Remember, Remember, The Eleventh Of September

Two days ago, the whole 9/11 memorial thing started here in earnest with a telefilm called World Trade Center I had never heard of, and a documentary on that fateful day that I had already watched, but still stuck glued to with my wife. Somehow, the crazy unrealness of the pictures, reminding you of the feeling of crazy unrealness when all of this went down, catches us sort of unaware every time, despite now having seen the towers go down and that insane dust cloud - which looks like some kind of sci-fi monster, as it winds its way around the highrises of downtown Manhattan - a number of times. Even twnety-five years, it still seems not quite real. 

The wife and I were both too close and too far away from events. we were both studying at the University of Kansas in lovely Lawrence, Kansas. I remember the beginning of the morning ell. I stumbled out of my bedroom because there was a lot of noise in the appartment. My flatmate had put his radio on high volume, and was on the way of leaving, just telling me that something had happened in New York, some sort of attack. And off he went. My flatmate was from Pakistan, and I believe going to join his friends and fellowcountrymen to lay low together somewhere. A thing to know about Lawrence, Kansas: It is easily the most cosmopolitan, international and idiosyncratic plce in all of the state of Kansas. Or as our buddy George - weed-smoking, tax-evading, barstool-philosophizing George - would say, "an island of sanity in an ocean of madness". his is probably the only place in Kansas were a 6"1 Asian drag ueen (probably 6"2 in hgh heels) could walk in full makeup, wig, dress and, yes, high heels through town without being bothered. I alwys thought. 'that lady/gentleman' goes ten miles out of city limits in any direction and we'll find him/her beaten to a bloody pulp in some street corner'. But not in Lawrence. 

And yet, and yet, for two or three days in Spetember 2001, dozens if not more international students - especially those from middle-eastern countries - laid low and stayed out of sight, for fear of some entirely unwarrated redneck retribution. Anyway, so there I was, left n the appartment, with only my flatmate's crappy radio-alarm clock as a source of information (I had a Tv, but only with a DVD player attached to it). So I sat all morning on my flatmate's bed, in front of that horrible-sounding pievce of crap radio, trying to make sense of somehthing that didn't make sense. I'm probably not the only one who had that thought, but I was thinking of Orson Welles' famous/infamous The War Of The Worlds radio play that have people believe that a Mrtian invasion was imminent. Could this stuff be real? It didn't help, that the radio reporting was as chaotic as almost everything else that day. They didn't know how many planes had been kidnapped, and how many planes were still in the air. I don't remember hearing te news of the towers fall, but that's because the rest of the morning is kind of a blur. I remember how I felt, but not what I heard or how much of it computed. 

It was probably around lunch time that I finally took my bike to drive on campus. They had put up televisions in the majority of university buildings, but by that time they had decided to stop sowing newscasts on them, as they felt it would only upset people and make a volatile situation even more volatile. That is also why neither me nor the wife had seen the towers go down, or any of the other events. I only for the first time saw the images a year later, when the first anniversary came up, and documentaries and memorial specials would fill up the screens the second week of September. I don't know why, maybe because it felt too ghoulish, but I had never looked up the moving pictures of the day's events. I read a ton of internet nd newspaper coverage on it, but other thn still pictures, I hadn't seen much of 9/11. So wwhen I saw the pictures for the first time a year later, I was floored. If things had seemed unreal in front of that crappy alarm-clock radio, they didn't look more real in moving pictures. Quite the opposite, the moving picturs somehow looked even less real than the confused radio reports I heard on the day itself. Even now, 25 years later, these pictures look like they got beamed in from an alternative dimension, if not for the recognizable early-2000s clothing and what not. 

I didn't think I'd write something about 9/11, but this stuff wants out, onto a page, so there it is. And so it makes sense to propose to you today the re-issue of my reworked version of Springsteen's The Rising. Until earier this year I had never really listened to the lyrics of that title song in detail, but then I heard a bootlegged version of a concert evrsion with a gospel choir, which was quite impressive, and for the first time in twenty years or so I took the booklet to The Rising and really looked at the lyrics. Somehow, I had fallen in the same Bruce trap that all those people misunderstanding "Born In The U.S.A." had fallen into. I had never really put the dots on the i's on that one, so when I reread it and realized that the titular rising is the dying protagonist's soul rising to heaven, I was like, 'dammit Bruce, you and your catchy choruses, you got me on that one'. 

