The Best Saturday Ever! (Robbies Big Adventures)

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Defence of the Realm. Bert Rigby, You're a Fool. Danny, the Champion of the World. The Pope Must Die. Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole. Oh, What a Night. The Adventures of Huck Finn. The World Is Not Enough. Message in a Bottle. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Our single point of intersection was Michael Jackson. Its population is almost 4 million but it has a non-corporate service economy that seemed to me like it would be unsustainable in a city four times as big.

It takes 15 minutes to walk 5th Avenue in Brooklyn from 7th Street till it dead-ends on Flatbush. By contrast, I spent 90 minutes walking through and beyond the Fitzroy section of Melbourne, and another 90 walking back along different streets, and the Park Slope hipster-commercial terrain stretched on and on, ramen dives and bookstores and rock clubs and coffeehouses and jeans and shoe stores.

The next day, in a neighborhood 40 minutes distant, Shad and I walked for a half-hour after soundcheck, and it was the same thing. There were graffiti, sidewalk vendors, pretty year-old buildings, and happy young people on bikes racially homogeneous young people everywhere. One was left puzzled as to where the hipsters were stealing money from to buy their body oils and other uplifting non-essentials. We played at a theater, a dance hall, and a festival situated on the bay, and were left with the impression that Melbourne has it all.

I had left my phone at the gate at Vancouver, and so I really felt unattached. My meal was sabich, a chickpea and potato dish, with a mixed mezze-plate appetizer. I had a lot of questions for Yael about the prep, the ingredients, and the history of the food, and I forget all of the answers. I returned to Ima the next morning for breakfast before the flight to Sydney and brought Shad with me.

Part of the fun of working from a book unavailable in the west is decoding the list of ingredients. I already had silverbeet and capsicums in my refrigerator, to my surprise. Visiting Sisters, Oregon for their annual folk festival and instructional camp will prove hard to forget. The town is cute -- a little too cute, if you ask me, more like a replica of a Western town, a la Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles. On the third day, the promoter called off the rest of the event on the advice of certain lily-livered local health authorities.

I spent the remainder of the cancelled event in a motor lodge, trying to work on lyric assignments from Logan Ledger, a dynamic young country singer, and Anat Cohen, the eminent clarinetist. Neither of them was in any way breathing down my neck, but I wanted to get something done, if only to please them.

I did get plenty of whiskey drinking and phone talking done, and, as the weekend rolled around, I rambled over to Bend to have an incredible meal at Ariana with my dear friends Frank and Sheri Cole. With each new installment in the wine flight over the 3-hour dinner, Kathy got a little more red-state. These seven days in September seemed never to end. On Sunday night, I checked out an intermittently engaging movie called Wind River in a cute theater on the edge of town.

On Monday I washed my clothes in a laundromat and read a book about the Warner brothers of Hollywood. It was September 11, , but it felt a little like September 12, , when I was also in Oregon and cut off from loved ones. Despite occasional contact with people, my feeling was of isolation and loneliness, which continued as I drove up to Portland to play a solo show.

I went up to my little room above the bar after playing, poured a slug of whiskey, and sank into an intermittently engaging Philip Roth novel and an Edward G. Now, about the whiffing. Anat Cohen had invited me to appear as her special guest and collaborator at the Logan Center on the south side of Chicago, where she and her ten-piece band were to unveil music from her style-straddling new record, Happy Song.

I first met her at a wedding in , where she was playing in one room and I in another. On break, I heard a pretty sound sailing on the air. Her arranger, Oded, threw me a couple tunes to try to put words to, at which I pretty much failed. Not much like the cool-encrusted, slangy, half-drunk, hamfisted loafers of the Americana scene! Apparently I forgot I was But that was nothing as compared to six weeks earlier, where I had the lowest performance point of my year, in a little town in the middle of New York state.

At a private party in a barn, with a few hundred middle-aged lollygagging in the dark and setting bonfires and gyrating savagely, nothing was clicking for me. And the sound was miserable, making us even worse than we were. The buyer was a great guy, full of cheer and hospitality, and he told me an inspiring tale about how his simple business idea had revitalized his struggling community, there two hours from Utica.

Also I have to admit that the payout was good. But all I could think of, as the golf cart carried us across his acreage back to our rental van, was the distance I had come to sound so terrible. When you degrade yourself in public and have only the consolation of a check, you can feel exactly as low as a whore. The second record is my next Bloodshot release, a duo record with Linda Gail Lewis.

