he says.

He says he paid off his Lincoln Continental with the money from his last trip to Japan, and I am left with the image of this tiny man, the keeper of Hawaiian tradition, pulling away from the hotel in a big-ass Lincoln.

George Lanakilakeikiahiali`i Na`ope died Oct. 26, 2009, of lung disease. He was 81.

The Flatlanders at KGNU studios, Nov. 1, 2009. (Photo by Scott Replogle)

It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that I got word from KGNU Music Director John Schaefer that the Flatlanders were coming in Sunday morning to play some songs and talk on the Roots & Branches program I host.

As an old-time music critic (remember those), I have known about the Flatlanders for a long time, dating back to the days when their debut album was passed around only on cassette among cognoscenti for eighteen years. But like most people, I didn’t really come in contact with the group until Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock reunited for the three albums they’ve made together since 1998.

Not that I didn’t know about the trio. Joe Ely has been a presence dating back to his MCA albums in the 1980s. I first saw him during the SXSW years in Austin, where the Flatlanders were gods, and I’ve enjoyed his last three albums, especially the live one with accordionist Joel Guzman. I kinda circled Gilmore and Butch Hancock, and often mixed up the latter with Wayne Hancock, another Texas musician. But after the always prescient G Brown put three songs from the Landers’ Wheels of Fortune onto the KCUV playlist back in 2004, I became a fan, and I’ve finally caught up with their catalog.

So the chance to throw them a few questions and listen to them play an intimate set in the studio on a program created for their kind of music on our community-powered radio station was a chance to revert for a couple hours back to rockcrit days. And there was a special bonus: I finally would get to ask Jimmie Dale Gilmore about how playing the character Smokey in one of our favorite movies, The Big Lebowski, affected his life.

The trio arrived at the studio with fourth member, guitarist Rob Gjersoe, about halfway through the show and spent half an hour setting up. Instead of forming a line, they set up in an arrangement that allowed them to face and see each other. One of the things that distinguishes the Flatlanders is that they are true collaborators. They don’t just pass the guitar around and add harmonies to each other’s songs. Though all have distinct writing styles, they somehow manage to come together in way that accentuates each others’ strengths. (You can stream or download the show’s podcast for the next couple of weeks by clicking here.)

Radio interviews are a lot of fun. You don’t have to take notes, just lob a thought out there (“how has being Smokey changed your life, Jimmie Dale?”) and when they get bored, ask for a song. In that regard, the Flatlanders were more than willing to accommodate.

A common theme when we talked was the Halloween celebration on the Boulder Mall the night before, which they attended. Apparently someone spotted Gilmore as Smokey, the “Mark-it-eight-Dude” league bowler who upsets Walter (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski. “I should have told him I was Smokey in costume as a Flatlander,” he joked. Gilmore said he is no actor, and that he never expected the acclaim he has gotten for that bit part in a film that has a huge following. He has been asked to appear at the Lebowskifests that have sprouted around the country. After noticing that Jeff Bridges has appeared at a couple, he says he might start doing it, too.

They played four songs, trading verses with each other while guitarist Gjersoe shot licks and riffs at them, and their versions of “Homeland Refugee,” “Borderless Love” and “After the Storm” were exquisitely performed, even with a couple of clunker notes, which made it very live and more powerful.

The little guitar riff that opens “After the Storm” really lit up the studio, a song that Gilmore introduced as taking them three years to finish (critic’s note: it was worth the wait), and they closed with a spirited “Sowing on the Mountain,” which Gilmore said they learned from a Woody Guthrie record (it’s on Guthrie’s Muleskinner Blues recording).

Flatlanders (l to r, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Rob Gjersoe). Photo: Leland Rucker

Later, Dr. Reptile and I were walking down Spruce Street at 14th, heading for the Boulder Theatre, where e-Town was featuring the Flatlanders and Bob Schneider, when we ran into Gilmore on the corner. He was heading for a rehearsal, but he stopped and we talked for a few more minutes. I’ve chatted with my share of professional musicians, and Gilmore, whose father was a non-professional musician and whose son Colin is a songwriter, too, was as unpretentious as they come.

The show was fantastic: the Flatlanders reprised the songs from the radio session with a full band, aided by e-Town host Nick Forster, who added 12-string guitar, mandolin and even some screaming electric guitar leads, and the always amazing e-Tones.

