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Down the Old Plank Road: Carolina Chocolate Drops, Frank Fairfield & Blind Boy Paxton

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As has been mentioned in a previous post – and as would likely be obvious from the overall content of NTSIB – I am a roots music fan. This used to mean mainly old blues: Robert Johnson, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf. It would be disingenuous to deny the role of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack album in opening me up to more styles of roots, or “old timey”, music, like Southern gospel-style music, string bands, bluegrass, etc., but it was the advent in my musical life of modern string band hustlers Old Crow Medicine Show that led me to discover that there are a number of young artists keeping the basics of the old music alive while also adding their own, up-to-date flair into the mix. One of the most exciting of those acts is the Carolina Chocolate Drops who are bringing the black string band tradition back to the forefront while evolving the possibilities of string band music with the injection of their modern sensibilities. This confluence of old and new is on exhilirating display in their treatment of Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style”, performed below during their appearance on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special.

 

Carolina Chocolate Drops performing "Hit 'Em Up Style"

 

There are also artists who keep so closely to the essence of the original sounds and styles of roots music that they almost defy belief and have you checking the calendar to confirm what century you’re in. Frank Fairfield and Blind Boy Paxton are prime examples. And they look the part, Fairfield with his Brylcreemed hair and shirts buttoned up to the neck, a piece of rope serving as the strap on his banjo, and Paxton sometimes sporting a suit and fedora, sometimes a pair of overalls. Their sound is so authentic that you wait to hear the hiss and pop of old vinyl after each verse. Indeed, it’s so authentic that some have been led to ask, “Why bother?” Why recreate so precisely the sound of the old string bands or the old bluesmen when those original recordings are still available to hear? I’m sure part of the motivation is purely selfish: for the joy of playing the music. But Fairfield and Paxton also perform an important service to the music itself: they bring it to the attention to people who might otherwise not listen to old time music. If the old music is not listened to, it can’t continue to influence musicians today and, it could be argued, future music would lose much of its soul. Also, if old music is not listened to, it can’t be preserved, and the loss of these roots would be a shattering crime.

 

Plus, damnit, it’s just fun to listen to.

 

Here Fairfield and Paxton jam with Dom Flemons of the Carolina Chocolate Drops:

Nouveau Oldtime Jam: Blind Boy Paxton, Dom Flemons, Frank Fairfield (Boing Boing Video)

 

Old Crow Medicine Show Official Site

Carolina Chocolate Drops Official Site

Frank Fairfield MySpace

Frank Fairfield Daytrotter Session

Blind Boy Paxton MySpace

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Ponderous Wank: “Remember the days when Grandpa would take us upstate to play in the country.”

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Adding to the lists of reasons why I love the Felice Brothers: It seems there upbringing was not terribly different from mine, and I can feel that familiarity in their words and actions. Just now, I was listening to “The Country is Gone” from their album Tonight at the Arizona, and I heard sounds that made tears catch in my throat. It was the distant call of a Blue Jay and the almost-subliminal rise and fall of the sound of Cicadas. Just in the background, just like the way I heard it as I went about my daily life in the country.

It’s an interesting thing… I spent so much of my youth just waiting for the time when I could get away from the countryside, but now that I am in the city (or near enough to it), I realize how the country left its mark on me, in a not-unpleasant way. I have always loved the lights and sounds and motion and tall buildings of the city, and I often feel filled with an electric energy when I’m surrounded by it, but it’s those sights and sounds and smells of the country that can move me to tears now and give me some peace at times.

As I was writing that last line, a train started passing on the tracks near my house. This is one of my most cherished sounds, a sound that I have been able to take with me from the country to the city, a sound that comforts me even as it might drown out whatever else it is I am listening to. The safest and calmest I ever feel is when I awake in the middle of a summer night and hear a freight train passing nearby.

