i guess i'm crazy but when this guy died, it marked the end of something that michael jackson couldn't even guess at understanding. such is life in the big world that never stops spinning & refuses to mark the passing of the great ones. that's suppose to be up to us & i guess we miss it more often than not. "machine gun" gave us a taste at where hendrix was going. enjoy.
DUANE ALLMAN b NOVEMBER 20 1946 "There ain’t no revolution, only evolution, but every time I’m in Georgia I 'eat a peach' for peace."
rex had the allman's right, along w/skynard. listening to these guys now, i just don't see what held us back. there was the redneck factor, i suppose, but hell, i was listening to hank williams & merle haggard. talking w/rex the last time back in p'cola, he just shook his head when he said, "these guys were in their late teens & early 20s when they were doing this stuff." it's true. duane allman was 25yo when he wrecked his motorcycle & checked out of this life for good. by that time, he'd amazed most everyone in the music business w/his versatile talents(session player at muscle shoals for the likes of Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter, King Curtis, Aretha Franklin, Otis Rush, Percy Sledge, Johnny Jenkins, Boz Scaggs, Delaney & Bonnie and jazz flautist Herbie Mann)& dazzled anyone else who listened w/his range, power, & lyricism: everything that makes "layla" by derek & the dominoes astonishing is all duane allman.
this is supposed to be the only song he ever wrote. enjoy.
GENE CLARK b NOVEMBER 17 1944 the 60s & the rock & roll business in general ate up a lot of astonishing talent. there were the big splashy stars that seem to have triumphed over death & still loom large but there was a lot of collateral damage along the way too. skip spence, syd barrett, gene clark, doug sahm. a lot of them made it out of the 1960s only to have their past excesses catch up w/them when they hit their 50s. i have to say i'm feeling that a bit at this point myself, down a gallbladder & feet that don't function & all. mainly, it's just a drag that these guys couldn't be around a little longer to produce the kind of music they were capable of producing.
this is a lovely lovely song. it makes you want to curl up & bite into some deep painful regret & suck it dry.
It was more like a dream than reality I must have thought it was a dream While she was here with me When she was near I didn't think she would leave When she was gone it was too much to believe
So with tomorrow I will borrow Another moment of joy and sorrow And another dream and another with tomorrow
So if some day won't be time just to look behind There won't be reasons No descriptions for my place and mind There was so much, I was told it was not real So many things that I could not taste but I could feel
So with tomorrow I will borrow Another moment of joy and sorrow And another dream and another with tomorrow
"He was the songwriter. He had the 'gift' that none of the rest of us had developed yet…. What deep inner part of his soul conjured up songs like "Set You Free," "Feel A Whole Lot Better," "I’m Feelin’ Higher," "Eight Miles High"? So many great songs! We learned a lot of songwriting from him and in the process learned a little bit about ourselves. At one time, he was the power in the Byrds, not McGuinn, not Crosby — it was Gene who would burst through the stage curtain banging on a tambourine, coming on like a young Prince Valiant. A hero, our savior. Few in the audience could take their eyes off this presence." chris hillman
"I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could."
the nude is by alfred stieglitz, the great groundbreaking photographer who married o'keefe when he was quite old. personally, i've always considered steiglitz to be more important as an artist & as a champion of many other modern artists. i've always found it hard to gender an artist & i can't really see much reason to do it. still, some of the greats seem to insist on foregrounding it. it's hard for me to see o'keefe's art being done by anyone other than a woman. it's true that mapplethorpe came along & "re-did" the flower motif but there's heavy irony in his pictures & he bleeds the color out of them. o'keefe is all about feminized colors(especially, the pastels)& space, both open & convoluted. o'keefe's flowers are anything but flowers or they are uber-flowers in their magnified complexity.
