Category — Music

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

Flash Cadillac: "Lunacy, but sweet lunacy" -- G Brown

Friday night Billie and I went down to the Boulder Theatre for the 40th Reunion of Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. It was a great show, but for me the coolest part was the the alumni set, which featured the original members of Flash back in the days when they ruled the Tulagi stage. For one brief moment, among the rush of fantastic oldies, I got to experience the memories of a band that I have only seen on film.

I think it was 1999 when Don Chapman and I were first approached to do a documentary film about the history of Boulder rock’n'roll. The Boulder Arts Commission, which approached us, was exploring ways to approach documenting the town’s musical heritage, and it was a subject in which I was interested, at least in part because I had done such a poor job of it in my days as a reporter back in the print days.

Don and I produced and directed the film by ourselves. I made a huge list of names, and among the first people we contacted were Harold Fielden, onstage Friday night as the drummer for the original Flash Cadillac and unofficial keeper of the flame as head of the 4-Nikators, the longest-running local band and probably worth a movie all its own, and erstwhile Denver music historian G Brown, who served beer to Glenn Frey and Don Henley in Tulagi in 1971 while they told him how famous they were going to be. We followed our noses from there, and went off from there, finally interviewing about thirty people in the next couple of years while amassing all the archive, period photographs, videos and recordings we could appropriate or transfer from Super-Eight technology.

It took us about three months to pare down thirty-five hours of interviews into some kind of cohesive story. Included are glimpses into long-shuttered dives the Blue Note and Shannon’s and recordings studios like Caribou and Mountain Ears amidst long-ago tales and period footage of the Astronauts, Flash, Tommy Bolin, Candy Givens, Zephyr, Otis Taylor, Steven Stills, Stevie Wonder, Richie Furay, Chris Daniels, Woody and the Peckers, Woody and the Too High Band, Firefall, Poco, Joe Walsh, Chris Hillman, Judy Roderick and Big Head Todd and the Monsters and Dusty Drapes and the Dusters, a bunch of hippies who cut their hair and played country swing, among many more.

Steve Swenson, who fronted Dusty Drapes and the Dusters in the 1970s here in Boulder, called us in late 2000 with plans to bring the Dusters, all ten of them, back to Boulder for a reunion show, and we quickly decided that the documentary would be the perfect fit as an opening act. That happened March 24, 2001, when I stood amidst a sold-out crowd at the Boulder Theatre to see the premiere of Sweet Lunacy: A Short History of Boulder Rock. I hadn’t seen the film in its entirety — Don had put the finishing touches on it that morning — and witnessing it there, among more than a thousand people, most of whom it was made for, was about as good as it gets for this music historian.

I mention all this because Sweet Lunacy is screening this Friday night in the main auditorium at the Boulder Public Library,  1000 Canyon Boulevard, at 7 p.m.  It’s FREE – and the filmmakers will be on hand, too. Hope you can make it.

If you can’t, Channel 8 has the documentary available for streaming here.

You’ll need a fast internet connection and QuickTime Player on your computer to view it.  Scroll down the program drop down to “Sweet Lunacy”; load the program and click play.  With a slower connection, it will become a slide show with good audio.  With a dial-up connection you may be out of luck to view on the internet.  The DVD is available for check-out at the Boulder Public Library.  DVD copies are available for $10; Contact me at leland.rucker@gmail.com.

My colleague and friend David Kirby, who is writing a story about the film in this week’s Boulder Weekly (out on Thursday), turned me onto this 2001 Westword story. Hope you can make the show.

Dave McIntyre made his performance debut Wednesday at Bob Dylan night at Oskar Blues, Lyons, Colorado.

The Is It Rolling Bob Band made its debut last night at Oskar Blues in the small but musically mighty village of Lyons, about fifteen miles north of Boulder.

It was Bob Dylan celebration night at Oskar, and there were 20 or 21 various combinations of solos to bands, each getting the chance to do two songs written by Uncle Bob. In a little over four hours.

Sharon and Kris and I had gone up in January for Beatles night, and Sharon and Steve were there in December for Neil Young night.

