When I started this whole music journo writing gig many years ago, part of my motivation was to build some “street cred” that I could leverage when proposing one of a few book ideas I have rolling around in my head. It never occurred to me that I might (even on rare occasions) stand up in front of a crowd and talk about this stuff. But thanks to the encouragement of a dear friend, last year (February 2012) I did just that: I gave a what’s called an Ignite Talk. And I enjoyed it a lot.

Here’s last year’s talk. Me? Nervous? Nah.

 

I enjoyed it so much so that I actually applied to do another one this year. And I’ve been selected as a finalist. But the final decision as to which speakers (ten, chosen from about 35) get the gig…well, that’s up to you. You needn’t be able to show up for the actual event (though that’d be cool, and I might even buy you a drink if you did), but if you enjoy my writing at all, voting for me would be a quick, painless and immensely appreciated way for you to show me some encouragement.

Voting takes only a moment, and you can (but don’t have to) vote for several entries. My proposed talk has to do with one of my book ideas.

This link will take you to the voting page. The deadline is in only a few days. It would mean a heckuva lot to me if you’d go to the page, fill out the form, and cast your vote for Bill Kopp and “The Greatest Music You’ve Never Heard in Your Life.”

Thank you. Count on me reminding you again, but please vote now.

http://igniteavl.org/vote

Update: No rare personal appearance for me this go-round. I didn’t make the cut. But I’ll continue to have plenty to say here online.

The big Yep Roc 15 three-night musical gala kicks off later this week. As I prepare to travel to Carrboro/Chapel Hill NC, meaning that be out of the office for a couple days, I’d like to take this opportunity to direct your attention to a couple of brief pieces I wrote back in the pre-blog days. Both are acts who’ll be among the YR15 headliners.

• This review covers the 30th anniversary of Nick Lowe‘s Jesus of Cool. The expanded release on Yep Roc  takes a wonderful album and makes it even better.
• Robyn Hitchcock has seen his catalog repackaged, expanded and reissued a number of times. But Yep Roc’s 2007 package I Wanna Go Backwards is one of the best, collecting three great albums and two discs worth of previously-unheard goodies. Here’s a review.

A whole bunch of other relevant links can be found in a blog post I published recently. That’s right here.

If you’re reading this and you plan to be at Yep Roc 15, let me know. I’m always happy to meet fellow music fans, especially ones who read my stuff on occasion.

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The Americana Music Association Conference and Festival took place September 18-22 in Nashville TN. As a first-time attendee – and as one whose tastes don’t fall neatly into the Americana category – I did my best to go with an open mind. Good thing: the AMA turned out to be perhaps the best festival I’ve ever attended. Quite a surprise, that.

Part of that is down to a simple fact: the AMA’s concept of Americana is very broad. Utilizing a big-tent philosophy, the Conference and Festival sought to include many forms of American music. This was not – as I might have thought some months ago – a strictly fiddles-n-banjos affair. Not by a long shot, in fact. It was possible, if one sought to do so, to neatly sidestep most of what might more traditionally be thought of as Americana, and instead focus on seminars, meetings, conversations and (most of all) musical performances that would best be labeled…well, something other than Americana.

But the big-tent approach makes real sense; it’s not some sort of sell-out, a bid by the AMA to draw a wider audience in simply to cover the event’s expenses. And a major attraction under that tent this year was the music of Memphis, Tennessee.

The focus on Memphis began early and continued. At the big awards ceremony held at the historic Ryman Auditorium (a church-like edifice with excellent acoustics and great sight lines no matter where one is seated), Booker T & the MG’s keyboardist Booker T. Jones accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award. (So, too, did blues guitarist/singer Bonnie Raitt and the very British Richard Thompson. Big tent indeed.) Jones sat in on Hammond B3 with Alabama Shakes as they delivered a rousing number to an appreciative room-capacity audience.

