From: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org (shindell-list-digest) To: shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: shindell-list-digest V9 #63 Reply-To: shindell-list@smoe.org Sender: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk shindell-list-digest Saturday, April 21 2007 Volume 09 : Number 063 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [RS] RS at The Concert Hall [John McDonnell & Jamie Younghans ] Re: [RS] RS at The Concert Hall ["Jeff Bernstein" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 11:17:55 -0400 From: John McDonnell & Jamie Younghans Subject: [RS] RS at The Concert Hall Hey All, Went to the Concert Hall show last night--double bill with Tom Paxton. My thoughts about this are on record and don't need repeating. Tom Paxton played with the guy who performed Duelling Banjos from "Deliverance." I will say he looks a lot better now than he did in the movie. Surprisingly, Paxton went on first--I thought it would be the other way around. Anyway, let me just say that venue (The Concert Hall) is just atrocious, acoustically speaking. I was in the center five rows back and the echo from the high ceiling was just driving me nuts. I couldn't feel anything from any of the songs because it felt as though they were just wafting away. I expected a lot more from a place that bills itself as it does. They should really call it The Echo Chamber. As for the set, it felt very short (12 songs in all), and I felt that RS played all of the songs slightly faster--not like an LP (remember those?) played at 45rpm (remember that?), but a little hurried. One quibble (the rest are complaints)--I was a little disappointed in the set list, but only because I was very excited about SOD and he had Sara Milonovich and Greg Anderson with him, so I expected him to play more from the disc, but he only did Senor (had a slightly "Desire"-ish feel to it, with the violin) and Deportee. The set list: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy Reunion Hill (the bass sounded kind of muffled on this, but that may just have been a function of my not being used to it) Transit (no longer at the end of the show!) Walden Well (a new song, a little didactic, so not my favorite. He did intimate that this song was something of a departure from his usual "useless beauty"/"art for art's sake" approach. It's a good song, and I agree with the sentiments; I think perhaps I just need a little more art, and a little less exhortation in my life) Fenario (still hard for me to believe that he flat picks this) Deportee (fine voices, nice instrumentation, fell completely flat because of the acoustics, I felt) Fishing (Said his father actually did take him fishing in Ontario, and when RS played the song for him, his father said "I thought you liked those fishing trips?"! Are You Happy Now Last Fare of the Day (there was a point between AYHN and LFOTD where people were yelling songs, and I did not get a chance to yell out Famous Blue Raincoat. Damn! I console myself by convincing myself that he wouldn't have done it anyway. When someone yelled out LFOTD, it appeared that he was doing that next, regardless of requests. So Says the Whippoorwill (he said it was pointed out to him that the song was ornithologically inaccurate in that whippoorwills don't fly in the afternoon. When he mentioned that at another concert, someone told him they don't eat seeds, either. However, RS was able to point out that they also don't talk. He ended with that, but came back on to do There Goes Mavis (again, the dizzying guitar work) I can't really say that the show was all that great, even though RS was in fine form, great voice, nice anecdotes, affable, etc. Sara Milonovich and Greg Anderson were a very nice complement (I got used to the bass)especially Sara M, on vocals and violin. To me they felt wasted in that venue. John McD. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:32:57 -0700 (PDT) From: Janet Cinelli Subject: [RS] RS at The Concert Hall As a last minute plan, I too was there. John, we were probably sitting next to each other. I was also center 5 rows back which amazed me because I just bought the tickets at the beginning of the week! I felt the same, it was difficult listening to the concert with the echo or distortion or whatever it was! I don't think that man was in Deliverance, he just did the banjo part. I could've done without that but Tom was wonderful, very entertaining. Sara and Greg really highlighted the show for me. She put a fresh spin on Transit, a song I've long grown tired of. My apologies to anyone who still likes it! I was hoping to hear John play more than the bass and occasional guitar. I wanted to hear him play bouzouki, I don't know if that's spelled right! I'm always glad to hear Fenario, just for the guitar part. I don't think I'd go there again to see anyone though. The seats I had were pretty good, it was just too hard to hear the music that way. Janet PS I'm going to see Harry Connick Jr. at Radio City Music Hall tonight, (my sister won tickets) Wonder if we'll ever get to see Richard play there! I bet the acoustics are a hell of alot better! heh, heh Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:39:16 -0400 From: "Jeff Bernstein" Subject: Re: [RS] RS at The Concert Hall > I don't think that man was in Deliverance, he > just did the banjo part. I'm assuming that you are talking about Eric Weissberg, who has a much longer and more impressive list of credits than playing the banjo in Deliverance. Here's his bio from Allmusic. Jeff - ----- Multi-instrumentalist Eric Weissberg will always be remembered as a one-hit wonder for his 1973 smash "Dueling Banjos," but that was only a small part of his lengthy career as a studio musician. Master of ten instruments -- bass (acoustic and electric), guitar, fiddle, banjo, kazoo, mandolin, pedal steel, Dobro, and jew's harp -- Weissberg has accompanied a who's who of folk-pop artists, including Judy Collins, Jim Croce, John Denver, Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Ian & Sylvia, Melanie, Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Doc Watson, as well as mainstream pop and rock stars like Burt Bacharach, David Byrne, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, and Talking Heads, and such jazz performers as Bob James, Earl Klugh, and Herbie Mann in a career that started in the late '50s and was still going strong at the end of the century. