kenny weir

Here in Melbourne and elsewhere I wouldn't be surprised to see a rise in house fires as a result of smoking bans in pubs and clubs. People who may have stayed on drinking AND smoking, stumbling home and straight into bed may now be boozing on at home.

No, I think that's all gone now. The season proper started last night, with Richmond (last year's wooden spooners) getting up to beat the loathsome Carlton (with new captain Chris Judd playing his first game for the Blues).

GA - check it out, man, very cool promo ad for the AFL:

Yep, and as well his "hee haw giddy up" cowboy mannerisms on the western stuff really grates sometimes. In fact, the whole lot of 'em suck so large when it comes to singing, when I get home tonight I'ma gonna burn burn all my GD artyfacts.

Donna's best, IMO, is Rain off Cats Under The Stars.

I like it - "The Complete Maternity Leave Shows"! Like, man, how many discs would that be?

I think "caterwauling" is the phrase you're seeking.

Yep, but that all went down long after I'd split, aside froma few Toy Love gigs in Wellington. When I was a kid, Dunedin prided itself on being "NZ's fourth largest city", which semed like some kinda BD. There seemed like a lot of heavier industry and so on. Just as I was looking to get out of there, the first tremors of globalisation kicked in. I've only been back, really, for my dad's funeral about 10 years ago. But I suspect I'd dig the place these days. I doubt it's the small-town myopic rugby-obsessed joint that dwells in my memories. These days, I've been led to believe it's all about the university, tourism, heritage buildings and so on, prolly with coffee shops and cool eateries and book shops and bars sprouting all over the place. Mind, you among all the straightness I remember so well, there was always a pretty staunch stream of alternative loopiness there. Of which Flying Nun was certainly part.

Oddly enough, but not really surprisingly, there were 2 or 3 record shops in my hometown of Dunedin, deep in the South Island of NZ, that had pretty darn good blues sections at the time I started taking an interest, in the late '60s and early '70s. (Dunedin's population then was about 100,000). Certainly, much, much better than you average mall store in 3-million plus Melbourne today. But still, information was exceedingly hard to come by. So getting a copy of Paul Oliver's The Story Of The Blues as a birthday prezzie was a a really BFD. Oliver, IIRC, did a pretty good job of covering the jazz band-backed chick blues singers and the minstrelsy influence and so on. Yet even then, I avoided Ma Rainey and the likes, and also Papa Charlie Jackson, in favour of the "far cooler" Robert Johnson, Hooker and so on. The idea of digging ona banjo-guitar playing minstrel bluesman didn't appeal. Which was/is crazy - as about the same time, thanks to another gift (a banjo that I never did master) and a mind-blowing Dunedin concert by Mike and Alice seeger, I was also embarking on a country journey. In recent years I have got a few Jackson sides on various compilations, but recently had a burning desire to hear more, so I ordered his complete recordings as found on three Dopcument label CDs. I have the first two so far. Ah - sweet epiphany! By the time I was 14 or so, I was subscribing to the Brit magazine Blues Unlimited, and then started importing albums to NZ at great cost. The first was Lightnin' Slim's Rooster Blues. As a pretty much penniless schoolboy it was tough. At one stage there I was gathering up empty beer cans at rugby union matches and sending them by the hundred to a blues lovin' can collector on the east coast of the US. He gave me 20 cents a can and sent me albums. I visited him later when I first hit the US. Those Blue unlimted guys played a role in keeping my tastes mongrel, too, with the likes of swamp poppers Cookie and the Cupcakes. John Broven in particular, with his subsequent book South to Louisiana, set me up for along love affair with cajun, zydeco, swamp pop, and Bruce Bastin's Flyright label had all kinds of crazy stuff on it.

Ha ha - that's pretty funny. I can see him now, white-coated nerd with clipboard and heavy rimmed glasses researching online forum deviancy ... "Start new account on jazz BB. CHECK! Start thread comparing musicians and mere listeners that has a superficial harmlessness masking its poisonous heart. CHECK! Start another gratuitous thread, again ostensibly harmless, suggesting many members are drunk and/or insane and/or utterly loopy and/or fucked-up and bitterly twisted nobodies. CHECK! Delete posts and depart. CHECK!"

What a revealing post! If I was a player who had posted the above, I would I suspect reflect on whether whatever I said on the relative dynamics of being a muso and/or a listener were worth the space they took up. As it is, I'm inclined to think that while you may be a fine/great/good/ musician, you sound like a piss poor listener! If your listening is so overwhelmingly dictated by your current playing needs/wants, it seems you're likely ill-placed to pass comment on the art of listening. It also strikes that it may be somewhat insulting to the art of your fellow players.