I hadn’t seen Bob Schneider before, and with a coterie of fans that included his sister, he quickly took control of the room with some incredibly catchy songs off his new album, Lovely Creatures, bringing the crowd to its collective feet for the Latin dance number, “Tarantula,” that put me in the mind of Vince Herman.

Just a Flatlanders kind of day.

Forty years ago this weekend I was driving out of New York, where I had spent the summer as a counselor at Camp Pioneer on the shores of Lake Erie in Angola, New York, on my way back to Kansas City. It had been an exciting summer. We looked up at the moon on the night Neil Armstrong walked there. I had played guitar and performed for the first time and bought the Crosby, Stills & Nash album while there.

About the time two of my counselor colleagues and I hit Pennsylvania, we heard on the radio about a music festival northwest of New York City that was closing roads and causing mass confusion.

The Life magazine special-edition version of Woodstock. I spent hours looking at the large photos.

News and photos of the event were ubiquitous, especially after pictures came out of nude, stoned hippies celebrating the rain, the music and seemingly, life itself. Newspapers and magazines, including Life, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, covered the event.

Seven months later, on March 26, 1970, I stood in line for opening night of Woodstock, the movie, a sprawling documentary that celebrated rock music, peace, love and dope as well as an audience of hundreds of thousands enduring a monsoon, food shortages, bad acid and impossible conditions. The film seemed as long as the festival itself and featured some of the most diverse, celebrated artists of the period at their peaks — Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly Stone, Crosby, Stills and Nash etc. – in brilliant color and dazzling, close-up camera angles. Woodstock literally made the careers of everyone who appeared in it. I went back the second night and saw it again, my enthusiasm stoked, and I bought into the hype hook, line and sinker, as you can see from a letter I wrote to my best friend after seeing the film for the first time.

As I began learning more about the background of the festival and the forces behind it, I began to realize that there were actually two events. The first was the three-day gathering itself; the second was the documentary that showed it. The latter was one version of what happened, but it was a carefully edited version, and for those of us who weren’t there, which is most of us, it’s really the only version.

Was it an important gathering of the tribe? A cultural milestone? Proof that the hippie generation could live in peace and love no matter the obstacles? Yes and no. For some it was blissful; for others, not so much. Mike Jahn, the Times rock critic who covered the festival, wrote recently:

“Woodstock was far from the mythological wonder, but that 90 percent of the attending were miserable and would have left after the first night had transportation been available. I spent time with them, not with the celebs backstage where it was dry and there was food and drugs. They were huddled under blankets in the rain, looking more like those photos of the fields of bodies at Gettysburg than like the nudes prancing in the lake or the celebs shouting ‘far out’ at one another and gabbing about the wonder of it all.”

Actually, for anybody watching at the time, the euphoria over Woodstock’s wonderfulness faded rather quickly and dramatically. It should be seen in the context of another outdoor event that took place less than four months later. On December 6, 1969, a festival headlined by the Rolling Stones at a speedway near Altamont, California, also captured with cameras, showed the darker underbelly of the peace-and-love subculture. The cameras caught Mick Jagger, then the king of rock, pathetically trying to calm an unruly crowd that had gotten ugly and confrontational. The resulting film, Gimme Shelter, showed one homicide, but there were other drowning deaths, and two others killed in an automobile hit-and-run. It wasn’t pretty, and it dampened the enthusiasm I felt about Woodstock Nation.

Woodstock wasn’t really a celebration of the Sixties as it was a harbinger of what was to come. The marketing of the event began almost immediately. I bought a Life special issue with lots of large photos of the event in the fall of 1969 (see photo). Posters of the event proliferated. Many of those who appeared in the film and on the album became superstars. The release of the Woodstock album, which featured two records of selected music from the festival, certainly caught the ear of my generation, but more importantly, caught the attention of record executives eager to cash in on the burgeoning rock phenomenon. Add advances in touring sound and stage technology, and Woodstock helped usher in the era of rock superstardom, big tours and even bigger money.

The myth of Woodstock is that we think we remember the event when we actually only remember the movie. And the truth is that Woodstock was much less about the decade it closed down than the one it begat.

Cabretta is still a masterpiece after more than thirty years.

Sad news this weekend: Willy DeVille, founder of Mink DeVille, the soul band that made its name at CBGB’s during the punk era, died Thursday in New York City of pancreatic cancer. Depending on the obit or music encyclopedia you reference, he was 55 or 58 years old.

