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The Music They Made
A sound collage featuring a sampling of musicians who died in 2009.
A beautiful tribute to some of the musicians who left us this year from the NYTimes. Featuring a diverse range: the Ronettes Ellie Greenwich, Wilco’s Jay Bennet, guitarist Jack Rose, the Stooges’ Ron Asheton, MJ, Koko Taylor and more. Click above link.
Vic Chestnutt’s West Of Rome spent a whole summer on rotation for me. If you’ve ever traveled into the interior of California alone, maneuvering beat-up farm roads with its insistent heat, listening to “Big Huge Valley” you may think Vic was your co-pilot.
Vic Chesnutt is a singer/songwriter who can divide a room, and that might be one of the highest compliments one can pay. Listeners can be turned off by his personal style that values storytelling — though not necessarily straightforward narrative — over smooth and even-metered rhymes. But his legion of fans — including many singer/songwriters — embrace these very distinguishing characteristics. He is surely an original, taking up traditional music streams folk, country, rock & roll, and producing his own idiosyncratic song style. It is tempting to place Chesnutt in the Southern gothic literary tradition. There is a certain Southern flavor in his songwriting — Southern in the sense that the lyrics are peopled with misfit outsiders who forge their own way, all described through Chesnutt’s own cracked lens. Chesnutt’s craggy voice, classical guitar, and outrageous imagination are his tools, and his performances were faithfully preserved by Scott Stuckey’s resonant living room production. After a few spins, listening to Chesnutt and company sound like they’re playing in your living room, the record begins to sound familiar; it’s nooks and crannies, cracks and crevices start to feel homey and comfortable, like an old house or an old friend. There’s a humble magic that West of Rome perpetuates that is ultimately the most enchanting thing about it — it offers a gentle reminder of things that are far too often taken for granted to those who care to listen.
Big Huge Valley.
well the big huge valley is a ribbon of light
the aqueducts are snakes tonight
the stars are homesteaders, staking claims
my head is hopping with historical names
transfer trucks are buffalos
chewing up this desert road
yes and i am nothing especially
just an uptight man on a useless journey
and the oil is pumping up out of the dirt
those virile dinosaurs continue to squirt
and the mountains lay like croaker sacks
the global forces sculpt with tectonic panache
and the crop duster flies through those blackish skies
she ain’t on the clock
she’s banking in and pulling out
her propeller eyes on the wind sock
well the big huge valley is on a respirator
life juices pumped from up in the sierras
the almond trees battle their own disease
the hay is jaundiced and the raisins wheeze
cattle march uner the knife
i do believe the big doctor is sweating up a storm tonight
Words from Kirsten Hersh
What this man was capable of was superhuman. Vic was brilliant, hilarious and necessary; his songs messages from the ether, uncensored. He developed a guitar style that allowed him to play bass, rhythm and lead in the same song — this with the movement of only two fingers. His fluid timing was inimitable, his poetry untainted by influences. He was my best friend.
I never saw the wheelchair—it was invisible to me—but he did. When our dressing room was up a flight of stairs, he’d casually tell me that he’d meet me in the bar. When we both contracted the same illness, I told him it was the worst pain I’d ever felt. “I don’t feel pain,” he said. Of course. I’d forgotten. When I asked him to take a walk down the rain spattered sidewalk with me, he said his hands would get wet. Sitting on stage with him, I would request a song and he’d flip me off, which meant, “This finger won’t work today.” I saw him as unassailable—huge and wonderful, but I think Vic saw Vic as small, broken. And sad.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to listen to his music again, but I know how vital it is that others hear it. When I got the phone call I’d been dreading for the last fifteen years, I lost my balance. My whole being shifted to the left; I couldn’t stand up without careening into the wall and I was freezing cold. I don’t think I like this planet without Vic; I swore I would never live here without him. But what he left here is the sound of a life that pushed against its constraints, as all lives should. It’s the sound of someone on fire. It makes this planet better.
And if I’m honest with myself, I admit that I still feel like he’s here, but free of his constraints. Maybe now he really is huge. Unbroken. And happy.
Love,
Kristin
Les Paul, who invented the solid-body electric guitar later wielded by a legion of rock ‘n’ roll greats, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 94.
As an inventor, Paul also helped bring about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll with multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the tracks in the finished recording. The use of electric guitar gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s, and then exploded with the advent of rock in the mid-’50s.
Les Paul has had such a staggeringly huge influence over the way American popular music sounds today that many tend to overlook his significant impact upon the jazz world. Heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt at first, Paul eventually developed an astonishingly fluid, hard-swinging style of his own, one that featured extremely rapid runs, fluttered and repeated single notes, and chunking rhythm support, mixing in country & western licks and humorous crowd-pleasing effects. No doubt his brassy style gave critics a bad time, but the gregarious, garrulous Paul didn’t much care; he was bent on showing his audiences a good time. And of course, his early use of the electric guitar and pioneering experiments with multitrack recording, guitar design and electronic effects devices have filtered down to countless jazz musicians. Among the jazzers who acknowledge his influence are George Benson, Al DiMeola, Stanley Jordan (whose neck-tapping sound is very reminiscent of Paul’s records), Pat Martino and Bucky Pizzarelli.
A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called “The Log,” a four-by-four piece of wood strung with steel strings.
“I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut.” He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a tradition guitar shape.
In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production on the Les Paul guitar. Pete Townsend of the Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string. Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie’s auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600.
