Gregg Allman - Low Country Blues

In my short lifetime I’ve liked some pretty good singers – Paul Rodgers, John Lennon, David Gilmour and Ronnie James Dio just to name a few.  But by far my favorite vocalist of all-time is Gregg Allman.  Between the Allman Brothers Band and his own Gregg Allman & Friends, I’ve seen him in concert nine times.   The first time I had the pleasure of seeing him live was the day after Carol and I got married in 1987.  We saw him open for Stevie Ray Vaughan [RIP] & Double Trouble.   I first got hooked on Gregg Allman’s voice when I first heard the Allman Brothers’ version of One Way Out.  I’m usually pretty skeptical about white guys trying to sing the blues, but Gregg Allman has earned that right.  He’s had his share of trials and tribulations, some of them of his own doing [five or six wives, drugs, booze], some of them not [brother Duane killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971, his own father murdered by a hitchhiker when he was two].  He recently had a liver transplant [due to liver cancer and Hepatitis C], from which he is slowly recovering.  He’s been sober since 1996, but he still has a feel for the blues.  For proof, listen to him on the Allman Brothers’ Hittin’the Note.  That album found Gregg Allman in perhaps the finest voice of his career.  Since that release we Allman Brothers fans have been craving another release of any kind from Gregg Allman.  Our hopes were answered with Low Country Blues.

Low Country Blues finds Gregg in as fine a voice as he was with Hittin’ the Note.  The big difference is he doesn’t have the big seven-piece band on Low Country Blues.  The music of the Allman Brothers is firmly in the blues-rock category, with the soul, R&B and jazz influences to the fore.  In the Allman Brothers, the guitar is king.  How could it not since the likes of Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks have all passed through its ranks?  What has made the Allman Brothers stand out is their inventive blend of traditional formats (Chicago, Delta, Country, Swamp, Appalachian) that reinvented the contours of the blues song.   Low Country Blues is pure blues.   Doyle Bramhall and T-Bone Burnett provide the sympathetic guitar work, but they don’t overpower the arrangements like Warren Haynes or Dickey Betts could.  Gregg’s Hammond B-3 is mixed just high enough to let you know it’s there.  Colin Linden’s Dobro adds just enough coloring to make the arrangements that much more exotic.  The production emphasis is where it should be on a Gregg Allman solo release – that voice.  He is sounding better now than in the Allman Brothers’ Fillmore East/Eat a Peach heyday.  After those two seminal albums, you could hear how the drugs and booze affected Gregg’s voice.  His voice was good then – it’s great now.  It rasps, it sweeps, it snarls, it bites, and it does it even more effectively today than back in his younger days.   T-Bone Burnett did an excellent job in capturing the rawness of Gregg Allman’s voice.  He let Gregg do only one or two vocal takes of each song.  That’s another endearing quality of Low Country Blues – a slickly-produced album it is not.

I haven’t heard the Sleepy John Estes original Floating Bridge.  I heard Eric Clapton cover it on Another Ticket.  Gregg’s version sounds nothing like that.  With his own acoustic guitar, Dr John’s piano, a few electric guitars wailing in the background and a rubbery upright bass, the song is “bouncy.”  Of the twelve songs on the album, there is one Gregg Allman original.  He wrote Just Another Rider with Allman Brothers/Gov’t Mule guitarist Warren Haynes.  Just Another Rider fits snugly amongst the other songs created by blues legends.  Am I implying Gregg Allman is also a blues legend?  Yes!  When he sings I feel like snappin’ my pistol in your face/the stone cold graveyard gonna be your restin’ place on Muddy Waters’ I Can’t Be Satisfied, you get the feeling he means it.  I’ve heard Muddy’s original, and I’ve also heard BB King’s Please Accept My Love.  Gregg does both songs justice.  Otis Rush’s Checking On My Baby reminds one of Gregg’s performance of Stormy Monday from the Fillmore East album. The traditional Rolling Stone is transformed by Gregg, T-Bone Burnett and Dr John into a 7-minute trance blues with a hypnotic percussion, a piano that doubles the upright bass lines, a dobro that gives the song a swampy feel, and a stark vocal.  It just oozes atmosphere.  This is the one that always makes me reach for the “repeat” button on my iPod.  I won’t go so far as to mimic Paula Abdul [her oft-repeated “you took the song and made it your own” cliché], but Gregg sings all of these blues nuggets very well.  