I was already aware of Mink and into the band’s debut album Cabretta when I caught Mink DeVille on May 20, 1978, at the Uptown Theatre in Kansas City, Mo. DeVille was first up on a triple bill that included Rockpile and Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Tickets were five bucks, and Billie and I were front and center for the show, easily one of the best bills I have ever seen. Dressed in a tailored suit with his gold-capped tooth, DeVille was charismatic and confident, strutting like Bernardo in West Side Story. His drawling Spanish-inflections were mesmerizing, and the band seemed perfectly in sync. This was before they banned cameras in concerts, and Billie got some good shots; one of DeVille throwing his suit coat over his shoulder caught the pure magic of the performance.

Cabretta, produced by Jack Nitzsche, is still an amazing record. When I first heard it, I was convinced that the tunes were all old soul songs I had missed somewhere along the way. One, “Little Girl,” really was (written by Barry Greenwich and Phil Spector), but to my utter amazement, incredible songs like “Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl,” “Can’t Do Without It” and “Venus of Avenue D” were written by a very young DeVille. The equally remarkable Return to Magenta followed, and the possibilities seemed endless.

In the fall of 1983, walking down the Pearl Street pedestrian mall, we spotted DeVille sitting in an outdoor patio. I had just gotten a job writing for Audience, a local entertainment publication, and somehow I found that Boulderite Michael Barnett had signed Deville to a management deal, and his first act as manager was to pluck him off the streets of NYC (“directly from the streets of Ninth Avenue,” DeVille said) and flew him to his Martin Acres home in Boulder, to cure him of heroin addiction. (Barnett at the time was also representing ex-Rhythm Ace Russell Smith, a very funny guy who was fronting a local band then called Dawn Patrol, and Alaska’s Hobo Jim, a folksinger who sounded like an up-north Woody Guthrie and could bore a hole in a wooden stage with his stomping cowboy boots.)

I talked with DeVille in January of 1984, an interview I have never forgotten. He drove up to the appointed meeting place, La Francaise, a local bakery then located in the Baseline Shopping Center, in a two-toned 1957 Chevrolet. During the interview he was pleasant and accommodating, smiling that gold-toothed smile.

He would lower his sunglasses periodically and ask, “My eyes are clear, aren’t they?” He was honest about his addiction, mincing no words while trying to explain how it felt to be straight for the first time in four years. “I tried to do it, but you have to have somebody’s help,” he said, and that he tried the black box, electronic acupuncture, endorphin stimulation and even quinidine, and nothing worked until he just cold-turkeyed out here. But he said he didn’t want to turn into a People magazine “look how I cleaned up” story and asked that I write that he was here only “for health reasons.” He said he was taking dance lessons from an instructor in town.

When he was young, he said, he wanted to look like John Hammond Jr., the blues singer known for his black hair and black leather jacket, and sing like John Lee Hooker, and somehow he managed to do both. When asked if he got along with the other bands during the punk era, he said, “I came in the door looking like George Chakiris and I was trying to be James Brown onstage. What do you think? They were playing sloppy and getting a lot of press, and I added the competitive element.” I gave him an 8×10 of Billie’s photo of him looking like the star of West Side Story when we finished the interview.

I bought a few more albums, but it wasn’t until 2004, when an incredible new DeVille song titled “Muddy Waters Rose Out of the Mississippi Mud” was added to the playlist of KCUV, the short-lived Denver Americana station where I was working, that I caught up with his music again. Crow Jane Alley, the album it came from, was an indication that DeVille’s talent was still intact.

Songwriter Doc Pomus was one of DeVille’s inspirations, his songs huge influences on those early DeVille tunes, and they later collaborated. In the liner notes for the album Return to Magenta, Pomus, summed DeVille up best:

“Mink DeVille knows the truth of a city street and the courage in a ghetto love song. And the harsh reality in his voice and phrasing is yesterday, today, and tomorrow — timeless in the same way that loneliness, no money, and troubles find each other and never quit for a minute. But the fighters always have a shot at turning a corner, and if you holler loud enough, sometimes somebody hears you.

“And truth and love always separate the greats from the neverwasses and the neverwillbes.”

Anybody can join the Bluegrass jam every Tuesday night at Oskar Blues in Lyons.

Every Tuesday night about eight o’clock they pull back the chairs in the upstairs bar at Oskar Blues and line them up in a circle. Various guitars, banjos, mandolins, dobros, fiddles and a big acoustic bass are pulled from cases, and players begin to sit down and tune up. Soon enough someone calls a song, and the Lyons Bluegrass Jam is underway.