The patchiness invites you to fill in the holes in your imagination, or spin off into your own alternate arrangements, which is what I did. Those first two projects kept me writing at a strong clip throughout the year. My youngest son totaled the family car, got a 30 on his ACT, maintained a C- average at school, socialized heavily, and may or may not end up at one the west coast colleges we visited in the fall, leaving Donna and me free to sell this square-foot prison and move on into the next chapter of our lives.

My summary may be written from a luxurious loft in the sparkling city, or, who knows, a padded chamber provided free by the county. While I'll be absent from the hustings for most of the winter and into spring, just puttering around the house, shoveling snow, and fixing elegant lunches, I will have some limited exposure later this month for you, the public, to relish and savor. If you don't like wearing pussy-hats, supporting the ACLU is a practical gesture and a way of saying, in this polarized time, "I'm right here on this side.

The three of us are fondly remembered by pious locals as The Jesus Christ Trio, under which moniker we delivered classic hymns at the Hideout in years gone by. On the 29th it's off to Chambersburg, Penn. Why not "Centre," or "Theater"? Let's rub this lack of consistent adherence to huffy Anglophilic orthography right in management's faces! And we finish on the 30th at that bastion of Washington, D. Americana, the Birchmere, with a final blast of the twangy klaxon. It presents wild anecdotes, told mainly by eyewitnesses, about the lives and misbehavior of classic country artists, in animated sequences that dramatize both the stories and the talkers.

What might someone outside the fold make of it? Not since the early writings of Nick Tosches has such a skilled and sympathetic artist captured and communicated the peculiar attraction of hardcore country, its humility and humor, its heart-wrenching plain-spoken expressiveness, and above all, its usually hilarious and sometimes disturbing excesses.

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I imagine the average consumer is welcome here. He seemed charmed and highly amused. To stand by that metaphor, the incredible content of the stories and the talent of the teller -- I mean Mr. Judge -- are what makes this show fly. Such a short cutaway effectively sacralizes the moment but avoids making one of those routine, unearned epiphanies in which TV comedies specialize. But most of the talking is done by close friends of the stars, by their hairdressers, by sidemen and road managers and cowriters and and codependents.

In fact, the sidemen predominate, and this is a canny move, because these are the people who see the wildest shenanigans the closest-up and who can balance their suffering in the situations they describe with a deep appreciation of the inborn musical abilities of the people causing them to suffer. Also, musicians as a breed have an advantage over prose writers and maybe even hairdressers: And when the subject is alive, which is often when the interest is highest, protecting feelings and personal earnings is a priority.

The pace is brisker, and the stories are shaped and supervised by a first-rate dramatist. As we know from listening to nutty old war veterans, tales grow ever more danger-laden and bullshit-packed with the passage of years. The participants would have been dumped into jail with no second thought, or maimed by Mother Nature, or shot by firing squad, rather than have gone on into old age enjoying esteemed careers as entertainers.

But the intercutting, in which sentences within anecdotes are passed between separate interviewees, and details of anecdotes laid out by party A and commented on by a wholly-removed party B, does plant an insane seed of credence: Besides that, though, no silly boasts mar the series at all. Wiping from animated to non-animated footage at key moments: Talking about it, the cartoon face of the manager emits a tear, at which point the animation gives way to the filmed face of the crying man. The power of this moment is as vivid as it is indefinable.

Another day and another great passed into the darkness. This one's from my corner of the world, so, Steely Dan people, here's your chance to have at me! Bill Friskics-Warren did the usual bang-up job in his obituary on Don Williams this morning, but he strikes a false note here:. His brand, which was startlingly developed with his first solo record "Come Early Morning," "Endless Sleep," "No Use Running," "Amanda," what a roster stood apart not only because of its soothing moral wholesomeness.

Where other country music of its era was, at one end, showily and densely orchestrated in the Atkins or Sherrill manner, or, at the other, apt to nod opportunistically at the guitar tones, kick drum weight, and machismo of contemporary rock a la Waylon or Paycheck, the sound Allen Reynolds and Garth Fundis achieved for Don was spare and as maximally reserved as commercial music can get. It turned the heat way down on the emotions, the image enhancements, the hot licks, the volume, and even the narrative drama. It's so bold in its unexcitingness as to create a new category of fascination.

Lloyd Green said that when he arrived at the studio to work on that first record, Reynolds and Fundis worked with the players to take away more and more from the playing. They kept at it for two weeks. The story may seem slightly too pat to credit, but no one could doubt listening to Don's music that his settings were fashioned with tremendous care, that they sounded like nothing else out there, and that these guys were bucking the trend. The rhythm section groove is positively wild in its lack of pizazz.

