Sunflower, Rhubarb, Sun Flower and Horseradish leaves on wall at Toko Imports in Ithaca
You don’t have to be a drummer to like Toko Imports in Ithaca. The owner, Tom, carries hats and hammocks as well as congas, djembes, gongs and every type of percussion instrument imaginable. Peggi rattled a donkey skull with the teeth still in their sockets, a primitive Vibra-Slap.
I bought some brushes and commented on the huge leaves on the wall behind the counter. Tom confirmed that they were indeed real, locally grown leaves from some common plants. He told us that we knew what these leaves were and pulled the right answers from us by giving us well rehearsed clues. Sunflower, Burdock, Rhubarb and Horseradish. The woman from Holland who was standing next to us had never heard of Horseradish.
Margaret Explosion playing at Bug Jar Happy Hour in 1998. Jack Schaefer on guitar, Paul Dodd on drums. Pete LaBonne on bas guitar and Peggi Fournier on soprano sax.
Jack Schaeffer and Pete LaBonne join Margaret Explosion tonight at the Bug Jar. I should say “rejoin” because they were both original members. Jack doesn’t settle for ordinary and Pete doesn’t even know what it is so it promises to be an adventure. The shot above was taken at the Bug Jar about thirteen years ago so it will be a reunion as well.
Invisible Idiot CD “Outta Sight, Outa Mind” (EAR 7) on Earring Records, released 1999
Station 12 from “Passion Play” by Paul Dodd, 24″ x 30″ inkjet print 1998
I had planned on stopping by Record Archive and the Bob Shop for Record Store Day. Peggi had emailed the Bop Shop ad we did for Tom for the upcoming Jazz Festival and I wanted to make sure it looked ok before we put it into InDesign and sent it off. I would also check the racks for new releases from my favorite artists, most of which are dead. I’m still hoping for one from Ornette before he says goodbye.
As it turns out we started the day by downloading a live Neil Young gig. So much for supporting local record stores. Duane sent us the link so I can blame him. We saw the “Chrome Dreams 2” tour in Buffalo where they were still using pieces of the Greendale set. This is an audience recording, it sounds amazing.
I’ve seen a few Rembrandts, just a handful really, but I was knocked out by how timeless they are. I mean they actually appear alive. This afternoon we heard Bach’s “St. John Passion” performed by “Voices”, the local professional chamber choir. Bach wrote the piece near the end of his long life and it was performed on Good Friday. Today was Palm Sunday and it was close enough. The eighteen voice chorus and small orchestra sounded great in the Lutheran Church, a fitting venue as they have a weekly service in German, a large German contingent to their parish and Bach’s “Passion” was performed in his and their native tongue. Bach’s music is also still alive. The church was packed. We squeezed into the back pew and were blown away by how powerful this music is. We are so fortunate to have this accumulated culture to dip into.
The Stations of the Cross were always my favorite part of church. I collected sources from newspaper clippings for a retelling, the Unabomber was on the front page one Good Friday, and I still plan to paint the Stations some day. I showed the studies at the Bug Jar in 1998 and they were shown again at the Finger Lakes Show in 1999.
I heard the last pope added a fifteen station, the resurrection, the most suspect of all miracles to say the least, for a happy ending. And the current pope wants to rush sainthood for the guy who hired him to “handle” the countless sex abuse cases. I say “sainthood now” for Rembrandt and Bach and Ornette.
Billy Bang at Water Street Music Hall in Rochester.NY in 2007
Billy Bang loved Rochester because Rochester loved Billy Bang. You could tell when he took the stage and he said as much. Somehow the rough and tumble sophistication fit. He was a cocky star in the underground jazz movement when he appeared with Sun Ra’s band at the Red Creek in ’86 and over the years Tom Kohn brought him to the Bop Shop atrium, the German House and Water Street in many configurations. His music soared when he began writing his haunting Viet Nam suite. It took him a while to process his war experience but when he did it came out in an incredibly rich, dark, beautiful way. Track down “KIAMIA” on iTunes and I’ll stop trying to describe it. He tore the roof off of Montage during the 2004 Rochester Jazz Festival and did so again in 2006 when Garth Fagan joined him on stage. The violinist was scheduled to open the fest this year but word has spread that he’s died of cancer and we’ll miss him.
