Listening in the car

Traveling Riverside Blues, Robert Johnson

I've been listening to Son House. I have mp3s in the car so as I ease out into the traffic into the 113 degree heat or the threatening rain (today) I can listen to the music of someone who recorded 80 years ago.

I was always a Robert Johnson fan myself. It was dee rigger, when I grew up in Britain in the seventies, to be an owner of a copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers volumes one and two, and although it took me a while to achieve it, I was eventually one of those. So I've lived with Robert Johnson for 35 years.

Son House, Clarksdale Blues. (I'm trying to avoid Death Letter and Grinnin' In Your Face, as I assume those are already known)

I'm reading a book, which I should have done before my recent trip to Clarksdale, about the blues. It was written in the nineties and bemoans a couple of times that no-one now records in the tradition of Son House. The book (which was written in the Robert Cray days) seemed a little bereft about it. They'd be glad to know, I'm sure, that the Son House tradition is being thoroughly followed up on by one outstanding blues guitarist and vocalist.

Later in that movie, It Might Get Loud, Jack White explains how all the gimmicks he employed in the White Stripes were to disguise the fact a couple of white Detroiters were playing blues music.

But people like what they like, and 35 years of listening to Robert Johnson has biased me. Son House's forte is his passion - and his lightly disguised struggle between carnal cravings and spirituality. But there's something about his music - for instance the fact that I heard most of those songs played by Lead Belly a long time ago, and I consider Lead Belly a folkie - that puts him behind Robert Johnson in my mind. And Robert Johnson's lyrics are a country mile ahead of any of his contemporaries.

I may have been unduly influenced by Nik Cohn's admiration of the line in If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day, but you have to admit that Son House's line about whiskey and women wouldn't let him pray is overshadowed by Robert Johnson's line about how, if he had possession over judgment day, "the woman I've been loving wouldn't have no right to pray."

No right to pray! And Johnson comes out with these gems all the time. Even the iPod generation can surely feel the frustration of "Stones in my Passway".

When Johnson sings:

a woman I know
took from my best friend
some joker get lucky
steal her back again
he better come on
in my kitchen
it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors
well she's gone
I know she won't come back
I took the last nickel
out of her nation sack
you better come on
in my kitchen
well, it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

...You know you're not listening to regular delta blues lyrics. And when it comes to Hellhound on My Trail,

I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving

Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

And the day keeps on remindin' me, there's a hellhound on my trail

Or Dust My Broom, or Cross Road Blues. Or try Terraplane Blues, or the Stones-covered Love in Vain. People love Terraplane, because of the car/girl metaphor later explored by Led Zeppelin in Trampled Underfoot, or for that matter 'squeeze my lemon' from his Traveling Riverside Blues that ended up in a Zeppelin song.

Led Zeppelin's Traveling Riverside Blues, my favorite song in all the world.

Science - it's not rocket science, you know!

This is a news website article about a scientific paper

There's a reason why many on-line non-scientists can't figure out the importance of scientific discoveries, and only 40% of it is due to them not having a clue about science, The bulk of it is due to the media. It's actually impossible to come to the right conclusion, given the media's take on scientific discoveries.

Funny article about science reporting from the Guardian blogs here.

Spot on parody, although a little longer than the real articles, in my humble opinion.

Boardroom buzzwords, neologisms division.

It appears that my department has put out a document explaining ISO 9001 which tells our staff that we always listen to the Voice of the Costumer.

I thought we listened to the Voice of the Customer, but I guess that was last year's thing.

(I love that Yves Saint Laurent number, by the way. Though I could do without the hat.)

Infusion Solution

A few days ago I started off a Limoncello infusion which will take about a month. Today Making Light pointed me towards an infusion technique that takes thirty seconds. It uses nitrous oxide, not as fuel injection, or for that matter as laughing gas, but as the pressurizing agent in whipped cream.

On the other hand, waiting a month seems more character-building.

Frank Zappa memorialized in Baltimore

Although I think of Frank Zappa as a Southern California boy, he was actually born in Baltimore. And said town immortalized him over the weekend. A honor for a musician is a wonderful thing.

Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of Zappa's Congressional testimony against censorship. He - and very few others - spoke before Congress on why musicians should have free speech. (I know, it's in the Constitution, but apparently there needed to be more reasons given.) He didn't succeed - which is why records need to have those "Parental Advisory" stickers on them that are so annoying particularly since nobody under 40 buys a CD. But he tried.

Lemon Tree

We have emptied out our lemon tree and these are the results. Or rather, the beginnings of the results.