I've seen some great jazz ion my time, but the life-changing gigs are all pretty much non-jazz for me: Muddy Waters, Christchurch Town Hall, 1973 Grateful Dead, Winterland, San Francisco, 1977 Flamin' Groovies, Roundhouse, London, 1978 Solomon Burke, New Orleans Municipal Auditorium, 1994

Perhaps March's problem is that like Clapton, myself and so many others, his path as a fan and a writer was formed at least in some partmand perhaps in BIG part, by the trends and dynamics described in the book.

I have yet to read the book - and am looking forward to it. But I get the sense Marsh - for whatever reason - is criticising it for not being something it never claims to be. I for one am very interested in the dynamics of how my early blues/roots tastes were affected by the blues mafia or whatever you want to call them. And that's quite a different thing from writing a history of the music itself. These days, it's a pleasure to enjopy a far more encompassing view of pop music and its history, but I find it all very intriguing.

I could've started a thread about this, but I figure pretty much anyone interested lobs in here every now and then, so ... In my sometimes fevered efforts to replicate the GD experience, I have bought some real turkeys in recent years. BUT - this one is a cracker. I stumbled across it at CDBaby and took a punt - and am very glad I did. It reminds me of the GD only a little bit, but others names that came to mind as I was listening were: Gene Clark, America, Spirit, Steely Dan, Traffic and many more. It's only marginally truly psychedelic - there's some feedback guitar and sitar stuff. But the playing is actually more jazzy than I expected, something accentuated by flute on several tracks. The members come from Them, the Buckinghams and Baby Huey, the soul behemouth - quite an interesting lineup. Truth Of Them and Other Tales Truth, the Chicago based late 60's band containing three ex-Them members, is proud to release "Of Them and Other Tales", which is almost 70 minutes of psychedelic drenched previously unreleased originals.tracks Obviously Van Morrison and Them were 60's rock icons. But what happened to the rest of Them? Jim Armstrong, Ray Elliot and Kenny McDowell regrouped with a top flight Chicago rhythm section and Truth was a mainstay on the midwest underground ballroom/ festival circuit at the end of the sixties. "Of Them and Other Tales" showcases their previously unreleased studio recordings in stunning fidelity. Truth's adventurous late sixties' sound is a bit hard to categorize, but it's all here: sitar, flute, exotic studio effects and (most important) great songwriting. The packaging on this cd is equally killer- the lavish, in depth liner notes (including many photos and archival images) tell the Them/Truth story as never before.

Uh, black. After all, I do live in Melbourne - where black is the new black AND the old black. Nah, just crapping on - my actual favourite colour is whichever of my Grateful dead t-shirts I am wearing. And only ONE of them is black.

Please save the intimate conversations for a pm Bucky. That seems bit tough - it's not that personal!

Originally from Dunedin in the deep south of NZ; have lived elsewhere in NZ and London; past 20+ years in Melbourne Orstralia. With much time also spent in New Orleans.

No doubt, but we don't see much by the way of American sweet stuff in Melbourne. Besides, we have such a strong Italian influence here, that if ya really want quality sweeties it's best to think biscotti and/or gelati.

Hmmm...cinamon cookies...never tried any of those. They good, Kenny? Hmmm, yup, fully of sugar. And cinamon. Crunchy, too. I loved Stanko for a while there, and even saw him at a festival a few years back. I doubt, though, he'd turn me on these days.

Today I'm full-bore on some Dutch cinamon cookies Bennie and me got when we were buying some sausages for din dins. God but I'm a sucker for that sweet/bitter coffee/cookie combo!

For me, on the evidence of the two releases so far, the Road Trips idea is looking pretty shaky. Not that I'm a completist or such like - after all, several of the band's greatest albums were compiled the same way. But I found the first Road Trips just pretty much useless. Although I concede that was my first serious foray into the post-Godchaux lineup. But but but ... a big part of the problem was that some change in the overall sound means I can no longer so easily separate, in my ears/mind, the playing of Garica, Mydland and Weir. There's no particular reason why this should be a problem, I guess. But I'm just so used to hearing the band the same way I listen to a really cooking hard bop outfit: All easily indentifiable parts, but sounding like one sweet-rocking whole. Road Trips Vol1 No2 is much, much better - there's some really great stuff. But some patchy things, too. Oh well, that's the GD! I guess it's tricky, but tune order is really crucial here. Don't know about the packaging, either. All very eco/greenie and stuff, but I wonder about its longevity.

Now that's bloody funny! What to you expect? It's a weird place.

FIXED:

A guarantee: This absolutely will not happen because this guy is ... 1. Too lazy. 2. Too self-observing. 3. Not really interested in a conversation with people, but mostly in having his own views commented upon. Postively or negatively, doesn't really matter. Looking up threads on artists would take time, and besides by posting on earlier threads he would be merely joining a conversation rather than initiating one. Not the same buzz at all, eh?