Tag: the Band

MIXTAPE: Caleb Caudle’s Country Funk Favorites

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There’s a special thing that happens when the groove of soul music meets the sharp pen of country music. I’ve heard folks call it Country Soul, Country Funk, Cosmic American Music or simply “The Rub.” I refer to it as Down Home Funk. It keeps the toes tapping and the mind thinking. The special blend is a sound I gravitated towards a few years ago and it really made its way into my new record, Better Hurry Up. — Caleb Caudle

Guy Clark – “Texas Cookin’”

Guy comes out swingin’ on his sophomore record with the funkiest rhythm to any of his tunes up to that point. It’s so greasy and I’m hungry just listening to it right now. Long live food in songs!

Bill Withers – “Grandma’s Hands”

Drenched with nostalgia, this is one of my favorite tunes from Mr. Withers. He puts his personal experiences in a songs and something personal becomes so relatable. It gets me thinking about my own grandma. I’m a sucker for that Wurlitzer.

Bobbie Gentry – “Louisiana Man”

The first time I heard this tune was on a Doug Kershaw record. I love how she makes it her own. She has one of my very favorite voices. Even got a little bitty muskrat cousin! Bless it.

The Band – “Up on Cripple Creek”

I mean who am I kidding? This whole playlist could be The Band. They changed the way I heard music. They take every brand of roots music and blend it up effortlessly and effectively. God bless Levon Helm and all of his magic. I’ve touched the horseshoe at Big Pink on three separate occasions. It’s a healthy obsession.

Jeannie C. Riley – “Back Side of Dallas”

I got turned on to this tune from the Cocaine & Rhinestones three-parter on “Harper Valley PTA.” I love the vocal delivery here. Total swagger. The band is bold and the lyrics are gritty. Just feels real man, I dig it.

JJ Cale – “Lies”

His groove is so perfect, I feel like he drops the listener right into it. His guitar tone is always so on point. I’ve spent way too much time watching YouTube videos and trying to figure out what all is going on. Lies, Lies, Lies!

Townes Van Zandt – “Where I Lead Me”

I like sad TVZ a lot but I love TVZ when he has a chip on his shoulder and a blues band behind him. Everything feels nice and loose. I’ve always loved the line “In the meantime, make a little money and buy a little mercy”

Aretha Franklin – “The Weight”

As much as I love the original from The Band, I consider this the definitive version. The band is great, especially that slide work from Brother Duane. She is peaking the mic all over this one and it’s just so perfect.

Bobby Charles – “Small Town Talk”

Being from a small town, this one hits home. I love this Bobby Charles self-titled record. I hope more folks get turned on to it. The whole record sounds like a ferry ride down the Mississippi River. Who are we to judge one another? That could cause a lot of hurt.

Dolly Parton – “Jolene”

What hasn’t been said about this tune? I think the greatness comes from it still sounding fresh to this day. The riff, the vocal, the lyrics… this is a perfect song. I’m sure it really stood out on country radio at the time. It’s haunting. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know this song.

Leon Russell – “Tight Rope”

Like The Band, I’m sure I could have made this whole playlist the master of space and time. He’s peculiar and familiar at the same time. I like the way this one bounces. A great opening track for my favorite record of his, Carney.

Linda Ronstadt – “Willin’”

I was familiar with the Little Feat version because it was all over classic rock radio when I was growing up. I recently got turned on to this take, I really love how patient it is. Great vocal take from Linda.

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain

MIXTAPE: Stevie Redstone’s Roots Music to Drive To

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I love me some driving. Whether it be for touring, or just a hankering to get out there and see some place I’ve never seen, I always enjoy packing up and hitting the pavement. While I do plenty of searching for new tunage, here are a few of my longtime staples you’d likely hear if you were in the passenger seat on a long ride with Stevie. — Stevie Redstone

The Band – “Across the Great Divide”

Nothing quite says road music to me more than The Band. They have so many great ones to travel to, but “Across the Great Divide” sticks out for me.

Paul Simon – “Graceland”

It’s no secret to those who know me that Paul is probably my favorite American songwriter. The Graceland album is a personal fave and the title track always gets me in that happy driving mood.

Allman Brothers Band – “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More”

I love everything about this song. Lyrics, message, melodies, vocals. It’s all there.

Grateful Dead – “Promised Land”

This Chuck Berry-penned tune covered by another driving music titan of a band, The Grateful Dead, will get your motor runnin’. It’s also quite literally about traveling around the country. See what I did there?

Creedence Clearwater Revival – “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”

Originally written by Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield of Motown fame, there are many adaptations of this great driving tune, including of course Marvin Gaye’s. I love this CCR version when I’m out there, in part because they really went for it with the jam. Eleven mins of gritty joy.

The Beach Boys – “Here She Comes”

Among  my favorite Beach Boys tunes. It has an infectious piano part/groove and the best bridge maybe ever.

The California Honeydrops – “When It Was Wrong”

One of the best and most underappreciated bands of our time. Just listen, mmk?

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”

A pinnacle of songwriting, harmonies, movement, etc. Simply stunning, and it never gets old.

My Morning Jacket – “Evil Urges”

I’m so impressed by Jim James as a solo artist and for his work with My Morning Jacket. This one’s always stuck out for me, but the catalogue of greatness is extensive.

Phish – “Down With Disease”

I’ve seen Phish live FAR more than any other band. I love a good jam and they’ve taken me to some of the highest highs that I’ve experienced for a live show. The sheer amount of songs and live recordings is too daunting to pick any one in particular, so I threw a YouTube dart and landed on this old video of “Down With Disease.”

