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As you may know, every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. I wrote the bios this week for two acoustic guitarists from Tompkins Square Records' compilation Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 3, Cian Nugent and Nathan Salsburg.
You can read all about them, and what they’re listening to (the Gun Club! Sizzla!), here:
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/735
I’ve written a fair amount about the Imaginational Anthem series, which began as a way to dig up recordings from the old Takoma-style fingerpickers (John Fahey is the marquee name here), as well as some of their younger followers. I wrote this story for Neumu about the first edition:
http://www.neumu.net/datastream/2006/2006-00002/2006-00002_datastream.shtml
I don’t have a copy of the third iteration of this series, so I can’t offer you a clip from either of the guys I email interviewed above. But why not celebrate this exceptional series with the song that gave it a name, “Imaginational Anthem,” played by Max Ochs, sometime in the late 1960s. (He has a famous cousin named Phil, in case you were wondering.)
This has been happening a lot lately. I’ll get some kind of hip, happening CD in the mail. On inspection, the band will turn out to be the bastard child (or legitimate child, so hard to keep track) of some band I drooled over at Splendid years ago…usually to the world’s utter disinterest. As they say on Wall Street, sometimes being early is sorta like being wrong. Anyway, this time it’s Indian Jewelry, and here’s what I said in Philly Weekly:
Indian Jewelry
Mon., May 12, 8pm., $8. With Lesser Known Neutrinos. Johnny Brenda’s, 1201 Frankford Ave. 215.739.9684. www.johnnybrendas.com
You may not care, but it made my day when I found out that dirgy, feedback-damaged Indian Jewelry were, in fact, the current-day descendants of NTX +Electric (and Swarm of Angels and a whole bunch of other bands). Back in 2003 I slavered over NTX ’s We Are the Wild Beast thusly: “Almost every track buries its hook under off-putting atonalities, skin-stripping dissonance and blinding waves of feedback. It’s the kind of aggressively noise-filled wrapping that cuts your hand as you reach for the melody, yet the hooks are undeniably there.” Five years later these guitar-pedal terrorists still inter radiant pop melodies under miasmic soups of distortion. Main difference: This time they’ve got the bloggers on board. (J.K.)
Here are the remaining dates:
05/08 - New York, NY @ Cake Shop
05/09 - Hanover, NH @ Fuel Rocket Club (Note: The world’s oldest, squarest rock journalist is hoping to make this one…where they’re playing with Parts and Labor!!)
05/10 - Providence, RI @ AS 220
05/11 - New Haven, CT Sundazed Bar
05/12 - Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brendas
05/14 - Washington, DC @ The Red and The Black
05/15 - Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
05/16 - Knoxville, TN @ Pilot Light
05/17 - Birmingham, AL @ Bottle Tree
And for history buffs, here’s the review I quoted from 2003.
http://www.splendidmagazine.com/review.html?reviewid=107067540751881
I've been talking about this review for a while, and here's the finished product.
Movin' On Up: The Music And Message Of Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions
Director: David Peck, Phil Galloway, Tom Gulotta, Rob Bowman
Cast: Curtis Mayfield, Altheida Mayfield, Sam Gooden, Fred Cash, Johnny Pate, Andrew Young, Carlos Santana, Chuck D
(2008) Rated: Unrated
US DVD release date: 6 May 2008 (Hip-O)
by Jennifer Kelly
Most people, asked to name a Curtis Mayfield song, will come up with something from Superfly, the superlative title track, spectrally funky “Freddy’s Dead” or the ethereally ominous “Pusherman”, all classics of the ‘70s funk era. There’s no question that these are great songs, full of biting social commentary and lacerating funk grooves. Yet for Mayfield, a serious, thoughtful man with long roots in the civil rights movement, it must have rankled that his best, most commercially successful songs were from the soundtrack to scenes of drug abuse and social degradation.
Ironic, yes, that the soul singer dubbed ‘the preacher” or “the reverend”, whose luminous “People Get Ready” became an unofficial anthem of the Freedom Rides, should be so closely associated with the fallout years, that post-Vietnam period when heroin took over the black neighborhoods. Movin’ On Up, an expansive documentary, tells both halves of these interlocking stories: the early years when Mayfield, along with Impressions Fred Cash and Sam Gooden sang high, eerie harmonies about a better world; and the later ones when his incendiary funk band sketched a nightmare scenario of poverty, dysfunction and crime.
The split for Mayfield, as for many soul musicians, came in 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. “Curtis who had sung about the triumph and the glory of us coming together as a people was now faced with a reality that I was faced with. Life without a Martin Luther King. Life without a Robert Kennedy. Life without a John Kennedy or a Malcolm X,” says Andrew Young, in an interview. “All of these were people who were voices of hope and they shared a vision. And we’ve been floundering ever since in some ways.”
More here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/film/reviews/57602/movin-on-up/
Comments
Early on in this enlightening documentary, civil rights activist Andrew Young suggests that Mayfield's messages of peace, love and understanding may have had a more immediate and further-reaching impact than Martin Luther King's, couched as they were in such seductive melodies. That might be exaggerating a little, but there's no denying the singer was one of the voices of conscience in the 1960s.
More than two dozen complete vintage small screen performances by Curtis, both solo and with his group, are gathered here, punctuated with insightful remembrances and opinions from former Impressions Fred Cash and Sam Gooden, Mayfield's widow Altheida, and lifelong fans like Chuck D. Radio stations refused to play certain records for being too "militant", but unlikely supporters like Rat Packer Joey Bishop fought the group's corner to get their songs on prime time TV.
The music footage is a real eye-opener (the integration rallying cry of Meeting Over Yonder in front of an entirely white teen audience, for instance), lovingly restored by the Reelin' In The Years team, who were also reponsible for the award-winning series of Motown archive collections of a couple of years ago. The whole shebang has a running time of close to three hours, but doesn't drag for a second. The perfect tribute to a giant of the protest song.
Can't wait to see it. I've heard good things about this Mayfield fellow. I see Rob Bowman in the credits. He's my idol as far as chroniclers of r & b go. He did liner notes for all 3 Stax box sets, a book on Stax, the 30,000 word Funkadelic booklet for their singles collection, and tons more. I am sooo jealous.
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Comments
Love this dense fog.
"usually to the world’s utter disinterest." the world-at-large might not be interested, but you know mog is!! Thanks!