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I know this shouldn’t bother me as much as it does, but the new Honda commercial really pisses me off. The spot portrays a happy family outing with a carful of kids singing an acapella version of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” with mom and dad singing along in the front seat.
I promise I’m not gonna get over-the-top bent out of shape over this. Taking the time to blog about it may already be a disproportionate response. But when I was 14 years old I was a huge Ozzy fan and at that time - in my hometown anyway - he was not “cool” at all. Early in the 80s before heavy metal became big business corporate hair metal bullshit, Ozzy was considered dangerous. Kids like me had to sneak his records into the house. Many parents equated Ozzy with Satan. Now of course we all know that back then he was just off his rocker, drunk and fucked up all the time. (His deranged exploits included the now-infamous gross-out contest with Motley Crue that culminated with Ozzy snorting a line of ants off the sidewalk.)
But in 21st Century Bizarro World, celebrities seem to clamor to be the next to fuck up royally in public because everything this side of child-molestation guarantees a cash-grab comeback. America loves its fallen heros. You watch: Charlie Sheen will be back on top in no time. And Lindsay Lohan will be looking over his shoulder, jockeying for position to be next in line. Mark my words.
But I digress. That’s not really the point I set out to make here.
Honda’s latest ad campaign is so aggressive that I get sucker punched by this damn commercial about ten times on any given Sunday. And each time it just seems to rattle my cage. Now I’m not saying I was ahead of my time. Even in 1982 Ozzy already had millions of followers. But the thing is: I recall being looked upon with shock, horror and disgust by the other kids in my school and many adults as well because I liked Ozzy’s music. Now Honda has a cutesy little family chirping his song in a car commercial like it was “Frere Jacques” and it kinda makes me sick.
Stranger still, Ozzy’s lyrics stripped to the bone in this acapella version makes it clearer than ever that most people never stop to think about their true message. Ozzy actually makes some astute sociological observations in the song, but most people’s unshakeable mental image of the man is a mad beast biting the heads off of bats and/or doves, or perhaps more commonly as the drug casualty daddy from the TV show The Osbournes. I can recall being absolutely dumbfounded the first time I realized that the lyrics to “After Forever” from Sabbath’s Master Of Reality LP were damn near a commercial for Christ, and I’d been listening to it for years already by that point. If I’m a fan and I never noticed it, what are the chances of non-fans ever having the slightest clue?
Corporate America is a soulless shark. It will exploit anything for a buck, destroying the pure essence of whatever it chooses to feed on. Ozzy’s music was never “sacred” to me. His music, indeed most heavy metal of the time, resonated with a certain contingent of the teenage audience of the early 80s because it fairly screamed rebellion in the face of all authority figures. But now it is a commodity to be shredded and “re-purposed” to make us all feel warm and fuzzy inside when we think of the 2012 Honda Pilot and that’s just weird.
This is a resentment that I do not wish to feel. It makes me think that maybe the parent-scaring music of my youth was sacred in a way. It was an ever-reliable place of refuge where I could always go to be alone and to get away from the adult world and all its ridiculous rules and false judgments. I still run to the music I loved as a kid as a means to escape the harsh realities of life. I take it so serious that some have even accused me of having a Peter Pan complex. I’m still wearing the same uniform of faded jeans and black t-shirt and Converse tennis shoes and I’m still listening to Black Sabbath at an unconscionably loud volume. As ever, this remains and shall forever be my secret hiding place. Honda’s stupid-ass commercial might get under my skin, but in the long run, in the grand scheme of things, it’ll barely register a blip on my radar. You know where to find me.
25 Haziran 2012 Pazartesi
Revelatory Romp: Tommy James' Life Story
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Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick
When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.
Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.
Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.
James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.
Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.
[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]
Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick
When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.
Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.
Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.
James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.
Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.
[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]
"Yesspeak" Decidedly NOT Yes's Peak
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Even through numerous line-up changes, the level of musicianship in Yes has always represented the best in the business and they are considered by many to be the kings of Progressive Rock. Without ever sacrificing the Prog roots seemingly embedded in their DNA, they have crafted numerous songs and several LPs that are staples of classic rock radio. Since their inception, they have always been the kind of band that other musicians look up to.
Music DVDs are naturally designed for an artist’s existing fan base. So it’s reasonable to postulate that very few casual observers will invest in the 2-disc DVD from Yes called “Yesspeak”. This is a band with a tremendous worldwide following, of course. So it is no small niche market that an item like this aims for. There are certainly some excellent concert performances included here but thanks to some ill-advised and overlong interview segments, the overall presentation comes across as pompous and self-important. Allowing for the fact that sometimes a British accent can convey an unintentional air of superiority, the interviews with individual band members contained here are nearly insufferable. Obviously there is a world of difference between a concert film and a documentary. One suspects that the strengths of Yes might be better exhibited in the former as opposed to the latter. As a bonus feature on the DVD, there’s 2 hours of audio from concert performances that speaks much better of this band’s true worth than interview segments featuring grown men cavorting in colorful capes and wispy flowing shirts of shiny silk.
The worst offender is singer Jon Anderson, who comes across as a delusional little man that fancies himself a spry elfin creature with magical powers and a sprawling countryside estate replete with mansion and vineyard. He openly admits that life on the road is spent fantasizing about going home. Humble drummer Alan White and bookish guitarist Steve Howe both seem to have kept one foot in the real world, while Rick Wakeman is enigmatic, deftly holding down the disparate roles of screwy philosopher and the voice of reason. It is primarily Anderson and bassist Chris Squire who carry themselves with odious pride, their swelled heads vainly held aloft in the clouds. The abiding mood created by their interview segments lands just this side of pathetic. Even Roger Daltrey’s narration is overzealous and hyperbolic, as if describing the mystical machinations of a mysterious cabal. A fleeting glimpse of the band members’ personal lives would have made for a much more intriguing presentation of their offstage activities. Perhaps the best approach to this DVD is to keep the remote control in hand and skip over the interview segments. Limit your viewing to the live performances, which are nothing short of astonishing, and you’ll find few flaws with this DVD.
Even through numerous line-up changes, the level of musicianship in Yes has always represented the best in the business and they are considered by many to be the kings of Progressive Rock. Without ever sacrificing the Prog roots seemingly embedded in their DNA, they have crafted numerous songs and several LPs that are staples of classic rock radio. Since their inception, they have always been the kind of band that other musicians look up to.
Music DVDs are naturally designed for an artist’s existing fan base. So it’s reasonable to postulate that very few casual observers will invest in the 2-disc DVD from Yes called “Yesspeak”. This is a band with a tremendous worldwide following, of course. So it is no small niche market that an item like this aims for. There are certainly some excellent concert performances included here but thanks to some ill-advised and overlong interview segments, the overall presentation comes across as pompous and self-important. Allowing for the fact that sometimes a British accent can convey an unintentional air of superiority, the interviews with individual band members contained here are nearly insufferable. Obviously there is a world of difference between a concert film and a documentary. One suspects that the strengths of Yes might be better exhibited in the former as opposed to the latter. As a bonus feature on the DVD, there’s 2 hours of audio from concert performances that speaks much better of this band’s true worth than interview segments featuring grown men cavorting in colorful capes and wispy flowing shirts of shiny silk.
The worst offender is singer Jon Anderson, who comes across as a delusional little man that fancies himself a spry elfin creature with magical powers and a sprawling countryside estate replete with mansion and vineyard. He openly admits that life on the road is spent fantasizing about going home. Humble drummer Alan White and bookish guitarist Steve Howe both seem to have kept one foot in the real world, while Rick Wakeman is enigmatic, deftly holding down the disparate roles of screwy philosopher and the voice of reason. It is primarily Anderson and bassist Chris Squire who carry themselves with odious pride, their swelled heads vainly held aloft in the clouds. The abiding mood created by their interview segments lands just this side of pathetic. Even Roger Daltrey’s narration is overzealous and hyperbolic, as if describing the mystical machinations of a mysterious cabal. A fleeting glimpse of the band members’ personal lives would have made for a much more intriguing presentation of their offstage activities. Perhaps the best approach to this DVD is to keep the remote control in hand and skip over the interview segments. Limit your viewing to the live performances, which are nothing short of astonishing, and you’ll find few flaws with this DVD.
BOOK REVIEW: I'm Chevy Chase... And You're Not by Rena Fruchter [Virgin Books]
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I finally got around to reading the 2007 biography I’m Chevy Chase… And You’re Not and I’m sorry to say I’m dubious about the book. Chase is one of Saturday Night Live‘s original cast members and indeed one of the main architects who created the show alongside Lorne Michaels and Michael O’Donoghue. I can be obsessive about SNL, picking up almost every book about the show and its rotating cast that I can get my hands on. Chevy’s work on SNL and his Hollywood career are well known and need no re-hash here. The man is certainly worthy of biographical treatment but my personal feeling is that perhaps this third rate biography is about all he deserves.
First of all, the writing is unimaginative and fails to rise to any level of investigative journalism. A third grader could do a better job than this. Okay. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Make that a sixth grader. It seems a little odd to me that after years of reading stuff about what a jerk Chevy can be, this biography comes along and paints the first glowing account of his life that I have ever seen or heard. It’s only natural that the subject should be a key source for an official biography, but author Rena Fruchter comes off as a total sycophant on Chevy’s pay roll.
To his credit, Chase is open and honest about the abuse he suffered as a child. Issues and challenges that those youthful experiences brought about in his adult life are addressed in a brutally honest and admirably forthcoming manner here. That alone constitutes a bravery sadly lacking in most people, be they celebrity or not. The book also provides new perspective on Chevy’s departure from SNL after only one season which I found illuminating.
I want to believe that maybe Chevy is not the asshole that dozens of writers and former co-workers have described over the years. And perhaps a better writer could have painted this portrait a little more convincingly. On the other hand, if he really is a jerk, I can’t imagine there would be much demand for a tell-all, “Citizen Chase”, Hollywood Babylon-type treatment. Ultimately, perhaps the chosen approach was a marketing decision. The largest prospective audience for a book like this is the man’s fan base. He’s a funny guy and a major figure in American comedy no matter how you look at it. So it’s two steps forward with his personal revelations but one step back with a poor choice for biographer and I remain ambivalent about whether he deserves better. It’s just been too many years for me reading about what a jerk Chevy can be for this book to come along and just completely change my thinking about him. Having said all that, I still love the guy. In the final analysis, the courage he displays in his willingness to speak about the horrors of child abuse and his own admission that drug use drove him into rehab in the 80s will likely win out and make me love him even more. Those are things that surely would have been glossed over or skipped altogether if this bio were a total hack job.
I finally got around to reading the 2007 biography I’m Chevy Chase… And You’re Not and I’m sorry to say I’m dubious about the book. Chase is one of Saturday Night Live‘s original cast members and indeed one of the main architects who created the show alongside Lorne Michaels and Michael O’Donoghue. I can be obsessive about SNL, picking up almost every book about the show and its rotating cast that I can get my hands on. Chevy’s work on SNL and his Hollywood career are well known and need no re-hash here. The man is certainly worthy of biographical treatment but my personal feeling is that perhaps this third rate biography is about all he deserves.
First of all, the writing is unimaginative and fails to rise to any level of investigative journalism. A third grader could do a better job than this. Okay. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Make that a sixth grader. It seems a little odd to me that after years of reading stuff about what a jerk Chevy can be, this biography comes along and paints the first glowing account of his life that I have ever seen or heard. It’s only natural that the subject should be a key source for an official biography, but author Rena Fruchter comes off as a total sycophant on Chevy’s pay roll.
To his credit, Chase is open and honest about the abuse he suffered as a child. Issues and challenges that those youthful experiences brought about in his adult life are addressed in a brutally honest and admirably forthcoming manner here. That alone constitutes a bravery sadly lacking in most people, be they celebrity or not. The book also provides new perspective on Chevy’s departure from SNL after only one season which I found illuminating.
I want to believe that maybe Chevy is not the asshole that dozens of writers and former co-workers have described over the years. And perhaps a better writer could have painted this portrait a little more convincingly. On the other hand, if he really is a jerk, I can’t imagine there would be much demand for a tell-all, “Citizen Chase”, Hollywood Babylon-type treatment. Ultimately, perhaps the chosen approach was a marketing decision. The largest prospective audience for a book like this is the man’s fan base. He’s a funny guy and a major figure in American comedy no matter how you look at it. So it’s two steps forward with his personal revelations but one step back with a poor choice for biographer and I remain ambivalent about whether he deserves better. It’s just been too many years for me reading about what a jerk Chevy can be for this book to come along and just completely change my thinking about him. Having said all that, I still love the guy. In the final analysis, the courage he displays in his willingness to speak about the horrors of child abuse and his own admission that drug use drove him into rehab in the 80s will likely win out and make me love him even more. Those are things that surely would have been glossed over or skipped altogether if this bio were a total hack job.