Robbie Coltrane

It's hard to find a more descriptive word than "white" for it. I suggested to some songwriters the other day they were all white, of course that they should consider aping the slang and cultural eccentricities of their own tribes, whatever they may be, rather than taking the easy and common path of mimicking black language and vocalizing. No one's likely to take that advice, since it means turning away from so much verbal invention and, really, so much of the best that American musical history offers. It cuddles up in its pajamas, settles back in its Barcalounger, pats its little paunch, raises aloft its cutely stencilled ceramic cup of hot cocoa, and smiles serenely, "I believe in Mom and Dad, and I believe in you.

Songs like these established Bob McDill's writerly voice in country. McDill's breakout, "Come Early Morning," made a good complement to Don's minimalistic aesthetic, because its lyric held back any sparkling details. One adjective less and the building collapses. I'd guess this was a conscious application of songwriter diction to production and vocal style, because old Bob had a lot more methods up his sleeve. Among the what-a-grumpy--old-man-am-I propositions that I audaciously offered my songwriting group the other day was: To this roll any number of Don's forty-five top hit songs can be added.

Not that self-crafted humility can't ever get cloying, or that the Don Williams show wasn't an "act," but given that it was presented so skillfully, and seemed so in tune with the natural personality of the singer, this music made itself globally felt, expressing some of the finest attributes and governed emotions to which all of us -- especially we men -- can aspire.

My friend Don Lewis was in a remote Ethiopian village when he happened to overhear two men arguing almost violently over whether a voice on a boombox was Don Williams's. But the connection goes wide and deep; I had a cab driver in Denver a few years ago who was Ethiopian and also so crazily fond of DW that he exulted for 15 minutes nonstop. I was walking the dog a couple weeks ago when the title popped into my head for some reason.

It's a beautiful and exquisitely sensitive American landscape, a picture of every boy's life in every small town, drawn by Norman Rockwell with Charles Whitman lurking behind the trees. For all that, though, parts of the melody escaped me. The contours I pretty much retained, but without a guiding instrument, I was led into some dead ends where I had clearly aimed too high or too low.

Once home I picked up a guitar and tried to tamp down the bumpy spots -- "And he used to lean upon me" and "Flying my bike," for instance. Couldn't nail it down, put the guitar away and forgot about it for awhile. Sometimes when I'm working on a song and hit a wall I sneak away from the notebook and do other things that are related to music and so in some way justified activities, but are really just time-killers delaying my return to the dreaded page. In fact that's why I'm writing on my blog now! Last month I was stuck while songwriting in a hotel room and I suddenly decided to chart "My Little Town" off of youtube.

The results are very interesting. The Nashville number system wasn't made for songs like this but I'll include it omitting compounds and altered bass roots for simplicity with the chord names below just to buttress a point. Here's the first 1: Hello, Berklee School of Fucking Music! First off, look at the numbers. The system presupposes a stable key center but nothing stays stable for more than several seconds here; calling C flat-7 when it's really -- briefly!

People like me who lean on numbers or at least have them somewhere in mind at all times while composing are thus at a disadvantage in some styles of writing; the system, too ingrained, can be a roadblock. And by the way, just how much modulating? The key center in "My Little Town" changes 6 times in its first 1: Since Barry Beckett's intro takes a little time, that sums to 7 key centers in 49 seconds. It has to be a record. One of the tricks I'm referring to is easy -- changing a major I to a minor that becomes the supertonic or ii of the new key formerly bVII, now I.

That's exemplified in the first mod: The other trick is extremely fantastic and not nearly as often used. This is modulating I to VI via the augmented-fifth over the first of the keys. We're in C at the "lean upon me" lyric. Now the G is added to the C to augment the 5th. At this point the chord is composed of three tones: Do you see the genius here? We are a hair's breadth away -- a half-step, which in western music is a hair -- from an E triad E, G , B. E serves as the V to the A, and voila, we're now in A.

Making the E an E7 is only slightly less subtle, and the whole-step and half-step parallel shift are crazy-beautiful. The above is less than half the song in length but is the section that delivers the point, and the point is -- where is the popular music of similar complexity and harmonic ambition these days? I resist these old-man outbursts and try to recognize them as a perspectival limitation, almost a neurological flaw As the above illustrates, the era from Revolver to punk music might have been if anything more harmonically adventurous than the Great American Songbook era.

With Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson at the wheel, a lot of radio music in the late s started sounding less like rhythm changes and the blues and more like symphonies. I really should get back to my writing now. More on "My Little Town" in a day or two. As usual any terminological clunkers or blind-spots in my reaches for a technically precise language are attributable to my complete lack of formal education, and I welcome corrections.

