Another New Album, Another New Year

Well, again, it's been too long.  As Yeats said, "All things can distract me from this craft of verse," or something kinda like that.

Anyway, the band has a new live album.  You should know I hate live albums.  Even Kiss Alive sucks, I think, and it's the same for any other live recording.  I can think of none that measure up.  (Sorry, those of you who love bootlegs.  I genuinely and generally feel that artists' intentions are best fostered in studios.  Live recordings are like black and white reproductions of master paintings.  If you catch my drift.)

But, that being said, everyone who listens to the damn thing, of course, tells me it's our best recording.  Shit.  What's a guy to do.  Harlan Ellison once said that the public never likes the work closest to your heart.  Such is the way of things.

And so, here's a video of "Floyd Hill Whiteout," from the new cd.  We made it with tiny Canon cameras, and in order to upload it here, it has to be a rather smallish file.  Keep that in mind while you watch.  On the upside, it kinda gives you the feeling of what it's like to be onstage while we play.

Cheers, and happy 2012.  May the end of the world be lovely for us all.

Sgt. Scott Kirkpatrick

I've been meaning to post this since "Sinners & Saints" came out.  This is the missing portrait from the album.  I meant to put it in the liner notes, but ran out of space and time.

Anyway, the album does say that the song, "Mission Avenue," is dedicated to Sgt. Scott Kirkpatrick, who was killed in Iraq on August 11, 2007.  Many people, aside from myself, heard the obituary on NPR, and were moved by his story.  It particularly affected me, as I, too, am a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson, just like the Kirkpatrick.

I remember feeling the loss personally, like we desperately need people like Kirkpatrick to come back from the war to write about it, to tell us about it.  Like his voice was, and is, necessary.  You can read about him at www.edkirkpatrick.com/scott/

Ballet Nouveau Colorado "Carry On" featuring Paper Bird

Last night I was talking to the well-known Denver painter Matt O'Neill in a bar, (big surprise), and he said, "You know, inspiration is like a plant, sometimes you gotta water it."

He was lamenting the sense of fragmentation both of us feel in Denver's visual art scene. I admit, that in my twenty first year in town, there have been long stretches where that revelatory rain just don't fall. And it's funny how often you run into refugees from Denver in New York at the Whitney or MOMA. Tonight, though, I think I may have simply been looking in the wrong direction.

I've often wished I were at certain cultural cornerstones; you know, like San Francisco when Ginsberg first read "Howl," or at the premier of "Einstein on the Beach," (yes, I'm a huge Philip Glass fan), or maybe the opening of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," or Horton Foote's "Texas Town."

These last two are particularly relevant, considering Garrett Ammon and Dawn Fay's regionalist aesthetic in "Carry On," the newest production from Ballet Nouveau Colorado. This gorgeous collaboration with the local and much lauded band Paper Bird drops an auger into the dry Denver ground and drills an enormous oasis for the heavy hearts of artists of any kind. The energy and love that all of the performers bring to the stage cracked even the hard crabby shell that sits over my own whiskey-soaked skeptical soul. That is to say, I really do want to like what I see when I go to a local play, band, dance performance, reading, whatever. And usually I can find something to admire. But this I loved without reservation. You walk out feeling like you just saw something shift in terms of what's possible, creatively, in Colorado. I suppose I ought to have waited around to say "thank you" to the troupe and the band, but as you know, I'm shy.

Every good thing said about "Carry On" is true. I'm telling everyone I know to see the damn thing while they can. It might even make you want to go home and blog.

New Album!

I don't know why it's taken me so long to post, but here we are in December. Another year seems to have gotten away from me.

Early in August of this year, we finally received the packaged CD of "Sinners and Saints," the third studio album by my band, Halden Wofford & the Hi-Beams. It's been three months since its release, and, contrary to most of my other recordings, I still love listening to this one. You can get it on iTunes, on CDbaby, and by ordering it directly from us on our website at www.hibeams.com. I'm posting the cover, a painting by Bret Bertholf. Featured are some of my favorite sinners, and maybe one saint.

They are from top to bottom, left to right:

Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, Allen Ginsberg

Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Billie Holliday

Frida Kahlo, Thelonius Monk, Moondog, Tammy Wynette

Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Hunter S. Thompson, and Lenny Bruce

A Tale of Two Thompsons

This was the last column I wrote for Stray Pickers.  I don't think it was ever published.

