Fun With The Old Testament

Blood, Frogs, Gnats, Flies, Pestilence, Boils,
Hail, Locusts, Darkness, and Death.

Happy Passover!

Download:



"Matzoh Balls" mp3
by Slim Gaillard & His Flat Foot Floogee Boys, 1939.
available on Laughing in Rhythm

photograph: © Ted Barron, 2009.

Duane Jarvis: 1957-2009

Guitarist Duane Jarvis died this week after a long battle with cancer. I met him around 2002, when he was touring with my friend Amy Rigby, and they stayed with me and my wife at our Brooklyn loft. I can't say I knew him well, but we did spend one memorable evening together listening to records and talking about music. I made him a copy of a Don Covay record that I was obsessed with at the time, and he gave me a copy of his then current release, Certified Miracle. The songs are good and soulful, and have caused me more than once to do a double-take and check out what was playing when they came up in my itunes shuffle. He was a gifted guitar player and songwriter, who played with many artists, including Lucinda Williams with whom he wrote, "Still I Long For Your Kiss."

Download:

"Still I Long For You Kiss" mp3
by Duane Jarvis, 2001.
available on Certified Miracle

"Intoxicate Me" mp3
by Duane Jarvis, 2001.
available on Certified Miracle

"Last Time You Cried" mp3
by Duane Jarvis, 2001.
available on Certified Miracle

**************************************

"Til The Wheels Fall Off" mp3
by Amy Rigby (with Todd Snider), 2003.
D.J. lead guitar
available on Til the Wheels Fall Off

Amy has written a nice remembrance of D.J. HERE

**************************************

also...

by Laura Cantrell

Duane Jarvis was someone I knew by reputation before I actually met him in person. He was in Lucinda Williams' band when I saw her a few times in New York, at the Mercury Lounge and maybe Tramps. She would introduce the song they wrote together, "Still I Long For Your Kiss," with a shout out to DJ. He was a low key presence on stage, and very approachable in person. I got to know him a bit back in Nashville, where he played with Amy Rigby and Tim Carroll and a lot of folks who had migrated down from NY. When I was finally starting to play on the UK/Europe alt country circuit, we crossed paths a few times and had a lovely show together in Edinburgh at Queen's Hall in 2003. Backstage at that gig, I got to tell DJ a story about hearing his music in a funny context. At the time I was still working on 57th street and one of my mid-day refuges was Bendel's department store on 56th Street and 5th Avenue. For several months that year, every time I was in the store I would hear DJ's song "A Girl That's Hip." I would sort of look around at the fancy ladies oblivious to the soundtrack of their shopping, and hope that DJ was getting some revenue from the spins. Hearing the song was also a little encouragement while I was trying to balance two totally different worlds, making my living in a big corporation and playing my own music whenever I could. So I got to tell DJ that his song had popped up a few times to lighten my mood, and we shared a nice smile over it backstage in Edinburgh. He was a very sweet guy.

Download:

"A Girl That's Hip" mp3
by Duane Jarvis, 1998.
available on Far From Perfect

**************************************

"Still I Long For Your Kiss" mp3
by Lucinda Williams, 1998.
available on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

top photo: Jenine de Shazer © 2006

SXSW

by Scott Schinder

In its 23-year existence, the Austin, Texas-based South by Southwest music festival/industry gathering has always mirrored the mood of both the mainstream music biz and the alt-rock underground. So it wasn't surprising that the vibe at that this year's SXSW carried an undercurrent of unease over the perilous state of the recorded-music business, even as a horde of young and/or unsigned acts were in town attempting to launch their careers by bypassing traditional business models.

While the seismic shifts in the music biz are undeniable, music continues to play as essential a role in people's lives as ever, a fact that's affirmed by SXSW's ongoing vitality in these hard times. For me, the most significant thing about the festival is the sheer quantity of music that descends upon Austin during SXSW week. During the four days and nights of the music fest proper, one can't take more than a few steps on Austin's club hub of 6th Street, or on the booming hipster drag of South Congress, without being assaulted by all manner of live music. The fact that much of that music is mediocre-to-downright-terrible is beside the point; the overkill is exhilarating and inspiring all the same.