I also realized that at least to my mind, a trilogy of The Rising's songs talk about the same unknown firefighter. "Into The Fire", "You're Missing" and "The Rising" seem to me about the same man, perishing in the fire. His wido comforts herself with his courage and cnviction in "Into The Fire", then lists all the things hat have changed or stay the same in his absence in his absence, then we go back to the oment he perishes in "The Rising". Whether you share or agree with that interpretation is bside the point, I think, the songwriting and observations on the best parts of The Rising - which are all left on my edited version of the album - are impressive, and anyone who still poo-poos Springsteen as a songwriter or storyteller, I really don' know what to tell you. 'Fuck off', probably. 

So, have a drink for the ones we lost, 25 years ago, in the time beteween, just now. And come on up for the Rising, come on up for the Rising tonight...

Bing! Bang! Boom! Bluegrass! Chartbusters!

Bluegrass fiends, you have not been forgotten. I'm surprised to find that it's been almost a month since our last volume, but of course our Bluegrass Chartbusters series will continue unabated, and here's Vol. 14, another volume that has been reworked a numbe rof times and probably doesn't resemble its original incarnation in the slightest. This can of course only be positive, because I found tons of cool stuff that I wanted to bring to you first, and this volume doesn't disappoint! After sitting out the volume, The Brothers Comatose are back with a vengeance...and a great cover of "Mercedes Benz" to boot! Della Mae are back with an equally wonderful version of "No Rain", a song that, as further reserach for the series has shown, is very propular among bluegrass bands. Dierks Bentley, normally not a Bluegrass player, sings U2"s "Pride (In The Name Of Love)", and boy has he brought some back up, enlisting both the Punch Brothers and genre legened Dl McCoury. 

As for newcomers, here's the first appearance of Holler Choir with "Heart-Shaped Box". I was ready to call them a one-off, but the latest expansion wave has brought some more Holler Choir tracks, so these guys will be back. The same is true for We Banjo 3, a now defunct Irish group who - in order to do justive to Tom Petet's "Wildflowers" - recruited Kiana June and Steve Ferrone for backup. I'm not the huget Old Crow Medicine Show fan, but they're debuting here in a backup function - lots of collabs on this one, as you might have noticed - as they are supporting Molly Tuttle and her beautiful take on Uncle Neil's "Helpless". 

Also making their first series appearance is Duluth's own Trapled By Turtles, an Americana group that play all kinds of country-inspired music, and only very rarely dabbles in Bluegrass, but often enough to record their fine cover of "Where Is My Mind?", which means that - somehat improbably - The Pixies are now joining the list of artists being covered. Other artists covered for the first time: Scotland's own Franz Fredinand via Cornbread Red's "Take Me Out" and Howard Jones via Love Canon's "Things Will Only Get Better". 

What else do we have here: Vets Iron Horse covering not one, not to, but three classics ("Sweet Child O' Mine", "Proud Mary" and "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"!  David Lee Roth covering himself, again, gicing Jamie's Cryin'" a bluegrass makeover with the help of The John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band. And more! So, 20 fine handpicked tracks, showing once again the genre's elasticity in bringing these pop, rock, folk and reggae songs to life...

