Founded in the mid 60’s, tonight’s band was one of the last British blues bands to hit the scene. Although never reaching hit status in England they were well received in America. The band has seen many personnel changes over the years with guitarist Kim Simmonds being the one constant member. Three of the original members left early on to form Foghat while other members also went on to other bands.
Unfortunately I was unable to find any videos of their early performances so…
Tonight we’ll start off with two live performances from 1995 and then move on to 2005 through the present.
Later, Eric Cartman will present the introduction to the second portion of the show. This portion is comprised of tracks off their 1960’s and ‘70’s albums with various fan generated slide shows.
This weekend I am again having to take the trip to my daughter's camp so I will leave you with this short but sweet show originally televised in 1970 on KQED in San Francisco.
In light of the smoke filled air for the last week due to the over 300 fires in northern California it’s only fitting that I bring you this band tonight.
Founded in the 1960’s and still performing today this British band is a founder of and one of the few remaining guitar-duo power bands. Although various members have come and gone the band has kept the music coming all these years. The current band bearing the original name is now headed up by one of the founding members Andy Powell, while another version of the band is headed up by founding member, Martin Turner.
So here tonight, reminiscent of the hillsides around here, Wishbone Ash!
Tonight’s show is by special request of Big Dan. This band is also one of my favorites.
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met in college in 1967 and began playing in local bands. Later moving to Brooklyn they released their first album in 1972. They toured briefly but soon retired to working only in the studio accompanied by a host of studio musicians. With six album releases in the ‘70s they broke up in the ‘80s but reformed in the ‘90s and began touring again.
Their blend of jazz, rock and pop sound equally well today as when they first hit the airwaves.
I’ll open tonight with a look had how they mold their music in the studio with a breakdown of their hit song Peg. Finally, I’ve left you a little piece of eye candy for your enjoyment at the end.
Enough from me, I’ll let these ladies tell you what it’s all about:
This has already been called the "Holy Grail" of Phish Videos.
The Rev. Jeff Mosier (Blueground Undergrass) was contracted by Phish in the Fall of 1994, to help them learn Bluegrass. They flew him to Michigan and Gordon picked him up in a limo, and they had their first lesson on 11-14-94, same night as Grand Rapids.
Although his styling may be rather one dimensional, this guy can really lay it down. I first became aware of him when I was putting together the Green Man Festival video in the post before this one.
Master of bayou-boogie-hobo-blues, he uses whatever he can find to deliver his message. His instruments range from an electric guitar with only three strings and the pickup duct taped, to a couple of tin cans, a van door handle, Christmas decorations and one string mounted on a 2x4. Not much to work with, but he can sure make them sing.
Headed for the Royal Albert Hall October 1st, he brings audiences stories of life on the down-side with a pounding beat from his Mississippi Drum Machine – a wooden box with a Mississippi license plate on the front.
This evening I’ll start you off with a short interview followed by a collection of his performances. Closing things out is an 18 minute movie and an encore to wrap it up.
Tonight I invite you to an evening with SEASICK STEVE!
Yesterday, when I opened my email, I found a letter from Mirjam in the U.K. Mirjam is involved in a music festival called The Green Man Festival to be held this August 15th - 17th in the Glanusk Park Estate near Crickhowell in Powys, Mid Wales.
Getting older, I look at the festival band lists and find I know few of the bands. This festival has three names that stand out to me - perhaps the biggest is Pentangle who have reformed with all the original artists for this show and a concert tour. Richard Thompson is also on top of my list and the Drive-by Truckers are pretty darn good too.
As for the bands I don't know, Mirjam and her cohorts have solved that problem too. There is a radio player at the website with selections from what seems to be all of the artists.
Having seen the Vault, Mirjam has invited me to the show and asked that I spread the word about it.
Unfortunately, due to the melting of the polar ice shield, my only possible land route is blocked and I won't be able to attend.
However, in spreading the word, I invite all my listeners to check out the Green Man Festival website and be sure to go to the show and report back to me if you have the means.
The really cool thing at their site is that you can post a video of your favorite band or your own band, and then people can vote on the bands. Those with the most votes will be added to the show.
So go LISTEN at the Green Man Radio Player. Sign up a BAND And go VOTE (To vote you must REGISTER - 30 seconds tops, plus a chance to win tickets) Greenman Festivals Past
Over the years music has been used to express the human condition. Ranging from working conditions and politics to war and human tragedies, events through history have left their mark in song. Minstrels have often taken the lead in delivering these messages of solidarity against oppression to the populace.
Updated 5/28/08 - Added Democracy Now Video [Photo - Christopher Dunn]
With this Saturday’s post nearly completed I learned of the passing of one of my favorite folk singers and song writers. Born the son of union organizers, Bruce Duncan Phillips took the name U. Utah Phillips from the state of Utah where he settled after life riding the rails.
Hobo, folk singer, anarchist, social reformer and a man of the people, Utah passed away this past Friday, just days after his 73rd birthday.
Story teller extraordinaire, Utah wrote songs about the troubles of the working man and railed against the government that kept them down. He describes an Anarchist as “someone who doesn’t need the police to tell him what to do”.
He even ran for President, but never voted. He professed that one votes with their body – it is the good deeds that one does for others that is your vote.
Being a fairly short distance from here I was able to see him on a number of occasions and it was always a treat.
Coincidently my original post was about the Human Condition and Utah was one of the featured artists. That program has been shelved for a later date and instead I have assembled this tribute to one of the great American Folk Artists. The first sequence is from one of Utah’s many local performances in his hometown of Nevada City, California where he joins a group of local musicians. This is followed by his show at the Strawberry Music Festival – Both shows are from the spring of 2007.
Below the videos is the official press release from his family
Democracy Now program from 5/27/08 featuring an hour long interview with Utah from 2004.
Rest in peace Utah, you deserve it for you’ve served us well!
Press Releasefor immediate release Saturday May 24, 2008
“Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73”
Nevada City, California
Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers.Whether through this early influence or an early life that was notalways tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people.He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as “the Wobblies,” an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.
Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life.Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country.His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself.Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.
Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his “elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives.They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.
“He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears,” said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.
A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure.He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy’s Joe Hill house.In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote.He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as “blacklisting.”
“It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform.Everybody went there.She fed everybody,” said John “Che” Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as “the Trade,” developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
“He was like an alchemist,” said Sorrels, “He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them.He didn’t believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."
A single from Phillips’s first record, “Moose Turd Pie,” a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973.From then on, Phillips had work on the road.His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination.Phillips’s songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others.He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.
Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances.He didn’t want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, “Loafer’s Glory,” produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town.Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night.In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.
Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife.He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan.He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.
The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California95945 (530) 271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org
Most of the videos linked here were created using the SplashCast interface. They were built of links to YouTube videos assembled into a player which had the ability to play the videos sequentially. SplashCast has yet to answer my question of what will happen to my videos, but I figure they will be lost after June 1st.
This has hit the Video Vault hard. This will leave about 50 of my shows dead. I will leave the posts up as I try and find another means of making these presentations. At some point I started listing the direct links to the videos so you can access them that way. I thought YouTube playlists would be the answer, but if the player gets to a broken link it just stops without ever skipping to the next video without human intervention.
Check back occasionally as I try and find a new format.
BB2
UPDATE 6/7/09:
I have recently found a new service called EmbedR which is very similar to Spalshcast in that it can assemble the links into a stream. I have begun using the player for my new shows and over time I will convert the old shows into the new format.
UPDATE 5/08/09:
From time to time the SplashCast videos come back to life, you may get lucky, or you may get a black box where the video should be.
