Author Archives: Roger Catlin

It was the early part of the last century when musicologists like Alan Lomax would travel to the hinterlands to come up with surprising results. That sense of search and discovery still goes on in the 21st century and it was in March 2020 when Bruce Watson of Fat Possum Records and Tim Duffy of the Music Maker Foundation took a trip to the tiny eastern rural town of Fountain, NC to film and record a series of sacred soul musicians—11 groups in eight days in a makeshift storefront studio in a 100 year old building.

It was just in the beginning stages of the pandemic in the US and they were able to record some of the several groups arising from the quartet tradition of a lead singer and a chorus doing call and response. It dates as far back as the 17th century and continues today with the added power of electric instruments.

The trip netted this performance of “Shake Me” by Bishop Albert Harrison & The Gospel Tones, that we are blessed to premiere today at The Vinyl District. The gritty voiced Bishop and his unerring Gospel Tones lock into a groove in “Shake Me” that translates to music lovers everywhere regardless of religion. “Jubilee singing is what I call it,” Harrison says. “We’re singing from our heart. But we come way down from below.”

Harrison has been traveling and singing gospel since the 1980s, but after a hospital stay in 2006 he decided to get serious and start a group, The Gospel Tones. While Harrison makes his home in the experimental planned Black community of Soul City in Warren County, the rest of the group live in Ahoskie, NC, so that’s the group’s home base.

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Longtime rocker and esteemed songwriter Willie Nile is back on the road, and releasing his 14th studio album this week on River House Records, recorded with his mask-wearing band earlier this year under unusual conditions.

He spoke to us from his pad in Soho about the album, The Day the Earth Stood Still, his series of streamed shows during the lockdown, and the first 45 purchase he ever made.

I understand the title of the new album had to do with the lockdown.

Absolutely. It’s a direct result of the pandemic. It’s about the pandemic. There’s a few songs on there that are pandemic-related. A lot of the events of the past year and a half, 17 months influenced it big time. I live in New York and if you told me two years ago that New York was going to become a ghost town, I would have thought you were nuts. There was no way. But it happened. It’s fascinating. I live in the village and in April, May, you step outside and there’s hardly any people. Just this eerie [scene], haunted buildings, looking down empty streets, a handful of people and very few cars. I found it really interesting and fascinating.

I have a storage space a block from the Holland Tunnel which heads towards Jersey and points South and West. A block away and every rush hour it’s brutal. It can take 45 minutes to go three blocks. And on a Friday night—we’ve done it with the band—we have to leave extra early. So end of last May I coming out of my storage space. Get to the corner of Varick and Spring and there was not a car in sight, literally. I would look uptown and could see a long distance, not one car, not one person. It’s a Friday at six o’clock. You look south, the tunnel and beyond, I took photographs. I stood in the middle of the street, I thought wow. I could have played down in the street and sung Rolling Stones songs.It was really remarkable.

And then walking home through this ghost-like zombie apocalypse. I dug it. It was fascinating. Obviously, scary nightmary stuff. But I thought immediately of The Day the Earth Stood Still, that old sci-fi film from 1951. And a couple weeks later, I was coming down Fifth Avenue in a cab, and seeing places boarded up and no people—all the way down Fifth Avenue. It was fascinating. I wrote the song then. So it’s directly inspired, the title is. And a number of the songs are inspired by the pandemic.

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More than 20 years after his hitmaking heyday, Rick James became a household name to a whole new generation in 2004 when Dave Chappelle mocked his brash personality with the catchphrase “I’m Rick James, bitch!”

The singer was still around and trying to catch a break after drug binges, prison, and record company indifference had sidelined his career. So James played into the lampoon when he appeared on the 2004 BET Awards with what was supposed to be a comeback performance, declaring the catchphrase anew as if to make it his own. He’d be dead two months later.

The phrase repeats in the title of the compelling new documentary on the musician’s career, Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, premiering on Showtime tonight, Friday September 3.

It’s surprising that there hasn’t previously been a full film documenting the singer’s remarkable life of ups and downs. Director Sacha Jenkins, who previously directed Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, takes on the task with a verve that reflects the artist at hand.

Taking from old interviews and rare live performances, as well as interviews with ex-wives and lovers, his kids, and members of his Stone City Band, it tells a full tale of what was anything but an overnight success story.

Born in Buffalo, James began playing in bands as a teenager. A member of the US Naval Reserves, he fled to Canada when he got called up and fell into a burgeoning Toronto music scene that eventually had him in a band with Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, before they went off to form Buffalo Springfield. Signed to Motown as a rare rock band, we hear the Mynah Birds single (and it’s pretty good) but James was caught for desertion and the band stalled.