Bang’s music transcends jazz and could easily fit on Scott Regan’s “Open Tunings” or Rick Simpson’s “Gumbo Variations”. In fact I’ll request it tonight. We saw Scott last night at the Margaret Explosion gig and I hope he doesn’t come down with anything in the next few days. I was telling him I thought I gotten sick from sick from a reaction to the drug they gave me for my colonoscopy but it had been in the back of mind that maybe I caught a bug from Scott’s bandmate, Steve Piper, who shook Peggi’s hand after their gig on Saturday night and then told Peggi that he had been sick with a stomach flu. Well Peggi left the stage while we were playing last night in a rather dramatic fashion. I followed her to the bathroom and sure enough she had the bug so I was wrong about my bad reaction and just as wrong to blame Steve Piper for the bug that is going around. Who wouldn’t shake Steve’s hand after his rousing version of an Elvis’s “His Latest Flame”?
Cuong Vu Trio performing in Hatch Recital Hall at the Eastman School of Music
Cuong Vu Trio performs their own music tonight in a free concert at Kilbourn Hall. They have been in town for a week while Cuong Vu has been teaching a workshop on creativity. Last night they played six compositions by Eastman students in the brand new performance space Hatch Recital Hall. This is clearly the best sounding room in the city. And “clearly” is a good word for the way you hear sound in this space.
The room is small, 200 or so seats, and it was designed as a “box within a box” so none of the walls come in contact with the rest of the building. The room is live sounding but without added reverb and as natural sounding a space as I have ever heard. It’s nothing like the dead studio spaces of the past. If a band has it’s act together an engineer could put two mics here and be done and the producer would be out of a job.
Ossia, the student-run new music performance group at the Eastman School of Music, held their last concert of the 2010-11 season last night in Kilbourn Hall. They performed Philip Glass’s “String Quartet No. 2: Company” and it stopped time. I have no idea how long it was but it wasn’t long enough. I had my eyes closed picturing the clouds in “Koyaanisqatsi” and then it stopped abruptly. My favorite piece of the evening though was “Marsias” for oboe and eight glass goblets by the Mexican born composer, Mario Lavista. The perfect fifth tones from the water filled glasses represented the “celestial” world of Apollo and the desperately melodic oboe stood for “the poet’s eternal search for perfect, precise expression”.
Lavista taught at Indiana University and currently teaches here at the Eastman. I visited his web site this morning and learned “He likes machines with hiccups and spiders with missing legs, looks at Paul Klee’s Notebooks everyday, hasn’t grown much since he reached adulthood at age 14, and tries to use the same set of ears to listen to Bach, Radiohead, or Ligeti.”
Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater tonight without program notes or a score. Listen to Pit by Magaret Explosion.
Hobblebush near Indian Lake in the Adirondack Mountains
I was really taken by these demonstrative plants as we skied around them in the Adirondack Mountains. I kept stopping in the fridig weather to pull my camera out of my pocket and photograph different clusters. They were all expressive, like they were singing opera or something. We had seen them earlier in the winter at Pete and Shelley’s and Shelley told us what they were but we couldn’t remember. We tried looking it up in Shelley’s book but we couldn’t find it because Shelley had drawn it in bloom not in it’s naked winter state. I sent this photo to Shelley and she identified the plant as Hobblebush. Hail the Hobblebush!
I ordered an expresso at the Little last night but Bill told me their machine was still out for repair. In fact, he said the machine was unrepairable and they had a new one on order. He was hoping to have it in by next Wednesday when Margaret Explosion returns. The first set last night felt unfocused but things gelled in the second and the songs swirled around their target. Maybe it was the Sirius “Chill” channel they were playing in the Café during the break.
I was in charge of the car radio on the way home and we stumbled on to “Dig This” (perfect name) on WITR. I wish they wouldn’t call it “witter. The Maestro mixes jazz, funk & hip-hop) on Wednesday nights from 9-11 and he posts his set lists and shows as mp3s on DigThisRadio. Last night’s show was “Extra Jazzy” and featured Ahmad Jamal, Miles, Digable Planets and The Roots.
