Tony's 2011 Picks - Eleven from '11

I didn’t buy a lot of “new” music in 2011.  There wasn’t a lot of new music that jumped out and screamed “buy me.”  Some of those that I did buy I’ve already written about at length.  I pretty much stuck to stuff that’s come out in years past that I didn’t get when they were new.  So my list of favorite releases from 2011 is a short one.  Ten of them contain new music, and one of them is a monster of a box set.  As one would expect from me, the list is filled with the usual suspects, but as long as the usual suspects continue to make new music, I’ll continue to buy it and write about it.

Tom Waits – Bad As Me The only surprise about this Tom Waits release is the brevity of the songs.  All thirteen songs (16 if you got the “deluxe” version) run under five minutes.  Sound-wise, there are no surprises.  The “human beatbox” that was prevalent on 2004’s Real Gone is gone, and keyboards that were absent from that release make their return on Bad As Me.  As usual, Tom Waits barks, hollers, croons, and rasps.  Keith Richards makes an appearance on four of the songs, the funniest of which is Satisfied.  Here Tom Waits mocks Mick and Keith by name and tells him that, unlike the singer who “can’t get no satisfaction” he will be satisfied by the time it’s his turn to depart planet Earth.  There’s an anti-war rant called Hell Broke Luce, which features machine-gun fire and snarling guitars.  He’s got poetic ballads like Back in the Crowd and Kiss Me.  Bad As Me has the mix of the old-timey and the surreal one expects of any Tom Waits release.  The songs sound like they were recorded after all the bars closed.  There’s dark humor and sorrow, anger, disgust and heartbreak.  The disgust comes in Talking At The Same Time: “We bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit, we got the rind…”  The sadness comes in Pay Me where the singer tells of his family who pays him not to come home.  The only way down from the gallows is to swing… To borrow a phrase, Bad As Me is chock full of brawlers, bawlers and bastards.  It is essential for any Tom Waits fan.  Same as it ever was…

Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down  Ry Cooder’s most recent works have looked back in the past.  There’s his “California trilogy” – Chávez Ravine [2005], My Name Is Buddy [2007], and I, Flathead [2008].  These albums serve as an alternative history of California one won’t find in the text book.  Chávez Ravine dealt with the Los Angeles Hispanic neighborhood that “disappeared” [it was bulldozed in the name of “progress”] to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium.  My Name Is Buddy chronicles the travels of a red cat named Buddy and some of his animal friends as they encounter dust bowl refugees, union organizers, union busters, anti-Communists, and a country music singer named Kash Buk.  Kash Buk reappears in I, Flathead, with its tales of drag-racing aliens, hot rods, honky tonks, hot blondes, his dog [his “homeland security”] Spayed Cooley, and 5000 country songs nobody wants to sing.  Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down doesn’t have an underlying them like the aforementioned trilogy.  Here, Ry Cooder channels his inner Woody Guthrie, and boy is he pissed.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down finds Ry Cooder commenting on current events.  He has a well-earned reputation of being a renowned Americana musicologist, and he puts that expertise to work on this CD.  Here he mixes blues, folk, ragtime, norteño, rock, and country.  Some of Ry Cooder’s usual suspects appear here – son Joachim [drums], Flaco Jimenez [accordion], Terry Evans, Willie Green and Juliette Commagere [vocals], Rene Camacho [bass].  Ry has the rest of the instruments covered – guitars, banjo, mandola, bajo sexton, bass, marimba.  Like Tom Waits he skewers those bankers who received financial bailouts from the government in 2008 in No Banker Left Behind.  In El Corrido Jesse James the outlaw asks God for his guns back so he can dispense some frontier-style justice on Wall Street.  In Quicksand a Mexican man describes a border crossing during which the guide for his group leaves in the middle of the night, and the man who takes over dies the next day in the sun.  He shows his disgust for Republicans in I Want My Crown [Republicans changed the lock on the heavenly door / keys to the kingdom don’t fit no more…]. Christmas Time This Year is Ry Cooder’s scathing indictment of America’s involvement in wars overseas set to a Mexican polka.  But there’s humor here as well.  John Lee Hooker for President imagines a world where all the Supreme Court justices are “fine looking women,” and if you’re nice you’ll have one bourbon, one scotch and one beer three times a day.  The children get milk, cream and alcohol if they stay in school.  If only…