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin and the Juilliard School of Music, Weissberg was part of a community of young New York City musicians who became interested in old-time country and bluegrass music in the late '50s and began to gather to play on Sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The group included Stefan Grossman, Roger Sprung, Bob Yellin, David Grisman, and Marshall Brickman [Jeff adds - who went on to collaborate with Woody Allen on Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan, and wrote numerous other screenplays and whose latest project is the Broadway show Jersey Boys] , among others. In 1958, Weissberg, Yellin, and singer/guitarist John Herald formed the Greenbriar Boys, one of the first groups to play at Gerde's Folk City, but Weissberg was with the band only a short time before leaving in 1959. He performed at the Newport Folk Festival that summer and began to get his first session work, appearing on records by Tommy Makem and Cisco Houston, among others. In 1963, he and Brickman recorded a duo album for Elektra Records, New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass. During the '60s, Weissberg was a late member of the folk group the Tarriers (with Brickman, Clarence Cooper, and Bob Carey), appearing on their final album for Decca Records, The Tarriers, which was recorded live at the Bitter End coffeehouse in Greenwich Village. He was also a member of the Blue Velvet Band (with Jim Rooney, Richard Greene, and Bill Keith), which released the album Sweet Moments on Warner Bros. Records in 1969. And he performed the world premiere of Earl Robinson's "Concerto for Five-String Banjo" with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Symphony in 1967. But most of his time was spent doing session work. Between 1964 and 1969, he appeared on albums by Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Doc Watson, Country Joe McDonald, Jim Croce, and John Denver, among others. He was just as busy in the early '70s, appearing on albums by Herbie Mann, John Denver, Country Joe McDonald, Melanie, Sha Na Na, Barbra Streisand, and Loudon Wainwright III, among others. As part of his other session work of the time, Weissberg received a call to perform music for a film soundtrack. A movie was being made of Southern poet James Dickey's best-selling novel Deliverance, about a group of suburbanites who go for a hunting trip in the woods that has unexpected consequences. Dickey, who wrote the screenplay, had heard an old banjo tune on the radio and gotten the idea of using it in a scene in which one of the characters encounters a mute country boy and communicates with him by playing a banjo/guitar duet. Weissberg called fellow musician Steve Mandell, and the two traveled to Atlanta to attend the shooting and coach the actors in miming their performance of the song. That was the last Weissberg heard of it until the fall of 1972, when Warner Bros. released the film and "Dueling Banjos," as the track had been dubbed, began to get such a reaction that Warner Bros. issued the Weissberg/Mandell recording as a single. The label did not bother to inform Weissberg of its action, and some early copies of the disc were even credited to Deliverance. (It also turned out that, far from being a traditional song, the tune was actually "Feuding Banjos," written by Arthur Smith and first recorded by him for MGM Records in 1955.) When the single took off after entering the charts in January 1973, Warner Bros., which had acquired Elektra Records, dug up the ten-year-old Weissberg/Brickman album New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass, replaced the opening cuts on each side with "Dueling Banjos" and its B-side, "End of a Dream," and re-released it under the title "Dueling Banjos" from the Original Soundtrack Deliverance. Weissberg was not informed of this action in advance, either. Both the single and the album topped the charts and went gold. (The single also topped the easy listening charts and made the Top Five of the country charts, and the album also topped the country charts.) The following year, "Dueling Banjos" won Weissberg and Mandell the Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance. Weissberg assembled a performing group, which he naturally called Deliverance, featuring Mandell, Charlie Brown, Tony Brown, and Richard Crooks, and played a series of clubs and concert halls. Reconciling with Warner Bros., he signed a recording contract with the label and recorded an album, Rural Free Delivery, which appeared in the charts briefly in the fall of 1973. He kept the band together for a while, and even placed a revival of "Yakety Yak" in the lower reaches of the country charts in the spring of 1975 on Epic Records, but "Dueling Banjos" was really a fluke, and soon he was spending most of his time backing other musicians once again. Not that he had ever left such work. Between 1973 and 1975, he had appeared on albums by Judy Collins, Jim Croce, John Denver, Richie Havens, Billy Joel, B.J. Thomas, Bob James, Willie Nelson, and Esther Phillips, among others, even getting a call from Bob Dylan to play on Blood on the Tracks. From then to the end of the decade, his studio clients included Blood, Sweat & Tears, John Denver, Bette Midler, Dory Previn, the Starland Vocal Band, Loudon Wainwright III, Burt Bacharach, Leon Redbone, and Tom Paxton. A particularly notable recording was Jean Ritchie's None But One (1977), on which Ritchie was backed by a band organized by Weissberg; the LP was named Best Folk Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine. Weissberg seems to have been less active in the early '80s, but in the second half of the decade he was heard on albums by Leon Redbone, Talking Heads, Aztec Two-Step, Art Garfunkel, Earl Klugh, Jude Cole, Peter, Paul & Mary, David Byrne, and Anita Carter. The early '90s found him taking more selected sessions, though he still appeared on albums by Bill Keith, Doc Severinsen, Judy Collins, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Robert James Waller, and Tom Chapin. In the mid-'90s, he began touring regularly as a backup musician for Art Garfunkel, who had him perform "Dueling Banjos" as part of the show, but he also found time to do occasional sessions such as those for Nanci Griffith's Other Voices, Too (1998), Bette Midler's Bathhouse Betty (1998), the original Broadway cast album for The Civil War (1999), Tom Chapin's This Pretty Planet (2000), and Judy Collins' Judy Collins Live at Wolf Trap (2000). ------------------------------ End of shindell-list-digest V9 #63 **********************************