Previously Unreleased Jimi Hendrix Recording, “Somewhere,” with Buddy Miles and Stephen Stills

in Music | January 11th, 2013

Because it’s Friday, we have a treat for you: a recently unearthed take of Jimi Hendrix ripping through a song called “Somewhere,” with Band of Gypsies drummer Buddy Miles and Stephen Stills (of CSNY) on bass. Released last November to mark the 70th anniversary of Hendrix’s birth, this track will be included on a 12-song album of previously unreleased Hendrix recordings from 1968–69 called People, Hell & Angels, coming in early March.

“Somewhere” has appeared before, on the 2000 box-set moneymaker The Jimi Hendrix Experience and a hit-and-miss 2003 double-disc of cuts called Axis Outtakes (culled from the Axis: Bold as Love Sessions). The previous release, however, was a different take, a blues-rock demo made prior to Electric Ladyland. Recorded early in 1968, with Mitch Mitchell adding drums in ’71, two years after Hendrix’s death, the other version is nothing to write home about, frankly, with a definite demo feel—exploratory, but somewhat uninspiring production, although the ideas are there (listen to it here).

The version above is another animal: it bursts out of the gate in full breakdown, then the drums recede, Hendrix rides the descending rhythm line in a long, expectant pause, and when the rhythm kicks back in, he wails and wahs his way into a tight verse, punctuated with bursts of his blues fills and Miles’s confident snare cracks. Stephen Stills’ bass playing holds up to anything Noel Redding or Billy Cox contributed to Hendrix’s ensembles. Between each verse, Hendrix explodes into the wild solo runs he’s known for. It’s a real gem, and the lyrical content perfectly captures the street-level, and Southeast Asia-ground-level, hostility, fear, and frustration of the late sixties:

Oh uh,
I see fingers, hands and shades of faces,
Reachin up and not quite touchin the promised land,
I hear pleas and prayers and a desperate whisper sayin,
Whoa Lord, please give us a helpin hand,
Yeah yeah

Way down in the background,
I can see frustrated souls of cities burnin,
And all across the water vapor,
I see weapons barkin out the stamp of death,
And up in the clouds I can imagine UFO’s jumpin themselves,
Laughin they sayin,
Those people so uptight, they sure know how to make a mess

Back in the saloon my tears mix and mildew with my drink,
I can’t really tell my feet from the stones on the floor,
But as far as I know, they may even try to wrap me up in cellophane and sell me
Brothers help me, and dont worry about lookin at the storm
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Hendrix was right. They did wrap him up and sell him.

Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Tim Burton Shoots Two Music Videos for The Killers

in Film, Music | January 11th, 2013

Nobody could ever accuse Tim Burton of underproductivity. The past decade has seen him not only direct seven feature films but step into the music video game as well. Most directors inclined to do music videos begin there in order to transition to full-fledged movies, but Burton has, to put it mildly, never hewn to tradition. At the top of this post, you can watch his very first music video, produced in 2006 for the song “Bones” by post-punk revivalists The Killers. Featuring model Devon Aoki and 90210 star Michael Steger, the video shows off Burton’s sensibilities both by plundering the history of ickily thrilling and slyly transgressive cinema — pieces of Lolita, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Jason and the Argonauts appear — and by making much thematic and aesthetic use of the human skeleton. Most of its action takes place in an early-sixties desert drive-in theater gone to seed, which seems to me the ideal venue in which to screen Burton’s features.

The imaginative auteur’s second and most recent music video came out just this past September. Working again in the service of The Killers, Burton dreamed up another piece of haunted whimsy for their song “Here With Me”. In it, a black-clad, serious-eyed adolescent boy — a Burtonian archetype if ever there was one — steals and makes a companion of a wax mannequin modeled after his favorite B‑movie actress. Fans can thrill to the fact that, to fill the role of this B‑movie actress, in comes Winona Ryder, star of the beloved Burton collaborations Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. Ryder has led a career filled with its share of both B- and A‑movies, but to which of those levels do Burton’s rise? Neither, it would seem, or perhaps both at once, or, even more likely, to the liminal state in between — a hard-to-define psychological space, both Burton’s boosters and detractors would agree, of his very own.

Tim Burton’s The World of Stainboy: Watch the Complete Animated Series

Vincent: Tim Burton’s Early Animated Film

Six Early Short Films By Tim Burton

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Making of The Blues Brothers: When Belushi and Aykroyd Went on a Mission for Comedy & Music

in Comedy, Film, Music | January 11th, 2013

Before you close out the week, you’ll want to spend some time with Ned Zeman’s piece in Vanity Fair, “Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers.” It brings us back to the 1970s, when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd labored to bring their characters, Jake and Elwood Blues, onto the national stage. Despite being the stars of Saturday Night Live, Belushi and Aykroyd had to cajole the show’s producer Lorne Michaels into letting them perform as The Blues Brothers on late night TV. First, Michaels let them warm up SNL audiences before shows. Then, in 1976, Michaels let the Blues Brothers make their first live appearance. But there was a rub. They had to dress as Killer Bees and not as “John Lee Hooker gone Hasidic.” Only in April, 1978, did Jake and Elwood make their true SNL debut as a musical act (see below).