A Tale of Two Thompsons

 

 

            We were tired.  You know how it is, the gig’s over, 3:30 in the morning, your steel guitar player driving, the road blurring into a version of Picasso’s Guernica.  That’s when Billings always gets paranoid.  He starts raving about the government, space aliens, conspiracies and the ways Philip K. Dick resembles Tolstoy.  If it’s a trip you haven’t taken, it’s one not to be taken lightly.

            So you know I had to do it.  I had to lock him out of the bathroom at the rest stop off of I-25, the one with all the info about the Ludlow Massacre and how they’re still digging up bits of skull from the women and children there. 

            Sure he screamed at me, and slammed his fists against the metal door, threatening to leave me there, and sure there was that enormous black spider with nearly twelve inch legs hanging upside down in the corner, but I had to do it.  There was no sense in allowing him in because he’d only say something that would so freak me out as to cause some kind of permanent damage, and I couldn’t have that. 

            Bret doesn’t like to talk about it now.  He says it’s embarrassing, but that’s not how I remember it.  It was actually somewhat pleasant. 

            Maybe that was just part of the effect of three days playing country music in southern Colorado mixed with the inevitable dietary supplements supplied by Bluegrass Festival organizers, about which NO ONE DARE SPEAK.  But as I listened to the rhythmic pounding of Billing’s fists, and the curses he added to my last name…names, really…I couldn’t help wondering “What would Hunter do?”  Meaning, of course, Hunter S. Thompson.

            And it wasn’t just because Bret had gotten off on one of his jags about the virtues of Brittany Spears’ music.  (Seriously, don’t get him started.  He has so much to say about that Grammy appearance and “the politics of sex” that you’ll be in Denver by the time he starts deconstructing “Oops, I Did It Again.”)

            Which was about when I saw the sign for the Ludlow Massacre.

            Oh, I’ll admit that I actually really liked “Oops, I Did It Again” the first time I heard it, and that was reason enough to be suspicious.

            I began to wonder, with that big spider crawling across the ceiling toward where I crouched, back against the door, if anyone else has that same relationship to songs.  It’s strange, but if there’s a song that I immediately like, I will almost always come to pity it.  Never despise it, exactly, but watch helplessly as it flounders and languishes as a lukewarm ex-enthusiasm, like a loaf of marble rye.

            Oddly, I thought, spider pausing, Billings imploring me to let him in because he needed the use of uninterrupted plumbing, oddly, the first time I heard Josh Ritter I had the same response.  I was watching a YouTube video with clips of Hunter S. set to Ritter’s “Monster Ballads,” and it seemed perfectly elegiac.  I rushed out, bought the album, and then watched it turn hard and crumbly, just like the rye bread.  (Though I still like “Monster Ballads.”)

            “Why?” I asked the spider.  “What is it about instantly likeable songs?”

            The spider let itself down to the floor on a long thread. 

            “Richard Thompson albums aren’t like that at all,” I said.  “Most of them I instantly dislike.  They’re more like a bottle of whiskey that tastes acrid at first, but a month later turns into the best drink you’ve ever had.”

            It wasn’t until then that I felt afraid of the spider.  It didn’t move once it hit the ground, but I was aware of how close it had crawled.  Billings started pleading.

            And here, with the dreaded fear of what’s coming, and the pounding insistence from outside, I want to make a roots recommendation.  You may have to go online to order it, but it’s worth the effort. 

            A couple of years ago Richard Thompson put out a DVD/CD of his concert “1000 Years of Popular Music.”  It’s a remarkable work, and one that fits the category of this column like no other:  roots music in the true sense of the word “roots.”  Beginning with the song, “Sumer is Icumen In,” from around 1260 AD, it moves though the Mikado, the Ink Spots, Buck Owens, on into, yes, “Oops, I Did It Again.” 

            I looked at the spider. I thought about the song, about how I’d fallen in love with it again after hearing the Richard Thompson version, and how I knew Billings was always right about everything: Brittany, Philip K. Dick, and the space aliens.  So I did what any music fan would do, I let him in. 

            And I don’t know if he even saw that spider.

            

So, I've been reading about blogs, and it appears that no one bothers to read anything longer than two paragraphs.  

Thus, this post.  Things don't change much, except possibly our attention spans.  Or maybe that's not true.  Maybe there are now more things in heaven and earth to which one might pay attention.  And we're all bound to pay!

The world turns.  Economies collapse.  A blight upon the face of the green earth we loose with our divided attentions.