Thanks to all who listened to the show tonight on the radio, and to all who suggested songs to play via Facebook and Twitter. I truly did not expect that volume of titles. I'm in bed now, post-show, thinking about the people I should have hobnobbed with and didn't: Tomorrow I'm writing songs with Logan Ledger and David Grier, and either writing the sequel to "Cocktails" with, or simply having cocktails with, Bill Anderson, it remains to be seen and I will fill you in shortly, keep tuned A quick reminder, as I'm on my way out the front door, that I'm off on my more-or-less annual southeast jaunt this week.

Since the southeast US is the historical wellspring of my music these occasional trips pull a little heavier on my heart -- and, ahem, a good turnout is especially heartening for those same sentimental reasons. After that, a little writing in Nashville, including a session with one of my favorite guitarists on the planet, David Grier. David's writing vocal numbers for his next record and I couldn't be more thrilled to lend a hand, or see if I can at least.

Then I'll be back home in about a week and in touch about whatever subject comes up next My brother was the first one, texting me the day before I left home, "Have fun with that sick band! Those were my thoughts exactly on hearing Doc and Merle Watson's sped-up version of "Black Mountain Rag" on their live record, or Tony Rice's solo on "Dawg's Bull" seven years later, or any of the four members of the reconstituted New Grass Revival in at the Bottom Line That was as clean and fast and thrillingly fresh as playing could be, back then.

Now, thirty-some years on, I had players of like prowess at my service, challenging my hands and mind and enacting my scripts. Along with our good-looking soundman, Pierce, we were: If you write songs I thought this to myself in the form of universal advice one day at the wheel of the van you should imagine that one day they'll be played by the most amazing players living, just to goad your creative powers and sense of quality control to the nth. As the changes in my songs went past during performance, especially on the older songs, I perceived them from the minds of those around me and thought, "Hmm.

The Hegelian idea of the self-aware consciousness among others, each calling itself by the same letter, "I," recurred during the week. But later I reflected that the comparison contained an offshoot which was a little illuminating. The awkward fact of having to appear naked before a hotly desired stranger is a contingency that is usually overlooked in the heat of pursuit. My keen anticipation of the performances obscured the inescapable fact that I would be a member of the quintet myself. Away from the stage I would also be seeing things through their eyes: No one complained about this stuff.

Nor am I bad at parking or planning. Nor, I hasten to add, and implore you to remember as I continue these tales, is prodigy playing the worthiest sort of playing! I'm a conscious being, however, sometimes cripplingly so. It's Myrna Loy in your arms -- deliver the goods, meathead! Personally, I had mainly onstage ice.

My soloing throughout the week was much more inhibited and clumsy than I had counted on from having exercised pretty rigorously for two weeks leading up to the dates. My hands had adequately limbered but my head threw me a little. Of the useful lessons to derive from this, "Be more secure in your own abilities" is probably least implementable, since I've been insecure for 54 years now -- and to some degree it's helped me to be that way. I'm always on the lookout for stimulating new people to play with!

When you're young, that goal is pretty cheap and easy. But I was more than happy to consider the cost not only a payment for a delightful experience but a kind of educational camp for myself, or weeklong lesson. I hadn't had a lesson in some time, and I knew I'd gain all sorts of invaluable nuggets: The simple things can get away from you. When they do, or even when they don't, it's good to hear them stated aloud from the mouth of a wise musician. In that vein, Dennis told a story in the van about a producer sitting alongside Allen Reynolds, the distinguished producer of Don Williams's and Garth Brooks's innovative recordings among hundreds of others.

The man asked Allen, "Do you prefer that a song fade out or have a formal ending? Not to overexplain, but the point of that story is that most of the nerdy questions you can ask in working on music -- and they are beyond number -- are reducible to much simpler questions, and the ultimate arbiter being the subjective mind or heart, none of these questions is answerable with technical precision. On Monday, after meeting one another at Matt's place in Nashville and rehearsing for a couple hours, we tracked a song at Sound Emporium.

After weeks of waffling, I went with "My Brain. Despite that reasoning, I did end up altering the chords slightly in the direction of complexity. I had asked for a close-circle set-up sans headphones, which is always my presumptively favored set-up with acoustic string instruments.

When I wasn't paying attention, Dennis plugged in, augmenting his miking with a direct line. I noticed on the first playback that we weren't as locked in as we could be, and Dennis remarked that the sound in the room had been hitting him a little late. All of this proved to be related, and Dennis and I talked about it briefly the next morning. I said I was surprised he'd admit a direct input into the situation. In fact, I would have argued with it if I'd known, but the main reason I didn't know was that so little of it was used in the mix, not nearly enough to sully the listening experience.