The Felice Brothers' Road Crusade For Authenticity
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I had the extremely good fortune to write an article about the Felice Brothers for Crawdaddy.com in late 2010 that was published online in January of 2011. One of my favorite contemporary acts, I went way overboard in researching the article. Though I was paid handsomely for my work, I went considerably over budget in my research, running up gasoline, food, and hotel bills as I traveled to see the band in Louisville and Nashville in the weeks running up to their appearance at Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House, where I interviewed James Felice for the article. Covering one of my favorite bands for the legendary Crawdaddy was a great honor for me. I will forever look upon this assignment as being akin to “winning the freelance Super Bowl”. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman and to James Felice for being so gracious with his time. Months after this piece first appeared I ran into James Felice at Cincinnati’s MidPoint festival and he spoke glowingly about the article, saying that it was one of his favorite things he’d ever seen written about the band. Remembering my face and our conversation, he asked, “Did you write the review of our new CD for Crawdaddy too?” I assured him that indeed I had and again he complimented my work. As good as it gets for a freelancer who remains an unabashed fanboy as well. Crawdaddy more or less folded in 2011, as they were gobbled up by Paste Magazine who has a much bigger readership but apparently no intention of honoring Crawdaddy with more than an untended, rarely-updated blog page on their site. Try going to Crawdaddy.com and you’ll see links to maybe a dozen articles or so, a shameful and inexcusable under-representation of the magazine that launched “Rock Journalism” before there even was such a thing and yes, even before Rolling Stone magazine. Shame on you, Paste. Anyway – here’s the piece I wrote about the Felice Brothers. Like the other stuff I wrote for Crawdaddy, I am real proud of it. Since even the band seemed to appreciate the article, I thought it would be a shame for it to just disappear forever from the interwebs. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year. –rh
***
If Keith Richards recorded an acoustic album in a loose, back porch hootenanny setting with Tom Waits producing, he’d be lucky if it came out sounding as raw and authentic as the Felice Brothers’ self-titled release from 2008. Though they have enjoyed an increasing amount of success in the Alt-Rock and Americana scene over the past few years, the Felice Brothers remain relatively unknown. With a sound often described as a bittersweet whiskey binge of Dylan-esque ballads and folksy anthems, the Felice Brothers also have an arsenal of infectious acoustic honky tonk numbers. Performing with sweaty, blood-in-their-eyes passion, the Felice Brothers’ live performances are a ramshackle hillbilly soul catharsis exorcism. They look like they’ve been on the road for five straight years, which they have. Trudging ever onward, they spend months at a time on the road, schlepping coast to coast in a beat-up old RV that they have driven all over the US and Canada. Even a cursory glance at their tour dates is enough to give you road fever. The band seems to be constantly touring, taking very few days off and frequently traveling several hundred miles in between shows.
Brothers Ian, James and Simone Felice were raised in a musical family in the Catskill Mountains. Drawing inspiration from their father and many generations of musicians that came before them, the three formed an ad hoc group and eventually moved to New York City. Busking on street corners, in subway stations and city parks, the band soon came to the attention of a small European label called Loose Records. Already veterans of the road at a very young age, the band cobbled together Tonight At The Arizona from a cluster of early demos and hit the highway once again.
Night after night in one city after another, the band performed a seemingly endless string of live shows unmatched in visceral intensity and emotional power. The ragged band of troubadours pressed on as their reputation grew. Their material originating mostly from brother Ian’s pen, it resonates with echoes of the past. Folk legends, murder ballads, strange tales of the rural poor. Some literal and linear in nature, others more abstract. Every last one of the slow tunes is heart wrenching and the rave ups are all unfailingly gut-bucket gritty.
The band’s self-titled CD surfaced in early 2008 and soon “Frankie’s Gun” and “Whiskey In My Whiskey” blossomed into college radio staples. A published novelist and renaissance man whose creativity knows no boundaries, brother Simone left the band to pursue other avenues. With fiddler Greg Farley and drummer Dave Turbeville now full-fledged members of the Felice Brothers entourage, the road was not kept waiting.
The band shares vocal duties. Ian and the similarly tight-lipped bassist Christmas Clapton keen and bleat like rusty saxophones. (Their vocal stylings are frequently compared to Dylan.) Wherefrom these stick figure scarecrows straight outta Steinbeck conjure the full spectrum of human emotion I don’t know. Burly, bearded, cherub-faced James has a huskier tone suiting his larger frame. A raspy raconteur with a voice of considerable depth, he howls “Goddamn You, Jim” and “Let Me Come Home” through tears of rage and desperation. Even Farley is strapping on a guitar and stepping up the microphone to belt out the occasional Cajun hillbilly rock and roux number nowadays.
Already accustomed to busking in the streets and subway tunnels of New York City, when their frozen fingers couldn’t feel the frets, teeth chattering between verses and subway trains drowning out every other chorus, the Felice Brothers’ dream to one day play the Newport Folk Festival was not going to be thwarted by a mere power outage. After the rain cleared, they just played barefoot and acoustic in the mud in front of the stage. By instinctively braving the elements and rising above less than ideal circumstances, they turned adverse conditions into a damn good story and overnight it became part of the legend. Just another tale from the road. Throw another log on the fire.
In support of 2009’s Yonder Is The Clock, the family Felice expanded for that summer’s Big Surprise Tour with Justin Townes Earle, Dave Rawlings Machine, and Old Crow Medicine Show. Though spanning barely a dozen stops on outdoor stages around the Midwest and down south, the tour was seen by many as a natural heir to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. A totally unique program was improvised by loose and spontaneous aggregations that included members of all four bands as they meandered on and off the stage throughout two lengthy sets on each stop of the tour.
Our bedraggled and baying band of road dogs was busier than ever this past summer, touring with few breaks straight on into the fall. Squeezing several European dates in between two extensive US tours, the band’s material began to evolve and change in unexpected ways. In Louisville, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee, this writer was witness to two performances that were wildly divergent in color and content, though the shows were a mere eight weeks apart. In the interim the band had ventured to the far corners of the earth and back again, their travels reflected in the evolution of their new material. With just a few dates left on of one of the longest treks of the band’s brief but already storied history, the gracious and loquacious James Felice took a few moments to chat with me before the band’s performance at the historic Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky. Finding the band finally in the home stretch of a lengthy fall tour, with the comforts of home almost within their grasp and the Cincinnati skyline looming on the horizon as darkness fell on the Ohio River, I asked James Felice about the band’s relationship with the road.
*
RH: You guys seem to be out there on the road almost all the time with very few days off.
James Felice: Yeah. I guess most bands at our level do a lot of touring because these days it’s the only way you can make money, really. We don’t have too many things tying us back at home and we’re always excited to get out on the road and play. It’s fun and we know that it helps us to live. We’re gonna be able to live this winter and not freeze to death because we toured all fall. When you’re a touring musician your work is sort of all lumped into a few months at time. Then there’s other times when you have nothing to do because it’s not like a nine-to-five job. It’s more like a September 1st to December 1st kinda job. It’s almost like going up to Alaska and being a fisherman or something like that.
RH: At some point does the road begin to feel like home and when you’re back home with nothing to do that feels strange?
JF: Yeah, absolutely. We call it Post-Tour Depression. For at least a week after a tour, especially a long tour like this one, you don’t know what to do. It’s seven o’clock and you feel like you should be loading into a club. It’s actually really weird how lonely and lost you feel. At home it’s really quiet. It gets really quiet really quick and kind of boring and scary. You almost feel like you’re suffocating sometimes, but you’re not of course. You’ve just been to forty-five, fifty cities in the last two months so it can be weird to come back home. Especially because we live in a little town where there’s nothing going on. I just have a little house I live in. I don’t have a real job. There’s no schedule. Like tonight, I’m doing this interview in a bar. I don’t usually do that. At home I’d be stacking wood or building a fire or something. So yeah, you fall into that depression but then two weeks later you’re thinking, “I can’t fucking believe that I was on tour! How did I live like that?”
RH: I’m sure you try to make the routing of the tour as easy as possible, but sometimes I guess it’s unavoidable that there’s going to be long drives between shows?
JF: Yeah. The first part of this tour was on the west coast and in the southwest so the drives were always very long because the cities are so far apart. We had something like eleven shows in a row from San Diego up to Vancouver. Then the next day we had a day off, but we had to drive eighteen hours to Salt Lake City. Then ten hours to get to Denver. Then seventeen hours to Omaha. So there’s an incredible amount of driving. We’ve put 12,000 miles on the bus in the last couple months. Maybe more, actually. It’s a lot of traveling. It’s a big ol’ country, man. It’s really, really big.
RH: Eighteen hour drive – that’s no kinda day off at all, is it?
JF: (Laughs) No, no! But I know I could be a truck driver now, you know? If this falls through, I could be a truck driver or a bus driver. Just get my CDL and be ready to go.
RH: You guys have been trekkin’ around in that same RV for a while now, is that right?
JF: Yeah it’s the only one we’ve ever had. Well, the only thing we’ve driven cross country. When we were just getting started we had like a “short bus” - like they have for special needs kids? - which we were! But that didn’t really last too long. We were gonna drive the short bus cross country on our first tour that we booked ourselves. And I remember we were like two miles from home just driving around and we hit a pothole and we all almost died. We almost careened off the road and we were like, “You know what? We can’t do this. We gotta be safe. We can’t take this thing across the country”. Driving that thing was so fucking dangerous.
RH: How much of the new material does the band write while you’re on tour and road test from night to night?
JF: We road test a lot. But we don’t write very much on tour. We’ve been working on our new record. We’re almost done now. We’ve been playing a lot of songs from the new record that’s coming out in March, I think. And it’s a different kind of sound. It’s a different record. The next tour we do, when we tour for the new record, it’s gonna be a different sounding band.
RH: Tell me about the new song, I think it’s called “Royal Hawaiian Hotel”?
JF: Yeah, actually I think it’s gonna be called “Ponzi”.
RH: When I heard it at the Nashville show that one struck me as really different. Ian puts down the guitar. He’s doing more of a frontman kinda thing, swinging his arms around a bit, a little more animated than usual…
JF: Yeah, we’re trying to have fun, man. We’ve been playing this folk kinda rock thing I guess, whatever you wanna call it, for a while. And it’s fun to do but we gotta keep movin’ on. Can’t play the same music your whole life. And, you know, we haven’t really cashed in on it as hard as some. It’s kinda funny ‘cause now you see a lotta bands doing really well with the kinda stuff we were doing. There’s like a whole scene now, bigger than I had noticed before. There seems to be a growing scene that plays this kind of music. But I think it’s time for us to move on and try out some new shit.
RH: The Felice Brothers are already an established act and quite prolific, obviously. But right now I have sense of you guys being on the brink of huge step forward. With the amount of new and very different material that I’ve heard over the course of just a handful of shows, I am reminded of Exile-era Stones or Wilco’s Being There. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me like single disc wouldn’t even scratch the surface of where you guys are at right now and maybe a double album might called for.
JF: Yeah, we have dozens and dozens and dozens of songs. Ian, my brother, writes most of the songs. He’s so prolific that we still pull up songs that he wrote years ago sometimes. Even things that didn’t make the first record. He’s got so many great songs. This new record is actually not going to be a double record. It’s a short, concise, straight to the point kind of thing. Which is important because I feel like our last record was a little sprawled, a little bit too much? This one’s concise and it’s different because we’re moving forward. Ian and the rest of us in the band, we’re never satisfied with what we’re doing and we don’t want to be pigeonholed. You know, this whole rootsy, folky, Bob Dylan, The Band, good time shit is cool. But it’s not us, really. It was. We started playing this kind of music because it was the only goddamn thing we knew how to play, you know? Acoustic guitar, a drum, an accordion. But it’s not who we are, you know? We’re certainly dirt bags. And we’re certainly broke still. But we are musicians and we like to challenge ourselves. So we just have to keep going.
RH: I’m often struck by the dichotomy between stage right and stage left. You and Farley do a fair bit of jumping around, but Ian and Christmas sometimes seem almost reluctant to be onstage at all.
JF: Well yeah, they’re more reserved. They’re more introverted I guess, than Farley and I. It depends on the show. It depends on the crowd and the energy and how things are going. Every show with us is not the same because we’re not acting up there. We’re not playing to a script. It seems like a lot of these big acts out there, there’s like a script that you play: You smile here, you make this joke there, you do this flourish at the end of this song. We don’t do that. We are completely loose and the feeling is always new and different. So some shows are not gonna be as wild and animated. They might be more intense and dark. Ian is sort of like the forefront. He’s our leader, he’s the guy. He’s in charge. And so he sets the tone. And naturally I guess Farley and I are a little more animated, and Christmas a little less so, and Dave does his thing behind the drums. So it depends on the show. The last show we played was crazy. Ian was crazy. He’s all standing up on the drums and fuckin’ around and it was great, you know? But the show before that he was dark and more subdued. That’s just the way it is. That makes it exciting for us because we can’t be sitting there doing the same thing every night. Sometimes the audience gets pissed because it’s maybe not what they expected. But that’s okay.
RH: Well I guess if your challenge was to be as animated as Farley on stage every night you’d have your work cut out for you!
JF: Right! I’d fuckin’ break my hip or somethin’!
RH: You’ve indicated that you’d rather not say at this time what label will be releasing the next record. What else can you tell me about the new record and where you guys are at right now?