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PHOTO: JAMIE HARMON | Van Duren emerged from the same burbling Ardent Studios evolutionary pond alongside Jody Stephens and Chris Bell, with whom he played in a Memphis band (and also auditioned for their onetime band Big Star). He recorded a couple of Todd Rundgren-like albums in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that became collectors items for power pop fanatics, and inspired a couple of smitten Australian fans to to seek him out, a pilgrimage captured in their subsequent 2018 documentary, Waiting: The Van Duren Story.

Not a long-lost songwriter like Sugarman had been in his similar rediscovery documentary, Duren could easily be found right in the same rich musical territory where he was raised: Memphis. After years with his well-considered band Good Question, he has more recently been turning out duet albums with Vicki Loveland, a well-kept Memphis secret of her own.

The third Loveland Duren release, Any Such Thing on Edgewood Recordings, won’t be out until October 1, but The Vinyl District is proud to debut a track from it today, “Tumbledown Hearts.” Like a lot of their music, it’s both catchy and emotional as it addresses real relationships among grown up people.

The two say it’s “really is a song about two people finding a way to celebrate life together in spite of turmoil, misunderstandings, disappointments, and a life lived long enough to know that while rose colored glasses may not be reality, we can sure put them on if we choose to.” Such is life among creative romantics. But, they add, the song is “also about sharing companionship and comfort in an adult world with another battered but hopeful and optimistic soul.”

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Out of all the musicians knocked off the road by the pandemic, it must have been a real strain on Bob Dylan. A guy who has essentially played one tour after another since 1988, totaling more than 3,000 shows, pausing only a few months during a health scare in 1997, he had seen nothing like this eradication of his touring schedule. 

He filled it initially with his remarkable “Murder Most Foul,” an unexpected, 16-minute rumination about the assassination of JFK that was also his first No. 1 single, 57 years into his recording career. Released March 20, 2020, soon after lockdowns began, it was an anchor for his 39th studio album Rough and Rowdy Ways, released in June 2020.

It took a while, though, for Dylan to catch up to fellow artists using the internet to stream concerts as a way to connect with fans and maybe make up for all that lost touring revenue. Dylan had gotten used to traveling the world and reworking his tunes while dressed in cowboy garb and maintaining his career-long mystery before devoted fans.

His streaming event Shadow Kingdom on Sunday allowed him belatedly to continue that interest. On stages he surrounds himself with old Hollywood klieg lights and smoke to create a kind of atmosphere. In his streaming concert, smoke almost takes over.

The idea is that he’s in an imaginary ’30s cafe — the nonexistent Bon Bon Cafe in Marseilles, France (given “special thanks” in the credits). But with the cowboy hats of the denizens, surrounded by columns of long neck beers and overflowing ashtrays, it’s more like a period cafe in Hollywood, where it was almost certainly created. A slightly different setting for some songs has him on a checkerboard linoleum, adding to the dreamlike Twin Peaks nightclub vibe.

Not a live event, the 50-minute, 12-song presentation is more like an extended black and white video. There are no songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways (whose cover suggested a similar fantasy juke joint), and nothing in fact from the past 30 years of the Dylan songbook.

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Rising like a shimmering fever dream in the middle of the desert, Las Vegas has always been about fakery.

Magicians and impersonators continue to be top draws in showrooms, the best of them mystifying the tourist flocks. Casinos are constructed to emulate ersatz pyramids, Roman coliseums, Parisian skylines, and the whole of New York City. Inside them, you are led to believe you might actually win at the tables.

So as Vegas lumbers to reopen with the rest of the country (though its pandemic numbers and deaths are currently worst in the nation) it is the tribute artist fill-ins who largely fill the musical bill in showrooms.

They currently include a fake Rat Pack, three different fake Motown revues, a generic Queens of Rock show, and a couple of Michael Jackson recreations. There is a rock revue of questionable taste, 27 – A Musical Adventure, impersonating rock stars who died at age 27, from Jimi, Janis, and Jim to Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. There’s an Australian Bee Gees (though the originals were Aussies too, right?) and the long-running smorgasbord of subterfuge, Legends in Concert.

There’s one show dedicated entirely to Elvis and two for Prince. One of the latter is Purple Reign: The Prince Tribute Show which has been performing around Vegas long before its subject died in 2016. Its star Jason Tenner has been putting on the purple costume for 25 years and generally stays in the realm Prince created in his 1984 film—down to giving a big chunk of the hour long show to Morris Day and the Time. Nothing wrong with that. Prince wrote and produced most of that music as well, their appearance and cavorting allows Tenner to go off and do costume changes.

Adding shimmying dancing girls is probably a law for every show on the Vegas strip so a couple of them gyrate here. Add a singer and they become Vanity 6 (paying tribute to yet another singer gone before her time; Vanity died in 2016 at 57).

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Given the size and power of the Baby Boomers demo, it’s a wonder the whole of TV isn’t back to back classic rock documentaries. But there are actually quite a lot of them.

