You can be forgiven if you mistook the star of today’s Jam for an emaciated Bob Seger. Here at ALDLAND, we’re still a bit hung up on J.J. Cale’s passage onto the big dust bowl in the sky, and I thought it would be nice to feature a selection from his chief Tulsa cohort, who somehow gets even less run than Cale:
If I’m on Death Row, I’m pretty sure I want my last meal to be an episode of “The Barry Gibb Talk Show,” because I’d like to hear something angelic before I go:
(HT: D. Weiss)
Monday is St. Patrick’s Day, which means it’s about time for everyone to start pretending he or she is a typecast stereotype Irish Catholic, whatever that may or may not entail. Sometimes it works out. Many times it does not. On rare occasions, it backfires gloriously. Today’s Jam is just for fun.
It’s basically a violation of international taxation conventions that I had not featured these guys in this space (of my own initiation) before today.
February’s almost over, John Lee Hooker was almost a Chicagoan, (try Detroit) where the clip of this week’s Jam was set by someone who was not Harold Ramis (try Egon’s sometimes collaborator John Landis), who was directly involved in almost every other comedy movie of the last forty years.
If you need me tonight, I’ll be watching Stripes.
In memory of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, here’s a fellow New York type who left town too soon:
Stephen Stills is one of my most favorite musicians and, like with Steve Winwood, I’ve enjoyed tracing his career through different ensembles and solo ventures and musical styles and phases. Somehow lesser-recognized today than bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash, Stills was the guitar and vocal muscle that drove and textured CSN’s harmonies. Even though it eventually left him, relatively speaking, Stills’ songwriting muse burned bright in those early days too.
I could write another essay just on Manassas, my favorite Stills band, and their two albums, the first of which has been called “a sprawling masterpiece akin to the Beatles’ White Album, the Stones’ Exile on Main St., or Wilco’s Being There in its makeup.” Stills also played a critical role in bringing to life Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield’s Super Session, which, like Sgt. Pepper’s, “ushered in several new phases in rock & roll’s concurrent transformation.” Even before all of that, he had penned one of the most lasting 1960s protest songs, “For What It’s Worth,” for Buffalo Springfield. While Crosby and Nash were off on one of their collaborations, he got together with Neil Young for the underappreciated Long May You Run, a quiet offering that ultimately failed to hold Young’s interest, as Winwood and Blind Faith ultimately failed to hold Eric Clapton’s. Although the strength of his later solo recordings wavered over the years, I enjoy his self-titled solo debut, which coyly hides guitar offerings from Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. I also enjoyed his 2005 solo-comeback-of-sorts, Man Alive!, with its cameos from Nash, Young, and Herbie Hancock. In 2007, Stills issued one of the few truly insightful and valuable archival releases in recent memory, and if you’re still with me at this point, you’ll want to read more about Just Roll Tape.
For all this, though, there’s no better Stills winter record than 1975’s Live, a somewhat brief offering with an electric A side and an acoustic B side. (And by “winter record,” I mean a disc to which you repeatedly turn when you’re trying to use the CD player to kickstart your Blazer’s chronically dysfunctional heater core in January in Michigan.) Today is Stills’ sixty-ninth birthday. Here’s the meat of that A side:
Bruce Springsteen is a prolific recording artist and live performer, but if you had to limit yourself to just one of his albums, the decision process would be easy: it’d be his Live at Hammersmith Odeon without question. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Springsteen and the E Street Band than that album and today’s selected Jam, which includes a literal introduction, in particular.
Without thinking about it too much, the E Street Band might be the tightest loose band I’ve heard, and on this album, which spans two compact discs, they play every song as if it’s their last– and this was 1975! Since then, sadly, a few members of the band– Dan Federici and Clarence Clemons– have played their last songs. Thankfully, however, high-definition video of this concert, during the band’s first overseas trip, exists and brings the Big Man, the Boss, and everyone else to vibrant life. Here’s the door:
It’s wintertime in America, which means many of you already are making some turns out there, with the rest of us hopefully not far behind. When I find myself with the itch to hit the not readily accessible slopes, a good way to go is to jam a skiing video. (My usual, trusted source for that cinematographic sub-genre is Andy over at MLP. For more skiing content on this site, click here.)
Today’s selection combines the ski sub-genre with what the semi-self-aware NPR-ish crowd has crassly dubbed “ruin porn.” On the sub-sub genre level, we have an urban skiing video set in post-2008 Detroit. On top of that, the executors of this brief venture seem too young (and, because it’s Detroit we can say, white) to be able to offer real gravity in their voiceover narrations.
Skiing is a physical negotiation with gravity, though, and like most good skiing videos born of conventional (wilderness and urban) tropes, the visuals eventually take over and create a worthwhile experience.
Such is the case with “Tracing Skylines.” It rides the thematic edge probably a little too closely at times, but the sum experience is one of a strong change of pace ski video.
Two fine bits of musical interaction made themselves known this week, and because neither are, so far as I can figure, embeddable, I’ll offer links to both of them.
The first Jam is multigenerationally interactive, just not for you. Watch it here.
The second is an all time great, and you get to play along. Click here (and keep clicking).
ALDLAND 