Whats on your turntable tonight?

@tomic601: My copy is on its way to me Jim. I again sprung for the deluxe boxset. uDiscover is selling it right now at 30% discount, with free shipping---Eric.

@slaw, I have the MCA Heavy Vinyl Buddy Holly, and the Analogue Productions version of that same album will be here tomorrow. On the front of the MCA cover the hype sticker has this quote from Fremer:

"Music erupts out of total silence from these thick, 180 gram virgin vinyl discs with a velvety smoothness, spaciousness and ultra-high resolution that stuns even the most committed CD diehard."

The back cover provides these technical details:

"Digitally transferred from original Coral monaural masters by Paul Elmore at MCA Studios, Glendale, CA."

At the time of that transfer, digital technology was still rather primitive. The Analogue Productions version is pure analogue, so a comparison of the two will be interesting.

You think he "lost it", @uberwaltz? Did he have something to lose? Only the love of hearing the sound of his own voice. Geez, I feel like I’m back on Facebook. ;-)

Ha! Your prediction has come to pass: the thread has been "removed by a moderator."

@tomic601, I just received notice from Revolution Hall that tickets for the Hiatt/Douglas show are on sale. Not too bad, $45 I think. No mention yet of a cancellation, though the Oregon Governor is implementing some measures.

I saw Jerry at Revolution when he toured in support of his last album, and his music that night was in the "Progressive Bluegrass" style (yes, there is such a thing), rather than Traditional. The Progressive strain has a lot of Jazz elements---no vocals, lots of soloing. I myself prefer Traditional, but I'll take Jerry Douglas---my favorite living musician (with Ry Cooder a very close second)---any way I can get him!

shadorne---I read Tom say that Steve came up with ideas that never occurred to him, ideas resulting from his technical training and experience, which Tom and The Heartbreakers don’t share with him . There’s an old saw amongst musicians, that one’s limitations determine one’s style. There’s some truth to that. There’s another, particularly amongst drummers, that drummers with advanced technique tend to sound alike, with no identifiable style of their own, only their technique. That I’m not so sure about, though Steve and Kenny Aronoff (University of Illinois training and degrees, Mellencamp’s original drummer) do sound alike. One guy with somewhat less technique but absolutely no style is Max Weinberg, Springsteen’s drummer. Boring.

There are drummers with technique who have/had a lot of style, starting with the incomparable Earl Palmer (New Orleans drummer credited with creating, single-handedly, Rock ’n’ Roll drumming---Little Richard, etc.), as well as Levon Helm (The Band), Roger Hawkins (Muscle Shoals studios---all those great Jerry Wexler-produced Atlantic recordings of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, etc., Traffic), Hal Blaine (L.A. studios---a LOT of 1960’s hit singles, including those of The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, Simon & Garfunkel, even Sinatra), Jim Gordon (Joe Cocker, Derek & The Dominoes, L.A. studios), and Jim Keltner (Ry Cooder, George Harrison, Traveling Wilburys, studios), and Steve Gadd (Eric Clapton, Paul Simon---including his great part in "50 Ways To leave Your lover").

Then there is Ringo Starr, a drummer with very limited technical ability, but a LOT of style. Charlie Watts too.

shadorne, stoked you like it! I’ve been following Chris for years, both solo (some albums on Sugar Hill) and in The Desert Rose Band (a great group, with not only Chris, but also Herb Pedersen and Telecaster master John Jorgenson of The Hellecasters). Chris and Herb have done a few albums as partners too. Love ’em!

Thanks slaw, Millennium has it on reorder, should be back in stock in a coupla days. I believe I’ll get it on LP, even if it was recorded and/or mastered digitally. LP’s are just a more substantial experience! I did buy the latest Rodney Crowell CD, which I'll give a listen to in the morning.

I know what you mean, reubent. Prine is a fine songwriter, and a singer with his own identifiable style and sound, rough as it is. But he, like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Bob Dylan, is really difficult to sing harmony with. His phrasing is just so unpredictable and erratic, that staying in synch with him is impossible!

