From: owner-jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org (jangle-poets-digest) To: jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org Subject: jangle-poets-digest V9 #133 Reply-To: jangle-poets@smoe.org Sender: owner-jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-jangle-poets-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk jangle-poets-digest Monday, January 28 2008 Volume 09 : Number 133 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: TK @ SFFF (Re: [JP] Better Dreams day) [Nieldsforever@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:54:42 EST From: Nieldsforever@aol.com Subject: Re: TK @ SFFF (Re: [JP] Better Dreams day) In a message dated 1/24/2008 2:15:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, rederry@gmail.com writes: > >It's been a while since I have done a proper review, so I thought that I > >might expand on John's post a bit. I no longer take notes during concerts > >like I did when I kept Concert Musings, for I found that I began filtering > >concerts through the lens of "how could I report back on this?" -- > >contriving nostalgia while the show was still happening. As a result, I > >don't have precise setlists -- just impressions and recollections. > Nonetheless, what a joy to get news -- well-hashed-out and contrived for communicability -- from a distant front that I couldn't possibly get to. It's extremely interesting to me, hearing Becca's take on the reviewing process. I always enjoy, or enjoyed, reading Bern and Cone's reviews over the years, with their very different yet equally colorful styles of presentation. I sort of wished I could tell the story of my travels the way they did, and barring being able to write like them, I imitated them as much as I could within my own different milieu. There *is* a kind of Japanese-tourist-with-camera skewed perspective, if you'll pardon the gross caricature. I was just saying to Crystal at the Nields at the Space in Hamden the other night, that my pretense at objectivity when I do the reviews for which I'm known is really a thinly disguised essay in propaganda. I'm really promoting the acts that I choose to review, and I do, as Becca says, often find myself contriving nostalgia and filtering concerts through that lens of "how could I report back on this?" Even if the promotional aspect is a self-delusion on my part, the "reporter's hat" slant that I adopt does have its occupational hazards. So regardless of whether I'm fooling some of the people some of the time, fooling myself, or what have you, I'm really toying with a not-so-hidden agenda that in subtle ways can sometimes come back to bite you in the arrears. My own attempts at propaganda specifically include trying to throw a positive light on the proceedings, whenever possible, to specifically say something good. Why? Because it has been my own experience that adverse criticism of a show or an artist or a song, i.e. less than positive criticism, inevitably seems to get back to the artist(s) through whatever agency of little birds who read the reviews and report back to the artist(s), later coming back home to roost, making an uncomfortable situation for me, sometimes for long periods of time to come, after that. As Timbuk 3 sings (my favorite lines by them) -- "You made a killing dealing real estate at NASA, Selling cemetery plots in outer space Till some falling coffins crashed upon your doorstep -- Welcome to the Human Race." Yeah, what you sow to the wind can come back to haunt you later, and come crashing down, just like those falling coffins crashing on your doorstep, in the song. So it's really, really difficult being objective when doing reviews, even once one has surrendered the pure buzz of the non-filtered concert experience. Unless one doesn't really care if people might get pissed at you! "Abandon objectivity, all ye who enter here." > >They also invited Rebecca Hall (vocals) and Ken Anderson (picnic table > >percussion, since there was no place to plug in a bass) from the band > >Hungrytown to play on "Season of the Witch" and "Matty Groves" for a lovely > >unmic'ed pseudo-Strangelings moment. (Is "Matty Groves" a 60s song? It's a > >Child ballad, if I recall correctly, so it's technically much older, but I > >suppose that it was popularized by the Fairport Convention and Joan Baez > >versions, which were both were released in the 60s, so fine. > Yeah, that's it. The Strangelings cite Fairport as one of their influences, and that was a 60's group originally, before they morphed wildly from one configuration of the band to another, until finally settling on just one lineup for decades, outliving original drummer Martin