The most annoying of the lot are like PBS’ new Icon: Music Through the Lens, an exhaustive and exhausting six-hour (!) celebration of the rock photographers who brag about the work they’ve done, repeat the same points over and over (“It’s about capturing a moment”) and use the word “iconic” to mean “a picture I did that I remember.” Perhaps because it’s Brit-centric, none of the images held up as iconic actually are. Like me, you may have never even seen many of them before.

For all their celebration of rock stars, they’ve neglected to license much of their music, so generic music plays underneath the boasts and florid remembrances. One guy who has stayed remarkably humble despite making music that actually is iconic is Paul McCartney, whose television appearances can be wanting. Even so, it looked like his 2018 Carpool Karaoke with James Corden would ever be topped.

But now comes the unexpected delight of Hulu’s new McCartney 3,2,1, a black and white document of the meeting of the former Beatle with famed and supremely bearded producer Rick Rubin to dissect the old songs. Mulling over the Beatles oeuvre on a mixing board so that individual tracks can be isolated is something their producer George Martin did on a public TV series a decade or so back.

But here it’s McCartney himself who takes the sliders in his hands to hear previously unnoticed aspects of songs we all thought we knew front and back. More often it’s Rubin, an admirer of his guest but never fawning, who takes the controls. From the first of six half hour segments, something as seemingly simple as “All My Loving” is shown to have all kinds of complexity beneath, with John Lennon’s frenzied rhythm guitar parts underlying the entire song.

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It was Free Comic Day that inspired Record Store Day, the annual celebration for vinyl fans that began in 2007. And what started as a promotion among 100 stores in the US has grown into an international event that not only survived the pandemic but had its biggest year ever last year by splitting its annual Record Store Day drops into three separate days to keep the crowds smaller and distanced.

At a time when the vinyl version of Taylor Swift’s six month old Evermore album took her back to No. 1 (from No. 74) this month, we talked to event co-creator Michael Kurtz in the lull between this summer’s two events, June 12 and July 17.

What have you heard about the success of this year’s first Record Store Day June 12?

The reports I’ve seen is that, with the second one, it should actually surpass the success of last year’s event.

How do you measure that?

Breaking all records for selling the most vinyl at independent retail. And the only barometer for that is MRC Data for Billboard, which we know is not perfect, but it definitely gives you a clear indication and we heard from the store owners themselves that the data supports.

How did last year become such a big year despite the pandemic?

We did a lot of work in advance for the three drops we did last year—Zoom calls with record store owners, lots of email discussions about how to morph and allow stores to operate. If they had no restrictions they could sell as normal, but if there was a lot of restrictions, and mandates for mask wearing and social distancing, then they would benefit by splitting all the release over three days, so we didn’t overwhelm the store with too many people and then we allowed the stores to online at 1 PM eastern time on their store websites to take care of people who were not comfortable shopping. All three of those things enabled it to be just a huge success.

And that’s why this year’s was broken into two dates as well?

Yeah, it’s the same thing.

Do you hope things will be back to normal by Black Friday or next year?

Yeah, we hope so.

What’s the reason there has been an increase in vinyl sales for 15 consecutive years?

I think it’s because the vinyl format has been adopted by whatever the youngest two generations talk about in marketing terms. For people that are less than 38 years old, vinyl is their format. They completely adopted it. The majority of people who shop in record stores now are female and the average age is 28. So they’ve taken it over. That’s why you also see the top sellers are Lady Gaga, Haim, Ariana Grande, that kind of thing, because it’s that next generation.

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Picking an epochal year in music can be tricky. While 1954 or 1977 may be easy choices for turning points in rock, I was always partial to 1966. Ronald Brownstein’s new book Rock Me on the Water zeroes in on 1974. And an inviting new eight-part series on Apple TV+ picks 1971.

At first sight, the tight focus on that 12-month period in 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything seems almost arbitrary—except that we’re in the golden anniversary of it.

Fifty years ago was two years after Woodstock, a year after The Beatles broke up and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, but years before punk or hip-hop would fully emerge. Other than the historical symmetry of being exactly 50 years ago, did it stand out? Sure, there was a lot of great music that year, the series makes clear, but did it actually change everything?

The series by Asif Kapadia and James Gay-Rees, who worked their magic in the Oscar-winning Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, makes its case thematically, with historical turning points saturated with the music of the day—songs that were not just influenced by the events surrounding them, but actually influenced the events as well.

Based on its own book, 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Greatest Year, by David Hepworth, the filmmakers rely solely on archival material, news clips, TV performances, home movies and still shots, stitched together to create a visually captivating portrait of an unsettled era not unlike our own. They match it to the voices from interviews both contemporary and archival, lending it an immediacy that doesn’t take one out of the era by actually seeing those who are speaking from today’s vantage point (so we dwell on how old they of course may look 50 years later).

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