As we speak they are opening up a spillway to fill the land of 25,000 people in Morganza, LA, instead of Baton Rouge and The Big Easy. Here is a photo from an article about it today in the NY Times.

Keep it coming, Mr. Helm..

I thought I’d first with a little “Better Off Dead” by Bill Withers. I have a feeling this song was pretty popular back when it came out but today it’s one of of Bill Wither’s more obscure songs. I have some alcoholism in my family and this song hit me a little hard the first time I heard it because it’s first person. The ending is a little nasty and abrubt but it’s a good one.

Bill Withers

The next couple songs are off a collection of songs by the famous guitar prodigy Duane Allman. which are some of the songs off a compilation called Duane Allman An Anthology (Volume 1).  I have this collection on vinyl too so I’ve had it  for years but recent downloaded it and recently re-discovered it.   Duane Allman was of course was one of the original Allman Brothers before he was abruptly killed in a motorcycle accident just days before his 25th birthday.  But he was picked up as an early musical prodigy particularly before using the slide on the guitar was popularized (Duane Allman popularized it) in addition to being well known in the Nashville scene as an unbelieveable studio musician — click here to read all about him and the early Allmans that I think beats the Wikipedia entry if you ask me.   Some day I’ll post the first Allman Brothers album in its entirety, Beginnings, that I think is a masterpiece.  Shortly after this album came out he was soon playing with Eric Clapton (Duane Allman plays the slide guitar on Layla) and dozens of other recordings.  All of these are attributed to Duane Allman but in reality he played with other singers and outshined them to the point the songs are attributed to him.  My favorite of this group is “Road of Love” that is played with a black soul singer named Clarence Carter, who’s great.   This said after hearing this recording I found a bunch of great Clarence Carter recordings but none that I think are worthy of posting to the blog, as of now.

I could only imagine what it would be like to hear a recording like that for the first time when this album had just come out.  I’ve read some of the original articles profiling this new band called “the Allman Brothers” and they were sort of like the Justin Timberlake of the day, young and sexy and tons of hype and particularly in this case, some serious actual talent.   In 1973, just two years after this album came out, they would play to some 1.5 million people for the largest concert in history (at the time).

The other good song is the cover of “The Weight” (originally by The Band) by Aretha Franklin that I thought would have been a good song for Didi Benami from American Idol 2010 to cover for some reason.

Didi Benami

I decided to add one of my favorite groups of recordings to the “Mantra” section of this site because I even reference it in this section and I now feel that this series of recordings perfectly represents what I’m talking about in the Mantra.

Here is the original post (from January 2009), posted again, so you can listen to it if you haven’t already:

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This is a great old recording in relatively high quality, which is demo/sales pitch where Herbie talked about the Fender Rhodes and some of the effects he was using. This was recorded some I figure in 1973 or 1974, just before his Thrust album came out.

The Spook Who Sat By the Door was a Blaxploitation era movie that Herbie Hancock did the soundtrack for. The theme song eventually became the song “Actual Proof” on Thrust. Look for more posts about this album and ‘the spook’ soundtrack coming up some time…

There is some rippin’ stuff particularly “Country Blues” (track 5) and some others…

I also wanted to add that Tom Petty, who is one of my heros, has a killer radio show on Sirius on the Deep Tracks channel. I’m only mentioning it because the show is killer and you really get to the bottom of Tom Petty (check out his wikipedia entry). More info here.

Cheers,
Andre

One major, major influence that has so far been missing from the site is…  Soulive!  These guys are so damn sick, three of them, two are brothers…   That’s right, one more “rich” sounding organ trio..  And they’re big, and popular, they play with the likes of Dave Matthews, Ani DiFranco — you name it… Just no one’s heard of them–hopefully until now:

Tunes from their 2001 funky-ass album Doin’ Somethin’ :

Last night was the first time I’d seen them in probably 3 or 4 years. Though it was just a sleepy Tuesday afternoon/evening show, it made my night, possibly my whole week… It’s funny too because even here in Utah, they have a huge following, and out of the wood work a lot of my old friends who were Soulive fans (or fanatics) were there, of course! 

For example my friends the Williams brothers…  Who like Soulive so much they started getting into collecting old Hammond organs, Wurlitzers, Clavinets, etc…  So much so that they’re now the underground kings of the Hammond world here in Utah (if you found this through a search engine and are looking to get a hold of them, email me).  Yes they sell them and even turned it into a little side business for a while..  Not surprisingly I found them talking it up Neil Evans after the show (pictured in the photo below):

Neil Evans on the Hammond B-3, The Clavinet, & playing bass at the same time...

These guys have so much good music and their live stuff is where they really shine. They’re also like Phish where their tried and true glory days (stuff off Phish’s Junta album for example) still holds true, so they keep playing it even though they’ve put out probably 5 or more albums since then.. This is awesome as this old funky stuff is where it’s at…

Here are some videos I took, now on Youtube… Look for a lot more Soulive to come out of this blog and check archive.org for a TON of their live recordings that just kill it.. This is just the tip of the iceberg..

In Comb Wash, where they found Everett Ruess

Also RIP Michael Jackson, devastating because I liked his music so much. It did shape my life and the music here, sort of as the ‘first taste.’ I played that album from when I could work the record player (3 or 4 maybe?) all the way through college, wearing the grooves through the vinyl… I feel he is in a better place as he was sick physically and mentally to have become the person he was. Sad to see him go…

Anyway, WordPress 2.8 is here and the best way to sort of highlight it and what it is and how the back end works (and all the new features) is to post their video about it. I’ve already updated easily 50% of the sites I have running WordPress with it (and it takes about 2 seconds to do, which is another nice feature of it).  Even on a complicated site like www.hazardassembly.com, with all sorts of crazy plugins (for example the site’s entire login feature is powered by vbulletin for example off a completely different database) it upgraded flawlessly and effortlessly.

Here is the video explaining it all.  For the tech geeks out there, enjoy!

Yeah. ..  that’s what I’m talking about.  Check out the track with Charlie Tuna from J-5!

“Peace and Love” as my friend Ara says… (hit play)

This is a pretty killer recording of Jaco Pastorious sitting in with Herbie Hancock quintet in 1977 at the Ivanhoe Theatre in New York. At first I thought I’d just play a couple of my favorite songs but I thought that wouldn’t be fair for the folks who haven’t heard it before, as this is rare but not “that” rare… Instead I staggered the order as Track 2 and particularly track 3 – It Remains to Be Seen, are some of my favorites. In typical fashion this track came on my ipod on the way home tonight from the shop and it just cranks, so here I am playing it — no rhyme or reason I suppose (smile).

Also — and this is important — now, here I was, thinking I was something special with some of these rare tracks. But as I was looking online for both the playlist and some art for this bootleg (or “import” as they were once called), out of the wood work I found some blogs way older than this one, including **holy gold mine** – very cool, make sure you click that link. In this single post there are 44 great bootlegs — many of which I don’t even own. And look at the lineup, Roy Ayers (trust me – there is some Roy Ayers coming) and a gazillion others… It’s so good that I added his blog to the blog roll on the right and it will take be days to get through it all, and to even get a good beginning…

Here is some art from this blog & this post. There is something about the covers of early 70s recordings, again just keepin it real…