Lamble, lead singer Sandy Denny, and God knows who else. > >Besides, with > >Ken and Rebecca at the festival, how could they have not done it?) > Yeah, and Red Kennedys did it too, so they just like doing it. When neither Red Molly nor Strangelings nor anyone else are available, Maura hunkers down and does all the verses herself at Kennedys shows too, so she must really like it -- "With or Without You." > >The Kennedys returned the favor to Hungrytown by singing harmony and playing > >guitar on a couple of songs during their mainstage set: "Hard Way to Learn" > >(also recorded by The Strangelings) and "Hungrytown Road." Check out their > >new self-titled album "Hungrytown," endorsed on-stage by The Kennedys. It's > >really pretty and unexpectedly jangly (in a less Beatlesesque and more trad > >or "retro" style). > Yeah, onstage endorsements have power. At the Lancaster Fireworks Show 6/25/05, Pete told people to get Chris & Meredith Thompson's latest album, _Live_, and didn't I take the bait, hook line and sinker, based on what I'd just seen on "A Bend in the River" done by C&M with P&M standing by, not performing along with them, just standing there onstage alongside C&M in open-mouthed amazement. C&M had gotten "inside" that song, and by doing so got "inside" TK and "inside" me too, in the process. That IMO was the Birth of the Strangelings. The very next time I saw C&M, which was my first-ever C&M show where I'd specifically gone just to see them, not TK, FRFF, or anyone else, I got all 5 of their albums which they were selling at the time. I hope some of these online list endorsements have power too, even if not as much as onstage endorsements by someone like TK. > >Unlike most of the music festivals I have attended in the northeast, The > >Kennedys were playing to an audience for whom they were comparatively > >unknown. Hence, as I think Susan pointed out, their mainstage set had to > >give a flavor of the different things they can do. They dedicated the set > >to John Stewart, who had just passed away, and they did their cover of his > >song "Jasmine" (one of my favorite songs on "Songs of the Open Road"). > That's one of the great things about TK, their remembering people in that way. I'm very happy to hear that they did that. I was bumming that the announcement in the news of John Stewart's death was falling on deaf ears of an off-the-radar world, like drops of rain bouncing off people's tents in a January SFFF rainstorm. One of Kate Wolf's signature anthems was a cover of John Stewart's, "Some Kind of Love." I can't imagine her without that song, it was so right for her. > >Not > >shockingly, they opened with "Life is Large" and closed with "Stand"; the > >audience stood with some prompting from Pete. In between, they played > >"Breathe," "Midnight Ghost," "9th Street Billy," "Eight Miles High," "Matty > >Groves" (with Ken and Rebecca again) a jam that segued into "Rhapsody in > >Blue" on uke, and some other songs, probably not in that order at all -- > >again, showcasing a lot of styles and moods. During "Stand," a performer > >standing behind me asked the guy next to him it was an original or a cover. > >It struck me that for a song like "Stand" that aims to be universal and > >ageless, this is a high compliment. Though it is such a Kennedys song that > >it is hard for me to imagine at this point that it could be anyone else's. > Maura was playing it at soundcheck at Ellsworth, Maine, during the Nields - Susan Werner - Kennedys FRFF-sponsored Summer in December tour in 2002 -- playing it as if it weren't quite finished yet. Then P&M first played it at the Lexington show, also in that series of concerts. I was sitting right next to my son Stephen, with Bern and April, in the front row. And that first time I heard TK play "Stand," I had this "aha" feeling, that P&M had come up with an "instant classic." I felt exactly the same way the first time the Nields played "Best Black Dress," 4/22/95 at Glastonbury. That was it. That was my conversion experience to TN, and I've been crazy about the Nields ever since, _nieldsforever@aol.com_ (mailto:nieldsforever@aol.com) , "mad baggins" and all, the whole nine yards. > >Let's see; what else was notable? Um, Bruce missed a pseudo-Strangelings > >appearance? ;-] > Yeah -- and don't I hate it when that happens! :-) Bruce digging 'Becca's perspectives since, like, forever it seems Check out the Kennedys' Official Home Page: http://www.KennedysMusic.com/ Fab photos, the Official tour diary, dashboard Buddha haiku, groovy merchandise...what more could you ask for? ------------------------------ End of jangle-poets-digest V9 #133 **********************************