So we put in a bid for Mallworthy (Gil Asakawa, Sharon Meyer, Steve Meyer and me) to play Bob Dylan Night and were selected by intrepid promoter and musician Jami Lunde to perform a (relatively) recent song, “Things Have Changed,” and “I Shall Be Released,” an old favorite that Gil and I have closed our sets on the Boulder Mall with for twenty-five years,

After the selection Gil and Steve both found they would be out of town that night. A flurry of emails later, and Sharon, who plays mandolin, and I were joined by Kris Ditson, a drummer who most recently has worked with Pete Wernick’s Flexigrass, Rob Ober, who lives two doors up the street from me and plays about anything you put in front of him, on bass, and Patrick Cullie, our local connection (he lives about two blocks from Oskar), who has picked with Gil and I in the past and plays a mean slide guitar. I was humbled to be working, if only for two songs, with such talented people on short notice.

We practiced without Patrick once and then Tuesday night we all got together and ran through the two songs a few times each. We figured driving up that since Oskar Blues is the home of Dales Pale Ale, king of craft beers, it wouldn’t matter if we sucked.

It was already crowded when we got there, and with fifty musicians as part of the crowd in the basement, it stayed that way all the way to the end. And it was really noisy.

Watching the talent on this night, all I could think of was that Lyons, a town of less than two thousand, is a little mini version of Austin, Texas, with talented musicians in many genres. The song selection was eclectic and unpredictable. I didn’t take notes, but I’d guess the most popular Dylan album of the night was Blood on the Tracks. Among the highlights I remember was a bluegrass quartet, Steamboat Zephyr, that absolutely smoked its way through “Quinn the Eskimo” and “Odds and Ends,” both from the Basement tapes and perfect candidates for their picking frenzy.

Several solo performers did courageous performances of intricate Dylan songs in a room that was filled with too many people to properly appreciate the subtleties. Everybody cheered loudly as Dave McIntyre, who books the entertainment, sat on the other side of the mike for the first time ever with a mandolin player named Greg Schocket and played spirited versions of “Spanish Harlem Incident” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Schocket later accompanied Lunde for two numbers, included a nice “She Belongs to Me.” Reed Foehl kept the crowd’s attention with great versions of “Visions of Johanna” and “Every Grain of Sand.”

We were 18th on the bill, so I missed a few in front of us getting ready, but the biggest surprise was the debut performance of the Blue Maddies, five or six ladies in various western outfits that included stage manager KC Groves. I can’t remember the first song, but I will never forget the closer, “Boots of Spanish Leather.” As they reached for the high harmonies I had never heard on that song before, I felt like I could have been in Ryman Auditorium fifty years ago hearing the Carter Family. Just one of those moments where it all comes together.

With that to buoy us, the Is It Rolling Bob Band moved onstage and made its way through “Things Have Changed” and “I Shall Be Released.” I seldom work with amplification, but everything seemed to work pretty well, and thanks to a cheat sheet scotch-taped to my guitar, I made it through “Things Have Changed” for the first time without blowing the words. Everybody danced and sang along to the final chorus of “I Shall Be Released” as we sang it a capella.

And you know, for those of us who perform even just occasionally, that’s what it’s all about, folks. Thanks to Jami and Dave and KC and Michael and Sean and everybody else who helps put on these lunatic affairs. Hope we get to do it again sometime.

p.s. There was video shot of our performance. i’ll keep you posted on when that will become available.

Buddy Holly would have been 73 on Sept. 7, 2009. I loved his music as a kid, but I loved that he was geeky-looking, had curly hair and wore glasses as much as his singles.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. Richardson in an airplane crash in a grain field five miles north of the Mason City, Iowa, airport, remembered in 2009 as rock’n'roll’s first tragedy.

I realized this about a month ago and decided to re-listen to Holly’s recordings, something I hadn’t done since I bought a six-LP set  of all his recordings back in the eighties. I watched the 1987 video The Real Buddy Holly Story again on VHS and read the LP set’s extensive notes and John Goldrosen’s Holly biography. Listening to the music digitally this time made it a lot easier to follow along than back in the days when I had to change LPs.

I won’t speculate on what might have happened to Richardson, aka the Big Bopper, and Valens was only seventeen years old that night. Holly, 22, seemed to just be coming into his own, and it’s interesting to consider what Holly might have done, especially while reading about the major changes he was making in his life at the time of his death and hearing the music he made in December 1958.