JF: Well, when we first got started we had all these labels knocking on our door after Tonight At The Arizona came out. Major. Huge. The biggest labels in the world. Some of the biggest producers in the world. And they flew us out to L.A. and here and there. We played for them and they said they wanted to produce our record. But at the end of the day we decided we didn’t want do that because they all wanted to tell us what to do. They wanted to have a hand in it. The A&R guys told us, “Yeah, yeah. We’ll let you do what you want but I’ll come in and check in like every couple days and make sure everything’s going well and I’ll have ideas.” And we said, “Fuck that”. We don’t want any A&R guy, or anybody telling us what to do. We turned down a lot of big time opportunities and went with Conor Oberst’s label Team Love and they’re great. It’s a little tiny label run by really awesome people. They don’t have a lot of money but they did their best with the record. But you know, we’re still struggling, man. You know, it’s hard to maintain a high level of artistic integrity when you also think “I’d also like to be able to pay my rent”, you know? The way the record industry is these days, for a lot of bands, it’s a struggle. It’s something that we have always struggled with as a band since we first started playing. Ian didn’t want to release Iantown (the band’s earliest demos). He’s like, “That’s a piece of shit. I don’t wanna put that out.” But we said, “Ian, come on. You know… You live in a tent. Let’s get a place to live.” So we did. But you know, Ian is very serious about artistic integrity. He lives and dies by that shit. So I think we’re doing okay. We’re real proud of the new record.
This time we’re gonna step it up a little bit to a slightly larger label. Nothing huge because we don’t want to go with a major that’s going to tell us what to do. And hopefully we’ll get on the right track. These people [at the new label] respect us for who we are and they like the music. They care about it, beyond making money. Because we’re never gonna be huge, I don’t think. You know? We’re gonna do our job and we do it very well. And we’re gonna get bigger than we are now. But we’re not gonna be doing like Lady Gaga numbers. You know we’re not gonna be doing nothing like that big. But these people, at Team Love and at the new label, they care about the music and that’s awesome. That’s what we need: we need financial support and freedom at the same time. Which is very hard to get, in any artistic endeavor. When you try to do anything. And that is the artist’s dilemma: Do I wanna eat? Or do I wanna do what I wanna do? And where do those two things meet? There’s always a compromise. Always. No matter what. But where do they meet, money versus freedom? Comfort versus freedom? Which of course is the great debate in the whole world.
I had the extremely good fortune to write an article about the Felice Brothers for Crawdaddy.com in late 2010 that was published online in January of 2011. One of my favorite contemporary acts, I went way overboard in researching the article. Though I was paid handsomely for my work, I went considerably over budget in my research, running up gasoline, food, and hotel bills as I traveled to see the band in Louisville and Nashville in the weeks running up to their appearance at Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House, where I interviewed James Felice for the article. Covering one of my favorite bands for the legendary Crawdaddy was a great honor for me. I will forever look upon this assignment as being akin to “winning the freelance Super Bowl”. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman and to James Felice for being so gracious with his time. Months after this piece first appeared I ran into James Felice at Cincinnati’s MidPoint festival and he spoke glowingly about the article, saying that it was one of his favorite things he’d ever seen written about the band. Remembering my face and our conversation, he asked, “Did you write the review of our new CD for Crawdaddy too?” I assured him that indeed I had and again he complimented my work. As good as it gets for a freelancer who remains an unabashed fanboy as well. Crawdaddy more or less folded in 2011, as they were gobbled up by Paste Magazine who has a much bigger readership but apparently no intention of honoring Crawdaddy with more than an untended, rarely-updated blog page on their site. Try going to Crawdaddy.com and you’ll see links to maybe a dozen articles or so, a shameful and inexcusable under-representation of the magazine that launched “Rock Journalism” before there even was such a thing and yes, even before Rolling Stone magazine. Shame on you, Paste. Anyway – here’s the piece I wrote about the Felice Brothers. Like the other stuff I wrote for Crawdaddy, I am real proud of it. Since even the band seemed to appreciate the article, I thought it would be a shame for it to just disappear forever from the interwebs. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year. –rh
***
If Keith Richards recorded an acoustic album in a loose, back porch hootenanny setting with Tom Waits producing, he’d be lucky if it came out sounding as raw and authentic as the Felice Brothers’ self-titled release from 2008. Though they have enjoyed an increasing amount of success in the Alt-Rock and Americana scene over the past few years, the Felice Brothers remain relatively unknown. With a sound often described as a bittersweet whiskey binge of Dylan-esque ballads and folksy anthems, the Felice Brothers also have an arsenal of infectious acoustic honky tonk numbers. Performing with sweaty, blood-in-their-eyes passion, the Felice Brothers’ live performances are a ramshackle hillbilly soul catharsis exorcism. They look like they’ve been on the road for five straight years, which they have. Trudging ever onward, they spend months at a time on the road, schlepping coast to coast in a beat-up old RV that they have driven all over the US and Canada. Even a cursory glance at their tour dates is enough to give you road fever. The band seems to be constantly touring, taking very few days off and frequently traveling several hundred miles in between shows.
Brothers Ian, James and Simone Felice were raised in a musical family in the Catskill Mountains. Drawing inspiration from their father and many generations of musicians that came before them, the three formed an ad hoc group and eventually moved to New York City. Busking on street corners, in subway stations and city parks, the band soon came to the attention of a small European label called Loose Records. Already veterans of the road at a very young age, the band cobbled together Tonight At The Arizona from a cluster of early demos and hit the highway once again.
Night after night in one city after another, the band performed a seemingly endless string of live shows unmatched in visceral intensity and emotional power. The ragged band of troubadours pressed on as their reputation grew. Their material originating mostly from brother Ian’s pen, it resonates with echoes of the past. Folk legends, murder ballads, strange tales of the rural poor. Some literal and linear in nature, others more abstract. Every last one of the slow tunes is heart wrenching and the rave ups are all unfailingly gut-bucket gritty.
The band’s self-titled CD surfaced in early 2008 and soon “Frankie’s Gun” and “Whiskey In My Whiskey” blossomed into college radio staples. A published novelist and renaissance man whose creativity knows no boundaries, brother Simone left the band to pursue other avenues. With fiddler Greg Farley and drummer Dave Turbeville now full-fledged members of the Felice Brothers entourage, the road was not kept waiting.
The band shares vocal duties. Ian and the similarly tight-lipped bassist Christmas Clapton keen and bleat like rusty saxophones. (Their vocal stylings are frequently compared to Dylan.) Wherefrom these stick figure scarecrows straight outta Steinbeck conjure the full spectrum of human emotion I don’t know. Burly, bearded, cherub-faced James has a huskier tone suiting his larger frame. A raspy raconteur with a voice of considerable depth, he howls “Goddamn You, Jim” and “Let Me Come Home” through tears of rage and desperation. Even Farley is strapping on a guitar and stepping up the microphone to belt out the occasional Cajun hillbilly rock and roux number nowadays.
Already accustomed to busking in the streets and subway tunnels of New York City, when their frozen fingers couldn’t feel the frets, teeth chattering between verses and subway trains drowning out every other chorus, the Felice Brothers’ dream to one day play the Newport Folk Festival was not going to be thwarted by a mere power outage. After the rain cleared, they just played barefoot and acoustic in the mud in front of the stage. By instinctively braving the elements and rising above less than ideal circumstances, they turned adverse conditions into a damn good story and overnight it became part of the legend. Just another tale from the road. Throw another log on the fire.
In support of 2009’s Yonder Is The Clock, the family Felice expanded for that summer’s Big Surprise Tour with Justin Townes Earle, Dave Rawlings Machine, and Old Crow Medicine Show. Though spanning barely a dozen stops on outdoor stages around the Midwest and down south, the tour was seen by many as a natural heir to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. A totally unique program was improvised by loose and spontaneous aggregations that included members of all four bands as they meandered on and off the stage throughout two lengthy sets on each stop of the tour.
Our bedraggled and baying band of road dogs was busier than ever this past summer, touring with few breaks straight on into the fall. Squeezing several European dates in between two extensive US tours, the band’s material began to evolve and change in unexpected ways. In Louisville, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee, this writer was witness to two performances that were wildly divergent in color and content, though the shows were a mere eight weeks apart. In the interim the band had ventured to the far corners of the earth and back again, their travels reflected in the evolution of their new material. With just a few dates left on of one of the longest treks of the band’s brief but already storied history, the gracious and loquacious James Felice took a few moments to chat with me before the band’s performance at the historic Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky. Finding the band finally in the home stretch of a lengthy fall tour, with the comforts of home almost within their grasp and the Cincinnati skyline looming on the horizon as darkness fell on the Ohio River, I asked James Felice about the band’s relationship with the road.
*
RH: You guys seem to be out there on the road almost all the time with very few days off.
James Felice: Yeah. I guess most bands at our level do a lot of touring because these days it’s the only way you can make money, really. We don’t have too many things tying us back at home and we’re always excited to get out on the road and play. It’s fun and we know that it helps us to live. We’re gonna be able to live this winter and not freeze to death because we toured all fall. When you’re a touring musician your work is sort of all lumped into a few months at time. Then there’s other times when you have nothing to do because it’s not like a nine-to-five job. It’s more like a September 1st to December 1st kinda job. It’s almost like going up to Alaska and being a fisherman or something like that.
RH: At some point does the road begin to feel like home and when you’re back home with nothing to do that feels strange?
JF: Yeah, absolutely. We call it Post-Tour Depression. For at least a week after a tour, especially a long tour like this one, you don’t know what to do. It’s seven o’clock and you feel like you should be loading into a club. It’s actually really weird how lonely and lost you feel. At home it’s really quiet. It gets really quiet really quick and kind of boring and scary. You almost feel like you’re suffocating sometimes, but you’re not of course. You’ve just been to forty-five, fifty cities in the last two months so it can be weird to come back home. Especially because we live in a little town where there’s nothing going on. I just have a little house I live in. I don’t have a real job. There’s no schedule. Like tonight, I’m doing this interview in a bar. I don’t usually do that. At home I’d be stacking wood or building a fire or something. So yeah, you fall into that depression but then two weeks later you’re thinking, “I can’t fucking believe that I was on tour! How did I live like that?”
RH: I’m sure you try to make the routing of the tour as easy as possible, but sometimes I guess it’s unavoidable that there’s going to be long drives between shows?
JF: Yeah. The first part of this tour was on the west coast and in the southwest so the drives were always very long because the cities are so far apart. We had something like eleven shows in a row from San Diego up to Vancouver. Then the next day we had a day off, but we had to drive eighteen hours to Salt Lake City. Then ten hours to get to Denver. Then seventeen hours to Omaha. So there’s an incredible amount of driving. We’ve put 12,000 miles on the bus in the last couple months. Maybe more, actually. It’s a lot of traveling. It’s a big ol’ country, man. It’s really, really big.
RH: Eighteen hour drive – that’s no kinda day off at all, is it?
JF: (Laughs) No, no! But I know I could be a truck driver now, you know? If this falls through, I could be a truck driver or a bus driver. Just get my CDL and be ready to go.
RH: You guys have been trekkin’ around in that same RV for a while now, is that right?
JF: Yeah it’s the only one we’ve ever had. Well, the only thing we’ve driven cross country. When we were just getting started we had like a “short bus” - like they have for special needs kids? - which we were! But that didn’t really last too long. We were gonna drive the short bus cross country on our first tour that we booked ourselves. And I remember we were like two miles from home just driving around and we hit a pothole and we all almost died. We almost careened off the road and we were like, “You know what? We can’t do this. We gotta be safe. We can’t take this thing across the country”. Driving that thing was so fucking dangerous.
RH: How much of the new material does the band write while you’re on tour and road test from night to night?
JF: We road test a lot. But we don’t write very much on tour. We’ve been working on our new record. We’re almost done now. We’ve been playing a lot of songs from the new record that’s coming out in March, I think. And it’s a different kind of sound. It’s a different record. The next tour we do, when we tour for the new record, it’s gonna be a different sounding band.
RH: Tell me about the new song, I think it’s called “Royal Hawaiian Hotel”?
JF: Yeah, actually I think it’s gonna be called “Ponzi”.
RH: When I heard it at the Nashville show that one struck me as really different. Ian puts down the guitar. He’s doing more of a frontman kinda thing, swinging his arms around a bit, a little more animated than usual…
JF: Yeah, we’re trying to have fun, man. We’ve been playing this folk kinda rock thing I guess, whatever you wanna call it, for a while. And it’s fun to do but we gotta keep movin’ on. Can’t play the same music your whole life. And, you know, we haven’t really cashed in on it as hard as some. It’s kinda funny ‘cause now you see a lotta bands doing really well with the kinda stuff we were doing. There’s like a whole scene now, bigger than I had noticed before. There seems to be a growing scene that plays this kind of music. But I think it’s time for us to move on and try out some new shit.
RH: The Felice Brothers are already an established act and quite prolific, obviously. But right now I have sense of you guys being on the brink of huge step forward. With the amount of new and very different material that I’ve heard over the course of just a handful of shows, I am reminded of Exile-era Stones or Wilco’s Being There. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me like single disc wouldn’t even scratch the surface of where you guys are at right now and maybe a double album might called for.