Zeman’s piece focuses mostly on the next chapter in the history of The Blues Brothers — the making of the now legendary film. That had its own set of difficulties. Big budgets, big ambitions and big coke addictions, all threatening to derail the project. Down to the very last moment, the film looked like a guaranteed financial bust, to the tune of $27 million. But, of course, that’s not how things turned out.

Above, you can watch The Making of The Blues Brothers, a 2005 documentary that came out with the 25th anniversary re-release of the comic masterpiece. Below, watch their SNL debut.

via Kottke

William S. Burroughs on Saturday Night Live, 1981

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Louis Armstrong and His All Stars Live in Belgium, 1959: The Full Show

in Music | January 10th, 2013

Duke Ellington once said of Louis Armstrong, “He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone on the way.”

The grandson of slaves, Armstrong grew up in the poorest neighborhood of New Orleans. As a child he was fascinated with the marching bands that played in funeral processions. At the age of seven he went to work for a junk dealer. He would ride on the junk wagon and, as he recalled later, toot an old tin horn “as a call for old rags, bones, bottles or anything that the people and the kids had to sell.” When the young boy saw an old cornet in the window of a pawn shop, he asked his boss to loan him the five dollars to buy it. He learned to play the instrument in the Home for Colored Waifs, where he was sent for delinquency. The gifted youngster soon caught the attention of the pioneering jazz cornetist Joe “King” Oliver, who became his mentor. In 1922 Armstrong joined Oliver in Chicago to play in his famous Creole Jazz Band. He was 21 years old. Before long Armstrong set out on his own, and in 1925 began recording his legendary “Hot Five” sessions that established him as a virtuoso and changed the course of jazz history. Armstrong’s horn playing and singing made an enormous impact on 20th century music. In 2006, Wynton Marsalis wrote:

Louis Armstrong’s sound transcends time and style. He’s the most modern trumpet player we’ve ever heard and the most ancient…at the same time. He has light in his sound. It’s big and open with a deep spiritual essence–a sound closest to the Angel Gabriel. You Can’t practice to get Louis Armstrong’s sound. It’s something within him that just came out. Rhythmically, he’s the most sophisticated player we’ve ever produced. He places notes unpredictably with such great timing–always swinging, always coordinated–with overwhelming transcendent power.

Marsalis’s comments are from the foreward to the Jazz Icons DVD Louis Armstrong: Live in ’59. The concert, see Part 1 above, was filmed in March of 1959 in Antwerp, Belgium. (Here are the remaining parts: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.) It may be the only full Armstrong concert captured on film. By the time it was made, Armstrong was firmly established as a cultural icon. He was touring Europe with the All Stars, a group he formed in 1947. The lineup at Antwerp featured Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, Michael “Peanuts” Hucko on clarinet, Trummy Young on trombone, Billy Kyle on piano, Mort Herbert on bass, Danny Barcelona on drums and Velma Middleton on vocals for “St. Louis Blues” and “Ko Ko Mo.” Here’s the complete set list:

When it’s Sleepy Time Down South
(Back Home Again in) Indiana
Basin Street Blues
Tiger Rag
Now You Has Jazz
Love is Just Around the Corner
C’est si bon
Mack the Knife
Stompin’ at the Savoy
St. Louis Blues
Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So)
When the Saints Go Marching In
La Vie en rose

“By the time of the All-Stars performance in Belgium,” writes Rob Bowman in the liner notes, “they were a well-oiled machine, performing similar sets night after night.” But three months later, Armstrong suffered a heart attack in Spoleto, Italy, and his pace slowed down. The Antwerp film captures Armstrong when he was still going strong. It showcases the craft of a consummate entertainer from the old school, who strove always to please people. As Bowman writes:

Coming of age as a professional musician at the dawn of jazz recording, musicians of Armstrong’s generation thought of themselves, first and foremost, as entertainers. Great art might occur in the process, but at the end of the day it was their ability to entertain that guaranteed them an audience and a living year after year. The roots of such entertainment for African American musicians of Armstrong’s generation were minstrelsy and vaudeville. To that end, Armstrong comes across as a larger-than-life character, clowning, grinning from ear to ear, rolling his eyes and mugging for the audience throughout the show. That meant shtick like Armstrong and Young’s parading at the end of “Tiger Rag,” the cornball humor of “Now You Has Jazz” and the constant guffawing and drawn out cries of “Ahh” heard at the end of tunes were an integral part of his show. While some contemporary critics accused Armstrong of being an Uncle Tom, they simply didn’t get it. This was a performance aesthetic from an earlier point in time, and Armstrong was a master.