Photograph by Richard Jacobs

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Bits: The Black Keys apart & together, Carolina Chocolate Drops on Fresh Air, mr. Gnome 7″, various tour dates

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xOxHyTP91c]

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The Low Anthem & The Avett Brothers at the House of Blues in Cleveland, OH, 2.27.10

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The Low Anthem Setlist
(in no particular order and incomplete)

Cage the Songbird
Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around
Apothecary
To the Ghosts Who Write History Books
This God Damn House
The Horizon is a Beltway
Don’t Let Nobody Turn You ‘Round
Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women

I’ll admit upfront that I have probably been spoiled by seeing some of the best acts around perform in hole-in-the-wall bars – from the Afghan Whigs at the Cactus Club in San Jose, California, to A.A. Bondy at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan – and this probably colors my view of the larger venues, but… I hate the House of Blues. It is partially the odd and claustrophobic layout of the venue and partially the disposition of the clientele. (It doesn’t help that I top out at 5’3″ and since I didn’t get to the sold-out show early enough to be close to the stage, I felt disconnected as I stood behind a wall of people a full head taller than me, affording me only a few glances of certain areas of the stage.)

You have to love the Low Anthem for putting their all into trying to overcome the obstacles. They played with great energy and sweetness and did manage to get the attention of the drunken, gabby audience a couple of times, but there were times when they were almost drown out by the loud talking of the audience amongst itself (one of whom started complaining as soon as the band started into their fourth song and didn’t stop until the band finished their set because “Oh my god, are they playing another song?”).

Still, I was able to hear enough to confirm that Jocie Adams and Ben Knox Miller can both belt out a killer vocal and Jeff Prystowsky has to be the smilingest musician I’ve ever witnessed. The Low Anthem have a good range from deeply pretty to aggressively foot-stomping, which they accomplish through more instrument changes than I’ve ever seen a band make. It’s a shame I couldn’t hear the clarinets they brought out for a couple of songs.

The Avett Brothers setlist
(in no particular order and less woefully incomplete)

Distraction #74
Laundry Room
January Wedding
Murder in the City
Colorshow
Tear Down the House
The Perfect Space
If It’s the Beaches
Where Have All the Average People Gone (Roger Miller cover)
I Would Be Sad
And It Spread
Please Pardon Yourself
Go To Sleep
Famous Flower of Manhattan
Slight Figure of Speech
Shame
At the Beach
Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise (? – I may just be hallucinating that they played this)

Part of the fun of attending a live show is seeing what’s happening onstage: who’s playing what, who’s whispering to whom, who just took his shirt off, etc. The fact that I could only see half of the Avett Brothers at any given time certainly affected my enjoyment of the show. But, too, the band seemed to have a little less of their famous energy and zeal than I have witnessed in live show videos and were pulling out many of their more sedate songs. Not to say that their performance was poor by any means – the Avetts are consummate professionals in the best sense of the term and they seem to truly love their audience – and the crowd of young devotees in front of me certainly loved it (I enjoyed watching one of them sing along with his eyes closed, looking like every, single word meant something to him), but I just did not feel moved for much of the show.

There were exceptions. “Laundry Room”, for instance, transcended all the issues of the night to be a perfect performance. Scott Avett’s solo delivery of “Murder in the City” was touching. They played my personal favorite, “Colorshow”, which is rousing no matter what. And they put in a great rendition of “Go to Sleep”, with the crowd helping out on the “la la la”s, which closed the pre-encore part of the show.

A sweet note: When the band left the stage, that same group of young devotees in front of me again took up the “la la la”s of “Go to Sleep”, and this spread throughout the venue as the call that brought the band back for their encore.

It was a good show – and we appreciate that the Avetts came through Cleveland when so many roots-based/Americana acts skip Cleveland, and sometimes Ohio, completely – it just wasn’t the banjo-shredding, scream-a-thon I was expecting.

More of my very poor photos from the show can be found at the NTSIB Flickr account.