The next day, Memphis music scholar Robert Gordon interviewed Jones at length in a small amphitheater inside of the Country Music Hall of Fame. For about eighty minutes, Gordon and Jones engaged in a lively trip down memory lane, and while Gordon’s questions were always knowing and well-chosen, the pair took several good questions from the full-house audience as well. (I asked Jones about the inspiration behind the McLemore Avenue album; a brief discussion of that exchange is here.)

Later that same day, back at the Downtown Sheraton (main location of the conference), a panel on The Music of Memhpis was moderated by Rick Clark, and included Scott Bomar of Electraphonic Records and The Bo-Keys (more on whom forthwith); Jody Stephens of Big Star; Robert Gordon; and Ardent Studios’ John Hampton. The conversation covered a wide range of topics, including Memphis’ contribution to powerpop in the form of Big Star, The Scruffs, Van Duren, Tommy Hoehn and others.

Perhaps the best was yet to come: an evening showcase at the Rutledge (a tiny and intimate club about a mile from the Sheraton) featured a stellar lineup of acts. First were Ardent darlings Star and Micey; theirs was a lively Americana-infused set that ended with the band wandering out into the audience, where they sang and played sans amplification. While they’re nominally Americana, their approach folded in elements of rock and soul into an exuberant whole.

Luther and Cody Dickinson (guitar/vocals and drums respectively) took the stage next for a set that was perhaps a bit lower-key than I might have expected. Very effective but not rocking-out. They saved that for a bit later, when they were joined by their full band (North Mississippi Allstars) and fronted by Jim Lauderdale. (The latter was also the affable host of the previous night’s awards ceremony.) I had seen the Allstars before, but with Lauderdale out front (I understand he will release a new album with them backing him) they transformed into something else, something more interesting. The music they performed had more in common with Memphis blue-eyed soul of the early 70s. The collaboration was a very natural one.

Scott Bomar’s Bo-Keys would be important even if they weren’t very good. Fortunately, they’re both. Comprised of younger players and (much) older ones, The Bo-Keys give the opportunity for deserving artists who might not otherwise get gigs to strut their stuff. Vocalist Percy Wiggins was resplendent in his tuxedo as he belted out the soulfullest of soul tunes, ably backed by the band with a full horn section. This is the sort of music that can’t easily be captured on record; it has to be experienced first-hand to truly appreciate the energy.

The evening’s Big Event came next. Billed as “Songs of Big Star,” this huge ensemble of artists was the highlight of the entire event for this attendee. The visual was a spectacle in and of itself: various people wandering on and off the stage as the demands of a given song dictated. Sometimes a string ensemble (with conductor!) would appear. Sometimes it was just Jody Stephens at the mic, backed by two or three players. Other times Stephens was behind his drum kit, as REM‘s Mike Mills sang lead. Or maybe ringleader Chris Stamey (The dB’s) might be out front. Or maybe the Dickinson boys. Or Brett Harris, an amazingly talented singer (and auxiliary member of The dB’s for live dates). The constantly changing aggregation – often reaching fifteen or more people on the relatively small stage – ran through the Big Star catalog, and even managed to faithfully recreate the ramshackle piano intro of “Jesus Christ.” By the time the all-in final number “Thank You Friends” got underway, there were cheering fans and moist eyes all around. I can’t speak for the other attendees, but I cam away with the feeling that we all were witness (and party) to something special, something unique.

More reporting on AMA to come in future blog posts.

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I’m not a fan of professional team spectator sports; that kind of thing has never held any fascination for me. But I sort of understand why others like it, I guess. I also (thank goodness) don’t work in a cube-farm office – got that out of my system back in the mid 90s – so I don’t have to endure endless water cooler chatter about who won the big game last night. My coworkers of that era quickly figured out that I was clueless when it came to sports: then as now I don’t know if the Cardinals (to pick a random example) are a baseball or football team. And I think I heard that the Rams don’t even play in Los Angeles any more.