Photo credit: Shelby Duncan

Uri Kohen Unites a World of Music at Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival in Ireland

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This summer, BGS UK is celebrating the festival makers – the men and women who put their time, their finances and their sanity on the line to bring us the music we love. For the past decade, Israeli-born Uri Kohen has been flying the flag for roots music in the west of Ireland with his Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival in County Mayo. What started out as a labour of love has become an event that draws people back, year after year, from across the globe. We caught up with Uri to find out more.

BGS: Uri, describe your hometown of Westport for those of us who haven’t been there.

It’s beautiful! It was voted as Ireland’s best town to live in and we still very much hold that title. It’s particularly famous for the mountain overlooking the town, Croagh Patrick, where St. Patrick sat 40 days and nights and banished the snakes from Ireland. We’ve got some of the best restaurants in the country, and they recently built an entire cycle lane all the way round called the Greenway which brings people in droves to ride their bikes. Brilliant pubs, too.

But it’s not where you’re originally from.

No, I grew up in a kibbutz in the west of Israel.

Is there a bluegrass scene in Israel?

Not particularly. I’d never heard bluegrass before I came to Ireland. But in the 1970s an English couple moved to a kibbutz called Ginosar, and they started a festival called Jacob’s Ladder. It was focused on Anglo Saxon music, so there was English folk, Scottish ballads, and American folk too. There was even a massive scale square dance! They’re still running it and it’s a super cool festival. You do hear bluegrass instruments getting into Israeli music now – pop albums with banjo.

What were your musical influences, growing up there?

My parents were socialists so the music they listened to in their early 20s was real workers’ music. My dad had spent two years in the US so he was influenced by that; he researched Alan Lomax and was a big fan of Leadbelly! And of The Weavers, Johnny Cash, and Peter, Paul & Mary… Pete Seeger came to Israel in 1964 and my dad actually got to meet him. But when I started stealing my parents’ records I chose the Bob Dylan and the Leonard Cohen.

You mention that they were politically inspired by the folk artists. Was there a lot of music making on the kibbutz too?

Yes, but bear in mind that most of the people that lived in my kibbutz were immigrants from Eastern Europe, so at that time Israeli music was heavily influenced by Russian music, led by accordion, clarinet and fiddle. The accordion was the main instrument and it’s still very popular to do public singing there – people pay good money to go and sing along with someone who leads them in communal singing. My granddad, who came from Austria, had played in a mandolin orchestra when he lived there, and I have a picture of him doing that which is cool.

You didn’t want to be a musician yourself?

I couldn’t play so I became a sound technician, which is the Failed Musician Syndrome. I loved rock and roll, and even as a little kid I was DJ-ing for friends and at school parties. I didn’t have equipment – I just used to sit all night and tape the songs from the radio. The ability to shape people’s mood by playing them good tunes is something I love to this day. Then at 14 I joined a sound company in my local village and I became fascinated by speakers and microphones. I really learned my craft touring the former Soviet Union as a sound engineer for the Israeli army’s bands. We had to work with whatever equipment we found there, and it wasn’t much.

Uri Kohen

How did you end up moving to Ireland?

It was like an actual dream. I woke up one day when I was about 16 with this epiphany and told my parents I was moving to Ireland. I didn’t know much about Ireland at all but I was charmed by it. Once I had the idea it was where I wanted to be, I read books and watched films about it and as soon as I saw The Commitments I knew that’s the way I wanted to live my life. Own a pub, live in the countryside. So that’s what I did! I flew to Dublin on a one-way ticket. I’m sure my parents were upset about it, but then again, my father went to kibbutz which wasn’t what his parents raised him to do… They’d taught us to do our own thing and so in a way they were probably proud of it.

Westport seems like a pretty remote part of the country to end up in.

There was an Israeli man by the same name, Uri, who lived here, and I knew of him, and he’d said sure if you’re in Ireland come over for a look. I went down and stayed in his house for three weeks! Within a week or two I got a job in a pub, and about the same time I met Leesa — who is now my wife. I don’t believe in fate but still, I couldn’t believe I ended up here, and that everything just worked out so well.

So you moved to Ireland, knew nothing about bluegrass — and now you run the country’s biggest bluegrass festival. Explain.

Well, I’d been running pubs and I’d almost left music production behind. Then one year some friends asked me to help them put on a Kurt Cobain tribute night and suddenly we had 200 people and six bands, something this small rural town had never seen before. Until then we’d just had a local band called the Kit Kat Boys because they’d play two songs and have a cigarette break. It inspired this idea to really develop the music scene in the town with a strong emphasis on production values and quality acts.

Anyway, I had the idea of doing a festival in the style of The Band’s The Last Waltz. I was imagining music like the Grateful Dead, and then someone said, “Why not do it with bluegrass?” I said, “I don’t have a clue what bluegrass is, but let’s do it.” And the great thing about Ireland is that the bluegrass family here is so keen that they came in droves. I couldn’t believe it. I remember the campers arriving on Thursday… I was so confused. I said “We don’t start til tomorrow!”

What has running the festival taught you about Irish bluegrass?

First of all it is way bigger than what we think. Both from a musician’s perspective and a fan’s one. Second, you don’t need to be an expert to enjoy this stuff. When I came to this music Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt meant nothing to me. What’s important for the crowds is that the acts are good — not whether you play Kentucky-style or California-style.