Emmylou Harris – Hard Bargain  For most of her career, Emmylou Harris has contented herself with being an interpreter of songs written by other people.  She’s always been insecure about her songwriting.  I think she sells herself short in that regard – she wrote From Boulder to Birmingham!  What I didn’t realize [and I probably should have – I have many or her albums] was that she was the primary songwriter for only three of her albums before Hard Bargain.  Emmylou wrote all the songs on Red Dirt Girl [2000] and Stumble Into Grace [2003], but returned to recording other peoples’ songs for All I Intended to Be [2008].  On Hard Bargain, Emmylou returned to songwriting and produced a wonderful collection of songs.  There are three elegies on Hard Bargain.   The Road is for Gram Parsons.  In this song she can still remember every song he played.  My Name is Emmitt Till is told in the first person, telling how a black boy from Chicago was murdered in 1950s Mississippi for talking to a white woman, how he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten, stabbed, shot, and thrown in the river “like trash when they were done.”  And she tells of how Emmitt Till’s mother kept the casket open to show her son’s mutilated body “for the whole wide world to see.”  Darlin’ Kate is for her late friend Kate McGarrigle, a frequent collaborator who lost her battle with cancer.

The album includes Six White Cadillacs.  Here, death is a welcome respite from the road that “we won’t have to wander anymore.”  The Ship on His Arm is about a wartime marriage that was inspired by her own parents, who married during World War II.  There’s New Orleans, where “the whole world stood to watch us drown,” but “to cut and run ain’t in our blood.”  It’s interesting how Emmylou chose to make “hurricane” and “Pontchartrain” rhyme in a song.  There are songs of lonely women – Lonely Girl and Nobody.  Given her long-time advocacy for animal rights, she even wrote a song about a Big Black Dog.  There’s a lot of melancholy on Hard Bargain, but it’s a good album nonetheless.  Her voice is still as angelic as ever.  I read in Billboard not too long ago that her next project will be a duets album with Rodney Crowell.  It’ll be good, that much is certain.

U2 – Achtung Baby Box Set Carol got me this for my birthday.  When author Bill Flanagan wrote his book U2 At the End of the World, he wrote about U2 in their Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  Manager Paul McGuinness described this time as a three-year campaign.  This box set is the product of that period.  Included in this set are six CDs and four DVDs.  The six CDs include the original Achtung Baby remastered, the original Zooropa remastered, B-sides and Rarities, 2 CDs of remixes [the Über and Ünter remixes], and the “alternate” Achtung Baby.  The hardest core U2 fans have heard all of these before, but not me.  The remastered Achtung Baby and Zooropa sound as good as one would expect.  The B-sides and Rarities are interesting.  I could do without the remixes.  The “alternate” album [‘Kindergaten’] is for U2 what Let It Be…Naked is for the Beatles.  Take away the studio tricks and underneath you still get a pretty good album.  The DVDs include the documentary U2: From the Sky Down.  U2 returned to Hansa Studios in Berlin to discuss the making of Achtung Baby with director Davis Guggenheim [he also made It Might Get Loud].  Half the film is devoted to the history of the band until 1990, the second half is devoted to the making of the album.  The best part of this film is when Bono and the Edge listen to some of the original session tapes.  You can almost see a light bulb go one over both of them when they hear how One came out of a working session for a different song.  One DVD contains each of the videos made from the Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  A third DVD is the Zoo TV – Live From Sydney concert.  This show was quite a bit of sensory overload, but it was good to see Bono not take himself so seriously for once.  The fourth and last DVD has lots of goodies – a Zoo TV special,  an MTV documentary, MTV’s show Most Wanted where a fan got to see a U2 show via satellite from his house, a video short about Trabants [‘Trabantland’], U2 on Naked City, U2 on TV-AM.  There’s CD-ROM content as well, complete with links to websites.  This is how to do a box set the right way.

Glen Campbell – Ghost On The Canvas  The country icon makes his final album and says goodbye to his fans.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Glen%20Campbell

 

Gregg Allman – Low Country Blues  Gregg’s first solo studio album in fourteen years has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Blues Album category.  In fact, of the five albums nominated, three were made by members of the Allman Brothers Band.  Perhaps for this year they should rename the category “Best Blues Album by a member of the Allman Brothers Band.”  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/08/gregg-allman-low-country-blues.html

Warren Haynes – Man in Motion  Also nominated for Best Blues Album [the third being the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator].  The hardest working man in the music business, Warren took a year off from Gov’t Mule to release and tour behind this soulful gem.  To these ears, Man in Motion is more of a soul album than blues, but I tend to nitpick.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/05/warren-haynes-tale-of-two-albums.html

Neil Young – A Treasure  Neil Young changed musical directions with every album he made for Geffen during the 1980s.  This CD captures Neil and some legendary Nashville studio pros in his “country phase.” http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/neil-young-treasure.html