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Trains and the Brits Who Love Them: Monty Python’s Michael Palin on Great Railway Journeys

in Television, Travel | January 10th, 2013

What is it with Britons and trains, anyway? Hardly just the title of collection of Irvine Welsh’s stories of heroin and degradation, the term “trainspotting” actually refers to a real, and fervently pursued hobby; trainspotters exist, just as do birdwatchers and sports fans. In terms of obsession with the design and operational minutiae of their own trains, Britain falls second only to the even more densely rail-laden Japan. But we Americans, possessed of a train system few would call robust, can’t quite bring ourselves to believe it. Perhaps we just need to hear it from the mouth of Michael Palin, writer, comedian, television host, Python — and avowed trainspotter. Most of Palin’s fans know him first through his characters in the Flying Circus: the shopkeeper, Luigi Vercotti, Ken Shabby, and the most memorable Gumbys, to name but a few. But some of us know him best as the central traveler of the globe-spanning television documentaries in which he’s starred since 1989. Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya, New Europe, and now Brazil with Michael Palin. Here we have a man who knows how best to get from point A to point Z, and all in between.

But before all of those shows came Palin’s first episode of the BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, a long-running series whose very existence speaks to the vitality of Britain’s train-related enthusiasm. 1980’s “Confessions of a Trainspotter”, viewable at the top of this post, follows Palin as he makes his gleeful way from London to Kyle of Lochalsh in northwestern Scotland on a series of trains fast and slow, long and short, old and new. This established him as a television traveler; fourteen years later, he returned to the program for “Derry to Kerry”, where he traced his roots along “that best-kept of all transport secrets, the Irish railway line.” “Is it just us who are like this?” Palin asks. “The British, I mean. Are there any trainspotters in Sicily? Do Belgians go misty-eyed with the thought of seeing the 12:16 to Antwerp? Do Swedes save up all year for a Hasselblad to photograph a Stockholm to Gothenburg coal train cresting a 1‑in-57 gradient?” Perhaps the most definitive answer comes from a fellow rail fan he meets mere minutes later. Palin asks the man if he has always loved trains. “Very nearly,” he replies. “There was a short period when I became interested in girls. Eventually, I got married and went back to railways.”

An Epic Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose

in Literature, Writing | January 10th, 2013

Image by Tom Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons

Jack Kerouac is the patron saint of every starry-eyed, born-too-late, wanderlusty hipster scribe who falls in love with the poetry and visionary power of their own inner voice. I may be old and crusty now, but I once fell under Kerouac’s spell and spilled my guts unedited into long rambling prose-poems on existential bliss and tantric Buddhist bebop. Then later I realized something: Kerouac’s Kerouac was very good. My Kerouac? Not so much. You gotta do your own thing. I grew out of Kerouac’s influence and didn’t take much of him with me. Then I realized that he wasn’t always good. That he’d made the mistake of every self-proclaimed genius and stopped letting people tell him “no.” He said so himself, in a 1968 Paris Review interview with Ted Berrigan in which he admitted that all his editors since the great Malcolm Cowley, “had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it.” Now I know this was part of his method, but sometimes the later Kerouac needed a good editor.

It is a delicate dance, between the inner voice and outer editor—whether that taskmaster is oneself or someone else—and the great attraction to Kerouac is his damn-it-all attitude toward tasks and masters. His improvisational prose is the point (I’m sure someone will tell me I missed it).

Kerouac doesn’t just write about freedom, he writes freedom, and for most of us tight-assed worrywarts, his voice is healing balm for our writer’s inner excoriations. 1957’s On the Road is an incredible experiment in process as product (it’s not only a novel, it’s an art object)–a three-week burst of non-stop, uninhibited creativity, so legend has it, and unequaled in his lifetime. And yet despite his aversion to tidiness, Kerouac, like almost every writer, made lists; one in particular is thirty guidelines he called “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.” I’ve excerpted what I think are ten highlights below, either because they seem profoundly beautiful or profoundly silly, but in a way that only Kerouac the holy fool could get away with. This is not “advice for writers.” It’s a catalog of states of being.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.

