Let’s kick this weeks column off with a brand new video by guitarist Jon Gomm. This dude has worked his ass off to get where he is and deserves all the publicity he gets, which is a damn lot. Brand new and hot off the presses. If nothing else, Gomm is famous for spitting in Simon Cowell’s eye.
I picked up a turntable for my sister a couple of months ago. She had found what she said was about twenty of her old albums (it was more like a hundred and fifty) and had the urge to once again hear them. Mostly they were albums I remember her liking— Percy Faith, Rod McKuen, Enoch Light and the like. She drove me nuts with those albums when we were kids but I secretly liked a lot of them. (I did truly hate the Sound of Music, Colleen, but the others were okay).
Meet Dan Phelps, if you have not already done so. I first ran across him over a decade ago when he was working with both Bill Pillmore and his daughter Jess Pillmore on their respective albums, Look In Look Out and Reveal. Bill was an original member of Cowboy and I had heard through Scott Boyer, another original member of that venerable band, that he was recording for the first time, to my knowledge, since Cowboy‘s excellent 1971 release, 5’ll Getcha Ten. When I contacted him, he was in full recording mode, working with Phelps, whom he had chosen to produce. To my amazement, Phelps did more than just produce. He was a sideman and a damn good one, a creator of good licks and solid musical ideas. It was a first look at a musician I would follow from that point on.
Continue reading
Lots of good stuff happening out there and it’s time we plugged in to some of it if only to counter the “real” musical happenings being covered by all of the sites who think that Kanye West canceling (or postponing) a show is news. I get it. No fun finding out your wife is being held at gunpoint. Just not headline news in my part of the world.
I just took another stroll through Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists. I do so occasionally just to remind me of what a fools errand such lists are. I realize that it sells “magazines” (are they a magazine these days?), people being suckers for Top of’s of 50 Best’s if for no other reason to compare choices with theirs. Jimi Hendrix? Sure. #1. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck? Automatic Top Ten. James Burton and Buddy Holly? You have no choice but to throw in the originators on occasion. John Fahey? Can’t leave out the cool artist who never really sold in terms of the numbers necessary to chart.
New and impressive albums are piling up on me and I have been on a listening tear. I cannot even imagine how far you are behind. Way behind, if you’re still giving time to The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. I would have thought you had memorized those by now. Like our fearless leader Bob Segarini is always saying, there’s more great music out there than ever, whether you choose to believe it or not. Set yourself. This column skims what I think are the best and most overlooked over the recent months. Starting with…..
Ah, Psychedelia! A musical underground which fed on the springs of youth. God knows where it came from or how it evolved (there are many theories based upon preconceived notions which may or may not have anything to do with anything except ego), but it most likely was a media conception: Old people trying to write about things they didn’t understand, looking at the new world through cataracts and prejudice, and that view taking hold.
After ending this last year cranking out two long columns about musicians we lost, I feel the need to counterbalance. While I know that death is a part of life (indeed, life = death according to the laws of nature), it was not all that much fun to dig through the past year searching for musicians recently passed. It was, in fact, a bit of a downer. Reliving the news that I knew was not half as bad as discovering the news I had missed. All too many musicians I admire tripped off this mortal coil without so much as a thank you, Frank, it’s been fun, and I was more than a little unsettled with each discovery. But the past is the past, whether we like it or not, and it was not all bad.
After reading what I consider Cam Carpenter‘s best column ever this past week (if you missed it, read it here), I could not help but look back over my years in the business. The big difference between Cam and myself is that I spent all of my years on the bottomside, i.e. retail, and started those years looking longingly at the labels, hoping to score that most wonderful and elusive job in A&R (Artists & Repertoire— the people who spend ungodly amounts of time listening to live tapes and demos and sucking in smoke in scuzzy bars looking for that next big thing in music). Cam did that.
It’s called introspection, sports fans. We all feel it every once in awhile and I have been under its spell for the past week and the result has been a total lack of perspective and thus, no cohesive idea for a column. I don’t know why it happens but I do know that it is indiscriminate, that it is sometimes a struggle to even look at the blank page without it beating you to a mental pulp. For myself, the one thing I fear beyond misspelling a musician’s name is the inability to write at all and we are all under deadline, the scourge of any supposed journalist. In the movies, the reporter is always able to crank out a barnburner of an article at the last second, saving his/her job and possibly the future of the newspaper itself. Well, that’s Hollywood, folks, but it does give you an idea of what it is like to produce under pressure.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 