Festivals are famously risky from a business point of view. Did you ever feel out of your depth?

In the second and third years I lost a lot of money because I was determined to book the best bands I could. But the response was amazing and it just grew and grew. I think I hit the jackpot choosing this style because these musicians want to play all the time. I brought the Loose Moose String Band from Liverpool and they almost played for 72 hours straight. And I’ve seen Tim Rogers — who’s the number one fiddler in Ireland and the managing director of the festival — once do a session for 11 hours solid.

Every night we have a gala concert but everything other gig is free and bluegrassers are so approachable that seasonal musicians who just have a fiddle lying in their house can come and join the sessions with the headline acts. It’s like playing on the street with Bruce Springsteen – when people see it for the first time they are blown away. For instance, in 2012 Roni Stoneman played an afternoon set, and there was a young feller, 13 years of age. Roni, in her 70s, plays “Dueling Banjos” with him. He returned to the festival year after year, and now he’s one of the most sought-after banjo players in the country.

So who excites you in this year’s line-up?

Brennen Leigh and Noel McKay, a country folk duo from Austin, Texas, are going to close the main stage on Saturday night with some special guests. And I can’t wait to see The Local Honeys, a duo doing old-time music from East Kentucky, doing a gospel hour on the Sunday morning. We’re also bringing over a six-piece from Alaska called Big Chimney Barn Dance, and Blue Summit from California, with the brilliant AJ Lee. It’s their first-ever visit across the water! There’ll be sixteen different acts including bands from Paris and the Netherlands and of course Ireland and the UK.

Sounds like you’ve got the beginnings of your own Bluegrass Eurovision.

As I like to say, it takes an Israeli man to bring a French band to play traditional American music in Ireland. I truly believe in world peace through bluegrass! We have all the worlds’ problems sorted here.

BGS 5+5: High South

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Artist: High South
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Latest album: Change in the Wind

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

High South has many influences and each member has his own favorite(s), of course. Interestingly though, we really do share a LOT of influences! Groups like CSN, America, the Eagles and The Band all immediately come to mind as helping shape our music. I also feel like there was an era of music from the mid ‘60s through the ‘70s when artists were very socially conscious. They wrote about love, peace and inclusion. We’ve been inspired greatly by that same spirit and whenever possible try to inject those same ideas into our music. — Jamey Garner

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

My favorite “on stage” High South memory is a recent one. We traveled to Grundlsee, Austria, this past summer to play to 10,000 very enthusiastic music fans. It was our biggest crowd yet. Such a rush!!!! — JG

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

A favorite ritual of ours is one we like to call “The Victory Dance.” There’s a Victory Dance at some point after every single High South show. It’s a chance for (usually) just the three of us to gather ourselves, talk about the show and also usually the last chance to bring up business before we really let loose. The Victory Dance is also how we refer to the joint that gets passed around during that meeting. — Kevin Campos

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Mission statements can be a tricky thing. Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the big picture. Obviously, we want to spread as much peace, love and harmony as we can, on as large a scale as possible. But the deeper we get into this thing, it’s starting to become more and more apparent that the best way to spread love is to give it honestly. That requires connection on a personal level in order to be authentic. The beauty of a real expression of love is that it feeds on itself and grows exponentially. The small victories turn into big ones in a hurry. We’re just trying to water the garden plant by plant, so to speak, in hopes that human nature will take it from there. It can be a beautiful, compassionate world if we let it be. — Phoenix Mendoza

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

A part of nature that never leaves our side, especially when we’re home, is our pets. Phoenix has a dog and Jamey has two. I am the proud uncle of Rico, Boo and Lulu, respectively. Our producer and co-writer, Josh Leo, has seven dogs and four cats out on his property in College Grove, Tennessee, where we did a lot of recording for the EP. In fact, at the very end of “Change In The Wind” you can hear a bark from his dog Jack that was at the end of an acoustic guitar track. He was probably asking to be let back in after going outside to relieve himself. Needless to say, we love our pets and have an affinity for all animals. Love, in all its facets and manifestations, is a central part of what High South is about and we feel like there a lot to be learned from the type of love a dog is capable of giving to those it chooses to love. — KC

Photo credit: Jim Shea

‘More Blood, More Tracks’ Shows Unguarded Dylan

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It’s just a little mmmmmmm-mmmm. The kind of sound you might make when you’ve tasted something really pleasant. Or when your kid says something cute. Or when your partner sidles up cozily against you under a warm blanket on a cold night. Satisfied. Secure. Certain. Dare we say… sexy. And completely in the moment.

It may be the most unguarded moment ever in a Bob Dylan recording. But also the most complex, complicated, deep and emotional, even as it seemingly belies the words of the lines it comes between: And I’m back in the rain / And you are on dry land.

There are eight takes of the song that contains that, “You’re a Big Girl Now,” on More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14, the sprawling new collection of the complete takes from Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks sessions. It culminates with the “final” version heard on the 1975 album. In each one he goes mmmmmmm-mmmm (or an uhhh or ohhh variation thereof) several times, each with a different spin, different nuance, different feeling in ways that are hard to pinpoint, but still quite clear on hearing.

There are two per verse and five verses in the song — accounting for a couple of the takes being fragments, there’s a total of 67 mmmmmmm-mmmms here. But it’s the very first one, in the very first verse of the first take of the song, just the third performance in a marathon four-day run in a New York studio, that will buckle your knees, make you swoon, make the rest of the world go away.