SXSW's reputation as a venue for buzz bands to be discovered, and for rising and established recording acts to launch new products, is well deserved. But attendees who focus exclusively on seeking out new talent are in constant danger of being disappointed, considering the multitude of unremarkable acts who regularly manage to stir up a SXSW buzz. Perhaps it's just because I live in New York, but I long ago stopped relying on SXSW as a vehicle for discovering new music. Of course, it's always a thrill to stumble upon something unexpectedly great, and I inevitably do on multiple occasions during the festival. But rather than spending SXSW seeking out the next big thing, I generally make an effort to sample the best of the festival's embarrassment of far-ranging musical riches, along with the countless unofficial events that take place within the festival's orbit, allows one the potential of seeing something great, or at least really good.

One early SXSW highlight was swamp-rock godfather Tony Joe White's riveting set on Wednesday, the festival's opening night. Four decades down the road from his signature hit "Polk Salad Annie," the Louisiana-bred singer/guitarist/tunesmith made some of the most raw and most compelling music of his storied career on last year's Deep Cuts. That album tricks out some of the artist's classic tunes with oddly appropriate electronic elements, creating a bracing mutant-blues stew that carries his iconoclastic style into exciting new sonic territory. The modified approach really comes to life on stage, where, accompanied only by a keyboardist and drummer, White's sublimely funky guitar work reaches new levels of funky inspiration.

Less inspired was resurgent psych-punk cult icon Roky Erickson's two-song mini-set the same night at the Austin Music Awards. Erickson's mere presence on stage, after decades of mental illness and musical inactivity, is miraculous in itself. But, after a run of inspired comeback shows with his '80s combo the Explosives, recent attempts to team Erickson with younger, hipper bands have been less satisfying. Tonight's pairing with talented Austin neopsychedelicists the Black Angels, must have seemed like an inspired concept on paper. But Roky tends to get lost in unfamiliar territory, and the Black Angels (like worthy Austin outfits Okkervil River and the Summer Wardrobe before them) weren't up to the task of keeping the erratic icon focused. After Erickson missed his cue on an otherwise promising reading of his 13th Floor Elevators classic "Splash One," the performance went off the rails and never regained its momentum.

More enjoyable was the awards show's paean to Roky's equally seminal contemporary, the late roots-rock godhead Doug Sahm, to celebrate the release of the largely excellent various-artists disc Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm. Led by Sir Doug's son Shawn (whose effusive stage persona eerily recalls that of his old man) and featuring Sahm's longtime keyboard sidekick Augie Meyers and a one-song guest spot by Alejandro Escovedo, the four-song set maintained the sort of loose but insistent groove that Sahm helped to invent.

One of the best bands I saw on Thursday—Michael Hall's current combo the Savage Trip—wasn't even playing an official SXSW showcase. Hall, a matter-of-factly elegant songwriter whose much-loved combo the Wild Seeds was a leading light of Austin's '80s alt-rock boom, has been making consistently excellent records (the most recent being 2006's The Song He Was Listening to When He Died) ever since. The Savage Trip, comprised largely of longtime Hall cohorts, was a subtly powerful vehicle for the artist's evocative songcraft, and it's a shame that the band rarely performs outside of Austin.

Also trading in literate, infectious jangle are England's Blue Aeroplanes, whose SXSW sets marked the band's first U.S. appearances in nearly two decades. In that time, the band's personnel has turned over completely, with the exception of frontman/lyricist Gerard Langley and his drummer brother John. But the current lineup (joined here by local ringer Steve Collier, late of Doctors' Mob and the Rite Flyers, standing in for the band's rhythm guitarist, who'd been refused a U.S. visa) do right by the Aeroplanes' longstanding mix of punchy folk-rock and barbed beat poetry.

Unlike Hall and the Aeroplanes, ex-Mavericks frontman Raul Malo, actually had a new release (the fine Lucky One) to promote, and did so with effortless class and passion in his SXSW showcase. If there's a better male vocalist than Malo in contemporary American popular music, I'd like to hear him.

On Friday afternoon at the Yard Dog folk-art gallery, venerable indie roots-rock label Bloodshot hosted its popular long-running SXSW bash. Swell performances by '50s R&B innovator Andre Williams, postpunk rockabilly visionary Dex Romweber and Florida cowpunk pioneer Charlie Pickett showed how much the label's vision has expanded in its decade-and-a-half existence. And a typically rousing closing set by Bloodshot's flagship band the Waco Brothers—an Anglo-American sextet co-led by Mekons member and multimedia renaissance rabble-rouser Jon Langford, whose multi-band work ethic has long made him one of SXSW's busiest performers—demonstrated how the Wacos have evolved from alcohol-fueled diversion to protest-song juggernaut.