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Notable shows in the greater Cleveland area & why you should be in Akron tonight

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Shows worth checking out this week in and around Cleveland:

The Beachland Ballroom & Tavern

  • Fri, Mar 5| 9 PM (8 PM door)
    Beachland 10th Anniversary Weekend!
    Pere Ubu
    The Modern Dance Album will be performed in its entirety! / Short Rabbits
    $20.00
    Ballroom | All Ages

  • Fri, Mar 5| 9 PM (8:30 PM door)
    Beachland 10th Anniversary Weekend
    This Moment in Black History
    Sun God
    Record Release Party!
    $5.00
    Tavern | All Ages

The Grog Shop

  • Thurs, Mar 4|9 PM
    Split Lip Rayfield
    Not So Good Ol Boys
    Heelsplitter
    $10 adv / $12 dos

Musica

  • Sat, Feb 27|8 PM
    mr. Gnome
    If These Trees Could Talk
    Simeon Soul Charger
    Krill
    $8

House of Blues

  • Sat, Feb 27|8 PM
    The Avett Brothers
    The Low Anthem
    SOLD OUT

If you need convincing that you should go check out mr. Gnome (either tonight in Akron or on their spring tour), check out this feature clip from Venus Zine.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gn0BLu9O5I]

(I’ll be missing out because I’ve had tickets for the Avett Brothers show for about two months now, but I’ll be catching Nicole & Sam when they get back home in late spring.)

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Rebirth of the Cool: Ring of Fire

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It’s a story known far and wide by now, how June Carter, the clown princess of American music royalty the Carter family, and Johnny Cash, who would eventually become known as the Man in Black, fell in love while married to other people. The first fruit of that relationship, as far as the music world is concerned anyway, was the classic song “Ring of Fire”.

The song was written by June with Merle Kilgore (who was also friends with Hank Williams, Sr., and his family) and given to June’s sister Anita to record.

 

 

But, of course, it was in Cash’s hands that the song came to life, perhaps due to the personal insight Cash had into the song.

 

 

“Ring of Fire” has become a favorite to cover, and, indeed, Wikipedia lists over 60 cover versions. The artists who have gone down in the burning ring range from Kitty Wells to Grace Jones to Bob Dylan to Blondie. I once had a small but substantial collection of Ring covers on mp3, and my favorite remains the heavily-synthed and characteristically idiosyncratic version by Stan Ridgway and Wall of Voodoo.

 

 

Bonus: Ridgway, in this 1982 television performance, Dean Martin-ing it up.

Johnny Cash would have been 78 years old today.

 

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Club Night: Dressed in Black

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For a few good years, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and spent a lot of time in the goth scene (though my musical tastes lead one boyfriend to label me as “just plain odd” instead of “goth”), and a friend I made back in those days just tipped me off to this club event, saying it made him immediately think of me.

On Monday, DJ’s DeathBoy and my self, present a tribute to “The Men in Black”. Dark Balladeers, and Torch Singers from the past 60 years that helped shape modern music. Everyone from Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Lee Hazlewood, Scott Walker, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Marc Almond, Brian Eno, Peter Murphy, Tom Waits, and many, many more!

Visit the Elbo Room website for more details. This looks like an unique club event worth checking out if your in the SF area.

Found this gem at The Velvet Rut. It’s an older clip, but it’s fantastic: the Punch Brothers (then known as known as Chris Thile and How to Grow a Band) covering Radiohead’s “Morning Bell”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeR5qUtd5U8]

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Ponderous Wank: Connection

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There is an alchemy that occurs when music is made. There is no formula, though. You cannot, for instance, take man + guitar + harmonica and get Bob Dylan every time. You cannot take sweeping samples + beats that feel like they grew up from the ground and into your soul + rhymes about Shaolin Kung Fu and get the Wu-Tang Clan every time. Even if you could come close to recreating that kind of magic in music, there is still the unpredictable variable of the listener. I love A.A. Bondy, but I don’t love every “folk” singer-songwriter with a guitar. I can barely come up with a handful of artists who could fit that category that I much care for. (And I have a hard time thinking of Bondy as a folk singer at all due to the loaded concept that term has come to engender over the years.)

The thing about music is that it is not a science. It’s human, living, changing thing. The musician brings her background, her emotions, her voice, skill, style, attitude, etc. The listener brings his experience, preferences, mood that day, memories, etc. Sometimes it all manages to fall into place and the listener finds several points where he connects to the artist’s music, whether it is through a sentiment in the lyrics, the way that E chord transitions into that Am chord or just the way the singer’s voice goes a little thin at the end of that verse. But many times, for whatever reason, there is a failure to connect.

