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The Sun Came Out. Highly recommended by Smart Energy.

The Sun Came Out: 7 Worlds Collide Again

How do 20 musicians who’ve never worked together before record an album of original material in three weeks? First, you get Neil Finn to invite you to the wild west coast of New Zealand. Make it for right around Christmas time, the heart of southern hemisphere summer, and have Finn invite not just you, but your whole family.

Ask everyone to bring a song. “We need songs,” Finn would’ve pointed out. “We’re recording an album.”

But no one does, of course, because artists are more human than humans, and thus are more easily distracted, are lazier, are more prone to procrastination. But it doesn’t matter because there is a deadline. Record the album, then play the shows.

Don’t want to let your mates down, so write something good and then learn to play it.

Because we’re not doing this for fun, nor for a nice subtropical vacation, but for Oxfam. So we want it to be good, so people will buy the album and come to the shows so we can make some money and give it all away. Read the rest of this entry »

“Today I lost my best friend,” guitarist Steve Cropper wrote on his Facebook page. “The World has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live.” Cropper, who was on the same Blues Brothers tour in Japan, said Dunn died in his sleep. Dunn was 70.

Listen to this guy walk the bass! Awesome fingerstyle guitar playing.

This is from Skye’s DVD, Solo Performance on the Sonoma Coast.

This is hilarious.

We saw Tower of Power last night at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival at the University of Idaho (KJ and I are both alums) in Moscow. They started at 11 p.m. and funked the house till 1 a.m.

I love what Larry Braggs, the lead singer, had to say last night about the group’s 45th anniversary DVD: “We know you college kids are broke and are gonna copy it. We’re kinda OK with that. It’s your parents we get mad it for copying.”

Here’s a cool rap video urging you to stop using all that plastic. This is in keeping with Plastic Planet, a documentary I reviewed here a while back. This video also puts me in mind of another film I reviewed, Gas Hole — which so totally missed the point about fossil fuels that I didn’t bother posting it here on Smart Energy (but you can read the review on Curled Up with a Good DVD).

Holy crap, Eric Skye cooks. I’ve been listening to him for a few months now after getting on to him via a guitar mag article. Today I just got his solo acoustic album, “For Lulu.” Tis amazing.

His String Trio is hot stuff, too. Check out this 6+-minute version of Skye’s composition, “Happy Cake.” Skye bakes the cake, and the mando solo is the shit!

Multi-instrumentalist Levon Helm was the chief voice of The Band -- and it's key songwriter.

I just heard an interview with Robbie Robertson, who has a new album out. In the interview, Robertson talked about what he was thinking and doing when he wrote all those great songs for The Band. The thing is, he didn’t write those songs and he continues to lie about it. Please don’t support this rip-off artist by buying his albums.

What happened with The Band and its songs was two-fold, and both were “business as usual” practice at the time.

Back then, it was standard practice to assign song writing credits to one or two members of a band. Witness the nom du musique “Lennon/McCarthy.” Paul McCarthy has said repeatedly that it wasn’t a fair way to do things and he wished he hadn’t gone along with the plan. For one thing, in the digital world, McCarthy’s name gets truncated, so it looks like his song-writing “partner” (they almost never wrote songs together) wrote everything. So it was with The Band: Robbie Robertson got credit for everything.

The other thing that has been standard operating procedure in the music industry is ripping off musicians and, when possible, musicians screwing their band mates. So it was with The Band: Robertson got the song writing credit and he and The Band’s manager shared the royalties, screwing the rest of the team.

Consider The Band’s songs and consider what Robertson has produced since the demise of The Band. The Band’s songs are noted for the stories they tell and for their deft reinterpretation of what now call Americana, American roots music. Thing is, since then, Robertson hasn’t written a single story-song. Indeed, he hasn’t written a memorable song. Ever. Period. More, though, was the subject of so many of the great Band songs, namely, life in the South. Where Levon Helm grew up (in Arkansas, in and around Fayetteville).

As a writer on NJN asks, how is it possible that Robertson, a Canadian Jew who grew up, the first few years of his life, on a Six Nations reserve, wrote “The Night They Drove Ol Dixie Down”, “Up on Cripple Creek,” or “Strawberry Wine”? Nothing Robertson did before or since is even remotely similar. Listen to any album Levon Helm was involved in since The Band (or before, when he was the leader of the Hawks) and the deep roots of his Southern American background come ringing through.

It’s a sad statement about the music business that the thief is the one inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and that music consumers are willing to go along with the lie by buying the poseur’s albums.