New in 2017

Which releases are you guys looking forward to in this new year?

jafant01-06-2017 10:53pm

Showing 10 responses by bdp24

bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 01-08-2017 at 05:46am Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete Great news Slaw! I saw Tift at The Troubadour---she was great. Saw Lucinda Williams there too, as well as Iris Dement. The Troub was the first stage I performed on after moving to L.A. in '79. Great room! Elton John made his first U.S. performance there, and The Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Warren Zevon drank at the bar regularly in the early 70's. I hope Tift tours in support of the album---I'd love to see her again.
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 01-09-2017 at 02:03am Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete I met Lucinda at a Long Ryders show at Club Lingerie in the mid-80’s. I was there because I liked them, she was there because she was married to LR drummer Greg Sowders (she’s been married to quite a few musician’s!). I was on the floor talking to the LR manager, and Lucinda walked up to say hey. He introduced us, telling me she was a songwriter and singer. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had two albums out on Folkways Records. I had never heard of her, not being a particular fan of acoustic Folk Blues. She looked down at the floor, with a kind of embarrassed/sheepish look on her face. I was impressed---humility in L.A.! Then her Rough Trade album came out, and I love, love, loved it! My girlfriend and I started going to see her wherever she appeared around town, one time at a pizza parlour. There were about a half dozen people in the room, including staff! The first time we saw her my girl said "Hey, she works at Moby Disc". MD was a small record store in Sherman Oaks, in the valley on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. Lucinda could often be found standing behind the cash register, gazing off into space. Perhaps composing lyrics? Then she got her Warner Brothers deal, and started work on what would become Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. She recorded the entire album three times, until she got what she was after. In that process, her lead guitarist/bandleader/producer Gurf Morlix (great guitarist name, ay?!) couldn’t take any more, quit the band, and moved to Austin, where he remains. The success of that album changed her life. For once, artistic excellence and commercial success! I couldn’t be happier for her, and for us. My "missed boat" story is of the time I went to see John Hiatt at The Roxy on Sunset Blvd. There was an opening act, some girl I had never heard. I don’t care to sit listening to music I don’t find interesting, having to pay ten bucks for a drink. So we arrived just as the opener was playing her last song, and damnit it, it was killer. The song was "Run Baby Run", and the girl was Sheryl Crow! The song was great, her voice was great, and she had a great band. Her first album was not out yet, and she was an unknown to me. Oops.
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 01-10-2017 at 05:29pm Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete Right Marty, Hiatt's Perfectly Good Guitar album tour. That album was a radical change from the previous two, Bring The Family and Slow Turning, both of which I loved (still do, of course!). I had mixed feelings about PGG upon it's release, but heard live I better understood what John was trying with it. Matt Ward's Gibson 335 was cranked way up, with lots of sustain and distortion, not my favorite electric guitar tone. But it worked with the material. And you're again right, the band rocked real hard, very exciting. I still prefer the material and musician's on BTF and ST (how ya gonna top Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe, Jim Keltner, and Sonny Landreth?!), but John couldn't keep making the same album over and over. John Hiatt, one of our best living songwriters and singers!
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 01-12-2017 at 06:49am Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete Wow Marty, you were into John early! I didn’t catch on to him until Bring The Family, his breakout album. Three blocks from The Bottom Line! You musta seen a lotta great shows. I had only to make the 15 minute drive from Burbank to Hollywood to get to The Roxy Theater, The Whiskey a Go-Go, The Troubadour, The Starwood, and The House Of Blues, not much of a deterrent! I saw SO many great shows in the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s. That was after living in San Jose in the 60’s and 70’s, only a 45 minute drive from San Francisco. A lotta great shows there too of course---not only The Fillmore Auditorium, Carousel Ballroom, and Winterland, but all the clubs. Luckily, Portland Oregon is part of the concert circuit for most currently touring artists, so great live music is still available to me. And Portland also has a thriving local music scene---lots of Blues, Singer/Songwriter, and Alternative. Can’t complain!
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 01-13-2017 at 03:17am Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete I lived at the last stop on the 7 line---Flushing in Queens, during most of '82. I saw a few great shows in Manhattan---Marshall Crenshaw (his "big" band 6-piece line-up), The dB's, Dave Edmunds. Great clubs, expensive drinks! It's nice not having to drive after drinking all night though ;-).
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 03-12-2017 at 10:34am Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete Rodney Crowell has a new album ("Close Ties") due the end of the month that I’m looking forward to. He has really grown into one of our premier artists imo.
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 03-13-2017 at 01:45pm Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete Yeah jafant, it’s nice. If you don’t have Rodneys Houston Kid album, it’s absolutely stellar, the equal of John Hiatts Bring The Family, which for me is about as good as it gets. Rodney wrote a book related to the subject matter of the album (autobiographical), entitled Chinaberry Sidewalks. I love it too.
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 03-14-2017 at 04:37am Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete I got to see Little Village (John Hiatt, Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe, Jim Gordon) live on a soundstage in Burbank, and it was just incredible seeing and hearing John sing and Ry play guitar up close. They did "Lipstick Sunset" from Johns Bring The Family album, and Rys solo made time stand still.
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 03-14-2017 at 07:26pm Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete MoD on SACD! Gotta get me one. It was Jim KELTNER who was in Little Village of course, not Jim GORDON. They were good friends and L.A. studio drummers, Ry Cooder arranging his recordings around Keltners availability, he's that good. They were both in Joe Cockers Mad Dogs & Englishmen band, then Gordon joined Delaney & Bonnies road band, where he met Eric Clapton, who also played in that band after breaking up Cream (prompted by hearing The Bands Music From Big Pink album). Eric and Gordon were in Derek & The Dominoes together (Gordon composed and played the beautiful piano part in the middle "breakdown" section of "Layla"), then Gordon joined Traffic for a while. That's Jim Gordon playing on Dave Masons Alone Together album, really fine drumming. They met when Dave was very briefly a member of D & TD. Jim Gordon was a master drummer, really, really, really good, but had mental problems which were exacerbated by the drug use rampant in the 1970's. He started hearing voices (as has Brian Wilson), and one day the voices told him to kill his mother, which he did, with a butcher knife. Yow! He's in Camarillo State Hospital for the criminally insane now, and I have one of his Camco drumsets, left in a storage space when they sent him away. It's not for sale!
bdp24 Details Discussions Posts This discussion Message User 4,908 posts 04-12-2017 at 06:11am Copy Comment URL Report Comment Edit Delete I never bothered to give Bob's Sinatra-themed album a listen---it just didn't interest me. I also feel ambivalent about the American Standards album. It appears that when his writing-mojo fails him, he records the songs of others, to keep the cash coming in. He did the same back in the early 90's with his Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong albums. I saw him live during that period, and he was awful. I didn't see him again for ten years, but that time it was a very different story. Fantastic!

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