Bill Jones asked for a little help moving his type making equipment around. The router, the band saw and every one of those big green woodworking machines are heavy. Bill makes wood type from oversized patterns. You can’t be around all this stuff without dreaming about type projects, signs or posters that you could put together with all these little wood pieces. I’m thinking about a letterpress cover for the upcoming Margaret Explosion single.
On the way over, a ten minute ride, I scanned the college radio band and found Matt & Kim’s “Silver Tiles” on WITR, Althea & Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking” on WRUR and Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” on WBER. I thought my iPod on shuffle was pretty good.
Margaret Explosion poster for Abilene Happy Hour gig
Somehow Margaret Explosion wound up with a long running Friday Happy Hour slot at the Bug Jar. This was back when Casey ran the place and Bug Jar Bob booked the bands and arranged the lighting and Steve Brown took care of the business and grudgingly stood behind the bar on Fridays. Rolling Rocks were a buck a piece and Casey brought in vegetarian Indian food.
Pete LaBonne named the band and played bass. Jack Schaefer played guitar and a parade of people sat in. We called our first cd “Happy Hour” and that vibe is an essential part of our sound. Rick Simpson played a song from that cd on hi WRUR show last night and it struck us how much the band has changed.
In 1998, before the band started one Friday, I took photos of everyone at the Bug Jar on one of those evenings, everyone who would let me take a photo of them that is, and I printed them out for a show of Mug Shots that went up a few weeks later.
Danny Deutsch invited us to play a Happy Hour at 6 tonight and Bob Martin has rounded up a batch of videos to project on the front wall of the upstairs lounge there. The Abilene site says there’s free munchies and there’s no cover. Sounds like fun.
Bunk Gardner and Don Preston at Abilene in Rochester, New York
In the second set at Abilene last night Don Preston looked up from his keyboard, quickly scanned the slim crowd, and asked “What is this? Is this a beer hall or is it somebody’s house? He didn’t wait for a reply or hear Bill Jones mutter, “It’s a gay bar” but he chuckled to himself as he and Bunk Gardner dug into “Holiday in Berlin.” It was such a treat to see these two old guys (they were old when they were in the Mothers) jump off the cover of The Mother’s 1968 album cover for “We’re Only In It For The Money” and come to life in 2011 in the paint-by-number room at Abilene. They sounded great as a sax/keyboards duo but Don kept turning on some pre-recorded drum tracks and they didn’t need them.
Between sets I told Bunk Gardner how Dave Mahoney and I returned to our little house while tripping to find someone had broken in and stolen our stereo with “Burnt Weeny Sandwich” still on the turntable. They left us the empty gatefold album to look at until we bought another copy. Bunk’s pictured in there but he didn’t seem too impressed by my story. I said, ‘You know. The one with ‘Little House I Used To Live In’ on it”.
It seems miraculous that the chipmunks are out. We watched them pack their small caves with nuts in the Fall and now they’re out darting around on the piles of snow. We hadn’t seen any deer in weeks and we were speculating that they too were hunkered down in the cold but today we watched a group of eight up move across a hillside. There was a pileated woodpecker up in one of the trees too but we couldn’t spot it. Sounded like a jackhammer. We interrupted a hawk who was devouring this squirrel right in the middle of our path. On the way back the squirrel was gone.
Pete LaBonne has a song called “Code Of The Great Outdoors” with the refrain, “better out, better out, better out than in.” It’s on his “High Time” release, same album as “Punk Rock Dressing Room” and only seven bucks for the download!
Chief Projectionist at the Dryden Theater of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York
Jim Heally is a fountain of film knowledge and a great interviewer. He held his own with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars and I’m sorry he left the Eastman House. I trust he is on to greener pastures. Last night was Members Night (free admission) and the last night of the Dydren’s Rock ‘n Roll series. They showed a beautiful print with a newly re-mastered soundtrack of “The Last Waltz” and Kyle Westphal, Chief Projectionist, did a great job of introducing the movie. I think they have found a worthy replacement over there as Kyle delivered the goods without notes, sometimes with his eyes closed like a improvising musician.
The Last Waltz has aged well. In fact the further down the road we get from it’s making the better this thing looks but then The Band always seemed a band out of time. That Big Pink album knocked me out when it came out. Garth Hudson’s organ on “Chest Fever”, Richard Manual’s take on “Long Black Veil”, Levon Helm’s sensational drumming and singing on “The Weight”. It was impossible to pick a favorite song (or a favorite vocalist) on that lp just like it is in the movie.
