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garystormsongs

Tag Archives: Folk Music

John Fahey

09 Saturday Feb 2013

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acoustic guitar, Folk Music, Great San Bernardino Birthday Party, John Fahey, Sprite

John Fahey - Vol. 4

I’m listening to “The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party” which runs into “Knott’s Berry Farm Molly,” a long guitar solo with many different movements, including segments in which the tape is played backwards.

The first time I saw John Fahey, the opening act was a lighthearted bluegrass band, whose name now escapes me.

And then there was a long pause.

And then John Fahey came out with his guitar.  And he sat with his legs akimbo, and he set the guitar on the stage, and opened a can of Sprite.  And he looked at no one in particular at the audience.  And he drank from the can.  And he looked with no particular interest at us again.  And he drank more from the can.  And he looked with indifference at the crowd.  And he drank from the can.  And the audience laughed.  And he kept looking and drinking.  And the audience laughed nervously.  And he looked and gulped.  And the audience tittered.  And he looked and took a swig.  And the audience didn’t know what to do.

And when he finished the can of Sprite, he set the empty can down, and kind of clumsily and kind of slowly picked up his guitar, and we noticed, for the first time, it was a really big guitar, like bigger than you have ever seen, and dark, strangely dark.  And he looked at us.

And he struck a string, and a bottomless yawning cavern opened beneath our feet and below us streams of lava bubbled and stars flickered and the kind of radiance you cannot see erupted through us and the auditorium ceiling floated up and dispersed and swinging galaxies ululated overhead and deities above allowed themselves to be seen, and we were never again the same persons who bought tickets and sauntered down the sloping walkway into that concert hall.

The second time I saw John Fahey, he was bombed out of his nut long before he ever hit the stage.

And he stood up, and I swear to god, when he stood up, if he didn’t hold up those jeans below his bulging beer belly they would have fallen down.  And, I don’t even remember why, but for some reason he thought the sound guy was messing with him.  He stood up, his round belly puffing, and shouted, Common up here!  You mother fucker!  Get up from that mixing board.  Common Sound Man.  You wanna take me on!  Common!  Get up here!

Oh god John, shut up sit down and play, you filthy drunk moronic fat slob.

And then he did.

And nothing else, nowhere else, only here, only this, only everything, only everywhere, only nowhere, only nothing, only now.

John Fahey, John Fahey Vol. 4, Takoma Records, C 1008 (1966).  Album design:  David Goines.

Decameron

25 Sunday Mar 2012

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Boccaccio, Celtic, Decameron, Folk Music

Listen to this is a prancing song in 5/4 time called “Saturday” by a British group named Decameron.

When they close up the market
and all the stalls come down
and the young men in their pickups
come in from all the country round
and they wind down the windows
and shout things at the girls
just because it’s Saturday.

This is a magic song in the middle of a forgotten album buried in the budget bins of the import section of a store that was going out of business.  Anyone who reads Giovanni Boccaccio (who lived from 1313 to 1375 and who wrote the 100 little tales compiled as The Decameron) can’t be anything but great.

Dik Cadbury and Dave Bell, “Saturday,” Scorpio Music (1975).  From: Decameron, Third Light, Transatlantic Records, TRA 304 (1975).  Art Direction – Philip Warr; Design – Pat Elliott Shircore; Photography – Keith Morris and Tony Evans.

Michael Hurley

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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cartoon, Eyes, Folk Music, HiFi Snock Uptown, Michael Hurley

Well he does sing.  Like it’s amazing singing.  Even using a falsetto.  But there is something about his singing that is more like talking.   And then there are these people and animals, and animals that represent people, he sings about.  And then the stuff that is so ordinary that it’s hard to understand why it’s worth singing about at all, like taking a wiz, and finishing a beer, and picking out bones from a fish.

I’ve heard he really lives like a hobo, traveling to gigs in a clunky jalopy, sleeping in his car or on couches and wherever.  You can hear Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and maybe even Joseph Spence, and who knows what bunch-of-others sending their inspiration into his sound.  For a time he played and wrote songs with Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber, the core members of the crowd of loonies known as the Holy Modal Rounders (which you must not forget is a spawn of the empire crushing Fuggs phenomenon).

And don’t forget his cartoons.  As inscrutable and captivating and perhaps weirder than those of R. Crumb and Bill Griffith and even Art Spiegelman.  How do those wolves walk and live in a human world and why are they the only ones playing music, and why do wolves seem to be the only objects of desire for those zaftig human women prancing naked in the street?

And then these crazy things that happen in his songs, involving werewolves and ghosts, not to mention his celebration of robbing banks and cutting off his lover’s ear.  And what the hell is a protein monster?

Protein monster
Ate a sack o’ poison sugar
Crawlin’ out of the barn
to the weeds to die
Rollin’ his Eyes – Eyes – Eye
s

It may be enough to say he is one of the greatest folk stylists ever in the history of the United States of America.  He is that, but he communicates about a social niche or way of life or state of mind that few, if any, would ever otherwise experience.  He is In The Life, he is an outsider.  The star of this album is named Hi Fi Snock but we know it is really Michael Hurley, even if we don’t know why.

And then there is just the loneliness, the blues, the strife, the missing you, the longing for peace:

She calls me a bum
Sleeping through the  day
There is nothing I wanted to say
I closed my Eyes – Eyes – Eyes

How could anyone sound at once so drunk and sad and funny and profound?