Friday night's Ponderosa Stomp revue offered a scaled-down version of the annual New Orleans-based festival of the same name, which every April offers a dizzying assortment of the underappreciated greats of early rock 'n' roll, blues, R&B, rockabilly and garage-rock, with an emphasis on vintage performers from the Gulf Coast region. This year's SXSW mini-Stomp offered a typically riveting array of talent, including such regulars as blue-eyed-soul wildman Roy Head, guitar-slinging soul queen Barbara Lynn and the great Louisiana guitarists Classie Ballou and Li'l Buck Sinegal, along with some of the never-thought-you'd-live-to-see-it rediscoveries that that the Stomp is so adept at providing. The latter group included memorable performances from fabled Dallas rocker Floyd Dakil, whose energetic set included his garage-compilation standards "Dance Franny Dance" and "Bad Boy," and Texas rockabilly original Huelyn Duvall. The latter pair received expert, unfussed backup from Austin semi-supergroup Eve and the Exiles.

Although they've never played an official SXSW gig, Houston's Allen Oldies Band is as much a SXSW success story as any act. Led by irrepressible frontman and vintage Top 40 fanatic Allen Hill, the Allen Oldies Band plays vintage AM pop hits with a transcendent fervor that belies the group's cover-band status, and their long-running marathon outdoor sets during the convention have won them a loyal following of SXSW registrants. Meanwhile, the group's instrumental expertise has won them a sideline backing vintage artists in their hometown and elsewhere. This year, the Allen Oldies Band was so in-demand that they managed to pack five sets in the space of six hours on Saturday. The marathon began with the band's annual 10AM throwdown at the Continental Club, followed by a noontime set across the street at Jo's Coffee (in between, Hill sat in on bass with German country-rock wiseacres the Twang). After Jo's, the band rushed across town to play behind the aforementioned Barbara Lynn and Roy Head at an outdoor neighborhood party, then returned to the Continental to back Andre Williams, after which Oldies multi-instrumentalist David Beebe walked down the street to play bass with Jon Langford at Yard Dog. Although none of these adventures was officially sanctioned by SXSW, it's this sort of thing that keeps the festival fun and exciting, and a big part of what keeps me coming back year after year.

Download:

"Roosevelt And Ira Lee (Night Of The Mossacin)" mp3
by Tony Joe White, 1969.
available on ...Continued

"Every Little Thing" mp3
by Michael Hall, 1994.
available on Adequate Desire

"Yr Own World" mp3
by The Blue Aeroplanes, 1991.
available on Beatsongs

"Sugar Shack" mp3
by The Allen Oldies Band, 2005.
available on Live and Delirious! on WFMU



"Dance Franny Dance" mp3
by The Floyd Dakil Combo, 1964.
available on Pebbles, Vol. 1



"Oh, Baby (We Got A Good Thing Goin')" mp3
by Barbara Lynn, 1964.
available on The Jamie Singles Collection 1962-1965



"Just A Little Bit" mp3
by Roy Head, 1965.
available on Teeny Weeny Bit

all photographs: Jacob Blickenstaff © 2009

April Fool's Day

by Mike DeCapite

April is here. When I got home from work on Friday my room was shadowy and the sky was bright above the alley. I set an ashtray on the windowsill, put my feet up on the desk, and listened to a record I’ve had since I was fifteen. One night Luke and I walked into one of the mall record stores where a harmonica was playing and I looked up as though I were in church. You know how you look up, by reflex? The record——I later found out from the words but I heard it instantly in the music——was about the road. It was about a life lived from place to place, person to person, job to job, but ultimately alone. It was about being honest rather than good. It accepted the nature of time and change, and imagined life as a series of episodes and entanglements which add up to an idea. The harmonica poured its heart out and the music glittered like sunlight on the spokes of a wheel or the surface of a stream. That moment was one of those recognitions of how things are, and are going to be, and the song has been like a church to me ever since.