On the left, the zest of all the lemons, sitting in Everclear. After a month or so, I'll add syrup (2 cups of water boiled with 2 cups of sugar), strain it and bottle it as Limoncello. Apparently the BevMo lady said she'd sold three bottles of Everclear on Saturday. 'Tis the season, apparently, to be making Limoncello as Christmas gifts.

On the right, lemons cut into eighths and salted, and then covered with the juice of the remaining lemons. Leave this to ferment for a week, then transfer to the fridge for another month and you have Preserved Lemons which can be used as an ingredient in stews, particularly North African recipes like tagine. Preserved lemons are nothing like fresh lemons - they have a much milder taste.

The problem with both recipes is the waiting a month or more to sample the results thing. Oh, and the waiting six months for more lemons on the tree.

Dead Weather Blue Blood Blues

In this piece I mentioned that United Record Pressing didn't seem to have a way to make one side of an album one color and the other side a second color. I underestimated them.

The trip to URP to watch vinyl being pressed failed to discover this clever bit of novelty pressing - The Dead Weather's Blue Blood Blues is available (in infinitesimal quantities) as a single trapped inside a 12 inch. Jack White explains it in the video below.

Road Trip: Nashville, Tennessee pics

Here is the Nashville White Castle, where we were unable, even after sampling, to determine what was in a Chicken Ring.

Tutwiler, Mississippi, Candy Store

Temember all those cocks on the street in Memphis and Nashville? Well, Third Man Records evidently knows about the tradition of big cocks and is trying to emulate the guy on the car a few blocks away in the Nashville photo, but it seems to have gotten the symbolism subtly wrong.

On the roof there - that's the wrong sort of cock, isn't it?

Road Trip: Mississippi and Tennessee - more photos

City Hall, Tutwiler, Mississippi

Hopson Bayou, Tutwiler, Mississippi

The train depot where W C Handy first heard the music that came to be called blues, Tutwiler, Mississippi.

Sun Studio, Memphis, Tennessee

Arnold's, best food in Nashville, Tennessee. Note the Pony. Her name is Lucifer.

Tutwiler tree



Truck, Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale

Road Trip: Clarksdale, Memphis, Nashville

Here's some photos from the recent Memphis/Nashville trip.

Hick's Tamales. Robert Johnson sang about Mississippi delta tamales. They're not like the Mexican ones, and apparently there's some debate over why they're a favorite food in the delta. I ate three sets, and Hick's (in Clarksdale) were by far the best.

Poster inside Hick's.

The crossroad, Clarksdale.

We came across this by accident. We were driving through Clarksdale looking for liquor - well, I was, Kali Durga doesn't drink. We found a little beer and wine store that appeared to be only licensed to sell 6% alcohol and under, so I bought a gigantic bottle of watered-down blackberry-flavored wine. Coming out of the store we saw the sign, which fails to actually appear in the photo, that marks the crossroad where Robert Johnson, among others, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play guitar. (I probably should have asked Old Nick for the ability to aim a cell phone in the dark.) The site is marked by a cheesy pair of crossed blue guitars and the 61/49 signs for the two roads that crossed there. You see this rune around a lot in these parts. (Just not in my photos.)

Oh, here we are. On the side of this building in the Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale, the guitar and numbers. And the unending flatness of the cotton fields.

By the way, I'd like to add that I throw around the story of the crossroads and the devil in the same enthusiastic way I recount the story of the Easter Bunny. I don't actually believe any of it and I don't think you have to in order to enjoy it/be in awe of it. (1)

Grave marker, Clarksdale cemetery. This was a lonely graveyard indeed.

Truck and delta, at the Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale.

My shack at the Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale.

(1) Actually I've no idea what the story of the Easter Bunny is. I know he leaves eggs under children's pillows or something. But you get the picture.

Road Trip: Touring URP, the Vinyl Countdown

On Friday we toured United Record Pressing, Inc. plant.

Friday's not actually a tour day, but people in Nashville are so danged nice that when we phoned, they said we could come around and if anyone was available we'd get a tour. We turned up and we did get one.

A record pressing plant is like a printer's, not like a publisher's. A publisher (or record label) signs an artist, but the printer or presser prints for many labels. URP worked with such labels as Motown, among a zillion others. URP has been in that building a long time and one major feature of the tour is the un-redecorated rooms where the Black Motown artists, among other Black artists, were lodged when they came to Nashville, so they wouldn't have to put up with any Southern segregated shit.

