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Monthly Archives: October 2002
Nibble on Your Little Ear
here isn’t much better than a CD player full of Van Morrison. “Tupelo Honey” is required listening at our house, as is much of the Morrison canon.I won’t spend time on Van’s biography; Jason Ankeny of the All Music Guide is perhaps even more effusive and hyperbolic than I would have been. Continue reading
Early in the Morning
o stranger to these pages, Harry Nilsson returns today with a tune that takes me back to my days as a bachelor, living with a friend who was as big a Nilsson fan as I was.Lonnie and I lived in a tiny mobile home. Tiny. It was 8 feet wide, and 30 feet long. My bedroom, the smaller one, was 6 feet by 8 feet, but since the hallway between the kitchen and bathroom ran through the middle, I actually had a builtin bunk on one side, and a dresser on the other, and that was it. Lonnie and I were pretty close, quite literally. Continue reading
Pacing the Cage
wo years ago I heard what I thought was a new song by guitar wizard Leo Kottke. This means it had an intricate bass-treble alternating bounce to the acoustic picking style, and unadorned but earnest vocal accompaniment. Eventually I learned that it was instead a great Canadian artist named Bruce Cockburn.”Pacing the Cage” is chock full of ‘what am I doing here?’ imagery. This pacing is what happens when we’ve gone down a path we didn’t scrutinize closely enough, to a place we’ve realized we don’t want to be. Lines like I never knew what you all wanted So I gave you everythingbespeak a certain weakness; succumbing to external pressure rather than maintaining fidelity. But the final verse seems to offer a reason, if not an excuse: Sometimes the best map will not guide you You can’t see what’s round the bend Sometimes the road leads through dark places Sometimes the darkness is your friendinvoking the belief that, essentially, we’re all making our best guess and can’t always know where it will lead. My head says that it’s possible to live without regrets, to look ahead and make the right choices. My heart doesn’t always agree. Continue reading
Comment: Lenny
rudy says, regarding ‘Lenny’ — Continue reading
Shelter from the Storm
ebster’s defines it as ‘a position or the state of being covered and protected.’ Sometimes some of us reach a place in life where, if we can’t have love, at least we hope for a shelter from the storm.From the opening verse ‘Twas in another life time, One of toil and blood. When blackness was a virtue And the road was full of mud. I came in from the wilderness, A creature void of form. “Come in” she said, “I’ll give you Shelter from the storm.”it’s not completely clear whether the shelter is real or imagined. Continue reading
Lenny
veryone has their short lists of musical preferences — favorite songs, greatest jazz album, all that. If you really want to incite a verbal riot, announce loudly that you think Ringo Starr is a great drummer (I do, and it does. Later, maybe.) But talk about guitarists, and on anyone’s top ten list, six, maybe seven of the names will be the same small group. And, if not at the top, very near it, will be Stevie Ray Vaughan; every single time.Personally, I think Eric Clapton has greater technical prowess; Mark Knopfler has more style, and Chet Atkins had more grace and overall ability than all of ‘em. But Stevie played with a passion to match Clapton’s hottest fire on nearly every recording he made. Clapton impresses; listen to “Motherless Children” or “After Midnight” and you know you’re hearing a master. Knopfler delights; hearing “What It Is” or “Skateaway” you know he’s grinning from ear to ear, because so are you. Chet inspires; he and Les Paul playing “Birth of the Blues” makes me wish I could, and his duet with Knopfler “Tahitian Skies” makes me know I could. But when Stevie Ray Vaughan is ‘on’, really playing what he feels, you feel it all the way to your core. Continue reading
A Murder of One
hen I first heard Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones” I didn’t like it; nothing definable, it just didn’t please. Strangely, when I saw the video and didn’t like that either, I suddenly realized that I did like the song (and still do.) After a few more huge hits, I decided it might be worth spending $12 on the CD. In retrospect, my caution seems silly, but that’s my nature.Coming after the upbeat radio hit “Rain King”, the album’s three quietest songs almost lulled me to sleep; “Sullivan Street”, a sweet ballad; “Ghost Train”, dark and brooding; “Raining in Baltimore”, so quiet and slow that it takes a careful listener to find the melody, which then rewards that listener doubly. Continue reading