But I do remember a game-of-sorts that my sports-loving coworkers used to really get into. It was something called “fantasy football.” It isn’t, I don’t think, anything like “band camps” in which you play a vast sum of money to hang out with rock stars slightly past their sell-by date; no, I think it has to do with picking a bunch of your favorite players and somehow pitting them against your friend’s list of players. Maybe I’m wrong.

But if that is what it is, then it’s slightly similar to a little imagination exercise I occasionally engage in: a fantasy festival. If I were a rock impresario with unlimited (or at least substantial) resources, and I wanted to put together a festival with a list of great acts, who might make the list?

As it happens, someone else has done this for me. And as luck would have it, that “someone” is the staff of Yep Roc Records, based in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill region of North Carolina. I live a mere four hours’ drive from the Triangle, and I’ll be attending the festival, designed to celebrate the label’s 15^th anniversary. It’s called Yep Roc 15, and the lineup – all acts signed to Yep Roc – is stellar. I’ll be reporting on it a number of times both before and after the three-day festival (October 11-13), and if my smartphone battery holds up, I might do a bit of liveblogging straight from Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, home to the three-night extravaganza.

For a full rundown of the acts who’ll take the stage, visit www.yr15.com. But here’s a survey of some (not all) of the acts I am most excited about seeing, hearing, and in some cases, meeting:

As co-leader (with brother Phil) of The Blasters, Dave Alvin was a pioneer in what we now call roots-rock. I saw The Blasters way back in 1981, in my fake ID era; that was the only way to get into Atlanta’s Agora Ballroom if you were under age. Alvin’s Romeo’s Escape LP (known outside the USA as Every Night About This Time) featured the amazing, heart-rending “Fourth of July,” a song he’d re-record (in an arguably inferior version) when he subsequently joined X. I saw Alvin onstage last year, and while he leans a bit more toward country than he did in his Blasters days, his story-songs and colorful personality make him a must-see.

There’s so much I could say about Nick Lowe. From his work with Kippington Lodge to Brinsley Schwarz to (most notably) Rockpile and his solo records, he’s consistently turned out some of the finest songs in any genre. While he made his name to some degree as a house producer at Stiff Records in the 70s, his biggest claims to fame are the classics “Cruel to Be Kind” and a song that’s become a standard, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.” The success of the latter set Lowe up so as not to have any financial worries. Like Alvin, Lowe has moved in a singer-songwriter direction; his current tour brings him to my hometown (Asheville) the night before Yep Roc 15, and in fact my interview with him will run in the local altweekly Mountain Xpress that week (it’ll be on this blog two weeks after that).

Robyn Hitchcock is in many ways the successor to Pink Floyd‘s Syd Barrett. But he’s much more than that. A prolific artist who has recorded with his groups (The Soft Boys and The Egyptians) as well as solo, the Cambridge-based Hitchcock can always be counted on for droll lyrics fused to winning melodies. I interviewed him many years ago in connection with a reissue of his albums. This will be my first time seeing him onstage.

Los Straitjackets are, quite simply, the world’s greatest instrumental surf guitar band. With their high-concept look and flawless choreography, they’re among the most distinctive bands you’ll ever hope to see. I’ve seen them twice and interviewed them twice (in 2007 and 2011). The current live dates are a special treat: guitarist Danny “Daddy-O Grande” Amis returns to the lineup after wrestling cancer to the ground.

Fountains of Wayne rank among the finest exponents of intelligent powerpop; every one of their albums is filled with wry observations on life, and more hooks than seems fair. I first saw FoW onstage at Bonnaroo 2007, and covered the release of a live concert DVD as well as a break-out solo album by their lead guitarist Jody Porter.