T-Bone Burnett, the producer of choice these days, produced this disc as he did for BB King’s latest, One Kind Favor [2008].  I mention One Kind Favor because both it and Low Country Blues have the same sound.  It’s almost like T-Bone Burnett cuts records and saves a place to “insert vocalist here.”  Both albums were made the same way.  Both were cut without the artists’ own bands.  Dr John’s piano and Jay Bellrose’s calf-skin drums grace both records, as does the acoustic upright bass.  The horns on both are arranged by Darrell Leonard, he of several albums from Taj Mahal.  Both albums have that 1950s throwback feel.  T-Bone Burnett gathered hundreds of songs for Gregg Allman and BB King to listen to, from which they chose which songs they were going to record.  And both singers got to chose from songs from the early blues era.  In BB King’s case it was the likes Blind Lemon Jefferson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lonnie Johnson, T-Bone Walker and Big Bill Broonzy.  With Gregg Allman it was Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, Bobby Blue Bland, Skip James, Junior Wells, and [ironically] BB King.  Both men covered the “Who’s Who” of American blues.  

The thing with both records is that both harken back to an earlier and simpler blues era.  If you like Low Country Blues, do yourself and pick up a copy of One Kind Favor while you’re at it.  Gregg Allman has said he can’t wait to do another record with T-Bone Burnett.  As much as I like Low Country Blues, I hope Gregg has more of his own tunes to offer the next time around.

Recommended songs:  Just Another Rider, Rolling Stone, Devil Got My Woman, I Can't Be Satisfied, Floating Bridge

Just Another Rider

Floating Bridge

I Can't Be Satisfied

Rolling Stone

Devil Got My Woman

On The Demon Mania Of Metal

Kris Morrison's thoughts on the partnership of metal and horror:

A thought struck me as I was watching a rerun of one of my hands-down favourite shows: Supernatural.  I think anyone who would read a blog on a metal site would appreciate a show about two brothers who go around kicking the shit out of demons, werewolves, ghosts and all other form of nasty by way of shotguns, machetes and homemade explosives.  In a wonderful bonus, the soundtrack features the likes of Metallica, Eagles of Death Metal, Ozzy, Ratt and Blue Oyster Cult.  What a combo!  AC/DC’s Highway to Hell playing while vampires get beheaded and demons face exorcism rights; it’s enough to make me stiff. 

What really got me thinking was the almost too natural partnership between hard rock/metal and the dark monster-filled underworld.  I have trouble seeing rap or trance matching the battle that occurs between the brothers and War, the first Horseman of the Apocalypse.  Why, though, is metal the obvious choice? 

Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath certainly revelled in the frightening and demonic imagery.  Some bands, like Slayer and Iron Maiden, have lyrics which focus on myth and dogma – even if it is in protest of it.  Is this odd considering that the genre originated as more of a protest against a failing real-world system?  It was artists who were working class people living hand to mouth that birthed metal.  They wanted others to know that however depressing life gets, you’re not alone.  And yet, Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks aimed to do the same thing.  I don’t see many Quick Stop or Mooby Burger shirts at a Children of Bodom concert or in a Hellraiser movie.

Of course, not all artists take to the dark side.  The glam rockers of the Sunset Strip were about partying and fighting social convention.  Most thrash metal is about fighting personal demons (the figurative kind of course – Linda Blair was on her own with that one).  So why do even we as metal heads seem to associate the genre with darkness?  Perhaps we find comfort in horror.  It’s an excellent way to view a real crisis in an easier-to-deal-with fictional form.  Death, suicide, abuse, and the incomprehensible evil of others is not a simple thing to handle.  Thinking too much about it would make you crazy. 