More players arrive as the night goes on, and as diners start to leave over in the next section, some pickers standing around the edges break off and start their own circle. Sometimes upwards of fifty musicians are huddled in different circles, passing around songs. The jams generally wind down around 11, but occasionally, like one night in March when Vince Herman and his son, Silas, stopped by, the picking went on after midnight.

Seeing someone like Herman, a founder of Leftover Salmon, isn’t that unusual in this little town, now home to a growing number of world-class musicians.  Lyons and the mountain communities from here up to Nederland have quietly become a roots-music artist colony. The gypsy jazz group Taarka, Grammy-award-winning slide guitarist Sally Van Meter, the bluegrass quartet Spring Creek, bassist Sally Truitt, Elephant Revival, bassist Eric Thorin, Dave Watts from the Motet, songwriter Nancy Thorwardson, guitarist Jason Hicks of the Blue Canyon Boys, Caleb Roberts of Open Road, drummer Brian McRae, luthier and guitarist Romano Paoletti, bluesman Lionel Young, classical violinist Mintze Wu and multi-instrumentalist K.C. Groves are just a few of the many accomplished musicians living in the Lyons area.

What is curious about the jams is that despite the plethora of talent, players of all levels are encouraged to pull up a chair. “Bluegrass, by nature, is a pretty competitive music,” explains resident Eric Zilling, a jam regular. “At festivals there are contests for best fiddler, best guitarist etc. Here, everybody knows where they stand. You go around the circle, you get your opportunity to play, and then somebody from Spring Creek, who’s sitting next to you, plays. It’s a welcoming atmosphere.”

Longtime resident Dave McIntyre books music and runs the soundboard at Oskar Blues. Fresh from New Jersey, he fell in love with Lyons, at that time, he says, “a sleepy bedroom community, good-old-boy oriented place.” McIntyre, who bought a house near downtown in 1976 and has watched the music and arts scene blossom over the last dozen years, says, “Planet Bluegrass was the catalyst for people to move here.”

Craig Ferguson, who heads Planet Bluegrass, which books the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and brings high-profile national events RockyGrass and the Folks Festival and other concerts to its local stages, first moved to Lyons in 1994. “I would guess we had something to do with it, probably more to do with bringing people to experience Lyons and having them fall in love with it — like we did. Now I’d say there really are a lot of musicians in town.”

Ferguson says that the scene is “more self-generating” today. “There is so much music in town, pickin’ parties, jams, that we really have nothing to do with.”

Singer and bassist Jessica Smith relocated to Lyons with the other members of Spring Creek three years ago. “We had been in Crested Butte and knew Colorado was a good market for bluegrass,” she says. “We wanted to be closer to the Front Range so we can get to places more easily, but we didn’t want to live in the city. We had been to RockyGrass, knew of other musicians living here and decided it would be a good place for us.”

Annie Sirotniak moved here in 2007 from Boulder. “There are folks to pick with, friendships form and there’s a great vibe,” she says. Sirotniak books 4-7 shows a year through High Street Concerts, an all-volunteer consortium started in 2003 by Sam Tallent, Mike Whip and K.C. Groves. This year High Street has presented guitarist Beppe Gambetta, fiddle wizard Casey Driessen and Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum, among others. “Profit isn’t the motive,” she says. “We have a committed volunteer crew. We’d rather put on a show and give as much as we can to the artists. I’ve been a performer as well, and know firsthand that it’s tough to make it as a musician. I guess that’s part of the reason I volunteer all my time.”

Profit isn’t the motive at the blues jams Patrick Cullie hosts each month at Oskar, or at the popular Tribute Nights that Jami Lunde manages once a month, either. Up to 20 bands each perform two or three songs from the catalogues of, so far, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Neil Young, Hank Williams (I, II or III) and Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris.

The idea, Lunde says, grew out of endless nights in living rooms and festival backstages when guitars are passed around the circle. “Oftentimes the circle will come around to cover songs,” she says, “and it ends up that we are having so much fun playing, singing, dancing.” The format has caught fire with musicians and audiences alike, making it one of Oskar’s biggest nights.

Last year several people, including Zilling and Groves, who co-hosts the bluegrass jams with Eric Thorin, started Redstone Radio, a station that streams the music of Lyons over the Internet. Zilling says the idea started at a Spring Creek show last May. “I had bought a handheld digital recorder, and I was walking around Oskar and I showed my new toy to K.C., and she started walking around interviewing people like a television reporter. It was pretty funny, and afterwards she came over and said we should start a radio station.”