Liam Finn comes by his talent at least in part thanks to genetics. His dad is Neil Finn of Crowded House, and Tim Finn (Split Enz, Crowded House) is his uncle. Liam tours sometimes as a member of Crowded House as well, but his own music offers a more modern take on the classic sounds of his dad’s band. I’ve seen him both as a Crowdie and as a solo opener; in the latter situation he made intelligent use of looping to create rocking songs out of nearly nothing but his voice and guitar.

The Sadies are an astounding band; their 2007 New Seasons album just might be the finest synthesis of rock, country and Americana since early Flying Burrito Brothers. But that’s not all they can do: though their vocal harmonies are a thing of beauty, their soundtrack to the documentary about Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (Tales of the Rat Fink) is an instro-surf extravaganza of the first order.

And that’s just some of the acts on the bill. Also scheduled to appear: John Doe (formerly of X), Chuck Prophet, Minus 5, Sloan, Chatham County Line and host/emcee John Wesley Harding. And several more. And the organizers promise more names are yet to be added.

I’m telling ya: Yep Roc 15 is my fantasy festival. I can’t wait; I’m already working on lining up some interviews. Stay tuned.

Tickets have long been on sale, and both discounted-advance and VIP tix are long gone. But individual day passes remain, at least at the time of this writing. Go get yours now.

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I’m headed to the Hopscotch Festival later this week in (relatively) nearby Raleigh NC. There is a loooong list of bands appearing. I know several that fall into the must-see category for me; The dBs are first among these. I plan on checking out the Jesus and Mary Chain (I bought Psycho Candy when it came out), The Roots (I saw them at the Echo Project Festival and they were very good) and Sunn O))) (mainly because they seem weird enough not to miss, even though friends who know my tastes insist I’ll hate ‘em).

Anyway, if you’re reading this and you’d care to weigh in with some suggestions as to who I ought to check out (or avoid), I welcome your input. Thanks. Here’s the full list.

In honor of Labor Day here in the USA, I’m taking a day-long break from regular posting on the blog. (Yeah, 350+ words constitutes a “break” from my point of view.) But I can’t go a weekday without chiming in about something music-related, so I’ll mention a group I had the pleasure of seeing waaay back in 1981. The venue was Atlanta’s Agora Ballroom, and since Georgia had recently changed its laws making alcohol legally available only those 21 and over (I was a lad of a mere eighteen at the time), the requisite fake ID was required to gain entrance to the Agora. (And no, I didn’t drink. I was there for the music.)

The band on this particular night – I went many other times, seeing The Blasters, Split Enz and other much-loved acts – was The Bus Boys. The group’s image was a little gimmicky, but not in a cynical, calculated way: they were a group of African Americans (with a Latino drummer) who played rock’n'roll. To audiences in the early 80s – not well-versed in the histories of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and so forth – this seemed quite the novel concept(!) They were really good, with sold playing, and multiple vocalists, giving them the opportunity to move in any number of musical directions. Their debut album Minimum Wage Rock & Roll remains a favorite of mine, mixing as it does humor, driving rock, and some pointed social commentary.

The band got a bit more exposure when they were feature in the Eddie Murphy film 48 Hrs. But it’s for their second album that I think of them on this day. The even more pointed lyrical concerns of the songs on American Worker dealt with the concerns of typical Americans who head to and from work every day, just trying to keep their heads above that metaphorical water.

So forgive the poor dub quality, and enjoy “American Worker” from The Bus Boys. Happy Labor Day, and a salute to my fellow Americans. (And let me point out: the way they jump around in the video: they were just like that onstage. A rousing, highly memorable concert.)

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From 2002 to mid 2005 I led a band called The Echoes of Tyme. Our concept – most all of my bands have what’s known as “high concept” – was to play Nuggets-style garage/psychedelic rock. The more obscure, the better. One song we did was a cover of The Electric Prunes‘ “Are You Lovin’ Me More (But Enjoying It Less),” the 1966 b-side to their second (and last) charting hit, “Get Me to the World On Time.” The song is incredibly catchy, and features a wonderful arrangement, but in the end that arrangement probably hurt its commercial prospects: it was perhaps a bit too, er, subtle for mass consumption. Certainly its shifting dynamics and changes in volume would have confused AM radio listeners of the day.