The reason people turn to any art is because it speaks to them.  Metal speaks to those who need some kind of relief from the world around them.  We need to escape to Blind Guardian’s version of Middle Earth.  We need to know that Megadeth feels the same way about the outrageous hypocrisies in our governments.  Metal might use metaphor from time to time, but it’s still in your face with it's point.  It screams loud enough that everyone has to hear it.  It doesn’t matter who is creating the wars - Satan or the wealthy elite who never have to actually go and fight - the wars happen anyway.  Metal wants us to know that horror is universal; we all face it together, even when we’re apart.  

Bahaya AC Bagi Tubuh Manusia

Udara panas dan pengap seringkali membuat orang ingin memasang AC dan berharap udara menjadi sejuk. Memang, AC bisa membuat udara menjadi sejuk dan dingin. Tapi jika terlalu berlebihan memakainya, Air Conditioner ini juga berbahaya bagi tubuh.

Bahaya AC bagi tubuh manusia antara lain:

Menyebarkan virus dan kuman penyakit
Jika lama tak dibersihkan, AC bisa menjadi sumber penyebar virus dan kumat penyakit. Alasannya karena AC akan mengalirkan udara yang berada di lingkungan tersebut berulang-ulang.

Efek sampingnya bisa mengakibatkan peradangan pada hidung, rhinitis alergi, dan masalah pernapasan lainnya atau bahkan lebih parah.

Nyeri otot akibat AC juga sudah lagu lama. Sebaiknya gunakan selimut tebal agar tubuh tidak terkena AC secara langsung dan suhu tubuh tetap terjaga.

Sarang penyakit
Biasanya tetesan air yang dikeluarkan pada AC selalu diwadahi dengan wadah semacam ember. Hal ini sebenarnya tak masalah asalkan selalu dibersihkan setiap hari. Jika tidak dibersihkan secara berkala, kuman dan bakteri akan bersarang. Nyamuk pun bisa jadi ada di ember yang penuh dengan genangan air tersebut.

Sindrom gedung sakit
Sindrom ini termasuk sindrom jenis baru. Gejalanya antara lain mata mengalami iritasi, kulit kering, sakit kepala, gatal-gatal, sakit hidung dan atau tenggorokan serta pusing. Solusinya adalah banyak minum air putih serta memberikan kesempatan udara bebas keluar masuk dengan cara membuka ventilasi atau jendela.

Bahaya AC bagi tubuh manusia selain beberapa penyakit diatas juga bisa menyebabkan penyakit lain seperti obesitas.

Untuk mengatasi masalah kepanasan, AC merupakan salah satu jalan keluarnya. Gunakan AC secara bijak dan seperlunya saja. Jika berlebihan, tentu akibatnya tak baik bagi tubuh.

Dampak lain secara tidak langsung adalah jika seseorang di sekitar Anda kentut, baunya akan susah sekali hilang dan itu akan sangat mengganggu. Jadi jangan kentut di dalam ruangan ber-AC ya

The Conspirator

We saw The Conspirator a couple of nights ago on Pay Per View.  The story looked promising – the telling of the story of Mary Surratt.  She was the first woman executed by the US government.  Her crime – being part of the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward.  The story was a courtroom drama, much like another such movie that is one of my favorites, Breaker Morant.  But where Breaker Morant has passionate and firey performances from Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson, one gets the feeling the life has been sucked out of The Conspirator, at least in the courtroom anyway.  Despite this being a courtroom drama, it’s what happens outside the courtroom that things get interesting.

For students of history, and especially those who want to know more about the Lincoln assassination up until Mary Surratt’s trial, this movie gets it right.  If you didn’t already know the facts surrounding the conspiracy to decapitate the US government, this movie gives you a fairly good primer.  There was indeed a conspiracy to kill Lincoln and the others, and the place these conspirators often met was Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse in Washington.