Holly was a musical prodigy. He learned piano and fiddle at an early age, and a recording of a Hank Snow song made in his parent’s Lubbock, Texas, home when he was 13 shows that even though his voice hadn’t changed yet, he was a confident guitar player. He had started pursuing a music career right out of high school and played the West Texas area with a group of friends called the Crickets. They hooked up with producer Norman Petty in Clovis, a town not far from Lubbock just across the New Mexico border.

Finding Petty was extremely propitious for the ambitious young Holly. Petty and his wife Vi were performers whose own musical tastes leaned to what we now call lounge music. But Petty was open enough to understand that this preternaturally talented curly-haired kid was onto something. Petty charged by the session, not by the hour, and the relaxed studio atmosphere certainly contributed to the success of the early recordings. Holly was known as a perfectionist, in Petty’s words “the stubbornest critter I ever ran across.”

Those early recordings show that Holly could emulate anything he heard on record, bluegrass,  western swing, rockabilly and soul (though it wasn’t called that back then). I had forgotten what a fascinating guitarist Holly was, and the Crickets’ unique sound owes much to his furious downstrumming (he played lead with all six strings!), a slapping rockabilly bass and Jerry Alison’s Latin drum variations. There was no rebellion in Holly or his music. His family backed him from the start, and Holly, by all accounts, was a squeaky-clean and respectful young man.

By the beginning of 1959, Holly was a modest regional performer just starting to hit the big time, with a number-one chart hit, “That’ll Be the Day,” in September, 1957, and two others, “Peggy Sue” and “Oh Boy,” that followed it into the Top Ten three months later.

But his life was changing, and dramatically. He was just starting to see the money from the sales of “That’ll Be the Day,” and in the year before his death he married, left producer Petty and the Crickets after their first national tour and made plans to have his wife Maria Elena Santiago become his manager. The couple moved to Greenwich Village, and Holly had cards made for his own label, Prism Records. he almost certainly would have become his own producer.

The split from Petty created contractual and financial problems for Holly, who probably went on the Winter Dance Party Tour to make some quick money and chartered the plane that night to save a long bus ride to the next stop and do his laundry.

The official report blamed pilot error for the crash. ©Hulton Archive Getty Images

The official Civil Aeronautics Board report on the crash blames pilot inexperience, not the cold weather. “The accident, like so many before it, was caused by the pilot’s decision to undertake a flight in which the likelihood of encountering instrument conditions existed, in the mistaken belief that he could cope with on route instrument conditions without having the necessary familiarization with the instruments in the aircraft and without being properly certificated to fly solely by instruments.”

What I found most fascinating this time around are the six demos recorded on a portable tape machine in his New York apartment on six different days in December, 1958.

These were recent songs, and he uses a new acoustic Gibson guitar to record them There are elements of the hiccupping, rhythmic music that had gotten him where he was, and I don’t want to read too much into six recordings, but they at least suggest that Holly’s songwriting and guitar skills were in evolution.

But it’s their intimacy that attract me; they sound like they could have been recorded a few weeks ago. The songs, which include “What to Do,” “That Makes It Tough,” and “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” were released after his death, but only after they were overdubbed by his record company and Petty to capitalize on public interest after his death. Those attempts, sincere though they were, tried to recapture the sound of the Crickets, and it’s difficult to imagine that the perfectionist Holly would have been pleased with the results.

As far as I can ascertain, these recordings aren’t commercially available except on boxed sets or the Purple Chick bootleg series, and they’re just a small part of his recorded legacy. But listening to them over and over on this cold morning is the best reminder of what was lost on that cold night in Iowa.

It was standing room only by the time we got to the Beatles tribute in the basement of Oskar Blues brewpub in Lyons, Colorado, last night. The concept was simple enough: From 7-11 p.m., musicians who signed up beforehand each got to play three songs by the Fabs.

Squint and you're in the Cavern Club - or not.