(Almost A) One Album Wonder: Summer's Almost Gone, As Blissfully Told By Al Manfredi

Al Manfredi is one of those glorious also-ran's and never-was's of the music industry, writing and recoring usic almost all of his life, yet never coming close to a career in music or hell, even to get his work published correctly. I initially stumbled onto Al Manfredi and the song "Blue Gold" while hunting little-known songs of the 1970s for the All Pearls, No Swine series, for which "Blue Gold" with its main stream soft rock sheen seemed almost too soft and fuzzy. Still, the song showed up on volume 14 of the series, though it still took me a bit of time to check out more of Al Manfredi. Well, what little more there is. As indicated by the title, Manfredi never managed to even issue a full-length album, the closest he came was to gather a couple of his strongest compositions and privately finance and press a hundred copies of a self-titled six-song EP, not necessarily to sell, but to send to record company people and DJs as a marketing tool. This included the fabulous "Of The Sea" as its opening track, "I Don't Live Today", "Five, Six", the aforementioned "Blue Gold" as side two opener, "Foggy Night" and "Empty Of Your Possession"

Hailing from San Clemente, Manfredi had, as a teenager, started garage band The Nuts & Bolts, shortly after renamed The Lost & Found (who, incidentally are not the same as a Houston-based garage rock band of the same name), who then recorded a one-off single during a one-year stay in Phoenix in late 1966 and early 1967. Back in San Clemente, The Lost & Found started to get...lost. Manfredi's closest band mate Mike Ingram was found hanged under suspicious circumstances, aged 17. Manfredi took a couple of months-long sabbatical in New York to chnage his ideas, then upon returning to California started a new band with old Lost & Found drummer Mike Ryer, only to have Ryer succumb to cancer at only 19 years old. Manfredi quit the band scene altogether and began running the family's music store in Garden Grove, future birthplace of The Offspring. 

But Manfredi kept writing and recording, until he had that EP, or mini-album, ready in 1973. Manfredi's mini-album has the same feel as Brian Wilson's melancholic assertions that summer and its fun, fun, fun can't last forever. It didn't have a real album cover, just a blank white sleeve with a tiny sticker with name and a picture of the artist. The archival release from 2019 added a title, Blue Gold, and a wonderful image of Manfredi with his young son in his arms, standing by the ocean. It was never planned as an album cover shot, but is just wonderful and captures the feeling of the recording incredibly well. 

To try to fill up the original six-track line-up to a full album-length endeavor I used some other songs and demos he recorded (probably, obviously there are no real recording dates or such listed) around the same time, but as the demos especially were kind of rambling, I edited both "Never With You" and "Let It Alone" for better flow and listenability, and better fit amongst its more polished brethren. Now, Blue Gold is still pretty short for an album, clocking in at nine tracks and a little more than thirty minutes, more or less barely getting to the industry standard of fifteen minutes of music per side. But, more importantly, it feels like a real album now. Then again, especially in country music (and in pop music, if you were the Beach Boys) groups and artists would still regularly bring in albums at less than 30 minutes. 

Manfredi's dreams of making it in the music business might have flown away on the ocen breeze, but the man always stuck with music, writing and occasionally homerecording, while the failure to make it as a music man unfortunately might have contributed to Manfredi's uneasy relationship with alcohol, which in turn probably contributed to his relatively early death in 1995. Al's son Alex Manfredi  - the very kid on the cover - grew up to be hip hop producer Exile. 

Blue Gold has touches of AOR (as on "Blue Gold"), as well as slight touches of psychedelia. Acoustic guitars dominate the recording. It's a wonderful, sunburned, blissed-out little record, sounding as unfinished as Manfredi's music career turned out to be, but also fresh and engaging. There might not have been much of Al Manfredi's music that made it out of his mind or his tape recorders, but what little did come out, is worth of rediscovery. So start (re)discovering now...

Summer Sun Has Turned To Rain Over Here...But We Got Sunshine (Reggae) In Our Heads....

 

...and no, by that I don't mean the novelty hit by Danish (of all people) duo Laid Back, but more of our Reggae Chartbusters, obviously. The sun might be temporarily hiding on my part of the globe, but that on't stop us from haring some sweet reggae sounds recalling past favorites. (Actually, today the sun is out after three days of rainy and rainy-ish days, but I'm sticking with my headline, dammit!). Same M.O. as last tim, folks. More or less the same line-u of studio projects and guns-for-hire that Argentine cheapo label Music Brokers could find, but the fun side of this still comes through plenty. I'm, as with volume one, taken with the contributions of Pinky Dread and Natty Bong, and think General Soundbwoy's version of "The Scientist" is another highlight.