Springtime always brings me back around to this record, which is about the presence of the past as much as anything else. On Friday as I leaned back against the bookcase, the music opened a window on the past. The past was a room I was looking into, and I was in that room, and it was the same room as the one I call the present. The things of this room are from the past, the same as my reasons for being here, all of which——the books, the trunk, the room, my reasons——are of the present, too. The past exists on the same plane as the present, with its wives and friends who come and go and the difficulties of communication and the permanence of impermanent relations and vice versa. I haven’t spoken to Flo since I left New York. A few weeks ago I had a tough conversation with Kitty, one of those conversations in which you can hear how things are and how they’re going to be. It’s five years since we split up, five years since I moved into this room. There are scenes and utterances which will be with me for the rest of my life. I undermined both marriages by drinking, which is a way of hanging onto a moment that’s already gone. I undermined my second marriage with guilt about the first, which is another way of hanging on. The guilt I’ve gotten past. I couldn’t carry that guy anymore, with all his ideas about things. What’s still standing, what’s hardest to accept, is the minor tragedy that all of us are right. There’s no turning back. There’s no help for it, there’s no one to call about it, there’s nothing much to say about it because it just is. And it’s always now.

When the record was done I swept and straightened the room and stacked some books on the bare floor. Then I went to a party which the warm weather had engendered as naturally as it brought forth the buds, walking quietly through the dusk, inhaling jasmine so sweet it was almost sour, and gardenia, and other things I couldn’t name. I didn’t want to go. I had nothing to say, I didn’t want to talk, or listen to others talk. The sky was emptying out. A bright pink contrail, which looked as permanent as a scar, had disappeared without a trace when I looked again.

At the party, everywhere I turned there were a bottles of liquor and wine and mixers and olive spears and fruit, and everyone was mixing and sipping delicious-looking and civilized martinis in cold metal shakers and Campari-&-sodas with orange slices and bourbons on the rocks, but my momentary temptation to have a drink was an ember easily stamped out, because it’s been a long time already and I have, hopefully, a long way to go.

It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be...

On Saturday morning I folded up the bed, made a pot of tea, did a little writing. Then I went to the racetrack.

I rode the train to the East Bay and got off at North Berkeley. There I left the station and crossed the road to where a cab driver was standing under a tree. There were three riders in his taxi, waiting for a fourth. I squeezed in and off we went, handing money over the seat——two-fifty each——the usual silent citizen with slicked-back hair in a blue windbreaker who rode up front, a shrunken man in a suit and turban, and a sizeable woman who said that if she won she was going to buy a new pair of shoes. Berkeley’s warmer, a month further into spring. We rode through streets of bungalows and yellow flowers in overgrown lawns, under the freeway to the bay.

At the curb we wished each other luck and went our separate ways. I took a Form, program, and coffee to the grandstand. The morning was spread below me with the Berkeley hills beyond. Sprinklers arced on the infield grass, which was mown in stripes. Slow tractors overturned the dark earth of the track, followed by the water trucks, which cooled it all down.

I had a bad day out there. In my first race I got shut out of a horse that won and paid $50, and then I had two out of three horses in the next five trifectas. Pete showed up and we caught a small trifecta which brought me halfway back. On our way out he wanted to watch them come around again, so we stopped and waited by the rail. I leaned on the fence, watching a bumblebee hovering above its shadow on the dirt. Funny how quiet it is when they come around. All you hear is the horses’ breathing, and now and then a whip...

Today, Sunday, I stood in the back door. Blazing sunlight had chosen a white flower and filled it with light, more light than it could hold, before moving on. Around 3:30 I took my laundry around the corner. The shadows were shot with sunlight, and the cool air carried the sun’s warmth. Everyone on the street looked a little blinded by the light, like they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves and they were waiting for it to die down a little...

It’s taken me five years to see that I live on the prettiest street in San Francisco. The trees won me over, the eloquent double row of elms in both directions...

After many months bare, the trees hang fully leafed now, slaves to life like everyone else.


Download:

"Tangled Up In Blue" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1975.
Available on Blood on the Tracks

"Simple Twist Of Fate" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1974.
available on New York Sessions: Blood On The Tracks

"Up To Me" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1974.
available on Biograph

"Call Letter Blues" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1974.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991

"You're A Big Girl Now" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1974.
available on New York Sessions: Blood On The Tracks

"Buckets of Rain" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1975.
available on Blood on the Tracks

"April Fool's Day" from RUINED FOR LIFE! © 2009 Mike DeCapite; originally published in somewhat different form, by angle magazine in 2004.

Mike DeCapite's long-out-of-print novel Through the Windshield is now available as a Kindle book via Amazon.