Dylan pulls the plug on “Forever Young”, just to show his old back up band who the boss is. Joni Mitchell sings otherworldly back up to Neil Young on the Band’s version of “Helpless”. And then Joni with her beautiful buck teeth belting out “Coyote.” Van Morrison kicking out the jams, a sincere, often funny performance. Dr. John gets down in a hurry with wicked version of “Such a Night.” Muddy Waters does a killer performance of “I’m A Man.” Like Buddy Guy in Scorcese’s “Shine A Light”, Muddy Waters made The Band look like toy musicians. These performances are so good you want to holler and clap at the end like you would at a concert. My favorite song in the movie was “The Weight” with the Staple Singers but I could easily be swayed.
Lew Allen photo of Buddy Holly in Rochester, New York, January 1958
We were in the last row of the Dryden Theater to hear Graham Nash talk about the Rock ‘n Roll photo show that he curated at the Eastman House so we were the first ones out of the theater. We had planned on seeing the show again so headed over to the gallery where we were the first ones in the door. Peggi had to visit the ladies room so I was standing at the entrance when Mr. Nash walked in. He stopped to look at the photo above and I thought wow, what can I ask Graham Nash. Then that moment was gone as someone came up to say “I really enjoyed your talk.” He pointed to this photo and said, “I really like this photo.” It was taken by Lew Allen when Buddy Holly performed in Rochester in January of 1958.
I never put it together that the Hollies were named after Buddy Holly and I learned that Carrie Ann was written about Marianne Faithful. One of the audience members asked Graham who he would most like to play music with and he answered Dylan. He called Dylan the best poet, singer and musician of our lifetime. It was interesting to hear the sweet voiced Graham put the word “singer” in that short list. He told a story about David Crosby singing on a Dylan track and how Dylan wouldn’t tell Crosby what the song was until the tape was rolling.
‘We Live Like Kings,” “Somebody Must Praying For Me,” “Pajama Pants” (Baby, you know what I mean), “Let The Weeds Take Over,” “High Time” and “Supermarket Employee.” There so many Pete LaBonne songs stuck in my head. The songs are stored in a place where they are easily accessible and it doesn’t take much to trigger them. Pete has digitized twenty two cds worth and he’s giving away a track from each on his website.
I heard Rick Simpson tell a listener he’d play a Pete LaBonne tune next week on his Thursday afternoon radio WRUR show. Pretty soon you’ll be walking around with lines like “You’re the 5th line on the eye chart,” “What am I gonna do when they turn me into a verb?” and “You gotta treat your woman like a sack of potatoes” floating around your head. Lucky you!
Pete LaBonne “We Live Like Kings” cover
Arouse The Thunder
C
They call her Miss Divisive on the street.
She put the spit in hospitality
Strandy hair parted around the ears
under her sweater’s a purple chiffon brassiere
F G
She turns me on flips me off
E Am
she’s not a hag puts me in a vacuum cleaner bag
F E
whips it out plugs it in
F G G
hits the switch and I hear the roar
C G G7
she could surely arouse the thunder
C
of the mighty Thor.
I’ve continued to adjust the sound of my tubs while they’re home for a few weeks. Tuning and dampening and listening. After all these years I’ve discovered that drums sound best at their lowest (loosest drum skin tension) position just before pitch falls apart. That is as low as you can go without the heads flopping about or having rattling unpleasantries attach themselves to the the way the drum rings when you strike it. There is a sweet spot right there and the drum rings with its fullest potential. You can imagine how big the drum is by the sound of it. You can just picture it. If you find that position on all the drums in your set they will undoubtedly be in tune with each other.
I play a Chinese kit made by Mapex with a snare, a 14 inch floor tom and a twenty inch kick. I hate their logo. Wrong font for the awkward space between the “A” and the “P.” When I bought the set I said I’ll take that maple set over their but put a different head on the front of the bass drum, one without that logo.”
