Remember when I said we’ve curated our SXSW showcase—this Friday, Clive Bar, 12-6—to reflect cities in the TVD Network? Well, strike that. There’s no TVD Troy, New York, home of the exceptionally talented Sean Rowe. But he IS Jon Sidel’s pick for our showcase and that trumps any regionalism.
Sean’s up first on Friday, so plan your timely arrival…
“My earliest relationship with vinyl was when I was 5 years old and acquired a particular KISS record that had the band’s name written in blood on the cover. I think it was written in blood anyway. Somebody help me out! I can’t remember the name of that record but I do know that in one of the songs, there is a lyric with “Jesse James” in it. I think it was a gift from my brother. Maybe it was his record. Either way, my mother was terrified of the band and the album cover but I would play that record religiously and stand in a corner of the room, rocking back and forth to the beat and just…getting lost in it.
It wasn’t until 20 years later that I really started to revisit vinyl seriously. I picked up a blue Califone suitcase player off of ebay for about $30. I remembered it looked just like the one Ms. Flint, my 3rd grade teacher ( who I desperately wanted to marry) used to play Jesus Christ Superstar on for the class. They don’t look fancy but were clearly built to last. You can also crank the shit out of the volume.
Soon after getting the Califone…I was playing a local concert in Troy, NY and I got chatty with this guy George who was attending the show. He told me he had a few old records he wanted to thin out of his collection but would only part with them if he could find some one who was really gonna appreciate those dusty gems.
Being a real enthusiast of old blues, I was pleasantly taken a-back by what he had in that plastic milk crate. Not to mention they were all in nearly mint condition. For $20 I went home with Lightning Hopkins, Big Joe Williams, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, and some other random 20’s era jailhouse and jug band stuff—but my most cherished out of all of these was a record called “Mississippi Delta Blues Vol. 2.”
Recorded by George Mitchell sometime in the early 60’s, it’s such a magical collection of tracks. The entire side A is R. L. Burnside in his prime. Just the man and his guitar on his terms. Mitchell went out of his way to the backwoods to record R. L. in his house. The recording is so alive and raw. It’s primitively captured with what sounds like one mic. You can hear when R.L. turns his head occasionally and sometimes you catch the movements of his kids in the background.
I’m not a real fan of the stuff he did later on in his career with the electric band. That stuff is ok, but the real power—the unpredictable fire and other-worldly delivery—is found in these early recordings. I never tire of this record.” —Sean Rowe