Once you get over the reason for their existence, those rooms are beautiful. The colors are completely wild and if I'd had a large enough handbag there's at least one rug and three chairs I would have smuggled out with me.

Then Adam, the guide - it's cool he was this young guy, in a vinyl pressing plant - took us to the label-making area. He said Third Man Records fans like us spent a lot of time in the label room. He was, as I say, young and probably didn't realize they were most likely memorizing serial numbers and trying to guess at upcoming releases for personal kudos and possible financial gain. And after that, we went to see the whole pressing process.

Which I didn't, alas, write down as I went through it. Man, it's complicated. I assumed musicians taped things, and then cut a lacquer which would be electroplated to make a reverse image, and that became the "master" and everything was stamped from that. Not so. There's about four steps between the lathe-cut original and the stamper, involving heavy chemistry and and at least two electroplating steps. Once the stamper is made, a machine you can imagine takes a handful of melted vinyl (a puck), puts the labels on both sides and then moves it between the stamper plates, where it is squished into being a record. Water then rapidly cools the stamped product. The swarf on the outside, which is not cooled, is trimmed off by a blade that runs around the outside of the closed stampers, and the waste goes into a bin. After a moment, the stampers open and the vinyl record is nudged up and on to a slide, where it is dropped on to a spindle for later collection.

The records are then inserted by hand into inner sleeves and piled up with flattening dividers every ten or so, and the albums await the outer sleeves, which I assume are printed elsewhere as Adam didn't mention them.

One thing that URP specializes in is multi-colored vinyl and Adam showed us exactly how pearlescent, glow-in-the-dark, bi-color and tri-color vinyls are made. Vinyl comes in small beads, so it's relatively easy to mix colors - throw in a few handfuls of different colored beads and when melted together, the puck is multi-colored or pearlescent. There's an automated way to make one half of a record one color and one half another. (I mean six inches of blue and six inches of black on an album. They didn't seem to have an easy way to make side A blue and side B black.) A tri-color puck has to be made up by hand and placed in the machine, so that's why they're rare and only sold as limited edition records. Since the pressing machine just squidges whatever's in the puck, every multi-colored puck makes a unique record.

And I'm ecstatic to report that the black-and-blue two-color albums they were pressing at that very instant were the Sea Of Cowards Dead Weather Live at Third Man Records records. Of which I'm getting two - on for being a Vault (fan club) member and one for actually being there when it was recorded. And frankly, I've waited long enough for that - it was May 3rd, so I'm glad to hear it's finally being pressed.

To my complete delight, Adam handed me a "rose" - a flower shape made by taking the still-soft (they aren't cooled, remember?) trimmings from the edge of a newly-printed album, and forming it into a spiral with a stem. So I have a "rose" from the black-and-blue album I'll be getting in a few weeks.

I loved this trip and the places I've been. I've seen cotton fields, blues groups on the streets, a luthiers' factory, a studio, a record-pressing plant. What I needed to see next was a retail vinyl outlet.

Oh, I'm in luck! The next place we went to, of course, was Third Man Records. Where I bought a bunch of vinyl records. Wonderful to see the culmination of everything we did on this trip, from stay in the delta, to make guitars, to record in a studio, to see records pressed - and now to buy them.

Next we went to the Chihuly exhibition at the Frist. Glassblowing seemed to fit the theme of blue bottles on trees/blue guitars on trees/pressing multicolored vinyl that had followed us around for a few days. I loved his Venetian and some other work and ended up with a bit of an issue around what he calls 'plant' or 'organic' shaped - don't think he has a grasp of the utter beauty of plant growth, but then again, not everyone does. Another exhibition at the Frist was of a Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Golden Age of Couture - "The New Look". The captions puzzled the hell out of me by stating that the "Board of Trade" had condemned the New Look, as if they were culture critics and without going into why they weighed in. Well, it's because of wartime rationing. The entire country was starving and had no cloth to spare for full figured, pleated designs! Why can't the exhibit state that? (You have to look for the PDF download to find out that simple fact.)

Arty video - Will There Be Enough Water, by the Dead Weather. Shot while the Dead Weather toured URP.

Nashville, post flood: The drying

Although I flew into Memphis in September in a cross-fire hurricane (in the Houston area), the weather in Nashville, once I got there, was benign compared with my earlier stay in May. That corresponded with major floods.

Joe's Crab Shack was under water in May.

The Hard Rock was under water in May.

But Joe's Crab Shack was dry in this month.

And the Hard Rock was also dry in September.