You have to wonder if on the day he made that recording – September 16, 1974 – if making the world go away was exactly his intent.

Six months earlier, on Valentine’s Day, 1974, Dylan stood alone singing “even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” on stage at the Forum in Inglewood, California. The crowd erupted in wild cheers, as had happened every night of his reunion tour with the Band, which closed that night. But on September 16, five weeks after Richard Nixon had resigned that Presidency, Dylan stood alone with just a guitar and harmonica in a New York recording studio, at his most emotionally naked, starting what would become Blood on the Tracks. This was and perhaps remains the first, the definitive post-Watergate album.

Many saw it as a new beginning when Dylan had reemerged from a several-year hermitage with the ’74 album Planet Waves and the tour with the Band, the latter documented on the Before the Flood album, which includes that Forum performance of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” This was a fresh start, the return of the Voice of a Generation to right all the wrongs of a world in chaos. Of course it was anything but. That was all housecleaning, doing away with the past, putting it to rest. Well, at least the past as seen from the outside. Now he had a blank slate and a tormented inner world to explore as he looked back over his relationship with wife Sara as it was coming to a close.

No wonder he struggled with how to present these songs, a fascinating process played out over the 87 tracks on More Blood. Sure, he’d done multiple takes of many songs in the past, as collected on some previous Bootleg Series sets, including the massive Cutting Edge account of every single studio recording he made in his watershed ’65 to ’66 run.

This is different. It’s not just the arrangements (adding and subtracting musicians to the mix), or his delivery, or even the words, with which he fiddles considerably more than in the past. It’s a whole sense that varies from take to take with each of the songs here, transforming the very nature of the song and how it might be received. There are 11 attempts at “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” before he gets what he considered a keeper, for example. And that’s true from mmmmmm-mmmm to mmmmmmm-mmmm, each given a different spin, a different tone, a different meaning. But, hearing these recordings now, the first take of each of the songs is as much a revelation of his personal struggles.

Back then we all were struggling with how to be, how to behave, how to approach the future. With Nixon gone, with the Vietnam War coming to a close, we’d lost our focus, we’d lost our purpose, we’d lost our sense of the future.

As he stepped into the studio, the No. 1 slot on the Billboard singles charts just whiplashed from Paul Anka’s smarmy “You’re Having My Baby” to Eric Clapton’s version of Bob Marley’s Jamaican/Western outlaw fantasy “I Shot the Sheriff.” The No. 1 album was a towering masterpiece, and perhaps a challenge to any artist now making a record: Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale.

Overall, the year was full of looking back and looking for diversion: Barbra Streisand topped the 1974 year-end singles chart with the hazy nostalgia of “The Way We Were,” with Terry Jacks’ syrupy “Seasons in the Sun” right behind, and not far down the list John Denver’s similar climate assessment “Sunshine on my Shoulder.” Grand Funk re-did “The Loco-Motion” and Ringo Starr hit with a remake of “You’re 16” while James Taylor and Carly Simon mined the golden oldies vein with “Mockingbird” for a big hit. The Beach Boys were back in fashion, via their Endless Summer collection. Blue Swede was “Hooked on a Feeling” (oooga-chucka, oooga-chucka).  By the end of the year, everybody was “Kung Fu Fighting.” Everybody.

And when Dylan released the album on January 20, 1975, the No. 1 spot was held by Barry Manilow with “Mandy.”

For many of us, Dylan’s pain provided our relief. Even for this writer, just 18 years old at the time and less-than-inexperienced in love, let alone heartbreak, Blood was a beacon, a blueprint, a map to the buried treasures of a hoped-for life to come. Yes, even with the pain, as it couldn’t exist without the pleasures that gave way to it.

Never mind Dylan’s protestations that this was not autobiographical — in his 2004 book Chronicles, Vol. 1 he maintained that it was based on Anton Chekhov short stories — apart from the lashing “Idiot Wind” (“Positively 4th Street” part two) and the rambling-gambling adventure “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” this is his version of Ingmar Bergman’s miniseries/movie, Scenes From a Marriage, seen as the marriage crumbles. It’s in turns — sometimes very quick turns — rueful, playful, bitter, dreamy, recriminating (self- and otherwise), wistful, wishful, despairing, desolate, sensual, confessional, impenetrable, regretful.

At the root of it, particularly in the songs that arguably make up the emotional core of the album — “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” and “Shelter From the Storm” — what emerges most strikingly, now more than then, is a deep tenderness. And then there’s the raw “If You See Her, Say Hello,” with the line “sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past / I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.” But also striking are the key things missing: acceptance and closure. “Everything about you is bringing me misery,” he sings in the finale, “Buckets of Rain.” It’s open-ended and an open wound.

Even as we projected our own cultural uncertainties onto it, Blood was and remains the intensely private work of an intensely private person. More Blood even more so. Of course he had trouble shaping what would become the public view of it. Of course he got cold feet at the last minute, just four weeks before the album’s release, flying to Minneapolis for hastily set-up sessions to re-record the songs with local folk musicians, five new versions then displacing the original New York sessions, including “Big Girl.”

What’s most striking, perhaps, is that he released it at all. Almost as soon as the album came out, after he had revealed himself so starkly, he embarked on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, a traveling circus in which he could get lost, get away, could hide, shielded and masked. As had so often been the case in his public past, he returned to his default setting of obfuscation.