ken or mike might be able to think of someone else who played both sides of the pop music street as well as young but i can't. as far as i'm concerned, no one rocked w/more ferocity (thank god for all that buzz & feedback) or created such delicately simple but memorable acoustic melodies. i can still remember playing after the goldrush for rex & him reacting as if i'd thrown acid in his eyes. "that voice," was all he kept saying & it was "that voice" that a lot of other folks (less qualified to judge than the gifted mr northrup) couldn't get over either. for me, the beauty of a song like "after the goldrush" or "don't let it bring you down" was the whole point, who cared about the voice singing it. we'd all done dylan duty by that time w/cohen on the way, so i couldn't see what the problem was w/young's voice & he could rock too. how many hours of air-guitar did we accumulate while listening to "down by the river" or "southern man"? hell, i think it was young who inspired us to actually buy guitars & learn to play & stop w/all the pretending.
i gave up on him somewhere after the harvest disappointment. that was actually my loss because he had a lot of good music left in him. i picked up listening to him again sometime during the outrigger years & tried to piece together his oeuvre. that wasn't easy because many of the albums were out of print at the time(i count nearly 10 albums that weren't available at the time). i did get a hold of comes a time, a mostly great album that stayed on the acoustic side of the street. he put out freedom & ragged glory during the outrigger years & even the shit-ass kids who worked for me were sold on young.
his last decent album, to me, was his collaboration w/pearl jam, mirror ball & his last really strong album was his homage to kurt cobain, sleeps with angels. while i'd like to think the magic could strike again at anytime w/someone as idiosyncratic as young, i'm not holding my breath. he hasn't put out a truly coherently great album since the 1970s & then, really, only two. he's always been a kind of hit or miss artist & there have been a LOT of misses lately. those 10 unavailable albums way back when are available now & tho none of them are completely great there is great music to be found there. i can't say the same for post-mirror ball music.
for me, young(NOT the rolling stones, who now just look like a bunch of drunk old women on stage)proved that rock & roll isn't only a young man's game. watching him huddled on stage w/the other members of crazy horse during the ragged glory tour was simply thrilling. there was no way to hear "time's winged chariot" through the buzz & grind of the band & that, i realized, is what rock & roll is all about.
when i first got out here to the bay area, i kept falling for the same thing over & over again. at various times of the day, for no obvious reasons, there would mount up in the skies east of berkeley huge purple clouds that resembled the kind of horrific thunderstorms i was accustomed to back home in p'cola. what did i know? who'd ever heard of fog so thick it really functioned like rain? i remember a bright warm sunny day in berkeley, so perfect i just had to go over to "the city" & it being so bright & warm & sunny there UNTIL out of nowhere the purple beast descended on the city within a few minutes & i was stuck way up in the castro in shorts on a sunday when public transit seems to be run by the i ching. this is serious fog, folks, & unless you've been a victim of it, you really can't imagine it. still, robert cameron's picture of the "fog that ate san francisco" gives you a pretty good idea. cameron just died this week at the age of 98. he was blind in one eye for the better part of his career & was mostly blind in the other one when he was up just last week doing ariels for his soon to open posthumous show. i can't say this is really ground breaking work but i can say, judging from these two shots, he had literally one hell of an eye.
this stagnant dufus should have been gone a long time ago. maybe around the time someone discovered all the various illegal aliens that were keeping his weekend funtime(horseshows) going. his obvious racist tendencies(vide his support of the "birthers")should have also been nails in his coffin. his stumbling mumbling delivery should have been too.
if you want the best indication of what a swine hack this fucker is check out the denials from HIM that's he's going over to fixed news. i'm imagining mr vaughn sitting in rapt attention as this ass-wipe spews out his hatred. he'll be on fox by c'mas. fucking liar. here's just one quote from an organization that dobbs has impacted in a negative, destructive way:
"Our contention all along was that Lou Dobbs — who has a long record of spreading lies and conspiracy theories about immigrants and Latinos — does not belong on the ‘most trusted name in news,’” Roberto Lovato, a co-founder of Presente.org, said in a statement. “We are thrilled that Dobbs no longer has this legitimate platform from which to incite fear and hate."