JF: Yeah, we have dozens and dozens and dozens of songs. Ian, my brother, writes most of the songs. He’s so prolific that we still pull up songs that he wrote years ago sometimes. Even things that didn’t make the first record. He’s got so many great songs. This new record is actually not going to be a double record. It’s a short, concise, straight to the point kind of thing. Which is important because I feel like our last record was a little sprawled, a little bit too much? This one’s concise and it’s different because we’re moving forward. Ian and the rest of us in the band, we’re never satisfied with what we’re doing and we don’t want to be pigeonholed. You know, this whole rootsy, folky, Bob Dylan, The Band, good time shit is cool. But it’s not us, really. It was. We started playing this kind of music because it was the only goddamn thing we knew how to play, you know? Acoustic guitar, a drum, an accordion. But it’s not who we are, you know? We’re certainly dirt bags. And we’re certainly broke still. But we are musicians and we like to challenge ourselves. So we just have to keep going.
RH: I’m often struck by the dichotomy between stage right and stage left. You and Farley do a fair bit of jumping around, but Ian and Christmas sometimes seem almost reluctant to be onstage at all.
JF: Well yeah, they’re more reserved. They’re more introverted I guess, than Farley and I. It depends on the show. It depends on the crowd and the energy and how things are going. Every show with us is not the same because we’re not acting up there. We’re not playing to a script. It seems like a lot of these big acts out there, there’s like a script that you play: You smile here, you make this joke there, you do this flourish at the end of this song. We don’t do that. We are completely loose and the feeling is always new and different. So some shows are not gonna be as wild and animated. They might be more intense and dark. Ian is sort of like the forefront. He’s our leader, he’s the guy. He’s in charge. And so he sets the tone. And naturally I guess Farley and I are a little more animated, and Christmas a little less so, and Dave does his thing behind the drums. So it depends on the show. The last show we played was crazy. Ian was crazy. He’s all standing up on the drums and fuckin’ around and it was great, you know? But the show before that he was dark and more subdued. That’s just the way it is. That makes it exciting for us because we can’t be sitting there doing the same thing every night. Sometimes the audience gets pissed because it’s maybe not what they expected. But that’s okay.
RH: Well I guess if your challenge was to be as animated as Farley on stage every night you’d have your work cut out for you!
JF: Right! I’d fuckin’ break my hip or somethin’!
RH: You’ve indicated that you’d rather not say at this time what label will be releasing the next record. What else can you tell me about the new record and where you guys are at right now?
JF: Well, when we first got started we had all these labels knocking on our door after Tonight At The Arizona came out. Major. Huge. The biggest labels in the world. Some of the biggest producers in the world. And they flew us out to L.A. and here and there. We played for them and they said they wanted to produce our record. But at the end of the day we decided we didn’t want do that because they all wanted to tell us what to do. They wanted to have a hand in it. The A&R guys told us, “Yeah, yeah. We’ll let you do what you want but I’ll come in and check in like every couple days and make sure everything’s going well and I’ll have ideas.” And we said, “Fuck that”. We don’t want any A&R guy, or anybody telling us what to do. We turned down a lot of big time opportunities and went with Conor Oberst’s label Team Love and they’re great. It’s a little tiny label run by really awesome people. They don’t have a lot of money but they did their best with the record. But you know, we’re still struggling, man. You know, it’s hard to maintain a high level of artistic integrity when you also think “I’d also like to be able to pay my rent”, you know? The way the record industry is these days, for a lot of bands, it’s a struggle. It’s something that we have always struggled with as a band since we first started playing. Ian didn’t want to release Iantown (the band’s earliest demos). He’s like, “That’s a piece of shit. I don’t wanna put that out.” But we said, “Ian, come on. You know… You live in a tent. Let’s get a place to live.” So we did. But you know, Ian is very serious about artistic integrity. He lives and dies by that shit. So I think we’re doing okay. We’re real proud of the new record.
This time we’re gonna step it up a little bit to a slightly larger label. Nothing huge because we don’t want to go with a major that’s going to tell us what to do. And hopefully we’ll get on the right track. These people [at the new label] respect us for who we are and they like the music. They care about it, beyond making money. Because we’re never gonna be huge, I don’t think. You know? We’re gonna do our job and we do it very well. And we’re gonna get bigger than we are now. But we’re not gonna be doing like Lady Gaga numbers. You know we’re not gonna be doing nothing like that big. But these people, at Team Love and at the new label, they care about the music and that’s awesome. That’s what we need: we need financial support and freedom at the same time. Which is very hard to get, in any artistic endeavor. When you try to do anything. And that is the artist’s dilemma: Do I wanna eat? Or do I wanna do what I wanna do? And where do those two things meet? There’s always a compromise. Always. No matter what. But where do they meet, money versus freedom? Comfort versus freedom? Which of course is the great debate in the whole world.
24 Haziran 2012 Pazar
Jack Bruce: Composing Himself (Jawbone Press)
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The specter of Cream’s mercurial and complicated drummer Ginger Baker hovers like a menacing thundercloud over the entire musical career of bassist Jack Bruce. The surly and smirking dark cloud presents a real threat while simultaneously promising the necessary H2O for growth and change. Great friends since their youthful days on the London club scene, Jack & Ginger have sparred off and on (mostly on) for their entire career in the music business. In the first few pages of Harry Shapiro’s incisive and illuminating Jack Bruce biography, our protagonist clarifies once and for all the question of whether or not the decades of feuding with Ginger have been exaggerated with a single, terse syllable: “No.”
Born in Scotland in 1943, Jack Bruce moved to Canada with his family for a brief time when he was still a young child. The family was forced to return home to Scotland when his father’s employment opportunities dried up but the experience gave young Jack his first inkling of other cultures and an emboldening taste of international travel at a very early age. From a decidedly political family, the boy was never short on independence and a steely strength of character. The Bruce clan was also a very musical family and Jack was something of a prodigy, even singing for Paul Robeson at a political rally when he was still a child. He wanted to play bass but because his hands were too small he started on cello. Even as a child his piano improvisations caught the attention of his instructors. Jack discovered jazz as a teenager, just as he was tiring of classical music’s strict rules that forbade improvisation. Finding regular work as a musician when he was still in school, Jack drove his own car to school at a time when many of his teachers could not afford an automobile. An accomplished bassist by the age of 18, Jack went to London in 1961.
One of the busiest working musicians on the London club scene in the early 60s, it was inevitable that Jack would eventually cross paths with Ginger Baker. Both players passed repeatedly through the ranks of Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the Graham Bond Organization among numerous other groups. Though the mutual respect was instant, sparks were flying between the two men before Jack had turned 20 years old. On one occasion Ginger kicked Jack out of a band at knifepoint.
Ironically the headstrong Scotsman struggled with insecurities. These were all but dispelled after an afternoon session backing Marvin Gaye for some British TV appearances. Hanging out after the taping, Gaye asked Jack to come to the States to join his band. Though the offer was a tremendous confidence boost, Jack turned it down and stayed on in London where he soon found himself playing bass with Manfred Mann just as that band’s fortunes were rapidly ascending.
In the early chapters of this fascinating biography I began to realize that, like many people, I knew almost nothing about Jack Bruce’s illustrious career. Even before the formation of Bruce’s most famous affiliation, he’d already had more experience in the music business than most musicians three times his age.
In 1966, Bruce, Baker and Clapton were getting bored with their respective bands. Where these three men saw the blues as a loose language, a beginning point, all their previous groups saw it as a rigid form, as an end. All this in spite of the obvious charm and immense talent encapsulated in bands like the Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds. In perhaps one of the most fortuitous coincidences in the history of rock music, the stars aligned and Cream was born.
Though the timing was perfect, the birth of Cream was fraught with tension and difficulty from the beginning. For one thing, Ginger was already a full-blown junkie before the band was formed and it was a stipulation to starting the band that he quit using. He didn’t and he nearly overdosed backstage at one of Cream’s earliest TV appearances.
Much of the aforementioned is common knowledge. But the diversity and sheer volume of Jack Bruce’s relatively unknown post-Cream musical activities is almost shocking. Indeed, it is the chapters of this book that relate Bruce’s post-Cream output that this writer found most illuminating. Readers may find it hard to believe how much stuff he’s done since Cream’s break up in 1968 and the list of players he has worked with is a mile long. As the trio’s most accomplished singer and songwriter, many believed it was Jack who would go on to greater fame as a solo artist after Cream disbanded. While Ginger disappeared into obscurity, only occasionally resurfacing for a gig here and there, it was Clapton of course who ascended to superstardom after a long battle with heroin and alcohol.
In the late 60s and early 70s very few musicians other than Miles Davis were blending jazz improv with the fire and fury of rock. Alongside Miles’s seminal Bitches Brew, the music Jack Bruce was making at that time with John McLaughlin and Tony Williams is considered one of the progenitors of fusion. This after Jack turned down an offer from John Paul Jones to join Led Zeppelin. Stephen Stills invited to Jack to join CSNY, but only as a bass player and not as a contributing songwriter. Another polite pass from Jack.
One of the most driven and fiercely independent musicians of the rock era, Jack Bruce followed his muse at every turn. This frequently meant starting over from scratch with a whole new band and playing small clubs for little or no money. In spite of these personal frustrations and financial limitations, Bruce shows no sign of regret for the path he chose was uniquely his. Over the years Jack was called upon to write and sing and play with an incredibly diverse array of players, including Carla Bley, Bernie Worrell, Gary Moore, Larry Coryell, Ringo Starr, and the Golden Palominos to name but a few.
There were huge successes along the way. Jack’s first two solo records were greeted with a rapturous reception and the announcement of his plans to launch a new group with Leslie West sparked one of the greatest bidding wars the industry has ever seen. Though that band would collapse in haze of drugs and corruption, Jack would rise again just a few years later with a new Jack Bruce Band featuring Mick Taylor on guitar. After the completion of a sold-out six week tour, Taylor’s recurring and career-paralyzing fear of success on someone else’s terms led him to quit the band on the eve of a recording session for the band’s first record. Not for the first or last time, Jack was forced to start all over again. In spite of disheartening episodes like this one, Jack never failed to rise again like a phoenix.
With his natural born skills, compositional prowess paired with uncanny improvisational instincts, and unparalleled standard of quality woven into and throughout the entirety of his massive output, Jack Bruce is like a great secret ghost whose legacy haunts and courses throughout the classic rock era. To a man, every individual who played with Jack over the years will say that the experience of working with him expanded their knowledge and understanding of music. This incredible testament is repeated numerous times throughout Jack’s bio, the end result being a sense of his overarching influence holding sway over the development of rock music over the past four decades. Co-written with long-time songwriting partner Pete Brown, Cream’s most famous number “Sunshine Of Your Love” seems now almost like a metaphor for the man himself. The rays of his loving sunshine have warmed and nurtured the music and memories of many of his contemporaries, all of whom consider him an unrecognized giant in his field.
Although I was largely ignorant of Bruce’s post-Cream activities and his tremendous influence before reading this great book, I have to agree with what Ginger Baker said in the wake of Cream’s very successful reunion concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in 2005: “I rather like wee Jack now!”
*
[A slightly edited version of this article originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September of 2010. –rh]
The specter of Cream’s mercurial and complicated drummer Ginger Baker hovers like a menacing thundercloud over the entire musical career of bassist Jack Bruce. The surly and smirking dark cloud presents a real threat while simultaneously promising the necessary H2O for growth and change. Great friends since their youthful days on the London club scene, Jack & Ginger have sparred off and on (mostly on) for their entire career in the music business. In the first few pages of Harry Shapiro’s incisive and illuminating Jack Bruce biography, our protagonist clarifies once and for all the question of whether or not the decades of feuding with Ginger have been exaggerated with a single, terse syllable: “No.”
Born in Scotland in 1943, Jack Bruce moved to Canada with his family for a brief time when he was still a young child. The family was forced to return home to Scotland when his father’s employment opportunities dried up but the experience gave young Jack his first inkling of other cultures and an emboldening taste of international travel at a very early age. From a decidedly political family, the boy was never short on independence and a steely strength of character. The Bruce clan was also a very musical family and Jack was something of a prodigy, even singing for Paul Robeson at a political rally when he was still a child. He wanted to play bass but because his hands were too small he started on cello. Even as a child his piano improvisations caught the attention of his instructors. Jack discovered jazz as a teenager, just as he was tiring of classical music’s strict rules that forbade improvisation. Finding regular work as a musician when he was still in school, Jack drove his own car to school at a time when many of his teachers could not afford an automobile. An accomplished bassist by the age of 18, Jack went to London in 1961.
One of the busiest working musicians on the London club scene in the early 60s, it was inevitable that Jack would eventually cross paths with Ginger Baker. Both players passed repeatedly through the ranks of Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the Graham Bond Organization among numerous other groups. Though the mutual respect was instant, sparks were flying between the two men before Jack had turned 20 years old. On one occasion Ginger kicked Jack out of a band at knifepoint.
Ironically the headstrong Scotsman struggled with insecurities. These were all but dispelled after an afternoon session backing Marvin Gaye for some British TV appearances. Hanging out after the taping, Gaye asked Jack to come to the States to join his band. Though the offer was a tremendous confidence boost, Jack turned it down and stayed on in London where he soon found himself playing bass with Manfred Mann just as that band’s fortunes were rapidly ascending.