We got there about 8:30, just in time to catch a duo turning “Got to Get You Into My Life” into a sweet acoustic number. The music ran the gamut from classics like “Nowhere Man” to late-period John Lennon blues, and it was fascinating to hear pick-up bands composed of people, most of them small children or not born when the Beatles ruled, imitating their idols just as the Beatles emulated their musical heroes on tiny stages in Liverpool half a century ago. The torch continues to be passed.

Everybody knew the words to the songs, and many sang along with each and every one. Easily the best moment for me was when a rock quartet wound itself around George Harrison’s crunching, droning “It’s All Too Much.” Between the bar noise, the aroma of beer brewing and the low ceilings, I squinted, and for a quick moment, I thought I might be in the Cavern Club.

Or maybe it was just the Christmas lights and those pints of Dales’ Pale Ale.

And whom should I find making his way from the stage to the sound booth? It’s my old friend Dave McIntyre, a tireless supporter of music in this area, columnist for Blues Access back in the day and in charge of live music at Oskar Blues, which features a smorgasbord of blues, bluegrass, western swing, jazz and Americana, depending on the night, in this intimate room. Last month Oskar’s saluted the music of Neil Young, and next up is Bob Dylan on February 18, with more to be added.

First it’s Bob Dylan, who finally decided he wanted to be Wolfman Jack and now hosts Theme Time Radio Hour, a program dedicated to showcasing music by artists, most of whom are long dead and most of us have never heard of. Now along comes Spectacle: Elvis Costello With …, a television interview show that seems bent on showcasing large-name artists (Sir Elton John and James Taylor) and lesser-known ones (Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright) in an intimate interview/performance setting. The twist here is that they aren’t talking about themselves. Instead, they are paying tribute to the music and musicians who influenced them.

Elvis Costello and Elton John make like Billy Stewart.

Perhaps it is that I share Dylan and Costello and John’s passion for arcane music and great artists who didn’t qualify for stardom. Given freedom from talking about why they are successful (for which most don’t have a clue, anyway) and prodded by the consummate music lover Costello, musicians talk much like the rest of us do in conversations about them. They’re just fans, too, and for me, that fact is far more interesting than anything about their celebrity or success.

Musically, I had long ago lost track of the former Reggie Dwight, but Costello drew me back into his story as he got John to talk about the period when he was trying to develop his act. John talked at length about performers, especially piano players, who caught his attention back then and from whom he picked up a style of playing that brought him more fame than any of those from which he learned. (He dismissed his own success as “luck” at one point.)

John used the piano to show how Laura Nyro’s talent for wandering off the traditional verse/chorus/middle eight/verse/chorus format crept into his piano playing and was his biggest influence. His stories about how hearing and seeing Leon Russell, Carole King and the Band shaped his own direction (which he dates to the album Tumbleweed Connection, where he says he found his sound) ring very true to the music itself.

John, a co-producer of Spectacle, seemed genuinely jazzed telling stories of touring with Major Lance, hanging with Patti Labelle and almost freezing onstage when he spotted Russell in the audience while performing “Burn Down the Mission” at the Troubadour in 1970. He did a short phrase of “Sitting in the Park,” the 1965 Billy Stewart single, which Costello quickly joined in before they discussed Stewart, the gifted, 300-pound vocalist who hit the big time by turning George Gershwin’s somber “Summertime” into a sputtering, falsetto soul masterpiece in 1966 and was killed several years later in a car accident (not by a gunshot, as John says).

And they talked about the sway that David Ackles, a piano player and songwriter with Nyro’s penchant for abandoning conventional verse-chorus formats, held on them both in the early 1970s. I, too, was stricken with Ackle’s 1972 American Gothic album back then.

Listening to it again for the first time in many years, I like it even better. Produced by John’s writing partner, Bernie Taupin, American Gothic still sounds wonderfully contemporary. Hearing Costello’s own interpretation of John’s “Border Song” and watching John and Costello close the program by resurrecting Ackles’ “Down River,” with a band that included Allen Toussaint, James Burton and Pete Thomas, transcended the decades.

Spectacle: Elvis Costello With … is on the Sundance Channel.

Best Music of 2008 Part Two

Cardboard Bob stands in my office next to a black velvet painting of the desert. Who knew he wanted to be Wolfman Jack?