Dennis said that the room's set-up close-circle, a dozen or so mikes called for two courses of action, both of which were to me strange and outside my thinking. First he needed to use more than just his ears and time-sense to play accurately in the room, since without headphones the information was getting to him late in the time it took to travel across the room. Second, he needed the pickup to help give his notes a "point," given that the many other mikes were registering his sound at different times and effectively scattering his attack.

People tend to think they didn't, but they usually did. All of this is very easy to understand. It's understood, for instance, by terrible players and terrible engineers! And it's knowledge that, if used very dogmatically or without reference to how things sound in the moment, perpetuates a lot of mediocre music. If a lesser player had used these ideas to make the case for a direct line to me, I'd have quashed them with little consideration.

There are also good reasons not to have some players on headphones and others off. But I always feel it's foolish not to defer to master musicians on points like these, because there's a good chance they're right. Also, I always have the solid insurance that anything played by a Dennis Crouch, regardless of the fine points of instrument or room or gear or miking, is going to sound better than the same thing played by almost any other string bassist.

The experience gave me a few more small ideas to chew on. Dennis knew without my saying that our shared mental reference point was the excellence of small-group acoustic records from the s through the s. Something about the clarity of his point and the speed with which he delivered it made me think he had delivered it many times before.

I'm very curious to know how fully true it is.

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Was Hartford's Morning Bugle recorded with phones? What about the classic records by Jimmy Martin, Jim and Jesse, et al? Probably Dennis has the answer to all these questions, but if readers do, please let me know. On Tuesday morning, after our session, Shad texted me that he was suffering greatly from toothache and had scheduled a last-minute root canal for the following morning which would probably make him a little late for practice. I was sitting in a squalid resort hotel near Opryland and had minor aches of my own, having had too much cheap beer the night before at a dinner with a recently-fired member of Dwight Yoakam's road band.

I had gotten back to my room a little after hours and was having trouble getting out of that cocooned zone where you disdain physical exercise and guitar practice in favor of meaningless emails and Isabelle Huppert movies on Amazon. Some of my emails were more artful and involving than the lousy Isabelle Huppert movie, which put aside plot or character or ideas in order to flatter non-French people with portrayals of French life as dull-witted non-French people might conceive it.

In the event, Shad did show up on time for rehearsal. His endodontist had advised that instead of root canal, the molar, which was cracked in half, needed pulling. In the green room afterward, he said he might miss the drive to Cincinnati next day if he couldn't schedule the extraction first thing next morning. This precipitated a small lapse in my bandleader skills, for I replied after an appropriate expression of concern: OK, then I'll arrange the rental car and I'll see you, fingers crossed, after soundcheck tomorrow but in time for our set.

What I should have said was, Who among us can drive a fellow human being who has just had his tooth pulled to Cincinnati? Luckily Noam piped up: One result of that was that the Thursday drive, Cincinnati to Columbus, was the first one with all six of us together. It was then that the mesh of personae assumed focus. Shad kept his own counsel. Matt was laid-back and soft-spoken. Noam laid if anything even farther back and, when he wasn't doing private listening on his laptop, spoke with the almost comically relaxed yet sharply logical authority of a commercial airline pilot.

Dennis was the dominant personality, and he did his talking largely in the mode of wide-rambling, earnestly rendered, Arkansan anecdote. The anecdotes featured singers and players behaving in memorable ways and were in no hurry to get to the end. It was lucky he was there because without him the rides might have gotten a little sepulchral. People who read books by people like Keith Richards to get an insider glimpse of the machinery and minutiae of popular music would be better advised to read books, if they wrote them, by guys like Dennis and Noam.

Dennis and Noam were the two of us who had spent the most time in the stratosphere of wealth and acclaim and abundant on-the-job amenities, and I thought that it showed in their imperturbable relationship to the world of sensation, their stolidity against people who threw meaningless complications in their paths, their easeful talent for concentrating on unsexy essentials. If you make it to a certain stratum in the business, and have mastered your instrument, and have strong raw intelligence, things are a lot less likely to get to you.

The thought came unbidden to me, after the first day with my quintet, that nothing I could conceivably say would impress anyone in the van. It was a healthy reminder not to try to impress people generally, or rather, to impress them only by virtue of your simple clear language and your polite refusal to be drawn into anyone's bullshit. Then the thought came to me that success in the arts might come at the cost of never again being credibly able to say things like "Oh my God!