If you're lucky, John's pal Iris Dement may appear with him as a guest. They often share the stage with each other.

Cool @tomic601. That Tony Rice Unit lineup did an earlier album, Still Inside, also on Rounder Records. Rounder was for years about the best label in the world imo, with an incredible roster of artists. NRBQ, one of my favorite bands when guitarist/songwriter/singer Al Anderson was a member, made a lot of albums that came on the label. Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, and Costello were all huge NRBQ fans.

I jammed with Tony Rice Unit bassist Todd Phillips last in 2012, I believe it was. He was playing his 18th Century German upright, so I know exactly what it's suppose to sound like when reproduced (assuming the recording engineer did his job well). More recently Todd has been on the road with Joan Baez.

Todd played a Fender Precision bass when we were kids in San Jose, and started going up to Marin in '71 to study mandolin with David Grisman (partly a result of the effect The Band's brown album had on all of us). Dave told him there were a lot of good mandolin players around, but a shortage of standup bass players (Dan Hicks had one in his band). Todd took Dave's advice, and ended up working with him!

I loved Procol Harum's first three albums at the time of their release, and still do. Then organist Matthew Fisher left the group, and their style and sound changed dramatically. The fourth album---Home---was not at all to my liking, Robin Trower’s rather clichéd white-boy Blues style of guitar playing coming far too center stage for me. I saw them live in 1970, and they struck me as just another British Blues-Rock band, a genre I find dreadfully boring. It was a shame, because the Matthew Fisher-era PH was a unique, magnificently Baroque-ish musical group. I wrote PH off, never desiring to hear another of their albums.

Had Trower left by the time of Grand Hotel? I’ll look it up. Perhaps his departure for a solo career returned PH to their former glory. Art Dudley often mentions Grand Hotel in his reviews, and now with reubent’s endorsement---my musical taste aligns with his---I believe I need to hear the album.

Yes, shadorne, Joe Cocker---I knew I was leaving out somebody! You possess musical wisdom to an unusual degree, my man, and your words, with which I agree 100%, were a pleasure to read. "Playing for the song" is the musicianship I crave, listen for in others, and employ myself. It sounds unimpressive to many, not "obvious" enough---too subtle. It takes a certain level of maturity and self-confidence to play with taste and economy (as your "it can be frightening to leave space" line acknowledges), and is what separates the men from the boys.

I first witnessed it in a drummer when I saw and heard Dewey Martin (Buffalo Springfield) live in 1969. Mitch Mitchell, Keith Moon, and Ginger Baker were my standard at the time, and it was a shock to learn there was another, very different, approach to playing drums. I had to learn how to play all over again, this time with a completely different objective---musicality, not empty virtuosity and self-congratulatory displays of pointless technique.

tostadosunidos---It was in ’69 I saw and heard Dewey live. Buffalo Springfield in parenthesis was to identify Dewey as the drummer in that group, not to say I saw them in ’69. The group in ’69 was named The New Buffalo, and Dewey was the only remaining original member. Neil Young was working on his first album, Stephen Stills on the first C,S,& Nash, and Richie Furay was starting Poco (along with late-Buffalo Springfield bassist Jim Messina).

In The New Buffalo playing bass and singing harmony was Randy Fuller, Bobby’s brother. My teen combo got the gig opening for them at a local San Jose High School, with the proviso Dewey---who traveled with only a snare drum, bass drum pedal, and stick bag---could use my drumset. Oh, okay ;-).