In the early chapters of this fascinating biography I began to realize that, like many people, I knew almost nothing about Jack Bruce’s illustrious career. Even before the formation of Bruce’s most famous affiliation, he’d already had more experience in the music business than most musicians three times his age.
In 1966, Bruce, Baker and Clapton were getting bored with their respective bands. Where these three men saw the blues as a loose language, a beginning point, all their previous groups saw it as a rigid form, as an end. All this in spite of the obvious charm and immense talent encapsulated in bands like the Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds. In perhaps one of the most fortuitous coincidences in the history of rock music, the stars aligned and Cream was born.
Though the timing was perfect, the birth of Cream was fraught with tension and difficulty from the beginning. For one thing, Ginger was already a full-blown junkie before the band was formed and it was a stipulation to starting the band that he quit using. He didn’t and he nearly overdosed backstage at one of Cream’s earliest TV appearances.
Much of the aforementioned is common knowledge. But the diversity and sheer volume of Jack Bruce’s relatively unknown post-Cream musical activities is almost shocking. Indeed, it is the chapters of this book that relate Bruce’s post-Cream output that this writer found most illuminating. Readers may find it hard to believe how much stuff he’s done since Cream’s break up in 1968 and the list of players he has worked with is a mile long. As the trio’s most accomplished singer and songwriter, many believed it was Jack who would go on to greater fame as a solo artist after Cream disbanded. While Ginger disappeared into obscurity, only occasionally resurfacing for a gig here and there, it was Clapton of course who ascended to superstardom after a long battle with heroin and alcohol.
In the late 60s and early 70s very few musicians other than Miles Davis were blending jazz improv with the fire and fury of rock. Alongside Miles’s seminal Bitches Brew, the music Jack Bruce was making at that time with John McLaughlin and Tony Williams is considered one of the progenitors of fusion. This after Jack turned down an offer from John Paul Jones to join Led Zeppelin. Stephen Stills invited to Jack to join CSNY, but only as a bass player and not as a contributing songwriter. Another polite pass from Jack.
One of the most driven and fiercely independent musicians of the rock era, Jack Bruce followed his muse at every turn. This frequently meant starting over from scratch with a whole new band and playing small clubs for little or no money. In spite of these personal frustrations and financial limitations, Bruce shows no sign of regret for the path he chose was uniquely his. Over the years Jack was called upon to write and sing and play with an incredibly diverse array of players, including Carla Bley, Bernie Worrell, Gary Moore, Larry Coryell, Ringo Starr, and the Golden Palominos to name but a few.
There were huge successes along the way. Jack’s first two solo records were greeted with a rapturous reception and the announcement of his plans to launch a new group with Leslie West sparked one of the greatest bidding wars the industry has ever seen. Though that band would collapse in haze of drugs and corruption, Jack would rise again just a few years later with a new Jack Bruce Band featuring Mick Taylor on guitar. After the completion of a sold-out six week tour, Taylor’s recurring and career-paralyzing fear of success on someone else’s terms led him to quit the band on the eve of a recording session for the band’s first record. Not for the first or last time, Jack was forced to start all over again. In spite of disheartening episodes like this one, Jack never failed to rise again like a phoenix.
With his natural born skills, compositional prowess paired with uncanny improvisational instincts, and unparalleled standard of quality woven into and throughout the entirety of his massive output, Jack Bruce is like a great secret ghost whose legacy haunts and courses throughout the classic rock era. To a man, every individual who played with Jack over the years will say that the experience of working with him expanded their knowledge and understanding of music. This incredible testament is repeated numerous times throughout Jack’s bio, the end result being a sense of his overarching influence holding sway over the development of rock music over the past four decades. Co-written with long-time songwriting partner Pete Brown, Cream’s most famous number “Sunshine Of Your Love” seems now almost like a metaphor for the man himself. The rays of his loving sunshine have warmed and nurtured the music and memories of many of his contemporaries, all of whom consider him an unrecognized giant in his field.
Although I was largely ignorant of Bruce’s post-Cream activities and his tremendous influence before reading this great book, I have to agree with what Ginger Baker said in the wake of Cream’s very successful reunion concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in 2005: “I rather like wee Jack now!”
*
[A slightly edited version of this article originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September of 2010. –rh]
Revelatory Romp: Tommy James' Life Story
To contact us Click HERE
Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick
When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.
Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.
Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.
James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.
Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.
[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]
Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick
When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.
Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.
Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.
James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.
Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.
[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]
"Yesspeak" Decidedly NOT Yes's Peak
To contact us Click HERE
Even through numerous line-up changes, the level of musicianship in Yes has always represented the best in the business and they are considered by many to be the kings of Progressive Rock. Without ever sacrificing the Prog roots seemingly embedded in their DNA, they have crafted numerous songs and several LPs that are staples of classic rock radio. Since their inception, they have always been the kind of band that other musicians look up to.
Music DVDs are naturally designed for an artist’s existing fan base. So it’s reasonable to postulate that very few casual observers will invest in the 2-disc DVD from Yes called “Yesspeak”. This is a band with a tremendous worldwide following, of course. So it is no small niche market that an item like this aims for. There are certainly some excellent concert performances included here but thanks to some ill-advised and overlong interview segments, the overall presentation comes across as pompous and self-important. Allowing for the fact that sometimes a British accent can convey an unintentional air of superiority, the interviews with individual band members contained here are nearly insufferable. Obviously there is a world of difference between a concert film and a documentary. One suspects that the strengths of Yes might be better exhibited in the former as opposed to the latter. As a bonus feature on the DVD, there’s 2 hours of audio from concert performances that speaks much better of this band’s true worth than interview segments featuring grown men cavorting in colorful capes and wispy flowing shirts of shiny silk.
The worst offender is singer Jon Anderson, who comes across as a delusional little man that fancies himself a spry elfin creature with magical powers and a sprawling countryside estate replete with mansion and vineyard. He openly admits that life on the road is spent fantasizing about going home. Humble drummer Alan White and bookish guitarist Steve Howe both seem to have kept one foot in the real world, while Rick Wakeman is enigmatic, deftly holding down the disparate roles of screwy philosopher and the voice of reason. It is primarily Anderson and bassist Chris Squire who carry themselves with odious pride, their swelled heads vainly held aloft in the clouds. The abiding mood created by their interview segments lands just this side of pathetic. Even Roger Daltrey’s narration is overzealous and hyperbolic, as if describing the mystical machinations of a mysterious cabal. A fleeting glimpse of the band members’ personal lives would have made for a much more intriguing presentation of their offstage activities. Perhaps the best approach to this DVD is to keep the remote control in hand and skip over the interview segments. Limit your viewing to the live performances, which are nothing short of astonishing, and you’ll find few flaws with this DVD.
Even through numerous line-up changes, the level of musicianship in Yes has always represented the best in the business and they are considered by many to be the kings of Progressive Rock. Without ever sacrificing the Prog roots seemingly embedded in their DNA, they have crafted numerous songs and several LPs that are staples of classic rock radio. Since their inception, they have always been the kind of band that other musicians look up to.
Music DVDs are naturally designed for an artist’s existing fan base. So it’s reasonable to postulate that very few casual observers will invest in the 2-disc DVD from Yes called “Yesspeak”. This is a band with a tremendous worldwide following, of course. So it is no small niche market that an item like this aims for. There are certainly some excellent concert performances included here but thanks to some ill-advised and overlong interview segments, the overall presentation comes across as pompous and self-important. Allowing for the fact that sometimes a British accent can convey an unintentional air of superiority, the interviews with individual band members contained here are nearly insufferable. Obviously there is a world of difference between a concert film and a documentary. One suspects that the strengths of Yes might be better exhibited in the former as opposed to the latter. As a bonus feature on the DVD, there’s 2 hours of audio from concert performances that speaks much better of this band’s true worth than interview segments featuring grown men cavorting in colorful capes and wispy flowing shirts of shiny silk.
The worst offender is singer Jon Anderson, who comes across as a delusional little man that fancies himself a spry elfin creature with magical powers and a sprawling countryside estate replete with mansion and vineyard. He openly admits that life on the road is spent fantasizing about going home. Humble drummer Alan White and bookish guitarist Steve Howe both seem to have kept one foot in the real world, while Rick Wakeman is enigmatic, deftly holding down the disparate roles of screwy philosopher and the voice of reason. It is primarily Anderson and bassist Chris Squire who carry themselves with odious pride, their swelled heads vainly held aloft in the clouds. The abiding mood created by their interview segments lands just this side of pathetic. Even Roger Daltrey’s narration is overzealous and hyperbolic, as if describing the mystical machinations of a mysterious cabal. A fleeting glimpse of the band members’ personal lives would have made for a much more intriguing presentation of their offstage activities. Perhaps the best approach to this DVD is to keep the remote control in hand and skip over the interview segments. Limit your viewing to the live performances, which are nothing short of astonishing, and you’ll find few flaws with this DVD.
BOOK REVIEW: I'm Chevy Chase... And You're Not by Rena Fruchter [Virgin Books]
To contact us Click HERE
I finally got around to reading the 2007 biography I’m Chevy Chase… And You’re Not and I’m sorry to say I’m dubious about the book. Chase is one of Saturday Night Live‘s original cast members and indeed one of the main architects who created the show alongside Lorne Michaels and Michael O’Donoghue. I can be obsessive about SNL, picking up almost every book about the show and its rotating cast that I can get my hands on. Chevy’s work on SNL and his Hollywood career are well known and need no re-hash here. The man is certainly worthy of biographical treatment but my personal feeling is that perhaps this third rate biography is about all he deserves.
First of all, the writing is unimaginative and fails to rise to any level of investigative journalism. A third grader could do a better job than this. Okay. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Make that a sixth grader. It seems a little odd to me that after years of reading stuff about what a jerk Chevy can be, this biography comes along and paints the first glowing account of his life that I have ever seen or heard. It’s only natural that the subject should be a key source for an official biography, but author Rena Fruchter comes off as a total sycophant on Chevy’s pay roll.
To his credit, Chase is open and honest about the abuse he suffered as a child. Issues and challenges that those youthful experiences brought about in his adult life are addressed in a brutally honest and admirably forthcoming manner here. That alone constitutes a bravery sadly lacking in most people, be they celebrity or not. The book also provides new perspective on Chevy’s departure from SNL after only one season which I found illuminating.
I want to believe that maybe Chevy is not the asshole that dozens of writers and former co-workers have described over the years. And perhaps a better writer could have painted this portrait a little more convincingly. On the other hand, if he really is a jerk, I can’t imagine there would be much demand for a tell-all, “Citizen Chase”, Hollywood Babylon-type treatment. Ultimately, perhaps the chosen approach was a marketing decision. The largest prospective audience for a book like this is the man’s fan base. He’s a funny guy and a major figure in American comedy no matter how you look at it. So it’s two steps forward with his personal revelations but one step back with a poor choice for biographer and I remain ambivalent about whether he deserves better. It’s just been too many years for me reading about what a jerk Chevy can be for this book to come along and just completely change my thinking about him. Having said all that, I still love the guy. In the final analysis, the courage he displays in his willingness to speak about the horrors of child abuse and his own admission that drug use drove him into rehab in the 80s will likely win out and make me love him even more. Those are things that surely would have been glossed over or skipped altogether if this bio were a total hack job.
I finally got around to reading the 2007 biography I’m Chevy Chase… And You’re Not and I’m sorry to say I’m dubious about the book. Chase is one of Saturday Night Live‘s original cast members and indeed one of the main architects who created the show alongside Lorne Michaels and Michael O’Donoghue. I can be obsessive about SNL, picking up almost every book about the show and its rotating cast that I can get my hands on. Chevy’s work on SNL and his Hollywood career are well known and need no re-hash here. The man is certainly worthy of biographical treatment but my personal feeling is that perhaps this third rate biography is about all he deserves.
First of all, the writing is unimaginative and fails to rise to any level of investigative journalism. A third grader could do a better job than this. Okay. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Make that a sixth grader. It seems a little odd to me that after years of reading stuff about what a jerk Chevy can be, this biography comes along and paints the first glowing account of his life that I have ever seen or heard. It’s only natural that the subject should be a key source for an official biography, but author Rena Fruchter comes off as a total sycophant on Chevy’s pay roll.
To his credit, Chase is open and honest about the abuse he suffered as a child. Issues and challenges that those youthful experiences brought about in his adult life are addressed in a brutally honest and admirably forthcoming manner here. That alone constitutes a bravery sadly lacking in most people, be they celebrity or not. The book also provides new perspective on Chevy’s departure from SNL after only one season which I found illuminating.