As with volume one, I added a couple of outsiders to the Vintage Reggae Café stuff, including Dread Zeppelin's cover of "Kashmir", the Easy Star All-Stars taking on The Beatles and David Bowie and of course UB40, whose token Chartbuster this time around is their cover of "Red Red Wine", which for many years I only associated with this band and not Neil Diamond.

This was the original album cover, but for some reason it didn't want to attach itself to some tracks or play on all Multimedia Players so I made a second version that hopefully works, and you get this bonus cover to look at, uh, the beautiful ocean in the background there. Certainly, don't let anything in the foreground distract ya, eh...

So, more Reggae Chartbusters for the end of the summer (heaven help us, the new school year is just around the corner), so I think I'll pack in the series for the time being and bring them out of mothballs next summer for the last two volumes. Unless, you know, you are hundreds dozens two or three who don't want to wait so long. Let me know, put this on, and enjoy some sunshine reggae, with or without sunshine, wherever you are...

Yes, Yes...I Haven't Forgotten You

When the first part of this lil' project came out in May, I more or less isinuated that that wasn't the end of the story. Because, while I also insinuated - rightfully so, I'd say - that that album tells it's own story, it waasn't the end of the story. Knowing I could not fit all favorites of Yes on a single disc, YEsterdays was always conceived as a two-dis adventure. But as a sort of test balloon I sent out disc one as it's own thing, and now it's time to complete the mess adventure. 

If you remember, the original plan was an uninterrupted megamix with lots of linking sections taken fromlonger works, but halfway through I changed my mind. The linking sections remain, so you"ll have soe bits that don't sound like you might remember them. I also did some associations that seemed obvious to me, like pairing up one of Drama's highlights, "Tempus Fugit" with "Würm" [sic!], the ending section of "Starship Trooper" or ending with the last section of "Machine Messiah" fused to a reprise of "We Can Fly", which brings the YESterdays somewhat full circle - the first real track on volume one after the short prologue of "Vevey's Theme" was "We Can Fly", so circling back to it, albeit briefly, for the finale, seemed a neat idea. 

And of course  I might have edited some stuff out. I don't recall what or where in detail, but I can see that "Perpetual Change" lost about three minutes, and "Yours Is No Disgrace" about three minutes and a half, presumably of stuff I wasn't in love with. So, as usual: proceed at your on risk and peril. But you might to hear some of Yes' finest - according to ol' OBG, of course - in a new context or with new neighbours. There are a ton of classics present here, along with the aforementioned - "Siberian Khatru", "And You And I", "Turn Of The Century", "Yours Is No Disgrace", and more. I even found place for the proggiest of Trevor Rabin-era megaseller's 90125 proggiest and possibly best track, "Hearts". As usual, flow was importat to me, so again, here's hoping that for ypu this flows as nicely as it does for me.

And, well, that's it. That concludes this blog's adventures in Yes Land for now. So get ready for about an hour twenty of some of the best bits that Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and the  rest of the crew have produced. Revel in some YESterdays, and then, as ever, it's off into the future. 

Goodbye, Dolly - From A Faraway Distance, And A Recent Admirer

I honestly can't say I have much of a relationship with Dolly Parton's music, of which I have only heard a song here or there. I of course knew the ridiculous image of Dolly - big hair, big boobs, big voice nd attitude. But I didn't listen much to her music and I didn't know much about her. That chnaged a couple of months ago, when - while zapping aimlessly with the wife in tow, yes, some people still watch TV! - we fell on a music documentary whose subject I don't recall, might have been Bowie. Right after, however, we segued straight into a documentary on Dolly Parton, and I increased my knowledge, not to mention my appreciation of here, manyfold. 