It’s accepted fact that Dylan released the “right” version of the album. It fit the times, fit his mood(s) — and ours. But it’s wondrous to revel in the possibility of an alternate in which he might have stopped after the first takes, with just the first versions recorded that day, September 16, 1974, when he stood alone and sang mmmmmmm-mmmm.

A Minute In the Catskills with Simone Felice

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Welcome to “A Minute In …” — a BGS feature that turns our favorite artists into hometown reporters. In our latest column, Simone Felice teaches us about the history of the Catskills and Hudson Valley.

Kaaterskill Falls: As fate would have it, I was born just a few ledges below the falls, on the same creek, which the early Dutch settlers named the Kaaterskill, or Cat’s River, after the wild mountain lions and lynx that roamed both forest and glen. In the 19th century Enlightenment Period, many prominent landscape painters and naturalist writers and poets — including Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole and his close friend William Cullen Bryant — made pilgrimages to these remote cataracts with easel and pen, and passed the hours in conversation, study, and communion with nature. Today, the falls, which are the highest in New York state, attract folks from far and wide in all seasons. It’s crazy on the weekends, so I climb up often weekdays at dawn. Maybe I’ll see you on the trail.

Olana: If you follow the Kaaterskill, as it snakes stubbornly eastward, you’ll come, by and by, to the mighty Hudson. Cross the river and take the old winding road up to, what is in my opinion, Fredrick Church’s most important masterpiece: Olana. With breathtaking views of the Catskill Mountain range and Hudson River, it’s no wonder that, upon discovering the location, Church wrote to a friend that he’d found “the center of the world.” You can tour his home and painting studio or simply wander the grounds, which he called “living landscapes.” I had many noonday picnics in the garden as a young kid with my mom, hoping for a glimpse of Peter Rabbit. And, after 40 years, it’s not lost a bit of that magic and wonder.

West Indies Grocery: The old city of Hudson was a sketchy place, when we were kids. It had been a prominent whaling town in the 19th century, earning a mention in Melville’s Moby Dick, but by the 1990s, many of the shops on its main (Warren) street were boarded up. Over the past 25 years, it’s gone through a near miracle of revitalization, block upon block of enviable period architecture has been spared the wrecking ball, and Hudsontown is again a center of arts and food culture. There are many posh hipster eateries I could mention, but my favorite is still this little grocery shop where the family matriarch, Paulette, cooks up homemade Jamaican “yard” food for her sons and neighbors, and if you’re lucky, there will a plate of curry goat or ox tails left for you. Cash only.

Circle W Market: “The W” is the beating heart of the Katterskill Clove. In the summer of 1908, Circle W opened its doors as a traditional country general store to serve the needs of a growing population of vacationers, quarrymen, landscape painters, and mill workers. Palenville, New York, (a small Catskill hamlet) had become famed for the many waterfalls in its vicinity (including Kaaterskill Falls and Fawn’s Leap), mountain views, artists’ retreats, and the setting for the mythical home of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle.

For close to a century, upon entering the store, one could find anything from a gallon of paint to a gallon of milk, a pair of work pants, a kite, homemade lunches, a fishing pole, hardware, ice cream, and much more. After falling into disrepair for many years, my family bought and restored the original store and, a few years back, our mom retired and my wife Jessie and I bought it, and a couple buddies and myself turned the old horse barn in back into a music space complete with a balcony and chandelier. Come on out for one of our wild barn nights — there’s always a fire, and you never know what sort of freaks will show up.

Big Pink: We grew up riding our bicycles past the dirt driveway that leads to this modest, unassuming house off a backroad just outside of Woodstock. It wasn’t until years later that I began to understand the eternal significance of the place in the hallowed annals of American song … after Rick Danko — bassist in Bob Dylan’s touring band in the mid ’60s — rented the house and he, Dylan, and the rest of the gang (Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson) set up a make-shift studio in the basement and stayed up all hours recording, drinking, smoking, waxing philosophical, and digging deep into the essence and origins of the songs and sound that they grew up on and would continue to pioneer for years to come.

Canon Fodder: The Band, ‘The Band’

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For decades, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the third song on the Band’s second album, has been among their most popular and beloved songs. It has appeared on every official live album and greatest hits compilation they’ve released — most notably on The Last Waltz with a horn chart by Allen Toussaint. It’s been covered countless times: Johnny Cash, John Denver, the Allman Brothers Band, the Black Crowes, the Zac Brown Band, Tanya Tucker, and even Roger Waters have recorded their own versions. The original was not a hit for the Band, but Joan Baez’s cover went to number five in 1971. More recently, it scored a pivotal scene in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, wrote the lyrics to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Every member of the Band contributed to the arrangement. Levon Helm, the only American in the group — and a Southerner, to boot — sang lead. Together, they all tell the story of Virgil Caine, a farmer in Virginia bearing witness to the cataclysmic end of the Civil War. Every element comments on his story: The wheeze of Garth Hudson’s organ evokes his spiritual fatigue, while the insistent tap of Helm’s snare drums jumps a beat when he sings the line about his dead brothers. And the four singers — Robertson and Helm joined by Rick Danko and Richard Manuel — harmonize beautifully, when Caine seems to have run out of words and can only express himself with a chorus of na na na nas.

Robertson gets the details just right to evoke this dark iteration of America: He introduces himself by saying he “served on the Danville train,” referring to the Danville & Richmond Railroad that was a crucial transportation for the Confederate Army. And when he declares, “I don’t care if my money’s no good,” he’s referring to the Confederate dollar, called a “greyback,” which was worthless after the war. His literary and Biblical references — to Dante’s Divine Comedy, to the Book of Genesis — suggest that this is not the actual South, but a mythological one. Is Virgil Caine our guide through the Purgatory of Reconstruction? Is this a retelling of Cain and Abel on a national scale? (And, if so, why is the South Cain instead of Abel?)

