Jerry Douglas – The Best Kept Secret Koch (2005)
Probably should have kept it a secret.
Zhenjie Zhou on Corporate Crime in China
Link to an interview with Zhenjie Zhou:
“Zhenjie Zhou on Corporate Crime in China”
Bonus link: “AFT Ends Four Month Old Coca-Cola Boycott”
Nicholas Fitz – Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think
Link to an article by Nicholas Fitz:
Bob Dylan – At Budokan
Bob Dylan – At Budokan Columbia PC2 36067 (1979)
Count At Budokan among the group of most divisive albums in the Dylan catalog. Recorded in Japan on a 1978 tour, amidst sessions for Street-Legal, it finds Dylan making an attempt to develop a Vegas-style show with a horn section and backing singers. The template for this type of show is an Elvis Presley album like Elvis in Person at the International Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada and Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite. Like the former Elvis album, Dylan is doing new arrangements of his old hits. The problem here is mostly that flautist/saxophonist/etc. Steve Douglas is TERRIBLE! That flute is too loud and the sax is clichéd. And the band as whole is a little stiff. In hindsight, others have pointed out that shows from the tour in England were stronger and would have made for a better album. As it stands, one of this album’s biggest liabilities is that it’s far too long. At two discs, there’s a full disc worth of unnecessary reggae and easy listening mediocrity. That’s too bad, because some of this — “Maggie’s Farm,” “All I Really Want to Do,” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” — really sounds good in its new setting. And, hey, Dylan is actually trying to sing, and doing a decent job of it by his usual standards.
Noah Berlatsky – Doing K to 12
Link to Noah Berlatsky’s review of Annette Fuentes‘ book Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse (2011):
Miles Davis – Bags Groove
Miles Davis – Bags Groove Prestige PRLP 7109 (1957)
My early reaction to this album was “it’s good not great.” Well, coming back to it years later my opinion has changed a bit. While I still look at this and say Miles’ playing is nothing special, due to his general complacency and the fact that he hasn’t yet realized the full potential of his stemless Harmon mute, I have to give credit to the rest of the band for truly achieving something special. The rhythm section steals the show. Percy Heath gives amazing performances throughout, and, despite the fact that he never solos, he’s the still the album’s star in my mind. People have long talked about Monk‘s solo on the title track (take 1), and that’s all well justified. It smokes. Unfortunately, he’s only heard on the title track. But Horace Silver plays well when he’s substituting for Monk, and Sonny Rollins‘ style is well-suited to the music. Milt Jackson also plays really well in his one appearance. Kenny Clarke is solid as always, and, significantly, he doesn’t distract from the other performers–something not to be underestimated with a talented group like this. Bag’s Groove is an excellent album to play in mixed company, even among people who have no specific knowledge of or appreciation for jazz. It’s about as good as “straight” jazz ever got.
Noam Chomsky – On Institutional Stupidity
Link to a transcript of a speech by Noam Chomsky:
Elvis – Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis
Elvis – Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis RCA Victor CPL1-0606 (1974)
Anyone following Elvis’ career in the early 1970s will note the large number of live albums. Oh, there were studio albums too, even really good ones. But most of the studio albums came from just a few recording sessions, and some were bolstered with selected live material. This was the time of Elvis’ Vegas act. It’s worth putting that in more perspective though. The King hit it big in the 1950s, as the first rock and roll superstar. But as his star rose, and he started to get into the movies, he was drafted into the Army and spent a few years stationed in Germany before returning to a musical career. He recorded as soon as he got out of the Army, but attention soon shifted to the movies. He didn’t perform concerts. His albums were movie soundtracks, sometimes improbably including a good tune (“Viva Las Vegas”), but for the most part — Elvis openly admitted as much in his later years — they were terrible. But with his Hollywood career going strong, he was resting his voice. It did not suffer from years of hard touring. He also made no attempt to be relevant in the era of Beatlemania and the British Invasion. He suddenly came back with a late-60s TV special and his first new non-soundtrack album in what seemed like forever. And then he started a Vegas act. These career paths were unprecedented. There simply weren’t any rock superstars before Elvis, so no one knew what they would do as they got older. No rocker had ever made a “comeback” before. But he could do it in part because he semi-consciously took time off from a focus on music, and the lack of touring meant his voice was ready and waiting for the task. There also weren’t any rock and roll themed Vegas acts, which was given over largely to Rat Pack style crooners, Liberace-like spectacles, and non-musical acts, of course. The signature feature of Elvis’ show was that it became huge, in terms of having an enormous cast of musicians supporting him. He performed enormously complex arrangements of old hits and new songs. And he and manager Col. Tom Parker always seemed to find great songs to incorporate into the act that fit Elvis like a glove. The success of this style of show rested in large part on the tremendous amount of hard work that Elvis put into it. But keeping the show going, often with two shows a night, took a toll. Elvis notoriously had a growing drug dependency, one exacerbated by the pressures of the entertainment industry. Despite hugely successful stands at the International Hotel in Vegas, big shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the first ever globally televised concert Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, by 1973 he was collapsing and being hospitalized as a result of his failing health.