A big part of 2008 for me was my introduction to Theme Time Radio Hour, the program hosted by Bob Dylan. I have been up early many days this year, letting the dog out, and while perusing the news on the web with my first cup of coffee, firing up an episode. The program, now in its third season on satellite radio, is a series of one-hour programs, each based on a theme – divorce, birds, hair, baseball, presidents, women’s names, smoking, with Dylan as your disc jockey. You get the idea.

“Your place for themes, dreams and schemes,” he often cackles, and he seems barely able to contain himself as he eagerly shares little-heard gems that he seems to have discovered throughout his life. If you didn’t know it, Bob Dylan is a major-league record nut. He tells a caller that all the music on the show comes from his own personal collection, and that he likes music “that was made 70 years ago and music that was made last Tuesday.”

Those are attributes I can really admire and appreciate in a DJ. According to “Inside Dylan’s Brain,” a Vanity Fair article that serves as a kind of a thesaurus for the first two seasons, more than fifty percent of the music he plays is from the nineteen fifties and earlier. He plays show tunes, novelty songs, soul and R&B. He talks with great enthusiasm about calypso and reggae, sticks up for rap and cowboy music and plays the Replacements, Green Day, the Ramones and Run DMC alongside Dinah Washington, Muddy Waters and Mud Boy and the Neutrons. Genres have no place here.

And he’s funny. “I don’t usually like to tell people what I’m doing, but I am talking to a couple of car companies about possibly being the voice of their GPS system,” he says, introducing Ray Charles’ “Lonely Avenue” on his latest theme, Road Maps. “I think it would be good, if you’re looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like ‘Take a left at the next street. No, a right. Know what, just go straight.’”

If you have read Chronicles Part One, you’ll know the world Dylan creates from a place he calls “the Abernathy building.” He seems to revel in history, pop culture, show-biz and political intrigue, rumors and gossip. He offers perspective on Nixon and the Checkers speech, Kennedy and his women, Sinatra and the Mob, Sinatra, Kennedy and their women. He likes Willie Nelson’s voice before he became the Red-Headed Stranger. When it comes to the Three Stooges, he argues Larry is the smartest and admits that he’s s Shemp man. He talks with equal aplomb about Edith Piaf and Paul Winchell, the ventriloquist who came up with the idea for the artificial heart. He is, he says, proud to live in America, “the only place where Slim Gaillard could sing an ode to matzo balls and gefilte fish.”

Dylan answers email, takes callers’ questions and includes conversations and soliloquies with Tom Waits (who ruminates on the extinction of the passenger pigeon, among other things), Elvis Costello, Jack White, Marianne Faithful, Richard Lewis, Jenny Lewis, Luke Wilson and Penn Gillette, among others. I mean, how cool is to hear David Hidalgo explain that Don Santiago Jimenez, the father of Flaco, is the godfather of tejano music, the first one to sing lyrics over polkas?

Dylan honestly sounds like he’s having the time of his life. “We’ve told the Percy Mayfield story a couple of times here,” he says introducing the original demo of “Hit the Road Jack” on the Road Maps show. “If you haven’t heard it, go download some of our shows illegally.” Did I mention he was funny?

After reading Chronicles and listening to a bunch of Theme Times, I think I know why people might get frustrated interviewing Dylan. If I ever got a crack at him I wouldn’t ask about him any of his songs. But you can bet I would bring up that Womack brothers’ acoustic demo of “Across 110th Street” that he says “shows how funky two acoustic guitars can be.”

Hear Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, on Sirius/XM and at Croz.FM. Read the first installment of Best of Music 2008.

A still from the opening credits of True Blood.

Beginning in 1980 and continuing into 2006, I participated in the Village Voice‘s Pazz & Jop Critics Poll. It began, I think, as a way for a small but growing number of newspaper and magazine critics to sound off about their favorite albums of the year, in the late 1970s, and by the time of its demise when Robert Christgau was fired a couple of years ago, it attracted nearly one thousand people who wrote about popular music to declare their top ten albums and singles of the year and choose a winner under a numerical rating system.