Most of the characters in this movie are not very sympathetic or very likeable.   Senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) at first starts out as a noble character, insisting on defending Mary Surratt in the face of public outrage at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  He talked a great game about Constitutional rights, but he didn’t “walk the walk.”  When the going got tough, he pawned the case off to a novice attorney in his employ, Capt. Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy).  His excuse was that Mary Surratt might get a more fair trial if she was represented by a Yankee.  For awhile that excuse held water, but when Aiken needed Johnson’s help Johnson conveniently needed to attend to some business in Baltimore.  Aiken himself felt his client was guilty when he took the case – at least he was honest.   Aiken redeemed himself later when he saw the trial in which he was participating was a sham.  He started his own investigation and realized it wasn’t Mary Surratt the feds were after, but her son John Jr., who had fled the country to Montreal before the assassination.  The trial was a kangaroo court, rules were made up as they went along, evidence was tampered with, and witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense lied to save their own skins.  Aiken evolved from being a skeptic about Mary Surratt’s innocence to Surratt’s fiercest defender.  He showed his own resolve when people started to shun him for being Surratt’s lawyer.  The social club he belonged to expelled him for “conduct unbecoming a member.”  His girlfriend Sarah dumped him [bitch!] because of his devotion to principle, for trying to ensure Mary Surratt got a fair trial.  Even his closest friends began to doubt him, but at least they stuck with him.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton [Kevin Kline] is consistent – he’s loathsome throughout the movie.  He wants Mary Surratt to be executed – period.  He even told Aiken if either Mary Surratt or her son, John Jr. was executed, that would be fine with him – he wasn’t particular.  When a majority of the tribunal found Mary Surratt guilty but opted to spare her the death penalty, Stanton wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and got the tribunal to reconsider.  When Aiken filed a Writ of Habeus Corpus to get a civilian trial for Mary Surratt, Stanton got Andrew Johnson to suspend the writ.  Kline’s Stanton cared not for the law, but vengeance.  Kline played Stanton very well.

Mary Surratt [Robin Wright] doesn’t generate a whole lot of sympathy.  She betrayed her Confederate sympathies when she referred to Abraham Lincoln as “your president” when talking with Aiken.  She isn’t very helpful to Aiken because her only thought was to protect her son.  Perhaps she knew that since her son was not in custody to be tried, that she was as good as dead and didn’t put up a fight to save herself.  She didn’t really deny that she knew nothing of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln.  She did admit she knew of a plot to kidnap [but not kill] Lincoln.  While she doesn’t generate any sympathy, Wright’s Surratt generates respect.  She is no clichéd “helpless female” – she’s a widow who’s had a hard life and has a steely resolve to get her through that hard life.  There are three times when you see any emotion from Mary Surratt – when her daughter testifies on her behalf, when Aiken tried to make the trial about her son, and right before she was led to the gallows.  But when she got to the gallows, she was recomposed.  You get to see the last thing Mary Surratt sees as the execution hood is placed over her head.  She went to her death clutching a rosary bead.  She exhibited more resolve and composure than the males who were being executed with her.

There is one poignant moment at the very end of the movie.  John Surratt Jr. had surrendered himself to the authorities after his mother’s execution.  Aiken [who by this time no longer practiced law] visited the younger Surratt in his prison cell to deliver to him the rosary his mother held onto when she died.  John Jr. looked at the rosary, but handed it back to Aiken.  He said “this is yours – you were more of a son to my mother than I was.”

At the end of the movie there’s a blurb about how the Supreme Court upheld the right for citizens to be tried by a jury of their peers, even in wartime.  The implication is clear – trying civilians with military tribunals is wrong.  Another blurb told of the government’s inability to convict John Surratt Jr. of anything relating to the Lincoln assassination, thus implying that Mary Surratt was wrongly convicted.  Was she guilty or not?  The movie lets you draw your own conclusions.  Many historians think she was guilty as charged.  Some historians aren’t so sure. 

Here’s what this movie was really about – this was a thought piece about how a country struggles uphold its ideals for the rule of law in times of crisis.  One cannot help but juxtapose the post-Civil War period with the post-9/11 world we live in today.  If that was Robert Redford’s intent, he succeeded.  As I set out to write this little blurb, I so wanted to bash Robert Redford over the head because I initially thought his movie about Mary Surratt’s “trial” [and I use that term loosely] was a propaganda piece for the Left.  Mary Surratt’s conspirators were led into the courtroom with hoods over their heads [Abu Grahib anyone?].  Mary Surratt herself wasn’t let out of her cell until Aiken intervened.  But the more I thought about it, the more I thought this could happen at any time, not just after 9/11.  American citizens of Japanese descent were deprived of their civil liberties during World War II.  People who opposed World War I were jailed for sedition [Eugene V. Debs comes to mind].  "In times of war, the law falls silent," goes Cicero's maxim, quoted in the film by Surratt's prosecutor, Joseph Holt (Danny Huston).  And so it seems, no matter the times.