Talk about a self-made millionaire or going from rags to riches. These are often used as metaphors, but rarely have they applied to somebody as well as Dolly Parton. Born in a wooden shack to dirt-poor parents and part of a family counting a dozen children, Dolly's upbringing was clearly the stuff normally reserved for screenplays. The way she managed to hold herself in  male-dominated business in the 60's, the way she looked for more freedom away from Porter Wagoner, all this stuff - just impressive as hell. And that is before you take into account her charity work, and the sense that she just had kind words for everyone, even those that didn't have any for her. That list of 'big somethings' I did in the paragraph above? It's fair to say that 'big heart' needs to be added and underlined a couple of times. In bright, trashy pink, if Dolly had her way. 

The wife and I stayed glued to that documentary, and then - somehow transfixed by the country mood watched half of a concert by the Highwaymen that followed the Parton doc, until at about 1.15 A.M. I told my wife that it would probably wise to pack it in. I had put 'check out more Dolly Parton' on the imaginaryt to do-list, as I was mostly familiar with her as part of the Trio albums with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. And then I never really got around to do that, with so much other music and other things taking precedence. So Dolly's death two days ago, at age 80, doesn't strike me really on a personal level, and i won't pretend that it does. But it's fair to say that our world just got a good bit poorer without Dolly in it. 

The One Buck Album of the day, Coat Of Many Colors, is a classic by Dolly Parton, including the title song that Dolly herself considered her favorite, from among the hundreds and hundreds of songs she wrote. It also came out at an impressively active time for Parton, being her third album of 1971 after The Golden Streets Of Glory and Joshua. This is the 2007 remaster with four bonus tracks. The cover still looks kind of weird (and makes Dolly somewhat look like anboy), but hey, that can't do any harm to the fab content. Just a fine little album to remember this giant of country music by. 

R.I.P. Dolly Rebecca Parton, 1946-2026

That Long Road Out Of Eden Just Got A Whole Lot Shorter, Folks...

What'd they say about Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road? 'Too fat to float'? That's pretty much true of most double albums. If I had to name a double that probably works better as a double, I'd point to London Calling, because the sprawl and diversity is the point and I would have trouble cutting that one down in a sensible way. But other than that? Woof, there's a lot of other double albums, even classics of the genre, that are indeed 'too fat to float' and so it's up to ol' OBG to try to get them to slim down. We started recently by turning Nick Cave's The Lyre Of Orpheus/Abbatoir Blues double whopper into a (hopefully) more delightful single album, My Beautiful World, and now it's time to take the knife to our first real double album.

The Eagles' Long Road Out Of Eden is a prime candidate for this nes weries, because, man, this thing is flabby as fuck, and there's a lot of grease to cut away here. Which in itself was surprising when the album came out in 2007. After all, in the preceding thirteen years after their 1994 reunion, the band had managed a grand total of five new songs, four in 1994 for Hell Freezes Over and a pretty good one-off ("Hole In The World") in 2003, which technically hails already from the first Long Road Out Of Eden sessions. So the fact that not only they'd finally came out with a new studio album, the first after 1979's The Long Run, but on top of that that it was a double album, was somewhat surprising. (Incidentally, and infamously, The Long Run was initially announced as a double album, mainly to give guys like Don Felder a chance at a lead vocal, but they didn't even have enough material for a single good album, hell, I'd argue not even enough for half a single good album. But, as usual, I digress.) Maybe less surprising: they worked, on and off,  over six years on that sucker. Another Long Run. Anyway, with one album they almost quadrupled their output of the last fifteen years of their existence. Impressive!

Except, well, you know. There's quite a bit of stuff on Long Road Out Of Eden that is, you know, not all that good. Not to mention that, much like Henley's and Frey's solo work, songs have a tendency to run long, too long. The result: A rather unreasonable ninety minutes for twenty tracks, and several tracks that drag. So, OBG to the rescue! There is a pretty good classic Eagles album in there, you just have to extract it from amidst all the chaff. Because, let's be honest: One part of Long Road Out Of Eden - arguably the better, more succesful part - was a conscious choice to recreate not only the Eagles sound, but to create songs that reminded you of the band's heydays: "Busy Being Fabulous" is such a song, as is the choice to finally issue J.D. Souther"s "How Long". 