As Ralph J. Gleason wrote in his Rolling Stone album review in 1969, “Nothing that I have read … has brought home to me the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does … It is a remarkable song. The rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon, and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Rick, and Richard Manuel in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn’t some oral tradition material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of ’65 to today. It has the ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.”

That could be said of every song on The Band. A self-schooled student of North American history, Robertson was writing about the past, setting the Band’s song deep in what Greil Marcus, writing about The Basement Tapes they recorded with Bob Dylan, called “the old, weird America.” This was not necessarily a new tack, as folk musicians had been not only reviving songs from previous centuries, but had occasionally written a few themselves. But the Band weren’t folk musicians — at least not strictly. They were a rock band. Rock in 1969 was still considered new: The Beatles and the Who proved it could be serious, heady high art; the San Francisco bands proved it could be political discourse; and the psych bands proved rock could serve as a narcotic/existential inquiry. The Band proved rock could be old, as well as new, the lens through which we view the past, either how it actually was or how we might want it to be.

Not every song is quite as specific in its historical setting as “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” explores the hard life of subsistence farmers, who faced innumerable tribulations and catastrophes. The narrator might even be Virgil Caine himself, turning from the lamentations of the Civil War to the horrors of survival in rural America. Other songs are much more elusive, like the fleet “Look Out Cleveland” (about Texas, not Ohio) and the randy, country-funk number “Up on Cripple Creek.” The latter is one of several songs on here about sex. Perhaps it was a response to the sexual liberation of the 1960s (as opposed to the 1860s) or perhaps the Band were merely addressing rock ‘n’ roll’s favorite topic through the filter of history. “Jemima surrender, I’m gonna give it to you,” they sing on “Jemima Surrender.” “Ain’t no pretender, gonna ride in my canoe.”

In the half-century since the Band recorded their second album, the Americana scene has pushed forward not with their openness about sex, but with the historically based songwriting. It’s nearly impossible to gauge their impact on the contemporary country and roots scene, but it’s safe to say that, whenever you hear an artist sing about something that happened decades ago, you’re hearing the Band’s influence. Last year, Colter Wall ended his breakthrough album with “Bald Butte,” a lengthy gunslinger story-song that is somehow bloodier than “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The year before that, Shovels & Rope recounted the Battle of Chattanooga on “Missionary Ridge,” imagining the ghosts of the Civil War dead still haunting those hills.

Almost every singer/songwriter resorts to historical re-enactment at some point. Steve Earle wrote “Ben McCulloch” about the disgraced Civil War brigadier general. Johnny Cash recorded a song called “God Bless Robert E. Lee” for his 1983 album Johnny 99, praising the general’s decision to surrender at Appomattox. There are many, many others, too bountiful to count, some dealing with the Civil War and even more dealing with other historical events. (A favorite: “Saskatchewan” by the Toronto band the Rheostatics, which describes a sailor’s death in a sinking ship.)

These songs all reflect shifting attitudes toward (North) American history, new ideas, and new opinions, but our thinking about history continues to change no matter how many times we play these songs. As a result, these historical songs become pieces of history themselves, reflecting outdated attitudes and concerns. In 2018, at a moment when the Confederate flag has become a lightning-rod controversy and Civil War monuments are being defaced or removed, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” takes on a very different meaning than it had in 1969. The melancholy of those na na nas has curdled into something ugly and regrettable — not something to be celebrated, but something to be commiserated.

In their 2014 book — The Long Reconstruction: The Post-Civil War South in History, Film, and Memory — Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli call “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” “the theme song of the Lost Cause ideology.” It is a song about the defeated, about the thwarted righteousness of the Southern cause. But it’s that righteousness that has become so disgusting in 2018, when the most spurious political groups have adopted the symbols and syntax of the Confederacy. Let’s not mince words: The Lost Cause excuses the enslavement of an entire race of people and rationalized it with misinterpreted Bible verses and twisted moral logic.

So, what do we do with a song like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”? It remains a compelling document of its time — 1969, not 1865 — and it is still a tremendous piece of music, inventive and innovative and finally, extremely influential. In that regard, it is exactly like every other song on The Band and on their 1968 debut, Music from Big Pink. Unlike a public monument, it cannot simply be removed from public space. Music doesn’t work that way. It is not stationary. It moves about, impossible to contain. We might strike it from future greatest hits albums, yet we would then have only a limited understanding of the Band’s story or their moment in time.

What do we do with disagreeable art? That’s one of the most important questions facing us in the final years of the 2010s. And here we come back to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. That film has been accused of being racially tone deaf and, sure enough, Baez’s version of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which does nothing to interrogate Virgil Caine’s sympathies, plays during a scene in which a character with a history of racially motivated violence redeems himself by trying to solve the rape and murder of a white girl. If it were ironic, it might be a powerful moment dissecting Southern masculinity, but I doubt director Martin McDonagh had as much in mind. It’s just a song, just a signifier of Southernness. And that’s definitely not how it should play in 2018.

10 Tunes for Your End of Summer Road Trip

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Summer’s pretty much over, but there’s still time to get in one last road trip to see Uncle Phil and Aunt May down Pennsyltucky way. So roll down the windows of the minivan, bluetooth your Spotify into the entertainment system, and hit the highway to this playlist of 10 Tunes for Your End of Summer Road Trip.