I want to believe that maybe Chevy is not the asshole that dozens of writers and former co-workers have described over the years. And perhaps a better writer could have painted this portrait a little more convincingly. On the other hand, if he really is a jerk, I can’t imagine there would be much demand for a tell-all, “Citizen Chase”, Hollywood Babylon-type treatment. Ultimately, perhaps the chosen approach was a marketing decision. The largest prospective audience for a book like this is the man’s fan base. He’s a funny guy and a major figure in American comedy no matter how you look at it. So it’s two steps forward with his personal revelations but one step back with a poor choice for biographer and I remain ambivalent about whether he deserves better. It’s just been too many years for me reading about what a jerk Chevy can be for this book to come along and just completely change my thinking about him. Having said all that, I still love the guy. In the final analysis, the courage he displays in his willingness to speak about the horrors of child abuse and his own admission that drug use drove him into rehab in the 80s will likely win out and make me love him even more. Those are things that surely would have been glossed over or skipped altogether if this bio were a total hack job.
The Felice Brothers' Road Crusade For Authenticity
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I had the extremely good fortune to write an article about the Felice Brothers for Crawdaddy.com in late 2010 that was published online in January of 2011. One of my favorite contemporary acts, I went way overboard in researching the article. Though I was paid handsomely for my work, I went considerably over budget in my research, running up gasoline, food, and hotel bills as I traveled to see the band in Louisville and Nashville in the weeks running up to their appearance at Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House, where I interviewed James Felice for the article. Covering one of my favorite bands for the legendary Crawdaddy was a great honor for me. I will forever look upon this assignment as being akin to “winning the freelance Super Bowl”. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman and to James Felice for being so gracious with his time. Months after this piece first appeared I ran into James Felice at Cincinnati’s MidPoint festival and he spoke glowingly about the article, saying that it was one of his favorite things he’d ever seen written about the band. Remembering my face and our conversation, he asked, “Did you write the review of our new CD for Crawdaddy too?” I assured him that indeed I had and again he complimented my work. As good as it gets for a freelancer who remains an unabashed fanboy as well. Crawdaddy more or less folded in 2011, as they were gobbled up by Paste Magazine who has a much bigger readership but apparently no intention of honoring Crawdaddy with more than an untended, rarely-updated blog page on their site. Try going to Crawdaddy.com and you’ll see links to maybe a dozen articles or so, a shameful and inexcusable under-representation of the magazine that launched “Rock Journalism” before there even was such a thing and yes, even before Rolling Stone magazine. Shame on you, Paste. Anyway – here’s the piece I wrote about the Felice Brothers. Like the other stuff I wrote for Crawdaddy, I am real proud of it. Since even the band seemed to appreciate the article, I thought it would be a shame for it to just disappear forever from the interwebs. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year. –rh
***
If Keith Richards recorded an acoustic album in a loose, back porch hootenanny setting with Tom Waits producing, he’d be lucky if it came out sounding as raw and authentic as the Felice Brothers’ self-titled release from 2008. Though they have enjoyed an increasing amount of success in the Alt-Rock and Americana scene over the past few years, the Felice Brothers remain relatively unknown. With a sound often described as a bittersweet whiskey binge of Dylan-esque ballads and folksy anthems, the Felice Brothers also have an arsenal of infectious acoustic honky tonk numbers. Performing with sweaty, blood-in-their-eyes passion, the Felice Brothers’ live performances are a ramshackle hillbilly soul catharsis exorcism. They look like they’ve been on the road for five straight years, which they have. Trudging ever onward, they spend months at a time on the road, schlepping coast to coast in a beat-up old RV that they have driven all over the US and Canada. Even a cursory glance at their tour dates is enough to give you road fever. The band seems to be constantly touring, taking very few days off and frequently traveling several hundred miles in between shows.
Brothers Ian, James and Simone Felice were raised in a musical family in the Catskill Mountains. Drawing inspiration from their father and many generations of musicians that came before them, the three formed an ad hoc group and eventually moved to New York City. Busking on street corners, in subway stations and city parks, the band soon came to the attention of a small European label called Loose Records. Already veterans of the road at a very young age, the band cobbled together Tonight At The Arizona from a cluster of early demos and hit the highway once again.
Night after night in one city after another, the band performed a seemingly endless string of live shows unmatched in visceral intensity and emotional power. The ragged band of troubadours pressed on as their reputation grew. Their material originating mostly from brother Ian’s pen, it resonates with echoes of the past. Folk legends, murder ballads, strange tales of the rural poor. Some literal and linear in nature, others more abstract. Every last one of the slow tunes is heart wrenching and the rave ups are all unfailingly gut-bucket gritty.
The band’s self-titled CD surfaced in early 2008 and soon “Frankie’s Gun” and “Whiskey In My Whiskey” blossomed into college radio staples. A published novelist and renaissance man whose creativity knows no boundaries, brother Simone left the band to pursue other avenues. With fiddler Greg Farley and drummer Dave Turbeville now full-fledged members of the Felice Brothers entourage, the road was not kept waiting.
The band shares vocal duties. Ian and the similarly tight-lipped bassist Christmas Clapton keen and bleat like rusty saxophones. (Their vocal stylings are frequently compared to Dylan.) Wherefrom these stick figure scarecrows straight outta Steinbeck conjure the full spectrum of human emotion I don’t know. Burly, bearded, cherub-faced James has a huskier tone suiting his larger frame. A raspy raconteur with a voice of considerable depth, he howls “Goddamn You, Jim” and “Let Me Come Home” through tears of rage and desperation. Even Farley is strapping on a guitar and stepping up the microphone to belt out the occasional Cajun hillbilly rock and roux number nowadays.
Already accustomed to busking in the streets and subway tunnels of New York City, when their frozen fingers couldn’t feel the frets, teeth chattering between verses and subway trains drowning out every other chorus, the Felice Brothers’ dream to one day play the Newport Folk Festival was not going to be thwarted by a mere power outage. After the rain cleared, they just played barefoot and acoustic in the mud in front of the stage. By instinctively braving the elements and rising above less than ideal circumstances, they turned adverse conditions into a damn good story and overnight it became part of the legend. Just another tale from the road. Throw another log on the fire.
In support of 2009’s Yonder Is The Clock, the family Felice expanded for that summer’s Big Surprise Tour with Justin Townes Earle, Dave Rawlings Machine, and Old Crow Medicine Show. Though spanning barely a dozen stops on outdoor stages around the Midwest and down south, the tour was seen by many as a natural heir to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. A totally unique program was improvised by loose and spontaneous aggregations that included members of all four bands as they meandered on and off the stage throughout two lengthy sets on each stop of the tour.
Our bedraggled and baying band of road dogs was busier than ever this past summer, touring with few breaks straight on into the fall. Squeezing several European dates in between two extensive US tours, the band’s material began to evolve and change in unexpected ways. In Louisville, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee, this writer was witness to two performances that were wildly divergent in color and content, though the shows were a mere eight weeks apart. In the interim the band had ventured to the far corners of the earth and back again, their travels reflected in the evolution of their new material. With just a few dates left on of one of the longest treks of the band’s brief but already storied history, the gracious and loquacious James Felice took a few moments to chat with me before the band’s performance at the historic Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky. Finding the band finally in the home stretch of a lengthy fall tour, with the comforts of home almost within their grasp and the Cincinnati skyline looming on the horizon as darkness fell on the Ohio River, I asked James Felice about the band’s relationship with the road.
*
RH: You guys seem to be out there on the road almost all the time with very few days off.
James Felice: Yeah. I guess most bands at our level do a lot of touring because these days it’s the only way you can make money, really. We don’t have too many things tying us back at home and we’re always excited to get out on the road and play. It’s fun and we know that it helps us to live. We’re gonna be able to live this winter and not freeze to death because we toured all fall. When you’re a touring musician your work is sort of all lumped into a few months at time. Then there’s other times when you have nothing to do because it’s not like a nine-to-five job. It’s more like a September 1st to December 1st kinda job. It’s almost like going up to Alaska and being a fisherman or something like that.
RH: At some point does the road begin to feel like home and when you’re back home with nothing to do that feels strange?
JF: Yeah, absolutely. We call it Post-Tour Depression. For at least a week after a tour, especially a long tour like this one, you don’t know what to do. It’s seven o’clock and you feel like you should be loading into a club. It’s actually really weird how lonely and lost you feel. At home it’s really quiet. It gets really quiet really quick and kind of boring and scary. You almost feel like you’re suffocating sometimes, but you’re not of course. You’ve just been to forty-five, fifty cities in the last two months so it can be weird to come back home. Especially because we live in a little town where there’s nothing going on. I just have a little house I live in. I don’t have a real job. There’s no schedule. Like tonight, I’m doing this interview in a bar. I don’t usually do that. At home I’d be stacking wood or building a fire or something. So yeah, you fall into that depression but then two weeks later you’re thinking, “I can’t fucking believe that I was on tour! How did I live like that?”
RH: I’m sure you try to make the routing of the tour as easy as possible, but sometimes I guess it’s unavoidable that there’s going to be long drives between shows?
JF: Yeah. The first part of this tour was on the west coast and in the southwest so the drives were always very long because the cities are so far apart. We had something like eleven shows in a row from San Diego up to Vancouver. Then the next day we had a day off, but we had to drive eighteen hours to Salt Lake City. Then ten hours to get to Denver. Then seventeen hours to Omaha. So there’s an incredible amount of driving. We’ve put 12,000 miles on the bus in the last couple months. Maybe more, actually. It’s a lot of traveling. It’s a big ol’ country, man. It’s really, really big.
RH: Eighteen hour drive – that’s no kinda day off at all, is it?
JF: (Laughs) No, no! But I know I could be a truck driver now, you know? If this falls through, I could be a truck driver or a bus driver. Just get my CDL and be ready to go.
RH: You guys have been trekkin’ around in that same RV for a while now, is that right?
JF: Yeah it’s the only one we’ve ever had. Well, the only thing we’ve driven cross country. When we were just getting started we had like a “short bus” - like they have for special needs kids? - which we were! But that didn’t really last too long. We were gonna drive the short bus cross country on our first tour that we booked ourselves. And I remember we were like two miles from home just driving around and we hit a pothole and we all almost died. We almost careened off the road and we were like, “You know what? We can’t do this. We gotta be safe. We can’t take this thing across the country”. Driving that thing was so fucking dangerous.
RH: How much of the new material does the band write while you’re on tour and road test from night to night?
JF: We road test a lot. But we don’t write very much on tour. We’ve been working on our new record. We’re almost done now. We’ve been playing a lot of songs from the new record that’s coming out in March, I think. And it’s a different kind of sound. It’s a different record. The next tour we do, when we tour for the new record, it’s gonna be a different sounding band.
RH: Tell me about the new song, I think it’s called “Royal Hawaiian Hotel”?
JF: Yeah, actually I think it’s gonna be called “Ponzi”.
RH: When I heard it at the Nashville show that one struck me as really different. Ian puts down the guitar. He’s doing more of a frontman kinda thing, swinging his arms around a bit, a little more animated than usual…
JF: Yeah, we’re trying to have fun, man. We’ve been playing this folk kinda rock thing I guess, whatever you wanna call it, for a while. And it’s fun to do but we gotta keep movin’ on. Can’t play the same music your whole life. And, you know, we haven’t really cashed in on it as hard as some. It’s kinda funny ‘cause now you see a lotta bands doing really well with the kinda stuff we were doing. There’s like a whole scene now, bigger than I had noticed before. There seems to be a growing scene that plays this kind of music. But I think it’s time for us to move on and try out some new shit.
RH: The Felice Brothers are already an established act and quite prolific, obviously. But right now I have sense of you guys being on the brink of huge step forward. With the amount of new and very different material that I’ve heard over the course of just a handful of shows, I am reminded of Exile-era Stones or Wilco’s Being There. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me like single disc wouldn’t even scratch the surface of where you guys are at right now and maybe a double album might called for.
JF: Yeah, we have dozens and dozens and dozens of songs. Ian, my brother, writes most of the songs. He’s so prolific that we still pull up songs that he wrote years ago sometimes. Even things that didn’t make the first record. He’s got so many great songs. This new record is actually not going to be a double record. It’s a short, concise, straight to the point kind of thing. Which is important because I feel like our last record was a little sprawled, a little bit too much? This one’s concise and it’s different because we’re moving forward. Ian and the rest of us in the band, we’re never satisfied with what we’re doing and we don’t want to be pigeonholed. You know, this whole rootsy, folky, Bob Dylan, The Band, good time shit is cool. But it’s not us, really. It was. We started playing this kind of music because it was the only goddamn thing we knew how to play, you know? Acoustic guitar, a drum, an accordion. But it’s not who we are, you know? We’re certainly dirt bags. And we’re certainly broke still. But we are musicians and we like to challenge ourselves. So we just have to keep going.
RH: I’m often struck by the dichotomy between stage right and stage left. You and Farley do a fair bit of jumping around, but Ian and Christmas sometimes seem almost reluctant to be onstage at all.
JF: Well yeah, they’re more reserved. They’re more introverted I guess, than Farley and I. It depends on the show. It depends on the crowd and the energy and how things are going. Every show with us is not the same because we’re not acting up there. We’re not playing to a script. It seems like a lot of these big acts out there, there’s like a script that you play: You smile here, you make this joke there, you do this flourish at the end of this song. We don’t do that. We are completely loose and the feeling is always new and different. So some shows are not gonna be as wild and animated. They might be more intense and dark. Ian is sort of like the forefront. He’s our leader, he’s the guy. He’s in charge. And so he sets the tone. And naturally I guess Farley and I are a little more animated, and Christmas a little less so, and Dave does his thing behind the drums. So it depends on the show. The last show we played was crazy. Ian was crazy. He’s all standing up on the drums and fuckin’ around and it was great, you know? But the show before that he was dark and more subdued. That’s just the way it is. That makes it exciting for us because we can’t be sitting there doing the same thing every night. Sometimes the audience gets pissed because it’s maybe not what they expected. But that’s okay.
