Visions of Bowie danced in their heads

I'm a sucker for traditions and it's that time of year again! When we make some hot cocoa and snuggle up to watch Bing Crosby's Christmas Program. Oh wait - what's this? Bowie lives next door to Bing's Christmas palace? Oh, marvelous! Really fine.

Electric Miles and Miles and Miles

"We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks have the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em. Play something else."
- Miles Davis in Notes and Tones, interviews with Arthur Taylor

Miles Davis went electric with In a Silent Way (1969). He followed that up with Bitches Brew (1970), A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971), and my fave, On The Corner (1972).

On the Corner's personnel is stacked with the usual Davis suspects: Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Mtume, et al. And it's like Jazz, Rock, and Funk are strutting down the street together on Grounation Day and they run into the three hot chicks Freedom, Space and Love and they just start dancing... Oh hell, I can't describe. It's a vinyl slab of party sugar?
Nevermind...Just look at the cover above (which is amazing). And watch the vid below, which is live in Vienna 1973. (Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas on guitar, Dave Liebman on sax, Michael Henderson on bass, Al Foster on drums, Mtume on percussion).

When Children's TV was Weird, and We were Weird Too

Bad news: I could not find footage on the internets of Buffy Sainte-Marie performing "Codine," which I was singing all day.
Good news: Back when Sesame Street was balls-out weird, Buffy and Fred the Wonder Horse mouth harp jammed "Cripple Creek."


UPDATE!
Next, Buffy explains breastfeeding to Big Bird! YES! When 100% hippies ran public television it was obviously AWESOME. The name of Buffy's babe is Dakota "Cody" Starblanket Wolfchild.

Freakfolk community, how have you not yet produced a band called Starblanket Wolfchild? Slackers.

Happy Bday Kenneth Patchen!

Tomorrow (december 13th) is the 97th anniversary of the birth of Kenneth Patchen. Let us all raise a glass for this man. Were my records not in storage I would throw the Folkways Love Poems side on the 'table and have a plain supper and be wonderful.

"A great deal has been said of the handless serpents
Which war has set loose in the gay milk of our heads
But because you braid your hair and taste like honey of heaven
We go together into town to buy wine and yellow candles."

(We Go Out Together In The Staring Town)

Peter Brotzmann has released some beautiful interpretations of Patchen's poems - 14 Love Poems (FMP) and Be Music Night with his Chicago Tentet (Okkadisk). Be Music... features Micheal Pearson reading the poems while the tentet shwrils around it. (Shwrils=weird typo that I have allowed to become a word. A volunteer, if you will.)

Here's a link to a Poetry Foundation blog entry on Patchen's sweet sweet painting poems. Love the little animals!

And finally, here is a Robert Creeley reading with a little shout out to KP.


May your Kenneth Patchen Birthday be sweet.

Erica Pomerance is a documentarian in Montreal?

I apologize to those of you who are more tuned in to the beat of progress and history, but I'm blown away by my recent googling of Erica Pomerance. She released You Used to Think on ESP in 1968 and then faded away, her happy weirdness never to be heard again. You Used to Think is a head-scratchin beaut - a healthy stew of 60s New York folk groove, free jazz and awesome drug induced usage of studio technology. I'm a sucker for a double-tracked vocal, and the title track may be my fave use of the ol' double track ever.
I was told, and I believed, that she had disappeared like a puff of the goodsmoke that fomented those tunes. BUT DUDE that is not the case.

Blastitude published a great interview with the lady a few years ago that I apparently missed. She is a documentarian! She lives a normal life in Quebec! She sings to her kids!
The Blastitude interview also has some juicy anecdotes about the album sessions. Apparently it was all recorded in two nights - one with jazz guys and the second a "snowy, acid-laced night." Excellent.
And here is her imdb page - where her best-known film appears to be Dabla! Excision, a film about the movement to stop Female Circumcision.

She's going to be Ms. March in my "Gone Ladies" Calendar for '09.

Life Changing Decision

Here it is. I'm going to tell my parents that I'm going back to law school next semester but instead I'm going to follow the Dead with Lindsay Weir and Kim Kelly. DO NOT be an asshole and nark me out.

(there's prob better footage than this, but I was in a hurry...)

More Greatest Moments in Dylan at the Grammies

While we're on the topic, let's relive the Soy Bomb Incident from the 1998 Grammy Awards.
Bob Dylan performed Love Sick from Time Out of Mind and around about the 3 minute mark, a young "multimedia artist" named Michael Portnoy swooped in to share a little What with us all.

Dylan's sideways glance is described by some as "startled" ... but I submit to you this evidence. Dylan kind of just ignores Soy Boy, he keeps the jam alive.
Oh, and PS: Kelsey Grammar is kind of a queef, isn't he?

Locusts Sang: Bob Dylan Tells Us What

As this country was just one month into Operation Desert Storm, we celebrated our recording industry with that annual pile of turd The Grammy Awards. Phil Collins took home Record of the Year, Mariah Carey won Best New Artist. And Dylan slammed down a multi-guitared version of Masters of War as a prelude to his "Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award." (You can watch the song, but the real treasure starts at 04:35)



Somehow, he managed to castrate the entire room.

"It is possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your own ways. Thank you."