Category — Music

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. 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.

News and photos of the event were plenteous, 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

Bruce Springsteen and the 12-member E-Street Band hit the stage of Denver’s Pepsi Center about ten minutes after eight on Friday night. It was the eighth show in the current tour, which began March 23 in Asbury Park, N.J.

The view from Section 340 as the house lights came on for "Born to Run" in Denver Friday night.

We were high in the nosebleed section (340), but both of us had binoculars and there was no one in the seats directly in front of us, so we had an unimpeded view of the entire stage and all players. Two screens behind the band showed incredibly sharp, close-up live images from every angle for those of us who didn’t wish to be legally scalped by Springsteen and Ticketmaster for more than our tickets’ face value ($100). The seats were actually quite nice, and my ears weren’t ringing when I got home. If it wasn’t a sell-out, it was pretty close.

With the exception of Clarence Clemons, who stayed in the background for the most part, I’m pleased to report that the band seems as vibrant and vital as ever. Max Weinberg and Gary Tallent form as seamless a bottom end as any in popular music, and Steve Van Zandt is still a wonderful foil and reliable presence. Springsteen doesn’t jump off pianos anymore, but he does exhibit the same kinetic energy I have always admired and remember from the first time I saw him in 1975.

For those watching the set lists the last couple of weeks, there were more than enough surprises to keep us guessing all night. The band opened with a loud, crunching “Badlands,” which took me right back to Kansas City, June 16, 1978, Memorial Hall, the Darkness at the Edge of Town tour, our second date with this group.

“Badlands” turned into “The Ties That Bind,” the first time he’s played that one on the current tour. The crowd joined right in, especially on the “by-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-ind” part. I realize I haven’t heard the song in years.

“Outlaw Pete,” from the new Working on a Dream album, tries to be provocative and dramatic, but I just can’t take it seriously. It actually made me laugh to watch him try and pump life into this trifle. Even with Springsteen’s neck muscles pulsing, an iconic Western backdrop and an oversized cowboy hat, Outlaw Pete still sounds like Yosemite Sam’s first cousin. Silvio Dante would have had him put out of his misery before he got to the end of the second chorus.

Another countdown and they gallop into “Out on the Street,” the second song tonight from The River, and again, it gets everybody to sing along – a mighty chorus of “oh oh oh oh oh, I talk the way I wanna talk.”

Another new one, “Working on a Dream,” like “Outlaw Pete,” comes and goes, its lightness giving way to the first real moment of the night: a loud, blustery “Seeds,” and I begin to notice that we’re quite well-positioned to watch Nils Lofgren, who provides a series of major guitar histrionics over the course of the evening. I can only describe the way he plucks as something more akin to playing a piano than a guitar. He plays like nobody I have ever seen.

“Seeds” bangs right up against “Johnny 99,” another hard-rocker and showcase for Lofgren, who throws up his right leg as a prop all night for whatever electric guitar he decides to play slide on. I’m really beginning to notice fiddle player Soozie Tyrell, who adds an edgy higher end to the mix, and the imaginative work of organist Charles Giordano, who has taken the place of Danny Federici.

The heavy mood continues with “Youngstown,” pretty much the same version as we saw the last couple of tours, with a red light bathed on Springsteen as his voice rises to a high, feral pitch at the end of the chorus. Listen to the original acoustic version on The Ghost of Tom Joad, and you see how far this song has come.

Patti Scialfa joins her husband center stage for a nice duet on “Tougher Than the Rest” before the band stop-starts into the rollicking lick, courtesy Lofgren, that propels “Darlington County.” This always gives Springsteen a chance to run around the stage, climb the platform in back to sing to those seated behind the stage and loosen things back up. This time he runs out to the edge of the stage and gathers 15 or 20 signs from the eager crowd and drops them back next to the drums.

This proves to be quite a gimmick, as he comes back to the front of the stage with one of the signs, which says “E-Street Shuffle.” And suddenly we are all back in the funky 1970s – “everybody form a line.”

He goes to the back of the stage, splashes himself with water and comes back with another handmade sign that says in bright red letters, “Bruce, Prove It.” He places it down at the base of his microphone so the cameras can pick it up, and apparently taking that as a challenge, they tear into “Prove It All Night,” always an onstage favorite. I can’t decipher my notes, but I think this was on this one that Lofgren began whirling and dancing in circles like a leprechaun as he built the tension before letting the air out of his soaring lead at just the right moment.

“Waiting on a Sunny Day” leads into a nice take of “The Promised Land,” with everybody joining in on the choruses. Lofgren and pianist Roy Bittan accompany Springsteen for “The Wrestler,” the first song from the new album to really connect with me tonight.

The last four songs of the set all build to a perfect climax. The melodic new “Kingdom of Days” leads right into “Lonesome Day” and “The Rising.” The latter took on the air of a gospel number before the house lights came up for “Born to Run,” letting those who have taken this long journey with the E-Streeters to capture a momentary piece of our youth and celebrate perhaps this band’s greatest moment, too.

I suppose this is nothing new to anyone who attends big shows these days, but I was amused that cell phones have replaced BIC lighters as the object of choice to hold up in the dark and swing back and forth while cheering for the band to come back onstage.