RH: Well I guess if your challenge was to be as animated as Farley on stage every night you’d have your work cut out for you!
JF: Right! I’d fuckin’ break my hip or somethin’!
RH: You’ve indicated that you’d rather not say at this time what label will be releasing the next record. What else can you tell me about the new record and where you guys are at right now?
JF: Well, when we first got started we had all these labels knocking on our door after Tonight At The Arizona came out. Major. Huge. The biggest labels in the world. Some of the biggest producers in the world. And they flew us out to L.A. and here and there. We played for them and they said they wanted to produce our record. But at the end of the day we decided we didn’t want do that because they all wanted to tell us what to do. They wanted to have a hand in it. The A&R guys told us, “Yeah, yeah. We’ll let you do what you want but I’ll come in and check in like every couple days and make sure everything’s going well and I’ll have ideas.” And we said, “Fuck that”. We don’t want any A&R guy, or anybody telling us what to do. We turned down a lot of big time opportunities and went with Conor Oberst’s label Team Love and they’re great. It’s a little tiny label run by really awesome people. They don’t have a lot of money but they did their best with the record. But you know, we’re still struggling, man. You know, it’s hard to maintain a high level of artistic integrity when you also think “I’d also like to be able to pay my rent”, you know? The way the record industry is these days, for a lot of bands, it’s a struggle. It’s something that we have always struggled with as a band since we first started playing. Ian didn’t want to release Iantown (the band’s earliest demos). He’s like, “That’s a piece of shit. I don’t wanna put that out.” But we said, “Ian, come on. You know… You live in a tent. Let’s get a place to live.” So we did. But you know, Ian is very serious about artistic integrity. He lives and dies by that shit. So I think we’re doing okay. We’re real proud of the new record.
This time we’re gonna step it up a little bit to a slightly larger label. Nothing huge because we don’t want to go with a major that’s going to tell us what to do. And hopefully we’ll get on the right track. These people [at the new label] respect us for who we are and they like the music. They care about it, beyond making money. Because we’re never gonna be huge, I don’t think. You know? We’re gonna do our job and we do it very well. And we’re gonna get bigger than we are now. But we’re not gonna be doing like Lady Gaga numbers. You know we’re not gonna be doing nothing like that big. But these people, at Team Love and at the new label, they care about the music and that’s awesome. That’s what we need: we need financial support and freedom at the same time. Which is very hard to get, in any artistic endeavor. When you try to do anything. And that is the artist’s dilemma: Do I wanna eat? Or do I wanna do what I wanna do? And where do those two things meet? There’s always a compromise. Always. No matter what. But where do they meet, money versus freedom? Comfort versus freedom? Which of course is the great debate in the whole world.
I had the extremely good fortune to write an article about the Felice Brothers for Crawdaddy.com in late 2010 that was published online in January of 2011. One of my favorite contemporary acts, I went way overboard in researching the article. Though I was paid handsomely for my work, I went considerably over budget in my research, running up gasoline, food, and hotel bills as I traveled to see the band in Louisville and Nashville in the weeks running up to their appearance at Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House, where I interviewed James Felice for the article. Covering one of my favorite bands for the legendary Crawdaddy was a great honor for me. I will forever look upon this assignment as being akin to “winning the freelance Super Bowl”. Special thanks to editor Angie Zimmerman and to James Felice for being so gracious with his time. Months after this piece first appeared I ran into James Felice at Cincinnati’s MidPoint festival and he spoke glowingly about the article, saying that it was one of his favorite things he’d ever seen written about the band. Remembering my face and our conversation, he asked, “Did you write the review of our new CD for Crawdaddy too?” I assured him that indeed I had and again he complimented my work. As good as it gets for a freelancer who remains an unabashed fanboy as well. Crawdaddy more or less folded in 2011, as they were gobbled up by Paste Magazine who has a much bigger readership but apparently no intention of honoring Crawdaddy with more than an untended, rarely-updated blog page on their site. Try going to Crawdaddy.com and you’ll see links to maybe a dozen articles or so, a shameful and inexcusable under-representation of the magazine that launched “Rock Journalism” before there even was such a thing and yes, even before Rolling Stone magazine. Shame on you, Paste. Anyway – here’s the piece I wrote about the Felice Brothers. Like the other stuff I wrote for Crawdaddy, I am real proud of it. Since even the band seemed to appreciate the article, I thought it would be a shame for it to just disappear forever from the interwebs. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year. –rh
***
If Keith Richards recorded an acoustic album in a loose, back porch hootenanny setting with Tom Waits producing, he’d be lucky if it came out sounding as raw and authentic as the Felice Brothers’ self-titled release from 2008. Though they have enjoyed an increasing amount of success in the Alt-Rock and Americana scene over the past few years, the Felice Brothers remain relatively unknown. With a sound often described as a bittersweet whiskey binge of Dylan-esque ballads and folksy anthems, the Felice Brothers also have an arsenal of infectious acoustic honky tonk numbers. Performing with sweaty, blood-in-their-eyes passion, the Felice Brothers’ live performances are a ramshackle hillbilly soul catharsis exorcism. They look like they’ve been on the road for five straight years, which they have. Trudging ever onward, they spend months at a time on the road, schlepping coast to coast in a beat-up old RV that they have driven all over the US and Canada. Even a cursory glance at their tour dates is enough to give you road fever. The band seems to be constantly touring, taking very few days off and frequently traveling several hundred miles in between shows.
Brothers Ian, James and Simone Felice were raised in a musical family in the Catskill Mountains. Drawing inspiration from their father and many generations of musicians that came before them, the three formed an ad hoc group and eventually moved to New York City. Busking on street corners, in subway stations and city parks, the band soon came to the attention of a small European label called Loose Records. Already veterans of the road at a very young age, the band cobbled together Tonight At The Arizona from a cluster of early demos and hit the highway once again.
Night after night in one city after another, the band performed a seemingly endless string of live shows unmatched in visceral intensity and emotional power. The ragged band of troubadours pressed on as their reputation grew. Their material originating mostly from brother Ian’s pen, it resonates with echoes of the past. Folk legends, murder ballads, strange tales of the rural poor. Some literal and linear in nature, others more abstract. Every last one of the slow tunes is heart wrenching and the rave ups are all unfailingly gut-bucket gritty.
The band’s self-titled CD surfaced in early 2008 and soon “Frankie’s Gun” and “Whiskey In My Whiskey” blossomed into college radio staples. A published novelist and renaissance man whose creativity knows no boundaries, brother Simone left the band to pursue other avenues. With fiddler Greg Farley and drummer Dave Turbeville now full-fledged members of the Felice Brothers entourage, the road was not kept waiting.
The band shares vocal duties. Ian and the similarly tight-lipped bassist Christmas Clapton keen and bleat like rusty saxophones. (Their vocal stylings are frequently compared to Dylan.) Wherefrom these stick figure scarecrows straight outta Steinbeck conjure the full spectrum of human emotion I don’t know. Burly, bearded, cherub-faced James has a huskier tone suiting his larger frame. A raspy raconteur with a voice of considerable depth, he howls “Goddamn You, Jim” and “Let Me Come Home” through tears of rage and desperation. Even Farley is strapping on a guitar and stepping up the microphone to belt out the occasional Cajun hillbilly rock and roux number nowadays.
Already accustomed to busking in the streets and subway tunnels of New York City, when their frozen fingers couldn’t feel the frets, teeth chattering between verses and subway trains drowning out every other chorus, the Felice Brothers’ dream to one day play the Newport Folk Festival was not going to be thwarted by a mere power outage. After the rain cleared, they just played barefoot and acoustic in the mud in front of the stage. By instinctively braving the elements and rising above less than ideal circumstances, they turned adverse conditions into a damn good story and overnight it became part of the legend. Just another tale from the road. Throw another log on the fire.
In support of 2009’s Yonder Is The Clock, the family Felice expanded for that summer’s Big Surprise Tour with Justin Townes Earle, Dave Rawlings Machine, and Old Crow Medicine Show. Though spanning barely a dozen stops on outdoor stages around the Midwest and down south, the tour was seen by many as a natural heir to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. A totally unique program was improvised by loose and spontaneous aggregations that included members of all four bands as they meandered on and off the stage throughout two lengthy sets on each stop of the tour.
Our bedraggled and baying band of road dogs was busier than ever this past summer, touring with few breaks straight on into the fall. Squeezing several European dates in between two extensive US tours, the band’s material began to evolve and change in unexpected ways. In Louisville, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee, this writer was witness to two performances that were wildly divergent in color and content, though the shows were a mere eight weeks apart. In the interim the band had ventured to the far corners of the earth and back again, their travels reflected in the evolution of their new material. With just a few dates left on of one of the longest treks of the band’s brief but already storied history, the gracious and loquacious James Felice took a few moments to chat with me before the band’s performance at the historic Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky. Finding the band finally in the home stretch of a lengthy fall tour, with the comforts of home almost within their grasp and the Cincinnati skyline looming on the horizon as darkness fell on the Ohio River, I asked James Felice about the band’s relationship with the road.
*
RH: You guys seem to be out there on the road almost all the time with very few days off.
James Felice: Yeah. I guess most bands at our level do a lot of touring because these days it’s the only way you can make money, really. We don’t have too many things tying us back at home and we’re always excited to get out on the road and play. It’s fun and we know that it helps us to live. We’re gonna be able to live this winter and not freeze to death because we toured all fall. When you’re a touring musician your work is sort of all lumped into a few months at time. Then there’s other times when you have nothing to do because it’s not like a nine-to-five job. It’s more like a September 1st to December 1st kinda job. It’s almost like going up to Alaska and being a fisherman or something like that.
RH: At some point does the road begin to feel like home and when you’re back home with nothing to do that feels strange?
JF: Yeah, absolutely. We call it Post-Tour Depression. For at least a week after a tour, especially a long tour like this one, you don’t know what to do. It’s seven o’clock and you feel like you should be loading into a club. It’s actually really weird how lonely and lost you feel. At home it’s really quiet. It gets really quiet really quick and kind of boring and scary. You almost feel like you’re suffocating sometimes, but you’re not of course. You’ve just been to forty-five, fifty cities in the last two months so it can be weird to come back home. Especially because we live in a little town where there’s nothing going on. I just have a little house I live in. I don’t have a real job. There’s no schedule. Like tonight, I’m doing this interview in a bar. I don’t usually do that. At home I’d be stacking wood or building a fire or something. So yeah, you fall into that depression but then two weeks later you’re thinking, “I can’t fucking believe that I was on tour! How did I live like that?”
RH: I’m sure you try to make the routing of the tour as easy as possible, but sometimes I guess it’s unavoidable that there’s going to be long drives between shows?
JF: Yeah. The first part of this tour was on the west coast and in the southwest so the drives were always very long because the cities are so far apart. We had something like eleven shows in a row from San Diego up to Vancouver. Then the next day we had a day off, but we had to drive eighteen hours to Salt Lake City. Then ten hours to get to Denver. Then seventeen hours to Omaha. So there’s an incredible amount of driving. We’ve put 12,000 miles on the bus in the last couple months. Maybe more, actually. It’s a lot of traveling. It’s a big ol’ country, man. It’s really, really big.
RH: Eighteen hour drive – that’s no kinda day off at all, is it?
JF: (Laughs) No, no! But I know I could be a truck driver now, you know? If this falls through, I could be a truck driver or a bus driver. Just get my CDL and be ready to go.
RH: You guys have been trekkin’ around in that same RV for a while now, is that right?
JF: Yeah it’s the only one we’ve ever had. Well, the only thing we’ve driven cross country. When we were just getting started we had like a “short bus” - like they have for special needs kids? - which we were! But that didn’t really last too long. We were gonna drive the short bus cross country on our first tour that we booked ourselves. And I remember we were like two miles from home just driving around and we hit a pothole and we all almost died. We almost careened off the road and we were like, “You know what? We can’t do this. We gotta be safe. We can’t take this thing across the country”. Driving that thing was so fucking dangerous.
RH: How much of the new material does the band write while you’re on tour and road test from night to night?
JF: We road test a lot. But we don’t write very much on tour. We’ve been working on our new record. We’re almost done now. We’ve been playing a lot of songs from the new record that’s coming out in March, I think. And it’s a different kind of sound. It’s a different record. The next tour we do, when we tour for the new record, it’s gonna be a different sounding band.
RH: Tell me about the new song, I think it’s called “Royal Hawaiian Hotel”?
JF: Yeah, actually I think it’s gonna be called “Ponzi”.