But I’m convinced the song did have influence of great import. Take a moment and listen to the opening, with its chugging/stuttering guitars line, punctuating drums hits and bleep-bleep organ parts.

Now tell me you don’t hear more than a passing similarity to Pink Floyd‘s single “Astronomy Dominé.”

It’s perhaps worth noting that – according to our friends at Wikipedia – the 45rpm with “Are You Lovin’ Me More” on its b-side was released in 1966 and reached #42 on the UK charts. “Astronomy Dominé,” however, was recorded in April 1967, and released in August of that year.

In a brief exchange of emails with Electric Prunes’ James Lowe a number of years ago, I pointed out the similarity. He hadn’t noticed it before but heard it clearly when he gave it another listen. None of this is intended to take anything away from Syd Barrett or Pink Floyd; Barrett – a big fan of the psychedelic sounds coming out of the USA at the time – was already on record admitting that the the descending riff of “Interstellar Overdrive” was based on Love‘s version of Burt Bacharach‘s “My Little Red Book.” So like the saying goes, everything is connected. Or: there’s nothing new under the sun. Or: good writers borrow, great writers steal. Take your pick.

Watch for a full review of Real Gone Music’s The Complete Reprise Singles – a 24-track CD collecting all of The Electric Prunes’ a- and b-sides in glorious back-to-mono – soon on this blog.

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Sure, it’s a tired conversational device to say, “Wow, it’s hard to believe it’s been X years since Y happened.” But when it’s true, it’s true. In today’s case, X = 55 years and Y = the day a sixteen year old John Lennon and a just-fifteen Paul McCartney met at St. Peter’s Church Hall fête in Woolton, Liverpool. John’s band The Quarrymen were the featured act that day, and Paul met a slightly drunk Lennon that afternoon. Not long thereafter, Paul would join The Quarrymen, an embryonic version of The Beatles that also included George Harrison among its members. It’s no overstatement to claim that the July 6 1957 meeting of Lennon and McCartney set in motion a sequence of events that would change the world.

And that fact remains true whether you are – as I am – a lifelong Beatles fanatic, a casual fan (should such animal exist) or – by some misguided upbringing – someone who fails to give The Beatles their due as the most important musical group in the history of, well, music.

Because The Beatles formed such an early part of my own musical journey – the first 45rpm single I ever bought was “Lady Madonna” b/w “The Inner Light,” the first vinyl LP I ever got (as a gift) was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the first cassette albums I got was The Beatles 1962-1966, and I remember clearly when “Hey Jude” was in the Top 40 – I have written about the group and its members a number of times.

This day in history is as good a time as any to take a quick look back at some of these:

• CD Review: George Harrison – Early Takes, Vol. 1
• CD Review: McGough & McGear (the latter is Paul’s brother Michael)
• CD Review: George Harrison and Ravi Shankar – Collaborations
• CD Review: thenewno2 – You Are Here (band led by George’s son Dhani)
• DVD Review: Strange Fruit: The Beatles’ Apple Records
• DVD Review: Composing Outside the Beatles
• DVD Review: Concert for George
• DVD Review: John Lennon Rare and Unseen
• DVD Review: Beatles Rare and Unseen
• DVD Review: John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band – Live in Toronto ’69
• Book Review: If You Like the Beatles…
• Book Review: The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones
• Book Review: Life is What Happens
• Bootleg Review: John Lennon – Free as a Bird: The Dakota Beatle Demos
• Concert Review: Paul McCartney in Charlotte, 2010
• The story of my working relationship with former Quarryman Ken Brown
• My interview with Sean Lennon
• My interview with Yoko Ono

 

There are many others, but those ought to keep interested parties busy on this day worth noting.

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