The idea stuck, and working incrementally, they created Redstone Radio, an internet-only station. Without doing a lot of promotion, the station logs about 800 listener hours per month playing 80 percent local musicians and 20 percent musicians with local ties, like Herman or Tim O’Brien. Everybody gets paid for their music, and Zilling says that after a year of operation, “It’s pretty darned self-sustaining.”

Redstone recently took a further step, renovating an abandoned cinderblock building at 4th Street and Broadway. Volunteers, many of them musicians or local music fans with trade skills, are bringing the building up to code, adding drywall and converting it into the Groove Shack, which gives Redstone Radio a physical space, but more importantly, adds a rehearsal and teaching space for musicians.

The gap that usually exists between artists and fans is absent here, and the synergy between residents, fans and musicians is as organic as it is self-sustaining. “Mostly, I think that musicians attract musicians at this point,” says Ferguson. “They also seem to attract other artists, as I’ve felt that there are so many more ‘artistic’ people around now, painters, potters, you name it.”

“It’s a great little town with a great mix of people,” Smith says. “There are people whose families have been here for generations, and people like us who come for artistic reasons. Planet Bluegrass brought people who wouldn’t have come here for any other reason and settled here. And it’s still happening.”

This article appears in the Summer issue of Boulder magazine.

The view of the board at KGNU studios, Boulder, Colorado.

I host a program called “Roots & Branches” some Sunday mornings 9-11 a.m. on our local community radio station KGNU. The program is loosely based around American music, which I interpret as all recorded music in America that is blues, folk, country, gospel, soul, rock or bluegrass-based and whenever possible, played on acoustic instruments.

It’s a pretty big area from which to choose, but as one who is still amazed by the incredible depth and breadth of American music, it’s territory that I love exploring for program ideas.

This Sunday’s program was titled “History Lessons,” and it includes only songs that concern historical events or periods in U.S. history. After introducing the concept in the first set, the show follows a period the period from World War II to the fall of Saigon, with the songs interspersed with original audio clips of current events of the time.

As usual in this type of endeavor, I left off a batch of good songs that I forgot, couldn’t fit into the concept or the time frame. I received lots of good calls reminded me of songs I left off or forgot about, which means there is a chance I’ll get around to a Part Two sometime.

You can stream the program for a couple of weeks here.

“History Lessons” Set List

“Everett Ruess,” Dave Alvin, Ashgrove
“Sailing To Philadelphia,” Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia
“Galveston Flood,” Tom Rush, Take a Little Walk With Me
“When That Great Ship Went Down?”, William & Versey Smith, Anthology Of American Folk Music
“True Story Of Amelia Earhart,” Plainsong, In Search Of Amelia Earhart
“Franklin D. Roosevelt, Poor Man’s Friend,” Willie Eason, Sacred Steel
“New Orleans Wins The War,” Randy Newman, Land of Dreams
“Eisenhower Blues,” J.B. Lenoir, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues
“The Great Atomic Power,” The Louvin Brothers, Hillbilly Music…Thank God!
“The Merry Minuet,” Kingston Trio, The Kingston Trio at the Hungry i
“On Beatniks,” Carl Sandburg, The Beat Generation
“Little Boxes,” Malvina Reynolds, Washington Square Memoirs: Urban Folk (1950-1970)
“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased
“I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Phil Ochs, Washington Square Memoirs : The Great Urban Folk Boom 1950-1970
“Fortunate Son,” Todd Snider, Long May You Run : 15 Tracks In The Key Of Neil
“Tears Of Rage,” The Band, Music From Big Pink
“Vietnam Blues,” Cassandra Wilson, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Best Of The Blues
“Okie from Muskogee,”  Merle Haggard, Vintage Collections Series
“What Is Truth,” Johnny Cash, The Legend
“Armstrong,” 2:40, John Stewart, American Originals
“Find The Cost Of Freedom,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Single
“Galveston,” Jimmy Webb, Ten Easy Pieces
“Lord God Bird,” Sufjan Stevens, Single
“Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” Plainsong, In Search Of Amelia Earhart
“Sail Away,” Randy Newman, Sail Away
“Talking Green Beret New Super Yellow Hydraulic Banana Teeny Bopper Blues,” Jaime Brockett, Remember The Wind And The Rain
“An Account Of Haley’s Comet,” John Stewart, Sunstorm

Neil Young working the crowd Monday night at Magness Arena.