RH: When I heard it at the Nashville show that one struck me as really different. Ian puts down the guitar. He’s doing more of a frontman kinda thing, swinging his arms around a bit, a little more animated than usual…
JF: Yeah, we’re trying to have fun, man. We’ve been playing this folk kinda rock thing I guess, whatever you wanna call it, for a while. And it’s fun to do but we gotta keep movin’ on. Can’t play the same music your whole life. And, you know, we haven’t really cashed in on it as hard as some. It’s kinda funny ‘cause now you see a lotta bands doing really well with the kinda stuff we were doing. There’s like a whole scene now, bigger than I had noticed before. There seems to be a growing scene that plays this kind of music. But I think it’s time for us to move on and try out some new shit.
RH: The Felice Brothers are already an established act and quite prolific, obviously. But right now I have sense of you guys being on the brink of huge step forward. With the amount of new and very different material that I’ve heard over the course of just a handful of shows, I am reminded of Exile-era Stones or Wilco’s Being There. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me like single disc wouldn’t even scratch the surface of where you guys are at right now and maybe a double album might called for.
JF: Yeah, we have dozens and dozens and dozens of songs. Ian, my brother, writes most of the songs. He’s so prolific that we still pull up songs that he wrote years ago sometimes. Even things that didn’t make the first record. He’s got so many great songs. This new record is actually not going to be a double record. It’s a short, concise, straight to the point kind of thing. Which is important because I feel like our last record was a little sprawled, a little bit too much? This one’s concise and it’s different because we’re moving forward. Ian and the rest of us in the band, we’re never satisfied with what we’re doing and we don’t want to be pigeonholed. You know, this whole rootsy, folky, Bob Dylan, The Band, good time shit is cool. But it’s not us, really. It was. We started playing this kind of music because it was the only goddamn thing we knew how to play, you know? Acoustic guitar, a drum, an accordion. But it’s not who we are, you know? We’re certainly dirt bags. And we’re certainly broke still. But we are musicians and we like to challenge ourselves. So we just have to keep going.
RH: I’m often struck by the dichotomy between stage right and stage left. You and Farley do a fair bit of jumping around, but Ian and Christmas sometimes seem almost reluctant to be onstage at all.
JF: Well yeah, they’re more reserved. They’re more introverted I guess, than Farley and I. It depends on the show. It depends on the crowd and the energy and how things are going. Every show with us is not the same because we’re not acting up there. We’re not playing to a script. It seems like a lot of these big acts out there, there’s like a script that you play: You smile here, you make this joke there, you do this flourish at the end of this song. We don’t do that. We are completely loose and the feeling is always new and different. So some shows are not gonna be as wild and animated. They might be more intense and dark. Ian is sort of like the forefront. He’s our leader, he’s the guy. He’s in charge. And so he sets the tone. And naturally I guess Farley and I are a little more animated, and Christmas a little less so, and Dave does his thing behind the drums. So it depends on the show. The last show we played was crazy. Ian was crazy. He’s all standing up on the drums and fuckin’ around and it was great, you know? But the show before that he was dark and more subdued. That’s just the way it is. That makes it exciting for us because we can’t be sitting there doing the same thing every night. Sometimes the audience gets pissed because it’s maybe not what they expected. But that’s okay.
RH: Well I guess if your challenge was to be as animated as Farley on stage every night you’d have your work cut out for you!
JF: Right! I’d fuckin’ break my hip or somethin’!
RH: You’ve indicated that you’d rather not say at this time what label will be releasing the next record. What else can you tell me about the new record and where you guys are at right now?
JF: Well, when we first got started we had all these labels knocking on our door after Tonight At The Arizona came out. Major. Huge. The biggest labels in the world. Some of the biggest producers in the world. And they flew us out to L.A. and here and there. We played for them and they said they wanted to produce our record. But at the end of the day we decided we didn’t want do that because they all wanted to tell us what to do. They wanted to have a hand in it. The A&R guys told us, “Yeah, yeah. We’ll let you do what you want but I’ll come in and check in like every couple days and make sure everything’s going well and I’ll have ideas.” And we said, “Fuck that”. We don’t want any A&R guy, or anybody telling us what to do. We turned down a lot of big time opportunities and went with Conor Oberst’s label Team Love and they’re great. It’s a little tiny label run by really awesome people. They don’t have a lot of money but they did their best with the record. But you know, we’re still struggling, man. You know, it’s hard to maintain a high level of artistic integrity when you also think “I’d also like to be able to pay my rent”, you know? The way the record industry is these days, for a lot of bands, it’s a struggle. It’s something that we have always struggled with as a band since we first started playing. Ian didn’t want to release Iantown (the band’s earliest demos). He’s like, “That’s a piece of shit. I don’t wanna put that out.” But we said, “Ian, come on. You know… You live in a tent. Let’s get a place to live.” So we did. But you know, Ian is very serious about artistic integrity. He lives and dies by that shit. So I think we’re doing okay. We’re real proud of the new record.
This time we’re gonna step it up a little bit to a slightly larger label. Nothing huge because we don’t want to go with a major that’s going to tell us what to do. And hopefully we’ll get on the right track. These people [at the new label] respect us for who we are and they like the music. They care about it, beyond making money. Because we’re never gonna be huge, I don’t think. You know? We’re gonna do our job and we do it very well. And we’re gonna get bigger than we are now. But we’re not gonna be doing like Lady Gaga numbers. You know we’re not gonna be doing nothing like that big. But these people, at Team Love and at the new label, they care about the music and that’s awesome. That’s what we need: we need financial support and freedom at the same time. Which is very hard to get, in any artistic endeavor. When you try to do anything. And that is the artist’s dilemma: Do I wanna eat? Or do I wanna do what I wanna do? And where do those two things meet? There’s always a compromise. Always. No matter what. But where do they meet, money versus freedom? Comfort versus freedom? Which of course is the great debate in the whole world.
23 Haziran 2012 Cumartesi
Lucinda Williams - Blessed (Lost Highway Records)
To contact us Click HERE
No one knows the dark nooks of the heart like Lucinda Williams. Throughout Blessed, her newest CD on Lost Highway Records, she travels across rugged emotional terrain. Williams’ songwriting displays an instinctive understanding that if you don’t put yourself way out there emotionally then you ain’t likely to come back with anything interesting to say.
The new record includes a pair of almost-formulaic portraits of the kind of shady characters Williams has always been drawn to. And her song-sketches of rough and tumble characters remain reliably spot-on and not without a strong element of introspection, as if maybe she’s singing to the mirror. Reflecting on the selfish habits of one particular bad apple on the blazing opener “Buttercup”, Williams snarls through a crooked grin and taunts him with the snarky overture, “Good luck finding your Buttercup”. But Miss Lu also takes frequent detours through new territory here, commenting on the ravages of war with “Soldier’s Song”, lamenting the loss of a beloved associate on “Copenhagen”, and, as ever, pouring her heart out in bittersweet love songs like “Sweet Love”, “Convince Me”, and more.
“Born To Be Loved” is a laconic and torchy recital of the awful things not intended for you: rejection, suffering, sadness. Juxtaposing this loving and positive message over a quiet and slow burning minor key vamp, Lucinda’s voice gets first into your ears and then your head and your heart like the warm rush of heroin permeating and percolating through your bloodstream and the effect is hypnotic.
As a songwriter, Williams possesses the rare ability to use stark, simple language that cuts to the core of human emotion. As a singer, her deep South mush mouth pronunciation subliminally suggests that to articulate the words any more clearly might be more than the heart could bear. She has a southern gothic’s strict economy with language, holding back all but the most essential syllables. Her voice frequently cracks with emotion when she sings, making the listener’s heart strings ripple and resonate like a livewire.
With vocal assistance from Matthew Sweet and some fiery guitar contributions courtesy of Elvis Costello, Lucinda and her band deliver twelve really strong tracks this time out. Arguably her best effort since 1998’s watershed Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.
*
[A slightly edited version of this review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in March 2011. –rh]
No one knows the dark nooks of the heart like Lucinda Williams. Throughout Blessed, her newest CD on Lost Highway Records, she travels across rugged emotional terrain. Williams’ songwriting displays an instinctive understanding that if you don’t put yourself way out there emotionally then you ain’t likely to come back with anything interesting to say.
The new record includes a pair of almost-formulaic portraits of the kind of shady characters Williams has always been drawn to. And her song-sketches of rough and tumble characters remain reliably spot-on and not without a strong element of introspection, as if maybe she’s singing to the mirror. Reflecting on the selfish habits of one particular bad apple on the blazing opener “Buttercup”, Williams snarls through a crooked grin and taunts him with the snarky overture, “Good luck finding your Buttercup”. But Miss Lu also takes frequent detours through new territory here, commenting on the ravages of war with “Soldier’s Song”, lamenting the loss of a beloved associate on “Copenhagen”, and, as ever, pouring her heart out in bittersweet love songs like “Sweet Love”, “Convince Me”, and more.
“Born To Be Loved” is a laconic and torchy recital of the awful things not intended for you: rejection, suffering, sadness. Juxtaposing this loving and positive message over a quiet and slow burning minor key vamp, Lucinda’s voice gets first into your ears and then your head and your heart like the warm rush of heroin permeating and percolating through your bloodstream and the effect is hypnotic.
As a songwriter, Williams possesses the rare ability to use stark, simple language that cuts to the core of human emotion. As a singer, her deep South mush mouth pronunciation subliminally suggests that to articulate the words any more clearly might be more than the heart could bear. She has a southern gothic’s strict economy with language, holding back all but the most essential syllables. Her voice frequently cracks with emotion when she sings, making the listener’s heart strings ripple and resonate like a livewire.
With vocal assistance from Matthew Sweet and some fiery guitar contributions courtesy of Elvis Costello, Lucinda and her band deliver twelve really strong tracks this time out. Arguably her best effort since 1998’s watershed Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.
*
[A slightly edited version of this review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in March 2011. –rh]
Revelatory Romp: Tommy James' Life Story
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Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick
When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.
Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.
Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.
James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.
Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.
[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]
Me, The Mob, And The Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James And The Shondells
By Tommy James with Martin Kirkpatrick
When he signed his first contract with Roulette records in 1965, Tommy James was promised “one hell of a ride” by the label’s shady president Morris Levy and that was exactly what he got. Readers of music industry books like Fred Goodman’s Hit Men will recognize Levy’s name. Notorious in his day for deep suspicion about mob connections that he never really tried to hide, Levy was eventually convicted on extortion charges in 1986. The wicked stepfather specter of Morris Levy looms large over the career of Tommy James, only one of dozens of artists who never collected a dime of royalties from Levy. That said, Tommy James still manages to paint a portrait of his career as a modern American fairy tale in his excellent new autobiography Me, The Mob, And The Music. Like a puppet with its smile painted on before leaving the factory, James manages to maintain an overwhelmingly positive outlook on his career regardless of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the evil puppet master Morris Levy.
Born Tommy Jackson in Dayton, Ohio in 1947 and raised in Michigan, his formative years encompassed the birth of rock n roll with the arrival of Elvis Presley and later Beatlemania. An incredibly enterprising young musician, James played his first club gigs at the tender age of 12. While still in his teens, Tommy landed a record store job that would provide him with a crucial education in music sounds and trends and how the industry worked. In those days bands were expected to perform three or four sets of music that would keep the kids dancing. Stiff competition made it common practice to borrow one another’s material. When James saw the crowd reaction to a rival band playing a song called “Hanky Panky”, he did what he’d already done dozens of times before and set about working up the song with his own group. Originally an obscure b-side by the Raindrops, James quickly made plans to record his own version of “Hanky Panky”. The record was a regional hit but without the means and the management to break the record outside their tiny market it quickly faded. At age 17, his hopes fading and his teenage girlfriend pregnant, James felt like the youngest has-been in America. He took a job as a department store manager but only drove halfway to the job on his first day before turning the car around. The young man wasn’t ready to give up on his dream.
Tommy’s whirlwind career began with one of the all-time greatest fluke occurrences in rock n roll history when a disc jockey in Pittsburgh started playing “Hanky Panky” and the record exploded. From there things happened fast for Tommy. The Pittsburgh market duly exploited it was on to New York for meetings with eager record labels. Enter Morris Levy.
James endured a stomach-turning, nerve-racking, teeth-gnashing confrontation with Levy every single time he needed to get a few bucks out of him. While Levy spent millions on hookers, gambling debts, and multiple mansions for himself with the money he should have been paying his artists. This poisonous connection to Levy definitely brought Tommy a lot of frustration and anguish, but it also opened the door to a very successful career and made everything possible for him. Out of this dysfunctional symbiosis the two men forged a lifelong friendship and James tells the whole fascinating tale in a compelling, easy-going style that is endearing and engaging.
Overall this is a pretty light read but, as promised, one hell of a ride indeed. James’s story is like a microcosm of the music industry in the 60s and 70s, covering the crooked business side, the USA in turmoil, the advent of drug use as a lifestyle, but also fame, fortune, and a successful string of huge hit singles in the late 60s. Whether he’s slipping Vice President Hubert Humphrey a black beauty to help him stay up all night to write an important speech, or fist fighting with Lee Majors at a Hollywood party, Tommy James consistently comes across like a wide-eyed kid from Ohio who’s eager to tell you about the charmed life that he himself can hardly believe was his.
[This book review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in September 2010. -rh]
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