The Conspirator is a good movie that could have been great, but watch it anyway. :-)

Leaves of Grass

There we were in our usual place, in front of the TV surfing for something to watch after dinner.  I wasn’t in the mood to watch any news on any station (all the news is bad these days).  Deadliest Catch is done for the season.  True Blood isn’t on until Sunday [yeah, it’s a guilty pleasure].   None of the baseball games interested me.  Then I found a movie in progress on Showtime called Leaves of Grass.  I saw it had Edward Norton so I stopped surfing.  Ever since I saw him in Primal Fear and American History X I’ve been a fan, so I left the TV on that station.  Tim Blake Nelson [the guy in O Brother Where Art Thou who said “we thought you was a toad”] wrote and directed the movie, and he has a supporting part.  It's a down-home kind of story set in Oklahoma about two brothers and their family.

Edward Norton plays the two brothers.  The first is Bill Kincaid, a professor of classics at Brown University.  He’s an accomplished guy – he has a reputation as a true scholar who is dedicated to his work of philosophical exploration.  He’s a published author and is about to get offered his own department at Harvard.  He wanted to get as far away from Oklahoma as he could, and worked very hard at losing his Southern accent.  His twin brother Brady is a stoner who grows some wicked good weed.  As one would expect of a guy in his profession, Brady is in trouble with others who are in his line of work, but mainly his chief customer, drug kingpin Pug Rothbaum [Richard Dreyfus].  One day while visiting his drug-addled mother [Susan Sarandon] in a rest home, she asks Brady if Bill will ever come back to see them.  Brady replies that it’ll probably take either him or his mom dying to make that happen [foreshadowing!].

Bill gets a phone call telling him his brother was killed by an errant crossbow.  So Bill hops on a plane to Tulsa.  While en route he has a conversation with a Jewish orthodontist who is relocating to Oklahoma to start an orthodontist practice.  He’s met at the airport by Brady’s partner-in-crime and best friend, Bolger [Tim Blake Nelson].  On the way back to Brady’s house they stop at a local convenience store, where they’re met by some of the area’s other drug dealers who mistake Bill for Brady.  A fight ensues, Bill gets the crap kicked out of him and gets knocked out.  When he comes to, there’s Brady to greet him.  Bill realizes he’s been had.  The reason Brady wanted to get Bill back to Oklahoma was to use him in a scheme to get out of all of his debts so he can marry his pregnant girlfriend [Melanie Lynskey].  What is very fun to watch is how these two brothers interact with each other – the learned scholar and the pot head.  Norton does such a great job playing both characters it’s easy to forget he’s the same guy.

Brady is every bit as smart as Bill [their mom implies he’s even smarter than Bill], but he chose to remain in Oklahoma.  Each is extremely articulate in his own way.  As Bill expresses his disdain for Brady’s chosen “career path,” he can’t help but be impressed by Brady’s hydroponic system for marijuana cultivation.  Brady, on the other hand, tells Bill that he reads everything Bill publishes, even though he has to use the “fuckin’ OED” to get through them all.  Meanwhile, while Bill is in town for the Brady funeral that doesn’t happen, he meets a pretty English teacher [Keri Russell] who likes to quote Walt Whitman [hence the Leaves of Grass title] and fish for catfish by hand.

After the characters are fleshed out, the movie gets to Brady’s last big caper, which doesn’t end well.  There are some weird twists along the way to keep you interested.  The dialog amongst all the characters is priceless.  As the movie progresses you find that you can’t walk away from it for fear of missing something witty.  The script doesn’t insult your intelligence.  It’s like watching a Coen Brothers movie.  Just when I thought American filmmakers had run out ideas, Tim Blake Nelson proved me wrong.  This is definitely not your average Hollywood fare.  It’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel, and it’s not an American adaptation of a foreign film.  Despite the use of a tried-and-true concept [twins who are polar opposites], it’s an original film that’s well-acted and fairly well-written.  I loved it!