It was a big Monday night for Neil Young electric guitar fans. Foregoing the acoustic set that he played here in 2007, Young blasted his way through a twenty-one-song list that ended with an blistering encore of “All Along the Watchtower” at Magness Arena.

The band seemed to be the same one he brought to the Wells Fargo Theater in Denver on Nov. 5, 2007, which includes core Young sidemen bassist Rick Rosas, guitarist Ben Keith and drummer Ralph Molina, with his wife Peggi Young and another vocalist and sometime guitarist. That night he divided the show into an acoustic and an electric set, but on this tour he stuck mostly with the latter, only strapping on the acoustic for a few songs to break up the high energy and intensity.

It is testament to his sizable repertoire that he only repeated one song, “Cinnamon Girl,” from the Wells Fargo date I saw a year and a half ago.

It was a long night. Everest came on at seven and played a thirty-five minute set. I had never heard of this Canadian band, but they played well, although the sound was a little muddy for their sometimes acoustic-based music.

The Neville Brothers were next, and for those of us not able to attend Jazzfest (this weekend is the last, with the Nevilles and Young both scheduled there for Sunday), they pumped forty-five minutes of heady New Orleans funk into the hall, with all the favorites – “Hey Pocky Way,” “Caravan,” “Fiyo on the Bayo,” “Fever” — and more. I haven’t seen the Nevilles in at least fifteen years, and their set didn’t seem to have changed too much, but their music is as rich, vibrant and deep as it comes, and they just knocked me out.

Young, dressed in tennis shoes, jeans and a white sports coat, opened strongly with “Love and Only Love,” loud and brash, which set the pace for the rest of the night. The songs from his current album, Fork in the Road, were sprinkled in among the classics and kept the intensity if not quite the impact of some of the older material. For me, only the last two, “Get Behind the Wheel” and “Just Singing a Song Won’t Change the World,” which closed down the regular set, really caught my ear, especially the latter.

Young always manages to surprise even the most jaded concertgoer. Early on he sat down at the piano and lit a fire beneath “Are You Ready For the Country,” and I found myself screaming “because it’s time to go.” He followed that with “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” with all the high harmonies intact. I don’t remember seeing him do this one in concert very often, if ever. “Pocahontas” got the crunch effect, with Young screaming out “Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me” as the song wound down.

But my own favorite section came near the end when he played a mini-set from Tonight’s the Night. After a version of “Heart of Gold” (never a personal favorite) that made me a believer again, he pulled out “Albuquerque,” “Speakin’ Out” and “Tonight’s the Night” itself.

I have long been fascinated by Young’s stage show, and we were sitting where we had a great view of the backstage area. Young is fastidious about his presentation, whether having a roadie go around wiping down each microphone just before the set began to another fellow who walks up between songs and changes out the hand-written lyric sheets.

As we watched guitar tech Larry Cragg set up Young’s onstage rig, Rob Ober, a good friend and guitar enthusiast who accompanied me, said there is a lot of interest in Young’s sound and instruments, and if you type “Neil Young sound” into a search engine, you’ll find a host of sites like this one dedicated to the Rig.

He always employs some kind of onstage shtick, and there was a painter positioned behind the band who created several interesting canvases during the set. For his environmental hymn, “Mother Earth,” Young walked up some steps at the back of the stage to an old, worn pipe organ, which added drama and gave the song the feel of an old evangelical revival.

All in all, it was a nice surprise, one we hadn’t planned. We got free tickets for the show online Monday afternoon when Magness Arena or Young apparently decided to paper the house, which wasn’t a sell-out, by giving away tickets near showtime. Total cost for the two tickets was about seven dollars, which paid for allowing me to print them on my computer. Other people in our section got their tickets the same way. Not sure who to thank for that, but hey, thanks anyway.

Neil Young
The Neville Brothers
Everest
Magness Arena
Denver, Colorado
Monday April 27, 2009

1. Love And Only Love
2. Fuel Line
3. Are You Ready For The Country?
4. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
5. When Worlds Collide
6. Pocahontas
7. Hit The Road
8. Change Your Mind (Everest – background vocals)
9. Cinnamon Girl
10. Mother Earth
11. The Needle And The Damage Done
12. Light A Candle
13. Goin’ Back
14. Heart Of Gold
15. Albuquerque
16. Speakin’ Out
17. Tonight’s The Night
18. Down By The River
19. Get Behind The Wheel
20. Just Singing A Song

Encore:

21. All Along The Watchtower