This all makes me wonder why the major labels have had this habit of trying to milk (or even create) a genre when one act hits big or why album reviewers insist on
comparing X to Z. The A.A. Bondy: Bob Dylan comparison would be an obvious one for me to point out. If I had to choose someone to compare Bondy to, I’d more likely go for Neil Young, but I’ve never seen anyone else draw this comparison. And just now, I found a 1994 Rolling Stone review of the Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen that compares Dulli and Co. to Pearl Jam. What?

I understand the human brain’s need to categorize things, but I think it serves an artist much better if she is judged on her own merit, without anyone else’s baggage to haul around with her. This is one of my favorite aspects of the internet revolution’s effect on music: the ability to judge an artist’s music on the artist’s music. Obviously, I enjoy writing about music, but it is first-hand experience that makes music such a lifeforce in the world. You won’t get pumped up or moved to tears by reading how Ian Felice of the Felice Brothers sounds just like Bob Dylan (is there anyone who artists are compared to more often than Dylan?). You can only experience music properly when you meet it head-on.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BZQ6iuJ2kM]

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Bits: Twilight Singers in the studio, mr. Gnome tours, behind-the-scenes with Gil Scott-Heron, Bowerbirds video

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  • Spin has a mini Q&A; with Greg Dulli, who is currently shaping up the next Twilight Singers album.

  • mr. Gnome go back on the road at the end of next month (with a warm-up gig in Akron this Saturday), and they promise a “b-side 7″ vinyl/digital very soon.”

  • Pitchfork has an 11-minute docu-vid on the making of Gil Scott-Heron’s magnificent album, I’m New Here, up until the end of the week. (Incidentally, I learned about the album when the Twilight Singers posted the video for “Me and the Devil” on their Facebook back in January.)

  • You can watch the Bowerbirds be adorable, nature-loving hippies in their brand new video for “Northern Lights” below.

http://assets.delvenetworks.com/player/loader.swf

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Roadtrippin’: It’s a Mississippi night…

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The NTSIB “offices” (i.e. my desk) are all abuzz at the moment. After a meeting with the taxman yesterday, it has been confirmed that the IRS has agreed to fund our proposed trip to Oxford, Mississippi, this summer (translation: I’m rockin’ out with my EITC out).

Why would this information be of any interest to NTSIB readers? While Oxford is most famous for being home to literary giant William Faulkner, Mississippi has produced more than its fair share of blues greats, and Ole Miss houses a blues archive that is purportedly the “world’s most extensive collection of blues recordings and related material”.

Nearby is the home of Fat Possum Records, a label that was started in order to give voice to great bluesmen of northern Mississippi – like R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford – who were going unrecorded and has since become the home of talent like the Black Keys, the Heartless Bastards, Andrew Bird and that A.A. Bondy guy we like so much. In the spring and autumn months, a visit to Oxford’s Square Books on a Thursday night will put you in the audience for a taping of the Thacker Mountain Radio Show, which has boasted authors such as Roy Blount, Jr., Rick Bragg and John Hodgman and musical guests like Lucero, Dent May and T-Model Ford.

Speaking of Dent May, he makes his home in nearby Taylor. Taylor is also home to Big Truck Theater, which promises “foot-stomping music”.

We’ve mentioned Oxford’s free, springtime Double Decker Arts Festival in previous posts (which we will be sad to miss as we’ll not be hitting town until late summer), and the annual Blues Today! Symposium will be taking place on March 26 this year. We also heartell that the Lyric and Proud Larry’s regularly host great live music.

So if my travel cohort and I don’t come back with a few posts worth of Oxford-centric music goodness, I will consider it my fault and not the fault of Oxford.

Today, we leave you with this article from 2003 on Fat Possum (it’s British press, so take it with an exaggerated grain of salt) and this little NPR piece on Fat Possum’s shift to embrace acts outside of the Mississippi blues milieu. (Obviously, we love us some Fat Possum here at NTSIB and encourage you to visit their site and purchase copious amounts of exceptional music.)