For an excellent example of playing in the less-is-more style, give a listen to Levon Helm in "Chest Fever" on Music From Big Pink. Hear how in the bridge he switches from playing the snare drum backbeat on 2 and 4 (in the verses) to playing all four beats on the snare drum? At least, that’s what you THINK he’s doing; listen again, and you’ll notice that by playing the 1, 2, and 3 on snare, he has lead you to assume he will also play the 4 (as Charlie Watts does all throughout "Satisfaction). He instead rests (doesn’t play) the fourth beat on snare drum, playing his bass drum on that beat instead. It sounds SO cool! Most drummers would play the 4 on snare drum, then crash a cymbal on the downbeat (the 1 of the next bar), which results in the release of tension, ala Keith Moon. Levon, by instead leaving out the 4 on snare and not crashing on the 1, CREATES tension. Brilliant! Music From Big Pink is full of that kind of playing---very, very rare in Rock ’n’ Roll. That’s why everyone from Ringo, to Jim Keltner, to Richie Hayward (Little feat), to songwriters like Nick Lowe and John Hiatt, consider Levon amongst the handful of best drummers in R & R’s history.

I left out one detail of Levon's remarkable playing in "Chest Fever". By not crashing on the downbeat (the 1) that introduces the next bar of the song, Levon has actually changed the construction of the song---from a bar-to-bar construct to a larger, longer viewpoint, that of the whole bridge. Very few drummers think in those terms, that of the construction of the song, and how their playing affects, determines even, that.

When a drummer emphasizes the "1" (by crashing on a cymbal as Keith Moon always does, or, as does John Bonham in so many LZ songs, by "burying" the bass drum beater into the bd head, preventing the head from ringing by not letting the beater bounce off the head), he does two things: First is bring the song to a screeching halt---stopping and starting again every four beats, back-and-forth. That creates a secondary effect, that of breaking up the song into little pieces---a bunch of 4-beat bars--- rather than the natural flow of the songwriter's chord progression, the whole song section (whether verse, chorus, or bridge/middle 8) as one. It is that kind of "small" playing that I find so common, so tedious, so pedestrian. Okay, I'm an elitist!

You’re SO right, tostadodunitos, Richard Manuel is a great drummer. Not in the technical sense, but musically. Levon Helm started the 1965 Bob Dylan world tour as the drummer in Dylan’s backing band for the tour, The Hawks. But he found the booing they encountered by the diehard Folk purists insufferable, and left the tour (and The Hawks), going down to the Gulf Coast to make a living working on an oil rig. When the tour ended in 1966, The Hawks relocated from The Chelsea Hotel in NYC to Saugerties in upstate New York, to be in close proximity to Dylan in nearby Woodstock. They found a house to rent (the infamous "Big Pink"), where they settled in and began recording what have come to be known as the Basement Tapes. When Capitol Records heard the recordings, they offered The Hawks their own contract. Hawks bassist Rick Danko gave Levon a call with the news, and Levon was on the next plane (;-).

Levon listened to the recordings, and Richard, who had played drums on many of the songs, became, as Levon states in his autobiography, his favorite drummer. That Richard is the drummer on some of the songs on The Band's 2nd, s/t ("brown") album, most people don't realize he's on about half the songs on that album, as well as a couple on their 1st, Music From Big Pink. The drumming of musicians whose primary instrument is other than drums is interesting, in that they are not playing the stock, "traditional" parts that primary-drummers have learned, but rather in a manner they find dictated by the song itself. Other non-drummers who play interesting, and sometimes great, drum parts include Stevie Wonder, Dave Edmunds, Andrew Gold, Paul McCartney, Emitt Rhodes (actually, Emitt was the drummer in The Palace Guard before he moved to guitar and piano in The Merry-Go-Round, and then his solo career) and, more recently, Marshall Crenshaw. Marshall’s drumming on his #447 album is really, really good!

slaw, is the 2013 Lucinda s/t album on LP? I have an expanded and remastered CD version from 1998 on Koch Records with six bonus live tracks, and the original Rough Trade LP. I like the album enough to get a new LP if it’s been done real well.

reubent, love The Rose Of England album! I saw Nick live quite a few years ago with his cool little 3-piece band, and he had Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham open for him. Great show!