The encore began with an absolutely gorgeous rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times.” It’s not often that a major modern performer plays a song that dates back to the 1850s, but this one, which he opened with his appeal to donate to your local food bank, was a reminder that good lyrics are timeless, and great harmonies are, too.

“Thunder Road” came next, always a great singalong for the crowd – “you ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright” is still timeless. “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” was its usual rollicking self, “Land of Hope and Dreams” was moving, but the real thriller was Pete Seeger’s “American Land,” which includes a lot of earthy harmonies, Little Steven on mandolin and Bittan and Giordano each sporting an accordion. It is a noteworthy tribute to Seeger, who turns 90 next month.

That would have been the perfect closer for me, but they ended with “Glory Days,” which, two hours and fifty minutes after the show began, came to a close with a nod to the primal riff that closes the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie” — and they were gone.

Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Pepsi Center, Denver, Coloroado, April 10, 2009:

Set List

Badlands
The Ties That Bind
Outlaw Pete
Out In The Street
Working on A Dream
Seeds
Johnny 99
Youngstown
Tougher Than The Rest
Darlington County
E Street Shuffle
Prove It All Night
Waiting On A Sunny Day
The Promised Land
The Wrestler
Racing In The Streets
Kingdom of Days
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born To Run

Encore:
Hard Times
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Land Of Hope And Dreams
American Land
Glory Days

And they wonder why people download music illegally?

The Beatles get ready to drop another big one on their fans. Michael Jackson will get his cut, too.

Apple Corp and EMI announced Tuesday that boxed-set remasters of the Beatles albums would go on sale September 9 in conjunction with the release of Rock Band: Beatles Edition. The news came with the usual breathless announcements that, as a favor to the rest of us, after all these years, we will finally be able to hear the Beatles as they were originally intended.

New York Times writer Allan Kozinn bought right into the hype: “Beatles fans are finally getting something they’ve been demanding for at least the last decade: sonically upgraded reissues of the group’s original British albums, in stereo and mono.”

As Jon Stewart might say as the spin begins to take hold: “Please continue.”

“The main reason collectors have been so intent on reissues of music they already own is that the 1987 CDs, like many discs released in the early years of the format, sound comparatively harsh and brittle by today’s standards,” Kozinn writes. “Since then, improvements in digital sound technology and remastering equipment have yielded a richer, smoother sound, and most of the major groups and artists from the 1960s have had their catalogs refurbished at least once since their first appearance on CD.”

Finally, farther down in the story, the writer concedes that remastering is a tricky business, but Apple Corps told him the engineers finally got it right this time.

OK. So the sound will be better. Maybe. We’ll take your word for it, just as we did in 1987, when you told us that a compact disc was the equivalent of a master recording.

But if you wish to purchase this farcical nonsense, you will pay, and pay, and pay. The Beatles albums all run about 25 or 30 minutes, and there are different versions of songs on the mono and stereo versions. But get this. EMI, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and the estates of George Harrison and John Lennon, greedy bastards that they all are, have decided that instead of putting the mono and stereo versions of the albums on one disc in one boxed set, the mono version will be offered in a boxed set, and the stereo version in a second boxed set. Both offer different “extras” like “never before heard studio chatter” to entice dopey consumers to buy both boxes.

And need we be reminded that both mono and stereo versions of each album would fit on a single CD?

I could go on, but why bother? EMI, McCartney and Starr should be ashamed of themselves. They should give this product away to thank Beatles fans for the immense wealth bestowed upon all of them; instead, they heap more abuse on their fans and hope for another big payday.

And really, they wonder why people download music illegally?

I’ll wait for the bit torrents.

Astral Weeks returns forty years after its original release, and it's way better now than it was back then.

Nobody paid much attention when, in 1968, Van Morrison released Astral Weeks, an unusual series of musical vignettes that matched an instinctive young soul singer with an intriguing backup band that included acoustic guitar, bass, flute, vibraphone, saxophone and string section. As people gravitated to the albums that began with Moondance and His Band and Street Choir, Astral Weeks, all banging acoustic guitars, rambunctious bass and careening violins, began to find an audience.

Even as critics christened it a song cycle worthy of genius, Morrison suggested more than once over the years that producer Lewis Merenstein spoiled his own Astral Weeks concept. And now, a propitious forty years after its original release, Astral Weeks returns, this time performed live, with a slightly larger band, apparently with little rehearsal, over a period of two nights in Los Angeles. It’s the debut release on Morrison’s Listen to the Lion label, and it is being released in several formats — DVD, vinyl album and compact disc — with each offering slightly differing versions, which at least suggests that Morrison never has decided on a final version of Astral Weeks, or perhaps he’s just being contrary.

Unless you’re a purist who feels that the album was perfect the first time around, you shouldn’t be disappointed in the retelling. Morrison, as is his wont, plays around with the arrangements. “The Way Young Lovers Do” approximates the original recording, but elsewhere, songs mutate into others. “Slim Slow Slider” almost doubles in length while “Madame George” comes in almost a full minute shorter. He shuffles the song order so that the set ends with “Madame George,” as it always should have.

The CD includes encores of “Listen to the Lion” and “Common One,” and each, especially “Lion,” fits the ambience perfectly, letting Morrison scat gloriously even longer into the night against those thumping, rambunctious, careening instruments.

Van Morrison
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl
Listen to the Lion Records