Karen O and her band, guitarists Holly Miranda and Moses Sumney, played at London’s Bush Hall on Saturday, October 3, 2014 covering songs by The Doors and Radiohead.
Karen O covers The Doors’ “Indian Summer”:
Holly Miranda covers Radiohead’s “High and Dry” (excerpt):
Karen O, “NYC Baby”:
Karen O, “Rapt”:
Karen O, “Hideaway”:
Karen O, “Day Go By”:
Karen O, “Body”:
Karen O, “Comes The Night”:
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
In his new film, “St. Vincent,” Bill Murray sings along to a recording of Bob Dylan singing “Shelter From The Storm.”
St. Vincent opens in a limited engagement on Oct. 10, and then everywhere Oct. 24.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Known around the world for carrying the best in roots music (and world music) – and rootsy world music.
While you can always order my rock ‘n’ roll novel, “True Love Scars,” from any physical book store, I’m thrilled to have the book carried and in stock at one of my favorite record stories, the irreplaceable Down Home Music, located in the down home capital of the world, El Cerrito California.
El Cerrito, which is located between Berkeley and Richmond, has a reputation for great music.
Both Down Home Music and Arhoolie have been based in El Cerrito for decades.
Arhoolie was founded in El Cerrito in 1960, when the late Chris Strachwitz released Mance Lipscomb’s Texas Sharecropper and Songster.
Down Home Music, Strachwitz’s record store, has been at 10341 San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito since 1976, and the folks there can be reached by phone at (510) 525-4827. The store is open each week Thursday through Sunday, from 11 am – 7 pm.
Also worth noting: the great John Fogerty grew up in El Cerrito, which is where Creedence Clearwater Revival formed and were based during their ’60s and early ’70s heyday.
Les Blank, the award-winning filmmaker who made many important music documentaries including “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, lived in El Cerrito. Bob Dylan thinks enough of Les Blank that he has included “The Blues Accordin’ To Lightnin’ Hopkins” as the only film recommended on his website.
The excellent community world music radio station, KECG, which is based in El Cerrito, can be listened to here.
And James Brown, of course, played in nearby Richmond in the ’60s.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
The great Lucinda Williams was on “Fallon” last night and performed a seriously great track off her new two-CD album, “Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone.”
The album was released today and it’s a winner. If you dig Lucinda, you need it.
Check out this killer live version of “Protection”:
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Brian Eno, who curates the new Fela Anikulakpo Kuti box set, says Fela’s music changed his life:
“Before about mid-September 1973 I didn’t have much interest in polyrhythmic music. I didn’t really get it. That all changed one autumn day when I walked into Stern’s Record Shop off Tottenham Court Road. For reasons I’ve long forgotten, I left the store with an album that was to change my life dramatically. It was Afrodisiac by Fela Ransome-Kuti (as he was then known) and his band The Africa 70. I remember the first time I listened and how dazzled I was by the groove and the rhythmic complexity, and by the raw, harsh sounds of the brass, like Mack trucks hurtling across highways with their horns blaring. Everything I thought I knew about music at that point was up in the air again. The sheer force and drive of this wild Nigerian stuff blew my mind. My friend Robert Wyatt called it ‘Jazz from another planet’ – and suddenly I thought I understood the point of jazz, until then an almost alien music to me.”
Fela has been called the “Bob Dylan of Africa.”
Maybe his music will change your life too!
Check out this live version of the late African musical legend’s “Colonial Mentality,” recorded at the New Afrika Shine in Fela’s hometown of Lagos. The track features Femi Kuti on sax.
Below is a player loaded with an interview with Alex Gibney who directed the new film “Finding Fela,” the live recording of “Colonial Mentality,” “Lover,” “Power Show” and “Zombie” from FELA! Original Broadway Cast.
The title track off the Fela album Zombie:
“Mr. Follow Follow” off the Fela album Zombie:
Fela Kuti Live in Berlin – Berliner Jazztage 1978:
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
When Bob Dylan arrived in New York in January 1961, he found himself in a cultural paradise, a city that offered him access to art and music and film that he could only have read about back in Hibbing, Minnesota.
But he had always been curious about the world.
According to Dylan in his autobiography, “Chronicles Volume One,” back in Hibbing he’d already been absorbing a fantastic amount of culture, reading “Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin Luther – visionaries, revolutionaries … it was like I knew those guys, like they’d been living in my backyard.”