Most grown-ups who say those things are probably insincere, and definitely annoying. As I wrote in another post, I'd never met or played with Matt, had played with Noam only three times at shows across several years, and played on two records with Dennis about 15 years back. So these three were my wild cards. I had various musical impressions of them through the week. I think that Dennis might take the prize for sheer attentiveness. He seemed to have listening skills that were closer to a lower animal than a civilized human.

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After the first show, one of the quintet I'd better not say who because he works with other bassists said to me, with what passes for awe in a man who abjures "Oh my God": On the one hand, the bassist enjoyed and employed space. He'd ground a chord with a pillowy fat note, then lay back and let the note die as the rest of the measure ambled by. On the other, it gave him clear and consistent pleasure to do the grounding in mediants and dominants, and to make cocky, lightly surprising moves that let you know he was alert and unworried.

Matt proved to be one of the best I've heard at on-the-spot composing. Give him 16 bars and he'd respond with a story, one so thoughtfully structured that it sounded impossible to have done on the fly. He may have had the most ingrained melody-love of any of us as soloists; and his light right hand, I supposed, had the effect of masking any effortfulness of thought. About Noam, I can hardly add much to the record, but I could repeat an earlier proposition I put out about his frequent collaborator Chris Thile, that he sounds like he strives to tax his own ingenuity, to paint himself deliberately into tough corners -- via bright tempos, journeys to the nether-reaches of the fretboard, displaced 32nd-note filigrees from which an ordinary man could hardly recover.

He also has a way of reflecting and honoring the recent American history of his instrument Scruggs, Reno, Keith, Trischka, Fleck , showing equal love of, for instance melody and roll, old-school drive and mellow impressionism, diatonic and chromatic, and -- I'd say "speed and space" but, fuck man, ain't no equal there, he likes to go at it fast. There was a small moment in a bar Wednesday night with Noam that interested me. We were hungry just before midnight, but it was Cincinnati and local authorities had put provisions under lock.

We ended up at a filthy joint that served five kinds of "steamed sandwiches," which were prepared by an angry person to the beat of a modern song titled, if memory serves, "Bitch Suck My Fuckin' Dick Or I Kill U. Our bartender was a stout bald beady-eyed man with bad knees who was still agitated over the whole Ronald Reagan thing. He left us alone for minutes on end, then would catch some stray word in our conversation, such as "Trump" or "music," and, as though he were an improv comic and we an audience providing prompts, begin a long rant.

It starts at 7, I'm working at 7. Noam waved his hand near his head to show that much of popular culture flowed around his person like water and there was no sense trying to dam it all just to examine a few shiny fragments -- I think that's what the wave meant. A tuned-in musician, alert to a hundred styles and historically aware, who only now heard about Carole King! I felt some excitement on behalf of my friend, for there are certain music experiences I've delayed for years, like Don Byron's tribute to Mickey Katz, in the certain knowledge of future pleasure.

No one can keep up with everything, probably in previous times and certainly in these times; and where musicians' blind spots are is at least as interesting as what they're deep into. Anthony Wilson and Gregory Porter were two of my blind spots, by the way. During the week there was excited talk about them, and I made sure to note the names. We were soundchecking at the bar in Indianapolis when Noam mentioned that the noise from the refrigeration unit sounded untenable.

It was making a weird vibratory clash with the Bb notes off our instruments. The notion was sufficiently foreign to me that he had to show me how to reset my Snark clip-on tuner to another pitch standard. We tried but the clash was still there. Meanwhile, I couldn't even hear the noise in the room that was so offensive to the others!

And actual deafness, as my ears have dulled over time, regrettably. At we were in the clear, and so we all tuned to that. Stepping off the stage, I finally heard the hum that was bothering everyone else. Once I heard it, I couldn't stop hearing it. I thought my throat would detect the difference, but that's really bonkers. There are no doubt people out there who record in pitch centers that are off-standard a couple cents, in the blatant hope that it will arrest the public's unconscious ear.

After our Chicago show I noticed a kid, about 15, with long shaggy hair, hanging around Noam. You got the feeling some inside stuff was going on. I saw my fiddler friend Matt Brown and asked who the teenager was. Evidently the kid had learned "Waveland," the first tune off Noam's latest record, by heart and had performed it in public flawlessly. You learn the ropes the only way you can, by transcribing records, reading books, practicing alone, going to see whoever passes through town. Then you have to move somewhere else to get into the business of music and to shake off your bondage to other people's styles.

If you don't move where the other musicians are, it's really tough to progress, to shake off the chains. I want to close these rambling thoughts with two points, based on my observations of these high priests. They're more or less addressed to an imaginary young person who's attracted to this scene. They're both simple obvious points, but again, it's good to say them aloud.