Michael Hurley. “Eyes, Eyes,” Dogfish Music (ASCAP) (1972).  From HiFi Snock Uptown, Racoon/Warner Bros. Records, BS 2625 (1972).  Cover art – Michael Hurley; Cover Design – not credited.

Bert Jansch

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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Bert Jansch, Celtic, Folk Music, Nottamun town, Pentangle, riddle song, World Music

Anyone who had anything to do with Pentangle is a member of the Divine Host.  This is a traditional tune, “Nottamun Town,” rendered otherworldly with Bert Jansch’s mystical guitar work.  Bert uses a drop D tuning and his intricate finger picking bites out notes from his steel strings like a shower of sparks.

I cannot say exactly what happens in this song.  The liner notes speculate that this song has “a high sexual content.”  Well, I can construe that.  But this is also a riddle song, like “Scarborough Fair” or “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” that sets up a series of impossibilities and contradictions.  I wonder if the medieval minstrel who devised this rhyme was presciently expressing existential ennui centuries before Jean Paul Sartre wrote “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

The protagonist begins “[i]n fair Nottamun town,” seeking someone who will show him the “the way to fair Nottamun town.”  He is where he wants to be and doesn’t know it.  His horse stands still and throws him to the dirt.  He caused his own fall, the horse could not have done it.

But the song seems to turn into a ghost story, as he encounters a King and Queen and their company, and a stark naked drummer “with his heels in his bosom.”  “Heel” can be the last or lowermost part of any object; can these be a description of the desolation of the drummer’s heart?  They laugh and yet not one looks gay, they talk and not a word is said.  They prefigure the worldly emptiness of “Sounds of Silence.”

In the end he is left sitting totally alone on “hot cold frozen stone,” with ten thousand people around him, “Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.”  Indeed, a pointless life is little different than one never born.

In any case, Bert Jansch’s vibratoless dry voice is a perfect vehicle for this song’s mystery.

Traditional, arranged by Bert Jansch, “Nottamun Town,” Heathside Music (no date).  From Bert Jansch, The Bert Jansch Sampler, Transatlantic Records Ltd., Transam 10 (1969).  Sleeve design – Rainbow; Photography – Peter Smith.

The Roches

29 Wednesday Feb 2012

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Barbershop Quartet, Folk Music, Maggie, Robert Fripp, Suzzy, Terre, The Roches, women's music

Another album I cannot pry off the turntable. How annoying and irresistible it is! I love the black and white images on the cover. Maggie, Suzzy, and Terre. They look so smart and mean and free. Which is the one with funny low voice? And what a surprise, in “Hammond Song,” to hear that unmistakable fuzzy Fripp guitar – the first time I heard it I said, Wow it can’t be! Such complex harmonies and counter points. Like a barbershop trio. There’s Robert Fripp again.

At the Buffalo Folk Festival, I said to Suzzy, The way you sing together reminds me of the complex harmonies in barbershop quartet songs. And she was way shorter than me but she came up to me right in my face and said LIKE WHAT??? And I was taken aback by her effrontery, her strength. I did not say I had sung the baritone lines in many a barbershop song – “Ida, sweet as apple cidah” – I was shy. How much fun they must have had as kids wailing gospel songs and folk songs and the Alleluia Chorus at the top of their lungs.

The Roches, The Roches, Warner Brothers Records, BSK 3298 (1979).  Photography – Gary Heery; Album Design – Brad Kanawyer; Art Direction – Peter Whorf.

Rosalie Sorrels

29 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by garystormsongs in Music I Love

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Archie, Folk Music, Mehitabel, Rosalie Sorrels

Well I am always a lady Archie, always a lady. I did not do anything vulgar.  I simply removed his right eye with my left claw.  And the next floor flusher who mentions marriage to me, I may lose my temper and slice him from gahena to duodenum!!

It is hard to imagine anyone more full with life wisdom than Rosalie Sorrels.  The pictures of her face, the whine of her voice, and her worldly songs of sorrow and peace and resignation and joy, she seems to have been through all ways and all things.  She is also a noted collector and preserver of traditional American folk songs.  Now we are listening to her sardonic humor, a riff on Don Marquis’ tales of Archie the literary cockroach and Mehitabel the alley cat.

Rosalie Sorrels, “Mehitabel’s Theme,” no publisher (1979).  From Rosalie Sorrels, Always a Lady, Philo Records, PH 1029 (1979).  Album Design – Margot Zalkind-Schur; Photography – Marion Ettlinger.

Gordon Bok

29 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by garystormsongs in Music I Love

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Folk Music, Gordon Bok, Peter Kagan and The Wind

In the liner notes they call it a cante-fable – a combination of song and story-telling. “Peter Kagan and The Wind” by Gordon Bok is one of the most strange and beautiful recordings I have ever heard. It is a myth about a fisherman who marries a seal. He is caught at sea by the cold North Wind.

The Wind says: Listen, I got something to tell you.
Kagan, rowing: I don’t want to hear it.

Gordon Bok worked among the fishermen off the toast of Maine, he is a poet and plays one of the most singing ringing acoustic guitars on record.

Kagan is freezing dying until . . . . . . he dreams his wife comes down the smoking sea and she climbs into the dory with him . . . . .

Gordon Bok, “Peter Kagan and the Wind,” Machigonnne Music (BMI) (1971).  From Gordon Bok, Peter Kagan and the Wind, Folk Legacy Records, FSI-44 (1971).  Album design – not credited.

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