Thelonious Monk, “Misterioso”:
He’d seen 100s of films and already had an encyclopedia of music in his head. Sure there were all the folk and blues and country records he’d heard, and many live performances he’d attended (Slim Whitman, Hank Snow, Web Pierce and others), but he’d listened to rock ‘n’ roll and jazz too. And pop music and classical!
As Dylan recounts in Chronicles, once he got to New York he had the opportunity to stretch even further. He saw Fellini films and hung out with Thelonious Monk at the Blue Note and attended performances by many jazz legends, read the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Ginsberg and so many others, and even saw Jean Genet’s play, The Balcony.
Trailer for Fellini’s
“8 1/2”:
And he was still reading all the time: Robert Graves, Thucydides, Gogol, Balzac, Maupassant, Dickens, Dante and so many more.
It was not a narrow focus on folk music and on playing folk songs that allowed Bob Dylan to become one of the greatest artists.
No, it was his wide-ranging curiosity. Dylan has a curious mind that constantly seeks out and absorbs new information from wide-ranging and eclectic sources.
The point I’m making is that Dylan exposed himself (and continues to expose himself) to a all kinds of new information. All of that forms the backdrop for his own unique art.
And this leads me to Festival Albertine, a six-night event curated by arguably the leading Dylan expert, Greil Marcus.
“Engrenages” – Season 1 – Trailer:
Marcus’ worldview is certainly informed by his love of Dylan, who he was been listening to and writing about since the ‘60s. Marcus has written three books about Dylan, including his “Basement Tapes” masterpiece, “The Old, Weird America.”
Next month, Festival Albertine will take place from October 14 through October 19 in New York, and videos of the panel discussions will be available for all to see at the Albertine website after the festival ends.
This festival itself, like Marcus’ own approach to writing about culture and history, reminds me of Dylan’s curious mind.
Marcus has reached out to radical French filmmakers and experimental novelists, a Foucoult expert, and the genius mathematician John Nash, TV show auteurs and rock, film and book critics, fashion experts and screenwriters, graphic novel creators and political science professors, and organized a wide-ranging series of panels on topics ranging from “Extremist Fiction in Ordinary Language” to “Olivier Assayas in the Post-May Period.”
All of them and more will be at Festival Albertine.
The trailer for “Après- Mai”:
For more about the festival, please check out my previous post on it here.
If you care about Bob Dylan, you should care about Greil Marcus, and if you care about Greil Marcus, you should care about Festival Albertine.
Enough said.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Singer-songwriters Laura Marling and Eddie Berman collaborate here on a version of Bob Dylan’s 1965 hit, “Like A Rolling Stone.”
L.A.-based Berman and England’s Marling turn Dylan’s caustic rocker into an introverted, brooding folk song.
It’s a powerful and very different version of this classic, and it will be on Berman’s upcoming album, Polyhymnia, due out October 21, 2014.
Give it a listen.
Marling and Berman previously covered Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark.”
You can listen to Berman’s last album, This Past Storm,here.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Still from video for “When I Get My Hands On You.”
The third song to be released off the upcoming album, Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes, is called “When I Get My Hands On You” and features Marcus Mumford on lead vocal.
The album, produced by T Bone Burnett and also featuring Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops), Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) and Jim James (My Morning Jacket), is out November 11, 2014.
“When I Get My Hands On You”:
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Today, a day when over 300,000 people reportedly assembled in New York for the People’s Climate Day March to voice their concerns that serious work needs to be done to stop climate change, Neil Young released an orchestral, studio recording of his protest song, “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?”
The musically stunning anthem attacks big oil and the “big machine.”
But what Neil Young doesn’t address in his song is that animal agriculture — factory farms and the whole system of meat production — is the biggest contributor to climate change. This is the elephant in the room.
As the new documentary “Cowspiracy” shows, environmental groups, for the most part, ignore this ‘inconvenient truth.’ If you haven’t seen the film, google it and find a showing near you. Or wait until early November and you can get the DVD. It’s a must-see film.
Today I spent three hours at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater with the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition at the huge Bay Area People’s Climate Day event and we passed out 100s of brochures detailing the impact of Factory Farms (and eating meat, or products made form animal secretions such as milk) to mostly unaware environmentalists.
Two activists at the Oakland People’s Climate Day event.
I would love for Neil Young to see “Cowspiracy,” or for someone, anyone, to get some information to him. It’s great what he’s doing but there’s this big hole, it would seem, in his knowledge of what is contributing to climate change.