The latter photo doesn't show that the river should have beenbe about forty feet below the level of the walkway beyond the Hard Rock Cafe.

That was a hell of a flood.

Cock of the Walk

For some reason, giant cocks seem to be feature of the southern landscape. Trouble is I can't help remarking on them out loud when I see them.



Memphis



Nashville

To be fair, the second one has a sticker on the back that says something like, "The biggest cock around", so it's not just me.

Road Trip: Kali, Aqua and Lyle go to White Castle

Yesterday was a full day, especially considering three hours of it was spent in a car being driven between Memphis and Nashville - and a trip to the airport and back to pick up a third member of our party. There was the Sun Studio tour, the Wanda Jackson/Dex Romweber show at the Mercy Lounge and a whole bunch in between.

Chris Giffy of Examiner.com reviews and illustrates the Wanda Jackson show here, with pictures of Dale Watson as well [Edit: The Examiner is gone, along with the pictures. The text is still available at the Archive Org, which I've relinked]. He must have left before the Dex Romweber Duo came on stage, so here's a not-very-good cellphone piccie of Mr. Romweber.



This show was a delight to me - I'd heard of his reputation, but hadn't actually heard any of his music. I have no idea why I hadn't been forcibly exposed to it by some obsessed hipster. He inspired me to try to do that to others, for sure. Go out and see them! Dale Watson, the opening act was pure country, with a classic voice, a songwriting flair and a smooth and confident band including a fiddle and a pedal steel. I knew I was in Nashville.

Between the Sun Studio tour and 10 pm when the Mercy Lounge show started, we packed some other stuff in. We went to the Memphis Gibson Guitar factory, a small (for Gibson) manufacturing facility that makes the hollow-bodied and semi-hollow-bodied guitars. I don't know if the one here in Nashville (which makes the solid-bodied guitars) has tours, but either way I'm glad I went to the Memphis place as the process for making a hollow-bodied guitar is more complex. And anyway, I once made my own solid-bodied guitar, so that's old hat.

Once again the tour guide was a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable woman, but in this case one who was capable of bellowing over the sound of sanders, band saws and presses. The construction of the guitars wasn't what I expected - I've never actually picked up this type of guitar and assumed they were put together like a more than usually slim acoustic, and they aren't - they have far more inner structure, with a wooden piece running from a tenon joint with the neck down to the strap-holder. The sound reverberates through this wood, as it does in a solid-body guitar, as well as in the sound box, as in an acoustic. The type of wood makes a difference to the sound, which I guess I knew but hadn't really realized that piece was in there. There's much more to it, which I'm sure you can imagine.

The Civil Rights Museum was a very sobering experience, which we took in slowly, trying to come to terms with the fact that people treated other people that way, not in the distant past, but during my own lifetime. And as the litany of lynchings, beatings, shootings, bombings and burnings unfolded, I remembered with a creepy feeling down the back of my neck that at that very moment some crazy pastor was threatening to burn the Quran, out of some atavistic - at least I hope it's atavistic - urge to other the brown people. Divide and conquer has been the tactic of tyrants for thousands of years. When someone foments hatred and fear of other people, before I fall for it I ask myself who might benefit from it.

It took until the show that evening to fully shake that sober feeling off. But after Dale/Wanda/Dex and Sara, I was a lot less sober in several senses of the word. When the show finally finished around 1:30 am, we went out for snacks and, never having been to a White Castle (even though I have seen the movie) that's where we went, where I ordered, I believe, "A number one sack" or "bag" or something and then we noted to our increasingly hysterical laughter, that the menu included not only Fish Nibblers but also Chicken Rings. "WTF are Chicken Rings?" we wondered. We may never know. Laughter was not extinguished when the driver of the van in front of us at the drive thru staggered back down to the take out window and slurred, "Ahhhhh...ummmmm...What did I just order?"

Today I fancy collard greens. I am, after all, in the south.

Mercy Lounge, Americana Music Festival 2010

Just back from an evening of watching Dale Watson, Wanda Jackson and the Dex Romweber Duo in Nashville. What an excellent time, particularly seeing a bunch of under-21's (judging by the magic marker on their hands) grooving to a rockabilly queen. You may recall my astonishment at the advanced age of the people we've seen so far on this trip - well, 73 year old Wanda attracted the exceptions.

Oh, there was one old timer boogeing by the side of the stage. Jack White was there. You know you've picked a decent dance club when someone like that turns up. (LJ was around as well, which proves the groove.)

More in the morning...oh, it is the morning. Well, more later, then.