Get used to the idea that the real-world economic hierarchy that exists in the arts isn't your "real world. But then the next story would be about an obscure hillbilly picker with one of the same two attributes, and would be related with the same intensity. You need to live in an imaginary land where you can't read the pricetags on the names, where your immersion in music that almost no one else values doesn't cause you a moment's perturbation.

Once you create that land it can actually exist, sort of. It did for us all last week. You should maximize your daily engagement with music. Performing and learning songs don't make a complete day of work. Shad and Noam wake up in the morning and start playing. Then in the van they listen to, talk about, and think about music.

The thinking is a crucial part of the regimen. Arriving at the venue, they play music some more, up to soundcheck and, after dinner, up to showtime. Then, for all I know, back at the hotel, instead of zoning out to the charms of Isabelle Huppert, they play some more goddamned music. If you're playing 6 or 7 hours a day, then the hour or two you're on stage won't loom quite as large, and as a result you'll play better in the gaze of an audience.

Honestly, the time commitment is a factor that impedes my own development, because my work hours are divided between writing and playing, and each one really demands that 6 hours. But no one said making a living off of music, or off of religious devotion, which the practice of music resembles, was easy. Another thing I just realized about these dicta is that they're superseded, like the fade-out versus natural ending question, by a simpler, three-word precept: Well, all right, that's worked for a few people. But they have ended up, by and large, seriously unhappy people, and on some level I think they're aware that they are the pathetic figures in comic stories told by happier people riding around in vans.

So I'm a little hazy on what a meme is, at least I know what a dream is. A dream band, that is. That's what I get to hear behind me more often than not these past few years, and it's a constantly shifting bunch of yokels. Back in my lates-early-and-mid's incarnation it was a steady cast, which I believe is what is usually meant by "band," though, like "meme," it's possible the new generation has taken a once-stable word and given it reassignment surgery. I wish the word would just go away, "band.

When promoters say, "Are you bringing a band? Are people I've never met a band? Is a group of players without a bassist or drummer a band? What about three people, is that a band? Switching it up constantly is an enjoyable and energizing MO for me at this time, which is why you often see me with different personnel, show to show.

Since I'm old and pretty established, I have entree to some astounding players, some of the best in acoustic music, most of whom I could never have worked with 15 years ago. You just can't do any better than people like that. In a week I'm going out with a fresh bunch and don't blink or you'll miss it.

Dennis Crouch I've known casually for years and recorded with, but never travelled with or played a note in front of an audience with. I wonder what that'll sound like? Noam Pikelny, same as far as friendship, and I've gigged exactly three times with him; never have I sat in a stinking minivan for hours on end with him. There goes the friendship.

1. Adele's £90m contract – warnings from previous megadeals from REM to Robbie | Music | The Guardian.
2. Robbie's big adventures (Series) - Des Plaines Public Library.
3. Rating / Basel 2 (German Edition).
4. !

Matt Flinner I've never met. Me of him, that is. I wonder if the newness of this quintet will show, especially the first time we get on stage together? If you're reading this now and are there on the 9th, let me know what you think. Back when I might be doing my th show with the same 3 accompanists, with whom I crisscrossed the country year in and out, I'd sense strongly that our longevity allowed us to offer a positive good to an audience.

They were aware and appreciative of the fast easy communication between us. On the other hand, though, I often encounter genuine disbelief when, after someone asks post-show how long I've been playing with so-and-so, I say truthfully, "We met for the first time just yesterday morning! With the old-timers I relax and bask, with relative strangers all neurons are at attention. When you're old, an increased attentiveness is quite valuable. It's a tribute to either our innate compatibility or the levelling hands of time that I'd gladly change my choice out for hers in almost any category.

I haven't seen Author! So there might lie a difference of sensibility, but I can't see us coming to blows over it. And speaking of blows, the don't make me sad. Any movie that well-made and deeply felt, regardless of its content, makes me happy that someone took the trouble, got the money, and carried through, despite all odds. Needless to say some of these categories are kind of stupid -- guilt, why guilt? Under- or overrated by whom? What kind of dummy lets a movie change his mind about something? Well, I began changing my mind about the sacredness of the National Lampoon trademark upon attending its second filmic release after Animal House, which I also didn't like too much, but didn't get around to seeing until later , Class Reunion , starring Gerrit Graham with a special assist from Mr.

I was dismayed to such an extreme that I wrote an offended letter to the magazine, which was at that time edited by Fred Graver. Fred graciously wrote back, admitting the film was a grievous embarrassment!