Levon Helm – Ramble at the Ryman  Recorded at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2008, Levon Helm and friends keep the spirit of The Band alive.  Levon doesn’t do all the singing, but with Larry Campbell, Theresa Williams and daughter Amy Helm along for the ride, he doesn’t have to.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/levon-helm-ramble-at-ryman.html

        

Joe Bonamassa – Dust Blow  This is the first of three releases Joe Bonamassa put out in 2011 [the others being Black Country Communion 2 and Don’t Explain (with singer Beth Hart)].  With three releases in 2011 Joe is trying to take Warren Haynes’ title as the hardest working man in the music business.  Unwilling to be put in a blues-rock straight jacket, Joe goes in a more eclectic direction as he did with his previous two releases, Black Rock [2010] and The Ballad of John Henry [2009].  I love to hear this guy play.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Black Country Communion – 2  After a not-so-stellar first album,  Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa and company fulfill their potential on their sophomore release.  At times Black Country Communion sounds like the second coming of Deep Purple.  Everything is better – Kevin Shirley’s production is better, Glenn is singing better, Joe is playing like a hard-rock guitarist, and Derek Sherinian can finally be heard in the mix.  Jason Bonham didn’t need to improve his drumming it’s still rock-solid as it was on the first album.  Father John would be proud.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

 

Gregg Allman & Friends - Jan 10, 2012, Pensacola, Fla

Of all the people I’ve seen in concert, I’ve seen Gregg Allman the most.  I saw him six times in the 1990s with the Allman Brothers Band, and now four times with Gregg Allman & Friends.    Carol and I first saw him in Pueblo, Colorado the day after we got married in 1987.  He was on tour promoting his then-new album, I’m No Angel.  He opened for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble.  This is the first time I took my kids to a concert.  My oldest son Greg has actually heard Gregg Allman before.  Carol was six-months pregnant with him when we saw Gregg at The Boathouse in Norfolk, Virginia in late 1995.  And now fifteen years later Greg got to actually see him in person.  Since both Greg and Mark were little kids they’ve been exposed to the Allman Brothers Band, and unlike other kids they actually like the music their parents listen to.  I thought this would be the time for them to go to their first concert.  They liked what they saw, liked what they heard and had a good time.  It wasn’t too loud and didn’t destroy their hearing.  It’s good to see Gregg in a setting that doesn’t demand high-volume guitar heroics

The venue for the evening’s festivities was the Saenger Theatre in Pensacola.  It’s an old Spanish Baroque/Rococo style theater that first opened its doors in 1925.  It hosted Vaudeville-type road shows, Broadway plays, and silent screen classics. During World War II it stayed open constantly to show news reels from the war.  Later years saw use as a movie house until 1975 when age caught up with it. It fell into disrepair and closed.  That same year the theater was donated to the city of Pensacola as a cultural arts center.  Both the city of Pensacola and the University of West Florida restored the theater in a joint effort.  The restoration took four years and $15 million dollars, and the theater reopened in 1981.  Today it’s on the National Registry of Historical Sites.  I have but one complaint.  The seating isn’t meant for tall people or large people.  One gets the feeling of sitting in coach on a cross-country flight.  But that is a minor complaint.  With a capacity of 2,250, it’s a cozy little place to see concerts.  We saw Peter Frampton there last October.  It’s a little smaller than New York’s Beacon Theatre, where the Allman Brothers play a multi-night stand every March [the real “March Madness” if you ask me and other Peacheads].

Jaimoe’s Jassz Band opened the show with a pretty good set.  They played selections from their new CD Renaissance Man.  I recognized all of two songs: Leaving Trunk and Rainy Night in Georgia. I wasn’t sure what to expect except to hear jazz.  I’m not a jazz person.  The closest I get to liking jazz is the improvisational music played by the Allman Brothers Band.  But when I see a band that says they play jazz, I thought that’s all I would hear.  I was pleasantly surprised when the music Jaimoe and his band ranged from jazz to R&B, blues and soul.  Another pleasant surprise was Junior Mack.  He played guitar and sang.  I’d heard of Junior Mack but I’d never heard any of his music.  I know he’s sat in from time to time with the Allman Brothers Band, but that’s the only connection I had with him.  After his performance in Pensacola I’d like to find anything else that bears his name.  He’s a very good guitarist and an even better singer.  A note of humor – after Jaimoe introduced the members of his band, someone in the audience shouted out “who are you?”  Jaimoe smiled and said “I’m Johanny Johanson from Gulfport, Mississippi.