Jack Kerouac Lists 9 Essentials for Writing Spontaneous Prose

Jack Kerouac’s Poetry & Prose Read/Performed by 20 Icons: Hunter S. Thompson, Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Johnny Depp & More

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Orchestral Manoeuvres in North Korea Prove Yet Again That Music is Universal

in Music | January 10th, 2013

In November 2012, the Munich Chamber Orchestra and its conductor Alexander Liebreich had the rare chance to travel to Pyongyang to work with the students of the local Kim Won Gyun Conservatory. The Goethe Institut Korea arranged the visit and invited German filmmaker Nils Clauss to shoot a documentary about this moment of cross-cultural musical cooperation. Joint orchestra rehearsals were held, but the German musicians also conducted one-on-one chamber music classes with the North Korean students. At the end of their visit, the German-Korean ensemble performed a concert at the conservatory.

Nils Clauss’s documentary shows in a beautiful and unobtrusive way how musicians from two very different worlds quickly overcame the language barriers and let only the music speak. Alexander Liebreich described in an interview with the BBC how much had changed since his last visit to North Korea in 2002.

You can enjoy parts of the final concert here:

Arirang, a Korean folk song
Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C Major, First Movement (Moderato) with soloist Trey Lee

Plus find bonus material here:

The Atlantic’s latest photo essay on life in North Korea
This little North Korean girl can play the guitar better than you.

By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

by Matthias Rascher | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Master Curator Paul Holdengräber Interviews Hitchens, Herzog, Gourevitch & Other Leading Thinkers

in History, Literature, Philosophy | January 9th, 2013

Paul Holdengräber is the kind of cultural gadabout that makes New York one of the greatest cities to live in, since New Yorkers like him are forever tracking down the world’s best writers, thinkers, and artists and roping them into intimate, unscripted public interviews, discussions, and performances. He belongs in the company of such luminary interviewers as James Lipton or Charlie Rose, but Holdengräber does something so many curators of culture don’t—he pulls things from his subjects that you’ve never heard them say before, and he does it because he’s seemingly fearless and a consummate amateur in the best sense of the word: he’s a lover—of literature, the arts, music, philosophy, and most of all, conversation. A recent Wall Street Journal profile described Holdengraber as the “only one man in New York who possesses the complement of skills—charm, erudition, curiosity and perhaps most of all chutzpah” to pull off what appear to be casual chats–but which Holdengräber carefully prepares–with people like Pete Townshend, Colum McCann, Umberto Eco, and just about anyone else you could think of.

Holdengräber works as curator of LIVE from the NYPL, a regular event described as “Cognitive Theater” that has featured previous guests like Harold Bloom, Patti Smith, Jay‑Z, and Colm Toibin. It’s something of a variety show. Some events put two complementary figures in conversation with each other, such as this past November’s conversation between the pardoned West Memphis Three suspect Damien Echols and former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins; some feature surprising, out-of-character performances, such as a reading of the modern classic kid’s book for adults, Go the F*ck to Sleep, as deadpanned by the voice of existential despair, Werner Herzog; and sometimes LIVE takes place in traditional interview format, with Holdengräber doing what he does best, getting fascinating people to tell stories about themselves. For example, Holdengräber sat down in June, 2010 for a lengthy talk with Christopher Hitchens, who had just published his memoir, Hitch 22. Little did either of them know that Hitchens would be gone in less than two years. In the short clip above, Hitchens and Holdengräber talk about mortality, both onstage and during an intimate backstage smoke break. Watch the full video of their talk below, and find the schedule for upcoming talks here.

As if his curatorial work for the NYPL were not enough, Holdengräber also hosts The Paul Holdengräber Show, which premiered last year on YouTube’s Intelligent Channel. Here he gets the chance to flex his interview muscles away from the audiences in a small studio setting. Now nine episodes in, the show has featured an unpredictable lineup of guests such as master chef David Chang, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, Robin Hood Foundation managing director Eric Weingartner, and this past July, New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch. In their conversation below, Holdengräber and Gourevitch have a conversation that swings effortlessly from reporting on international tragedy and war to writing a piece on James Brown to Gourevitch’s love for the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Gourevitch retells the story with the intensity and vividness of an eyewitness and the incisive commentary of a Talmudic scholar. It’s a moment only Paul Holdengräber could set up.

Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Previously Unreleased Jimi Hendrix Recording, “Somewhere,” with Buddy Miles and Stephen Stills

Tim Burton Shoots Two Music Videos for The Killers

The Making of The Blues Brothers: When Belushi and Aykroyd Went on a Mission for Comedy & Music

Louis Armstrong and His All Stars Live in Belgium, 1959: The Full Show

Trains and the Brits Who Love Them: Monty Python’s Michael Palin on Great Railway Journeys

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose

Orchestral Manoeuvres in North Korea Prove Yet Again That Music is Universal

Master Curator Paul Holdengräber Interviews Hitchens, Herzog, Gourevitch & Other Leading Thinkers

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