“All Shook Up” Eastman House in Rochester New York
We finally got over to see the Graham Nash curated rock and roll photography show at the George Eastman House. The shot of Hendrix during the soundcheck at Monterrey Pop was worth the price of admission and there were plenty of classic shots and outtakes from famous sessions. Gene Vincent looked liked he invented rock ‘n roll in a 1959 shot. Anton Corbjn’s photos transcended the music aspect. His shot of Joe Cocker was my favorite in the show. Mick Jagger looks silly stretching before a show next to a shot of Iggy doing a back bend in performance. I could only wonder if that was an intentional dig. Graham Nash included a few of his own shots of Neil Young and his girlfriend Joni and he’s going to be here to talk about the show in a few weeks.
An accompanying show in the small gallery as you walk in had five projections of snippets of rock and roll performances from tv shows like Hullabaloo, Ed Sullivan, Dick Cavett, MTV and Hollywood movies. With five screens going at once we darted back and forth to catch the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Tina Turner, Freddie Mercury, the Stones and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
I was thinking how this thing we grew up with is really our culture now but it’s spread is not complete. It still has not registered for my parents and it never will for them. My father and I were driving back from the Van Gogh drawing show in NYC a few years ago when “Like A Rolling Stone” came on the radio. I said something like, “This song changed everything when it came out” and I remember the blank stare. I hope they had their own touchstones that got under their skin in a similar way.
Joan Rivers is a workaholic and like most she doesn’t want to stop. We watched her documentary the other night and I couldn’t help but hope that something happens to her so she can cool it. John Gilmore rode with us to last night’s Margaret Explosion gig and he had another documentary for us to watch after the gig, this one called “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?”
I wasn’t a fan when he was around but I liked the song he did in Midnight Cowboy and it turns out he didn’t write that one. And I didn’t care for the Altman “Popeye” soundtrack. A friend of ours loved him back in the day and he lived downstairs from us so we couldn’t help but hear quite a bit of Nilsson, that and Genesis and Early Elton John and Phoebe Snow. I lumped it all together and decided I didn’t like any of it. I was way wrong on Nilsson. He had a magical voice and he created gorgeous melodies out of thin air. He was very musical and his his music has aged very well. It’s an “Instant Play” at Netflix.
Carol Acquilano landscape at Little Theater Café in Rochester, New York
We plan to celebrate the Solstice tonight at the Little Theatre Café with a healthy dose of pagan holiday cheer. Carol Aquilano has a exceptional show of Sumi ink drawings of local landscapes on full sheets of watercolor paper. Best art show I’ve seen in there in a while! Hope you can stop out and join us for a toast to the late Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) as we play one of his songs.
Here’s a track from a few weeks ago. James Nichols joins Margaret Explosion on piano.
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band performing live at Ludlow’s Garage in Cincinnati in 1969. Photo by Kim Torgerson.
We haven’t seen the man-child mayor of Durand all winter. We have seen his buddies a few times on the long twisted path that they sled down and the next time we see them I plan ask about the mayor. The banks of that hill are all packed down with fresh snow making it look like a bobsled run. We skied down it today but snow plowed most of the way down to break our speed.
Our neighbor spotted a coyote yesterday and the neighbors down the street heard them howling last night. They said the coyotes had killed a deer out back so Peggi and I skied around the creek bed to see if we could spot the carcass but no luck. We got back to the house around dusk and there was a message from our friend, Duane, giving us the news that Don van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) had passed away. Duane owns one of Van Vliet’s prints and Peggi, Duane and I had seen a few of Van Vliet’s painting shows together in New York. I love his paintings but I absolutely love his music and poetry.
One of my favorite psychedelic experiences was having the sensation that the little house that Dave Mahoney and I lived in in Bloomington was flying like that scene in the Wizard of Oz. The soundtrack was 1969’s “Trout Mask Replica” which had just been released. We rode to Cincinnati with Jeff Amour from MX-80 Sound to see the Captain at Ludlow’s Garage on that tour. We sat in giant chairs. Screaming Gypsy Bandits and The Hampton Grease Band opened. Kim Torgerson took the photo above at that show. Steve Hoy drove us to Columbus the following year to hear the Magic Band on the “Lick My Decals Off Baby” tour. And back in Rochester I heard him at the Red Creek Inn where I recorded the live track below. That’s Brad Fox you hear sitting next to me. Greg Prevost from the Chesterfield Kings interviewed the Captain between sets.
Captain Beefheart Live at Red Creek in Rochester, NY
