AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

SOUNDCHECK

With an array of regurgitated sounds taking the floor in the music biz it's becoming effectivley more difficult to put your finger on authenticity or just what seem's to be bland covers of 60's 70's & 80's jams. Assuming your role models idenity being one thing & just knowing your history in the evidence of your music being another, distinction will play a key role in the progression of music as we know it. "Hail to the future" i say, still believing genius is amongst all the koas. I've recently thumed threw countless acts with this potential and cheffed up a few to serve as examples....

WILD BEASTS-THE OLD DOG (acoustic)
 

HAUNTED GRAFFITI-SHE'S GONE (sound check)
 

GHOSTLAND OBSERVATORY-PIANO MAN/STRANGER LOVER


PVC STREET GANG-CUTLASS


HARLEM-SOUTH OF FRANCE


Till next time lads & ladies this is a sound check sign off. Hope you enjoyed!

INHALED HISTORY

    The Zig Zag man was one of the most popular tattoo designs from the 1960s. The folk story goes that in the 19th century during a battle os Sevastopol, a French soldier also known as Zouave, had the misfourtune of having his clay pipe broken by a flying bullet. Needing a smoke he decided to try rolling his tobacco in a piece of paper torn from the bag that his gunpowder came in. 

   This worked but it was in 1894 that the Braunstein Brothers figured out the process of interleaving papers in a zig zag manner and putting them in a convient paper booklet that took the market by storm. Thank you Braunstein Brothers.

POW POW BANG BANG

For some unfathomable reason one of the greatest bands to come out of the U.S.A. in the last 25 years has never seemed to receive the respect it is due. Coming straight out of the L.A. punk scene in 1980, The Gun Club were one of the first to take a really punk attitude to roots music. True, they had been predated by several bands like The Blasters, NRBQ, etc. but these were really way too respectful of the material they were recreating. The Gun Club, according at least to bandleader Jeffrey Lee Pierce's autobiography Go Tell The Mountain, set out on a mission to destroy.

Instead, they appear to have fathered, or at least heavily influenced, the whole No Depression alternative country genre. Don't let that put you off; most progenitors of similar influence are stellar compared to their bastard offspring. Take Nick Cave's (one of Jeffrey Lee's personal friends) work with both the Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds as a prime example. There was a short lived reissue campaign afoot over the last year with Buddah records having re-released Mother Juno and Pastoral Hide and Seek/Divinity in December and Rhino reissuing Fire of Love, viewed by many as their classic recording in January. This was actually the 3rd time it had been re-released in the space of a year. For a little recognised band there also appear to be a plethora of bootlegs doing the rounds. One classic one Moonlight Motel was also re-released under a different title last year. Deprived of the iconic loop none to say the least, Gun Club is still at the fore front of lyrical couragousness with a brash array of genre bending audio to back it up. 

JOE KENNEDY AND THE TRUE AMERICAN DREAM

“Beautiful, vivacious, bright, witty, and very naughty… a Kennedy, through and through” writes Chris Buckley of his daughter’s friend Kate Kennedy. Buckley’s philosophical apple may have fallen far from his father’s, William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, tree, but his description of America’s answer to English gentry is spot on. Joe Kennedy’s dynasty has fascinated, intrigued, infuriated, and – with questionable success – governed America for decades. And they’re at it again, in the re-issued PBS documentary “The Kennedys.”

The film, scaled back from its original four hours, traces the family’s rise from investor, influencer, and bootlegger Joe to his nine children, and their heirs. The documentary is worthwhile historically, and also for its rare footage of super-lawyer Clark Clifford (a native Missourian), enlisted by Jack Kennedy to talk his father, Joe, out of an ill-conceived decision to have Jack’s brother Robert made attorney general. Joe was shortly thereafter relieved of an Ambassadorship for his Nazi sympathies.



If nothing else, the film is an eloquent study in power and drive: Joe’s. By hook or by crook, the Kennedy patriarch built an empire for his family and saw to it that they took advantage of his work. “The Kennedys” is a story of that uniquely American vision, to build a family, twisted to the power of one hundred, and its tag-line could well be Hawthorne’s old adage: “Families are always rising and falling in America.” In Joe’s family, the rise is meteoric. The fall is equally so, although more quiet: the family’s position, so painstakingly constructed, is the perfect foundation for infighting and dysfunction. The documentary, in detailing an American dream gone awry, is an equally American cautionary tale.