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kenny weir

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Everything posted by kenny weir

  1. You can't beat this - $12 for two discs at Amazon: And this is a classic:
  2. I'm surprised they haven't been. But just wait - they'll get done. Recently, after waiting and waiting, I recently got the first (classic) Redwing album, which was also a Fantasy release - recently reissued by Fallout. And in the past couple of years I've also snapped up the PPL double, various Sons of Champlin on Acadia and other goodies.
  3. Yeah, I also subscribed to Hot Wacks - they're the crew, IIRC, who turned me on to John Martyn. Another band championed by this lot (ZZ I think, maybe Dark Star) was Clover. I never did hear their American rekkids, but I rilly liked the second of their two Brit-recorded albums. Heck, I'd love to thumb through some old copies of these rags. I remembers the ravings of Steve Burgess fondly.
  4. WTF? Pete Frame was Mac Garry? My first zine experiences in NZ as a high school boy were with Blues Unlimited and, a little later, Living Blues. But I soon moved on to Zig Zag, Dark Star and Omaha Rainbow, the John Stewart-devoted zine put out by Pete O'Brien. Just about the time I arrived in London, Zig Zag went punk, but I credit all three mags with opening my ears to numerous goodies that have stuck with me. I borrowed, with permission, a Craig Fuller (Pure Prairie League) interview in Omaha Rainbow for the underground freebie rag I was puvblishing in NZ at the time. I've been meaning to grab the completist double CD of Kaleidoscope for some time - I'm not sure how much I'd actually listen to it, though! Another zine I was very into at the time was Not Fade Away, put out by Doug Hanners in Austin, Texas. I styed with him on my first trip to the US, in 1977. The internet has changed everything, but I still vividly recall the intense, enlightening, explosive pleasure those zines - little treasures of hipness - would deliver on dropping into our mailbox in the cultural wasteland that was Dunedin.
  5. Yep, although I think guitarist rather than bassist. And, truthfully, at least three of Scaggs' subsequent albums - S/T. My Time and Moments are cleary superior, IMO, to anything released under Miller's name before or after. But then, I consider all three masterpieces, even if minor masterpieces.. Hey I have nothin' against Miller - good luck to him. But slagging off the likes of the GD is just cheap BS. As far as SF blowins, I'd vote for Cody and Crew and also Doug Sahm and crew. That Sir Doug Quintet box set is calling me ...
  6. Oh yeah - fuck him. Sounds like sheer envy to me. There's a choice few pars in the McNally book quoting Miles Davis and his horror at the Miller band's efforts and then delight with the Dead when the Davis crew played with them at Fillmore. I concur. IIRC, Davis compared to the difference between non-music and music.
  7. As a daily commuter I can sympathise with this idiot's disgruntlementisation with mobile phones, farting passengers and so on. But I won't. If he want to pursue his "right to be let alone", he should make some lifestyle changes so he doesn't need to travel on public transport any longer.
  8. I concur with most of the suggestions made so far, but have one important addition to make - one that has shed valuable and enjoyable light for me on my previous and current incarnations as blues fan, R&B fan, country fan and so on: That Devilin' Tune - all four boxes. Also: If you're up for a special treat, Amazon has Revenant's Charley Patton box for $170 - which strikes me as something of a bargain given how much I continue to enjoy it and how much it sells for here in Melbourne. Old Hat is the bees knees as far as reissue labels go these days - I have three of 'em: Good For What Ails You, and the two black/blues/jazz fiddle comps, Folks He Sure Do Pull Some Bow and Violin Sing The Blues For Me. There's some duplication with other stuff I have, but they just hang together really well - in the sense that, yeah, comps are often the way to go with this sort of stuff. Having just bought all three Papa Charlie Jackson CDs on Document, I am intrigued by that label's, er, documentation of early country. Some really esoteric but enjoyable stuff in there. Another new and expensive byway to explore!
  9. 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.
  10. 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).
  11. GA - check it out, man, very cool promo ad for the AFL:
  12. 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.
  13. Donna's best, IMO, is Rain off Cats Under The Stars.
  14. I like it - "The Complete Maternity Leave Shows"! Like, man, how many discs would that be?
  15. I think "caterwauling" is the phrase you're seeking.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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!"
  19. 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.
  20. 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
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. Please save the intimate conversations for a pm Bucky. That seems bit tough - it's not that personal!
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