I was a great believer in albums, and rating my favorites against my peers was really fun at the time, but I don’t miss it, for various reasons, but mostly because I don’t really listen to albums as albums anymore. Who does, I wonder? I still review five or six a year and will readily admit that I can be rewarded by listening to an entire compact disc several times. I might play one all the way through because it is actually created that way, (Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine comes to mind) or if it is an artist I really like (Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs, although that one sounds just as well in shuffle as in sequence). Otherwise, the whole idea of listening to albums seems rather quaint.

This might sound strange coming from someone whose enthusiasm for the recorded album as an art form helped lead me into a career as a writer.  Today I don’t necessarily rely upon albums to find music. One of the top songs of the year for me is Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” (see below), but the only times I hear it is while watching the HBO series True Blood, for which it is the title song. I was led to Sarah Bareilles “Love Song” by a Rhapsody commercial. I find all kinds of good stuff on YouTube and in the blogs of music fans.

I continue to hear out friends who tell me that music isn’t as good as it used to be or are disillusioned with it. And I just don’t get it. The good stuff is perhaps not as centrally located as it used to be, and you certainly can’t keep up with everything even in a small genre, but I continue to be challenged by more great music out there than any time in my memory. That includes music that was made seventy years ago and music that was recorded last Tuesday, as Bob Dylan said this year on this radio show. We have reverted back to the days of the jukebox, ie. you’re only as good as your last single.

Having my music in a database that I can access instantly, of course, is a big part of the richness and variety that I need. If I don’t have anything in mind to listen to, I turn on shuffle until I find something I do want to explore. If I don’t like something, I just cue up the next song.

The way I see it, as music labels continue their inexorable decline (and don’t miss Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age for that particular story), musicians will take more control over their work. And, since there are more musicians and bands out there and the marketplace less organized and controlled by labels, learn to take less for their art than perhaps they have been accustomed and find ways to make it work.

‘Nuff said. But here’s part one of the bounty I have found this year, those songs that keep me hitting the repeat button, that force the Jukebox in My Head to pick up the needle and start it over. Whenever possible, I’m providing links to YouTube videos or some site so you can hear the music, too.

Billie and I are huge fans of True Blood, HBO’s tawdry, witty, bloody vampire soap, and part of the charm is the use of Jace Everett’s rockabilly rave, “Bad Things,” as the title song. Judge for yourself, but I find the video, like the series, particularly unsettling yet wonderfully strange. I can’t think of a southern cliché that isn’t found somewhere in this minute and a half slice of Louisiana religion, voodoo, sex, violence and racism. Bad pickup line of the year: “I want to do real bad things with you.”

Jakob Dylan's first solo record is titled Seeing Things.

Jakob Dylan’s first solo record, Seeing Things, produced by Rick Rubin, is a quiet acoustic affair that, like Chavez Ravine, actually works as an album for me. Rubin’s tasty arrangements never work against Dylan’s guitar scratching or his vocal delivery. Best song is the first one, “Evil is Alive and Well,” a commentary on the strange year of 2008 like no other.

His songs (“See You Later Alligator,” “Walkin’ to New Orleans”) are universally known, but Bobby Charles has worked in complete obscurity almost his whole life. This year he released Homemade Songs, a terrific set of his own tunes, including this funky version of “But I Do”, a song I  learned decades ago from  Clarence “Frogman” Henry.

OK. What would a year be without a good old rowdy rock band tune? The Hold Steady’s “Sequestered In Memphis” has the kind of bozy, guitar-band energy that I cut my musical teeth on, and though I’ve heard a variation of this song a thousand times before, I still love it when I hear it.

I don’t know where I found “Soul Of A Man,” since I don’t have the Modern Guilt disc, but this quick little song kept my attention whenever it came on. This video from an outdoor concert doesn’t hold up as well as the single.

Amy Winehouse belts it out from the green chair.

I was only vaguely familiar with the Zutons’ “Valerie,” but I really like the way Mark Ronson, with vocal assistance from Amy Winehouse, turns a punky pop/rock song into a soul rave.  Looking for the video where I found this song, I ran across this quiet, stripped-down Winehouse rendition, accompanied by only an off-camera guitar.

Winehouse also adds her vocals to Mutya Buena’s “B Boy Baby,” which moves my aging loins much as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” did in 1963, when those loins were more supple.

Coming: Theme Time Radio Hour, Bobby Womack, why YouTube beats concerts and more.