New Grass Revival: "On the Boulevard"
Guitarist Pat Flynn wrote this one as the title cut for the first of four albums recorded by the band’s last lineup (that included Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, and John Cowan). It’s a nice, easy cooker that’s perfect to get you off the onramp and onto the road.

The Allman Brothers: "Jessica"
Some 40+ years since the Allmans dropped this in 1973, it’s still one of the greatest country instrumentals of all time. Dicky Betts wrote the record for his daughter with Les Dudek helping out on the bridge. Air guitaring is allowed in the passenger’s seat only.

Little Feat: "Let It Roll"
The title cut from the first post-Lowell album from the Feat, this one simply smokes, from the opening B3 spread by Billy Payne to the funky horn riffs to the song’s drive-off-the-cliff ending. Please don’t follow.

Robert Earl Keen: "Amarillo Highway"
If you’re going on a road trip, who would be the first Americana artist you’d invite? I’d invite Robert Earl Keen to sing while I drive (and beat four-on-the-floor with my free foot).

Dave Dudley: "Six Days on the Highway"
Earl Green and Muscle Shoals songwriter Carl Montgomery wrote this one for Dave Dudley. It’s a little known fact that going on a family road trip without playing this song once is illegal in 29 states and the District of Columbia.

Junior Brown: "Highway Patrol"
Dave’s the rebel and Junior’s the law — and, funny enough, they sound almost the same. One of the best songs ever recorded by a dude who easily has the best guitar collection on the planet.

John Hiatt: "Memphis in the Meantime"
Any excuse to include John Hiatt in a playlist is an acceptable excuse … except no excuse is needed. This tune rocks as hard as any he’s ever recorded.

The Band: "Endless Highway"
This is a song that was batted around the Band for a number of years but never got a proper airing. Capitol Records does us a favor by including it on a rarities record and we inject it into the proceedings, right between John Hiatt and Cross Canadian Ragweed.

Cross Canadian Ragweed: "Highway 377"
A road trip without at least one sinister song is like a campfire without a ghost story. Herein, we travel down the dark road that is “Highway 377,” courtesy of the dearly departed Cross Canadian Ragweed.

Homer & Jethro: "Freda on the Freeway"
Every sinister song needs a silly antidote and this one’s perfect. Country humorist Don Bowman recorded this one in ‘66, but his musical brethren Homer & Jethro bring this one home to roost.

Save the full playlist to your Spotify account right here.

Photo credit: Princess Stand in the Rain / Foter / CC BY-NC

Intentionally Simpler: A Conversation with Tracy Bonham

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For music fans of a certain age, hearing the name Tracy Bonham likely conjures up “Mother Mother,” an alt-rock MTV hit from the mid-'90s that found Bonham in a full-throated wail backed by a wall of shredding guitars. But that was then. And this is now. Over the two decades since, the singer/songwriter has chased and tracked her sound through the pop/rock gems of Down Here to the complex twists of Blink the Brightest to the playful dance of Masts of Manhatta, releasing albums, essentially, every five years. Right on time, she's back with Wax & Gold, a wonderfully rootsy collection that reflects where she is in life — geographically and personally — and features the work of local musicians — including Amy Helm and Langhorne Slim. (Bonham's local is Woodstock, NY, after all.)

You've gotten some good love on this new record. Four stars from Rolling Stone, a great write-up on HuffPost …

I got some love. It's been nice. It's so funny because it's a different age. You don't know what it turns into. It just feels good to be recognized, but it's not like it's really pertinent to your career except that maybe people will pay attention the next time you put something out … if you don't wait five years. I can't really tell what comes out of it, but it feels nice.

We came of age in the music industry at the same time, so we've seen it totally turned on its ear. But, we're adapting. It took you a while, but you finally got the hang of StageIt.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it's totally fun. I was kind of surprised — I don't know if you read the Huffington Post thing — but he made it sound like I was so savvy with all that stuff. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Just let 'em think it. The other thing is, most folks probably think of you — like in that article — as an alternative rocker chick from back in the day, but you've always dangled a couple toes in the roots music water. I remember the Wayfaring Strangers when you did that [with Matt Glaser, Tony Trischka, Jennifer Kimball, et al]. Were they your first? Take me back to that era.

Let me see … That was the first recorded … No, actually, I had been kind of interested in gospel music for a long, long time. I was in college, kind of doing everything. I wanted to sing jazz. I thought I wanted to be an R&B singer for a second.

[Laughs] Because a white girl from Oregon … that makes sense.

Uh huh. [Laughs] But I had this big, bellowing voice so I remember I would get the solos in the gospel choir at the University of Oregon. I went there for one term. After I'd done my SoCal thing and my Berklee thing, I went to U of O and was in the gospel choir. I was like [Sings] “Whoa-oa-oa-whooooa!” doing the whole thing and I just loved gospel music. I didn't love some of the cheesy stuff, but … At first it was Aretha Franklin doing her gospel, solo piano stuff. That was probably what got me really interested. And I just took it from there. So I always had that other side of me and it was so totally opposite of what I was doing on Burdens where I wasn't even trying to sing. I was just playing it all down. I was kind of schizophrenic back at that time.

And being the fiddle — or violin – player that you are, it lends a gypsy air to things. That's folksy.

Yeah. My classical foundation gave me a whole world of that kind of stuff. I totally love the Eastern Europeans … Tchaikovsky and all that Russian stuff. It just blended. The boundaries were not very clear.