The band had covered that tune in concert throughout 1973 - with Frey, Henley and Randy Meisner all trading lead vocals on verses - but didn't issue a studio version to not steal their buddy's thunder. Having Frey's kids stumble onto their dad playing that song on Dutch TV on Youtube pushed the band to issue it as the first single, making it, like "Busy Being Fabulous", a top thirty hit, which was no small feat for a veteran classic rock band in 2007. But the slow crawl - sometimes literally - through Long Road Out Of Eden also reveals, that the band's two dictators leaders Frey and Henley used the album as a sneaky stealth way to issue what sounds like solo recordings, more or less smuggling in solo EPs into the double album, knowing full well that an album with the Eagles name on it would largely outsell any of their solo records. 

So, there' was a lot of throwing out to do. A ton of tracks that sounded like solo adventures got the boot, mostly Frey's, since he indulged a lot in yawn-inducing ballads. All the songs that sounded like Eagles songs made the line-up, with the exception of "Fast Company", a sort-of redo of "Life In The Fast Lane". The problem with that one: The band did another number that vaguely recalls the funk-rock of "Life", "Fail Grasp At The Big Picture", one of Henley's patented political rants, and of the two I liked the latter better. So long, "Fast Company"! Speaking of Henley's political content: This is of course the biggest change from the classic years: Whatever ecologic or political criticism the band could muster in its prime was couched in metaphor so as to be almost unrecognizable - you have to really stretch to read the 'white settlers edstroying paradise'-scenario of "The Last Resort" as a critique of the way Aspen, Colorado got turned into a snowy Disneyland for rich guys like, ironically, Henley and Frey.

Henley got a lot more direct during his solo years, and it shows on Long Road Out Of Eden. His nature activism shows up on the a capella poem adaptation "No More Walks In The Woods"and he comments on the reliance on media manipulation and American Imperialism in "Fail Grasp" and the title song. The sentiments of both have sadly become way more relevant in the last decade thanks to a certain orange dictatorial authoritarian dictatorial you-know-who. Henley's bitter political rants aren't obvious classic Eagles material, but they're better than the overkill of soppy ballads. 

A classic Eagles album would make room for one solo spot for the two 'good hands' members of the band, which limited the choices for Wals and Schmit, who had two tracks each on the double album - quitely respecting the logic of 'one track per album'. I picked "Do Something" for Schmit, which while also a ballad is much more urgent than the ultra-sappy "What Do I Do With My Heart". For Walsh, a dilemma: He has an original song on the album, but it's an ultra-slow crawl of a song about doing nothing that, well, does nothing, but takes a mind-numbingly long seven minutes to do so. Attempts to edit it down proved unsuccessful, so I picked his cover of "Guilty Of A Crime", which itself is a remake. He recorded it in the mid-90s for a TV series soundtrack, but it's sprightly and (somewhat) rocking, which any version of Long Road Out Of Eden is in short supply of, so it might have gotten the vote for inclusion either way. 

Well, folks, this write-up threatens to get as long and difficult to get through as the original album *shudder*, so I'll try to be quick: Conceived as a classic vinyl-era album, ten tracks sequenced as two distinct sides with their own dynamics; The two singles and most-Eagles sounding tracks frontload side a, while side b opens with the album's epic, the ten-minute title song and its accompanying piece, Frey's short (and Grammy-winning) instrumental "I Dreamed There Was No War". The Walsh track then livens up the solemn proceedings, before we close gently with "Waiting In The Weeds" - sounding totally like a Henley solo track, but again, real quality cuts were limited - and the aforementioned "No More Walks In The Woods", which is lovely, but works much better as a closer than an album opener.   

Given Henley's and Frey's predilections for long, drawn out codas that don't really bring much to the table besides running time - carried over from their solo work - a number of them have been edited down a bit. Also: no soft rock slop! That sleazy saxophone solo at the end of "No More Cloudy Days"? Sayonara, sucker!

So there it is, ol' OBG really slimmed that flabby album down to a core that is infinitely more listenable. The Long Road Out Of Eden might still be long, but it's a lot shorter and more agreeable to listen to.. agree? Disagree? Step on that road to find out...