Photograph: Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA. 2008
© Ted Barron

Sonny and the Sunsets

I don't usually review new releases here (or even write reviews, for that matter) but today when I opened the mail and found this brand new 45 by Sonny and the Sunsets sent to me from Soft Abuse Records in Minneapolis with a note asking me to write a review and a crisp $100 bill attached, I changed my tune.

No, that's not true, let's start over.



Sometime in mid 2007, I got an email from Sonny Smith saying he was enjoying the Boogie Woogie Flu, and singling out a post with music from Alex Chilton's Like Flies on Sherbert, in which I included original versions of songs, by The Bell Notes and Troy Shondell, that Chilton covered. Sonny explained that he found the blog through a friend of mine. We exchanged a few emails, and then I heard some of Sonny's songs which won me over almost immediately.

His record Fruitvale, is a collection of songs about the singer's neighborhood, populated by pimps, transvestites, drug dealers, vigilantes, good folks and bad cops as well as some lovely melodies and harmonies. It has elements of Lou Reed, Ray Davies and Eliot Smith's songwriting without really sounding like any of them or anybody else in particular.

Sometime that summer, Sonny was in New York and played a gig at the Lakeside, backed by the able rhythm section of Tony Maimone and Steve Goulding. During the set he performed a new song that bared an uncanny resemblence to "I've Had It" by the Bell Notes. Afterwards, we talked a little and he confessed that he had taken the riff from that tune that he first heard here. I invited him to come over while he was in town to listen to some records, and later that week he and our mutual friend Mike DeCapite came over and we listened for hours late into the night to mostly 45's. When going through my boxes of singles, I realized that I had two copies of "I've Had It" (one was cracked) and I bestowed my extra copy on him. I remember Sonny walking out the door later holding the damaged styrene single like it was some kind of sacred object.

Last spring Sonny and I hung out one night in San Francisco. We walked around the Mission and ended up a sitting at a broke-down, slightly picturesque, but undeniably depressing bar drinking sodas and commiserating with one another about our respective troubles. We were both in the middle of some serious shit. Sonny, at the time, was living apart from his girlfriend and young son and trying to figure out which way to go. I was experiencing a confluence of events in my life that were presented to me like a cosmic mind-fuck. Misery loves company, and there we were, two sober guys, prattling on at some dingy bar like a couple of drunks.

What am I gettng at here? The interconnectedness of things, I guess - a friend, a record, an idea, or any number of variables or coincidences that can present themselves to you like a dirty trick or a wondrous gift. Sonny has taken them to be a gift. This cool little single is the debut of his latest incarnation, Sonny and the Sunsets. It comes accompanied by a faux religious tract penned by Sonny and lovingly illustrated by Sunsets drummer Raphi Gottesman - a humorous chronicle of a spiritual crisis, and the road to redemption and reinvention.





Download:

"Strange Love" mp3
by Sonny and the Sunsets, 2009.
available on Love and Death 7"

"Stranded (on Planet Earth)" mp3
by Sonny and the Sunsets, 2009.




"I've Had It" mp3
by The Bellnotes, 1959.
available on I've Had It: The Very Best of the Bell Notes

"Curtis on the Corner" mp3
by Sonny Smith, 2007.
available on Fruitvale

"Good Folks Bad Folks" mp3
by Sonny Smith, 2007.
available on Fruitvale

Love and Death cover art by Chris Johanson
This single is limited to 300 copies and is available HERE

What Me Worry?

My apologies for the silence of The Flu. I've been in a state of suspended digiflux - stuck between the digital world and my analog ways. I've been switching my computers and my cameras - and in my line of work, that's a major hassle - grappling with the elusive ones and zeroes that control our modern lives. That, and the timely crash of my server has kept things static. I'm still working out the bugs. I'm writing this and posting today because I care - really I do - despite what today's selections may otherwise suggest.

"I Don't Care" mp3
by Reigning Sound, 2001.
available on Break Up Break Down

"I Don't Care" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"Careful" (I Don't Care) demo mp3
by Television, 1975.
available on Double Exposure

"Do You Think That I Really Care?" mp3
by the Rolling Stones, 1978.
available on Place Pigalle Vol. 1

Technical Difficulties

My server is down - both here and at my website - and apparently has been for a couple of days. The mp3 links are currently not working. This will hopefully be fixed shortly and I'll be back with a new post.

***UPDATE: 3-19

Links are again active, we are back on the air, and will return with a post very soon.