1. Aint You Coming Back To Dixieland / I Can Hear The Ukuleles Calling Me medley (Fox Trot)!
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3. !
4. Changes!
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Try that with Grown Ups 2. Grievous embarrassments are now just another day at the office in LaLa Land. The month just past was one I'd hotly anticipated, since I'd be serving Jenny Scheinman's musical project for the first three weeks and Mark Roberts's play the last week. From time to time I wish I got a little more sideman work on the calendar, so that I could step away from the center and stare at my fretboard awhile. And set my mind to absorbing musical ideas coming from other brains, with different quirks and vocabularies.

The Journey Never Ends Music Video🎵 Big World Big Adventures! raised pitch

And have a stronger excuse to sit and practice playing. While we were out with Jenny, every time some little issue came up, like where to eat or which road to take, I whispered obnoxiously to Robbie Gjersoe, "I'm a sideman! That wasn't, strictly speaking, "blessing the leader," which is how one friend of mine who does a lot of sideman work speaks of the job.

Celebrating someone you appreciate is an easier and maybe more pleasurable pastime than organizing and pulling the caravan. When you add in the obligation of promoting your own work via performance and salesmanship, the role starts showing its heaviness. Also there's the gloomy fact that the money can be better, off to the side. You can never not play like yourself, and it's good to have a leader who understands that and values it too -- anything less makes for second-rate music and a boring time onstage. That the material wasn't created by me or that my name's not on the marquee drops the intensity only a few percentage points, and not being the consistent center of attention and the dude-in-charge is a real relief.

But I'm guessing, after a month of sidemanship, that those percentage points gradually accumulate for the guys that do this work all the time. That little drop in intensity is a short-term gain in comfort but ultimately it reduces the payoff too. I'm about as eager now to return to the spotlight as I was to cede it a couple weeks back. A full performance isn't only a display of skills you've learned but of values you hold.

It might be too shiny a gloss to put on a human activity with both ego-enhancing and money-making aspects, but I think the desire to move for a little while from side to center comes less from tiring of all the lifting and loving than itching to show in full what you yourself feel is beautiful and right.

I'll be leading my dates, me me me, all of them, from now through the summer, by which time I'll no doubt be ready to shift to the lift. Right now though, I'm excited to play my songs once again with my handpicked people, which I'll be doing in the coming week in Texas and Louisiana. A little more activity later in the month in the midwest, and in May things really get underway and stay underway till October at least, maybe through year's end.

There's a couple guys on upcoming dates that I've long dreamed of travelling and working with -- okay, that sounds smarmy, and I didn't actually dream about it, not even once, but I can honestly say that thinking about working with people you admire a lot and know only a little raises your pulse. It's probably the main reason I stay happy on the job year in and out. More specifics later, meanwhile come see me if you can. This Monday wraps up the until now open-ended series of shows at the Hideout that I started just over 7 years ago. I'll be duo-ing with Robbie Gjersoe, as I did on the first show.

I'll resist the temptation to bloviate, as if it's the Mary Tyler Moore show ending rather than a sort of stemwinding experiment at a little Chicago club. But it has been front-and-center in my weekly doings for a long time, and I'm touched to hear and read sentimental words from some folks who feel a connection to it.

Thank you for that. I started it because I wanted a place to try out new ideas, some of which were offbeat and none of which I could see coming much in advance, at a place that was laidback and non-prominent enough that a loose and not always highly performative approach could be accepted. This was a direct outcome of my shows with Jenny Scheinman at Barbes in Park Slope, where we worked the little PA ourselves, squeezed in 50 people, and passed a cup for our dinner money.

This was more fun than I ever expected. The Hideout wasn't ideal to extend that, in that its capacity is more than twice Barbes's, the PA is pretty tricked-out, the stage is a real stage, and the club's profile is a little bigger, proportionate to its home base and probably nationally as well. So it didn't end up being a very close approximation of the other experience, but, with the exception that a turnout of 20 people looked pretty limp compared to that number at Barbes, the environment fit the concept and the shows were able to sound good without, I believe, projecting much self-consciousness or bombast.

Here are some things I was able to do under the circumstances, things I hadn't done before: Some of this I do regret. However, I see now that I deeply regretted aspirational actions like playing the bass guitar on "Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass," or trying to comp an unknown Gershwin piece at high tempo, in the moments I was doing it, then let it go immediately afterward.

This marks clear progress for me from the days when I'd forget a lyric or do something stupid in public and then experience burning blood to the face when the memory arose months or years after. The little humiliations were so ongoing for me during this series that I normalized them and was able to get over myself, at last, here at age