Then, with your own stuff, In the City + In the Woods was probably your first real exploring of your rootsier side, right? Doing “Crazy in Love” as a gypsy folk bop-along and what not …

Right! [Laughs] Whatever that was.

So how much of that evolution can be attributed to spending a good chunk of your time in Woodstock and not in the city?

Hmmm … It's been almost 10 years that we've been hanging out in Woodstock. It has influenced me hugely. Not even just musically, but mentally. There's more space up there so you can kind of clear the cobwebs. I think it coincided with an era [in which] it didn't matter as much whether or not you had a hit on the radio. So I had this kind of freedom to go up there and create and just be myself. When I was doing my overdubs for Masts, I was in my cute little stone cottage with the fire burning and my ProTools set up — it was the first time I'd ever done my own ProTools thing. I was like, “I can do anything up here!” I recorded the fire, the wood-burning stove, the tea pot burning …

Move over, Alan Lomax!

Exactly! Or like Paul McCartney when he did Ram and he holed himself up in a castle somewhere. I was just enjoying being in control.

Tell me about the musical community up there. Levon's gone, but his legacy of pulling folks together lives on.

It's really true. It's so amazing up there. There are still stories of Levon. The local station up there [WDST] has a pretty far reach and they play the Band all the time. I'll be driving [my son] Selman in the backseat with Levon's grandkids because those are his best friends — Amy Helm's kids and Selman are the three musketeers. I'll be driving them to the pizza parlor and, all of a sudden, Levon's voice will be on radio and I'll be like, “Dudes! That's your grandpa!” [Laughs] It's such a weird phenomenon.

Then, we'll be at the pizza place and who'll walk by but John Sebastian, of course, from Lovin Spoonful, and we'll have a conversation. Then it'll be … Rachael Yamagata. It's just this amazing place where you can bump into so many talented people. We've made a lot of friends at a restaurant called the Bear which is part of the whole Bearsville complex that Albert Grossman started. I've made some of my best friends … a writer who wrote about the Beatles … there are just interesting people. It's 100 miles outside of the city — a lot of people are having some interesting conversations.

And this new record wouldn't have happened without some of those folks …

Oh my God, you're right.

… and your PledgeMusic donors, of course. That combination of the global and the local coming together is about as community-oriented as you can get.

That's nice. That's awesome. And the global feels local because it's really a small group of people.

How many donors did you end up having?

You know, not that many. I'm going to say only a few hundred people were following that whole thing. But I remember sitting with Kevin [Salem, her producer] at the café one time and he said, “Look. If you could find 1,000 Tracy Bonham fans and they each gave $10 to you, you'd be pretty psyched.” So I got, like, 600.

My whole conundrum has always been “Where did my fans go?” Probably because I spent five years on this new record, that's probably why and because I had a radio hit that fell off the face of the earth half as quick as it rose. The conversation was always, with management or labels, “Where did those people go?” It was back before you could connect with people on the Internet in '96. Then, when I had to wait for four years, I lost a lot of people.

But that's the shift from … I mean, all of my friends who were on major labels and came off of that lost their people because the major labels — at least back in the '90s — email lists weren't a thing. So those people just vanished and you have to call them up again, somehow. Summon their spirits.

Yeah.

The other main artistic driver for the record was the adoption of your little Selman. His presence is felt on this thing in various ways. You have nods to his Ethiopian homeland, but also several tunes that could easily be on a cool kids' record. Was that intentional or just how it came out?

Which songs are you referring to? Because I like that idea. Oh, I know: “From the Tree to the Hand to the Page.”

Sure. Yeah. Of course.

That's one of Selman's favorites.

There are others, though. The repetitive ones: “Lovelovelovelovelove” and “Gonegonegone,” maybe?

Oh, yeah. You're right.

They're a little bit of a stretch, but the kind of kids' record that the parents wouldn't be driven crazy by.

[Laughs] Exactly. That's probably because I am writing more for … I have that whole other [teaching kids] project going on. But I think, also, my writing has changed, at least for now, and it's a lot simpler. It's intentionally simpler. This is going to sound funny, but I just don't have time to … I can't explain it. I've often thought of it like moving through molasses, when you're a mom and you're trying to be creative and you have to stop and deal with life and come back to it a week later. You just want to finish the damn song. [Laughs] Just get it done.

I've been wanting to challenge myself to write more simply, although I love what I've done before and what other artists have done when things take left turns or bring something surprising. I still love that. But, for this particular album, I just wanted … “Under the Ruby Moon” is two chords over and over again, and it's one of my favorites.

I would say, Blink the Brightest will always be one of my across-the-board, all-time favorite records.

Thank you.

But, in your canon, I'll put this one second.

No way! Really?

Yeah. And I know the Burdens people are gonna get mad about that, but whatever. They can go kick some rocks. So Rolling Stone singled out “Grandpa's Guitar” as the heart of this thing …

Yeah, I was surprised by that.

… but I gotta go with “Wax & Gold.”

Me, too. Me, too.

That's your pick?

Yeah, totally. I mean, “Grandpa's Guitar,” as much as I love it, I feel like it's a certain audience. But I totally think “Wax & Gold” encapsulates everything.

It has such a great sound and feel to it. And, thematically, what you're pulling from for it …

Totally. Totally.

Take THAT, Rolling Stone. We just outvoted you.

[Laughs] Yeah!

Photos courtesy of the artist