Jaimoe's Jassz Band (Picture courtesy of Slyckyr, Allman Brothers Band web forum)

After a fifteen minute break to get the instruments in place, Gregg Allman & Friends took the stage.  The big surprise of the evening for me was hearing Please Call Home.  In all the times I’ve seen Gregg Allman, this was the first time I heard that song live.  It was the Laid Back version, not the Idlewild South version.  I’d seen from setlists of previous shows from this tour and I noticed the show we saw was one of the very few where he played it.  In other shows on this tour he played Just Another Rider.  We didn’t hear that, nor did we hear Midnight Rider.  Midnight Rider wasn’t missed since I’ve heard it live many times before, but I was looking forward to hearing Just Another Rider.  I think he’s past the stage of promoting his latest album, Low Country Blues.  He’s digging deeper into his back catalog.  But I got to hear Please Call Home, so that made up for it.  Another surprise was the number of Allman Brothers songs in his set.  About half the songs his set was ABB songs.  Dreams and Wasted Words were especially good.  It was good to hear Dreams without a screaming guitar.  Scott Sharrard is a fine player, and he didn’t feel the need to go b`lls-to-the-wall like Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes or Dickey Betts would in an ABB setting.  Hearing Wasted Words live during this show was another first for me.  I’d always wanted to hear These Days and Melissa in the same show, and I finally got my wish.  We got to hear Jay Collins play the flute on Melissa. I wasn’t sure how a flute would work with Gregg Allman’s music, but it di and very well. When the band played Ridin’ Thumb, I didn’t recognize it.  I pride myself in knowing Gregg’s music inside and out, but this one stumped me.  I had to look it up when I got home.  It’s a song written by Jimmy Seals [of Seals and Crofts fame] that had been covered by the likes of Ray Charles, King Curtis, and Three Dog Night.  When I found that Ray Charles had done it, it’s inclusion in Gregg’s set made perfect sense.  I would love to have heard Queen of Hearts from Laid Back, but on this night it was not to be.  Gregg’s rendition of Whipping Post was the Searching for Simplicity arrangement, not the jam monolith from the first ABB album.

Gregg was in very fine voice.  He reaffirmed why he is my favorite singer.  Considering that he had liver cancer and had a liver transplant two years ago, he’s holding up very well.  When I first saw him he was 39 years old.  Now he’s 64 (!).  He spent most of the evening behind his Hammond B-3 organ, but he’d play the acoustic guitar on some songs [These Days, Melissa, Floating Bridge], a Fender Stratocaster on others [I Can’t Be Satisfied, Whipping Post, One Way Out].  It must be hell to be talented.

The setlist:

I’m No Angel / Statesboro Blues / Please Call Home / I Can’t Be Satisfied / Ridin’ Thumb / You Must Be Crazy [Floyd Miles] / These Days / Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’ / Dreams / Wasted Words / Melissa / Going Back To Daytona [Floyd Miles] / Just Before the Bullets Fly / Whipping Post

Encore:

Floating Bridge / One Way Out

The band:

Gregg Allman – vocals, Hammond B-3, acoustic and electric guitar

Floyd Miles – vocals, percussion

Scott Sharrard – guitars

Bruce Katz – keyboards

Jay Collins – saxophones, flute

Jerry Jemmott – bass

Steve Potts - drums

Gregg Allman & Friends (Picture courtesy of Slyckyr, Allman Brothers Band web forum)

Gregg Allman & Friends (Picture courtesy of Slyckyr, Allman Brothers Band web forum)

Not all of the entertainment came from the stage.   We sat up in the balcony, about six rows back.  There’s a small half-wall between the first three rows and the rest of the balcony seats.  A guy who sat three rows in front of us and had way too much to drink, and during one of the songs he jumped over the wall and stating to pretend to play piano on the half-wall.  In his mind he was Jerry Lee Lewis.  He was fun to watch.  Too bad the light wasn’t good enough for me to film him.  Otherwise I’d post it here.  I was highly amused.  There weren’t any twirlers though…I guess they only go to Allman Brothers shows.

All things considered [to borrow a phrase], it was an excellent show. I’m especially glad my boys went with us.  They got to see real musicians play real music that means so much to many people.  Gregg Allman has a knack for taking old songs, re-arranging them and making them sound fresh.  I hope that someday soon Gregg will see fit to record another album and that he will stop by Pensacola again.

Thanks to Slyckyr, a "Peach Pro" from the Allman Brothers Band website forum for allowing me to use his pictures.  He was at the same show but took better pictures than I did.

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