So then we arrive in 1974, when Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis was recorded March 20th at the Midsouth Coliseum. In 2004 a reissue of this album presented the entire concert, but the original album featured only an abridged selection of material from the show. The entire show followed more or less the same familiar formula as nearly all of Elvis’ concerts and live albums of the previous few years: commencing with “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (known as the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey), then right into “See See Rider”, with a medley of 50s hits in the middle and familiar tunes like “Polk Salad Annie,” “An American Trilogy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Suspicious Minds” littered throughout. But what is most intriguing about this album is how it differs from the usual format of the previous few years. There is a big band, but not with an emphasis on a huge string orchestra. There are more intimate moments with Elvis singing just with a piano. He also does some gospel songs. Unlike most of Elvis’ live albums, the crowd is readily audible (though allegedly some audience noise is overdubbed). It does sound at times like the band, and Elvis, have tired some of playing the same songs yet again, the same way as always. But those concerns fade when listening to “Why Me Lord,” “How Great Thou Art” and “Help Me.” What is unfortunate is that there does not seem to be the same level of effort in expanding and evolving the act as there was a few years earlier. These are just minor adjustments meant to perpetuate the same successful formula.
This isn’t the best of Elvis’ live albums of his musical comeback. It’s still a good one, with elements of widespread appeal. It is best admired by fans who have heard his other material of the era and want something more that sets off in a similar direction with a few tweaks and slightly different material. It’s too bad Elvis couldn’t just retreat back to the movies and then emerge in the late 70s/early 80s backed by a punk-like trio…oh, you know it might have worked! Even Bob Dylan almost went with it in the early 80s.
Elvis – Today
Elvis – Today RCA Victor APL1-1039 (1975)
Today brought Elvis back into the recording studio for the first time in well over a year, since the sessions for Good Times (the follow-up Promised Land was compiled from outtakes of those sessions). It finds Elvis in something of an identity crisis. He dabbles in a little of this and a little of that, but never settles into any particular style. There is a little bit of countrypolitan flavor in everything, but the individual songs range from boogie rock (“T-R-O-U-B-L-E”), to soul/R&B (“Shake a Hand”), to easy listening (“And I Love You So”), to straight contemporary country (“Fairytale”). The problem is that little really clicks. Elvis is stuck in the realm of the mediocre, which is territory he hadn’t really found himself in since the days of recording movie soundtracks almost a decade earlier. Yet the mid-tempo country stomper “Susan When She Tried,” the ballad “Pieces of My Life” and the R&B torch song “Shake a Hand” are okay. Biographer Peter Guralnick noted that these sessions weren’t as fun as ones a few years earlier, and that this was a time when Elvis’ entourage was shifting around and he seemed to not know who to trust as his personal relationships became exceptionally shallow. Elvis perhaps could have stood to just pick a style and go with it, like a more extensive trip into boogie rock territory, doing a Little Feat cover (“Oh Atlanta” or “Two Trains,” for instance) or even just bringing Little Feat into the studio with him. But really, it wouldn’t matter which direction he took. Picking one would have given him a chance to focus and improve on a single sound. Yet committing to anything on a deeper level was probably the biggest overall problem facing Elvis in 1975. As it stands, Today is a middling effort with hardly any songs that stand out.
Townes Van Zandt – Flyin’ Shoes
Townes Van Zandt – Flyin’ Shoes Tomato TOM 7017 (1978)
After a flurry of activity in the late 1960s and early 70s, Townes Van Zandt’s recording output slowed considerably. For the next fifteen years, he released just two albums. One was the concert recording Live at The Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, arguably his very best, and the other was the studio effort Flyin’ Shoes. This contains a few great songs, “Loretta,” “No Place to Fall,” and, to a lesser extent, “Flyin’ Shoes.” The rest of the material is noticeably weaker, and the production by Chips Moman, once associated with the Southern Soul movement but later associated with Elvis and pop-country crossover, is all wrong. Moman overproduces Flyin’ Shoes. Townes’ early albums suffered if anything from low-budgets and underproduction — a sort of indifference where it sounds like first takes were used when extra takes might have yielded improvements. It is the opposite problem here. There is polish, but that goes hand in hand with an overemphasis on presenting a more eclectic and varied sound across the album. Most of those efforts don’t fit the songs or Townes’ vocals. Where indifference on the earlier recordings oddly fit the folk-inflected, hippie country music Townes was making, slicker and tinnier production with effects like a vocal chorus and synthetic sounding electric bass just obscure the music. The other reality, though, is that the counter-cultural movement that Van Zandt tapped into a decade earlier had faded and he struggles to find a footing outside that paradigm. [Note: at least one CD reissue makes some rather unfortunate changes to the track sequencing, placing all the best material toward the end.]