Screengrab: Five Character Actors Who Took The Lead

New post up at the Screengrab on Warren Oates, Forest Whitaker, Richard Farnsworth, Takashi Shimura, and Klaus Kinski.

Music Library: BIG!: Big Beat, Big Black, Big Boys, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Big Star

Everything's BIG in this post!

The Big Beat - Cross Our Hearts and Demos. My Canuck friend John T sent me these. Pretty decent Everly-ish Americana.

Big Black - "Kerosene" and Songs About Fucking. Phil Freeman used to say something like "every time Steve Albini touches a guitar, he should cut Andy Gill of Gang of Four a royalty check." It's true. Also true: I don't love Big Black as much as I used to.

The Big Boys - The Fat Elvis and The Skinny Elvis. The funky lords of Austin hardcore.

Big Mama Thornton - "Little Red Rooster" and "Hound Dog." Man, this lady could sing. Stop the presses!

Big Maybelle - The Complete OKeh Sessions 1952-1955. One of Mrs. Obscurity's favorite albums, Big Maybelle was a blues & soul shouter with a lot of proto-feminist swagger.

Big Star:

• #1 Record: It's amazing, all of the different elements that make this one of the best guitar-pop albums of all time. There's Memphis soul, Gram Parsons-like cosmic american music, healthy doses of the Beatles and Kinks in the hooks, and a love of Brit-folk in the acoustic material. I could do without "The India Song," which is the only one on the album that dates the material. Otherwise, it could have been released last week. Killer, killer, killer stuff.
• Ardent Studio Sessions 1972-73: Rough mixes of tracks from #1 Record and Radio City. Interesting as a bootleg document, but there's nothing on here close to the studio releases.
• Radio City: Perfection. My old friend John Smith (now in the Dexateens!) once pointed out that there's only one song on the album ("Mod Lang") that fades out rather than coming to a complete stop. This album is like the pyramids: there's no mortar, but you couldn't slide a piece of paper between the stones.
• Third/Sister Lovers: A different kind of perfection. Radio City is what happens when you shoot for the stars and reach them. Third/Sister Lovers is what happens when you fall down the stairs and accidentally invent a new art movement. This would be on my short list of music to send into space so that aliens will know what humanity is capable of.
• Big Star Live: Alex Chilton's crazy guitar skills & vocals are on prominent display in this radio broadcast for a Long Island radio station from 1974-ish.
• Columbia: Live at Missouri University: This is a weird one. Organizers for a music festival in Missouri asked Chilton, almost on a dare, if he'd be willing to re-form Big Star in 1993. He surprised everyone by saying yes. He and drummer Jody Stephens recruited a couple of the Posies and have been playing off-and-on ever since. They've even recorded an album, which we'll get to in a minute.
• Nobody Can Dance: This is a little out of order. This album has some rehearsal tapes and a show from the early 70s in Memphis. The title comes from an announcement partway through, where people are told that dancing in this park is illegal. This is indicative of Chilton's luck at the time.
• In Space: An album from 2005 that never should have been released under the Big Star name. It sounds like a lot of Alex Chilton's more recent efforts, which is to say "unengaged." I know Chilton doesn't seem to give a shit about Big Star these days. That's his perogative, but this is the sound of an artist spitting on his best work. Yuck.

John Leonard, RIP

I've written about John Leonard in this blog a number of times, almost always negatively. His stints as the head of the book review sections in The Nation and Harper's were marked by opinions that often struck me as infuriatingly wrongheaded. I couldn't believe that this guy - with whom, clearly, I shared a lot of interests - could always see down as up, day as night, black as white, right as wrong.

Yet I always came back for more. Leonard was wrong, but he was fascinatingly wrong. He was brilliantly wrong. He was inspiringly wrong. I loved to disagree with him, and what's more, I think he loved being a guy who wrote criticism that made his opponents bring their A-game.

John Leonard died yesterday at 69, which is too young. I feel for his family, who surely wish they had more time with him. His son, Andrew, is the columnist who writes How The World Works for Salon, one of my favorite reads. I'm sorry for Andrew today, and I'm sorry for everyone who knew and loved him.

Phil Nugent has a typically razor-sharp appreciation of Leonard's life at his blog. I don't have Phil's chops and depth of pop culture knowledge, but I'm also going to miss John Leonard. I'm going to miss disagreeing with him.

Back from L.A.!

Great reading, great experience. Scott Plagenhoef talked about Belle & Sebastian's aesthetic and the changing face of music fandom with the advent of the Internet and the access it provides. I showed Richard & Linda Thompson pictures, some courtesy of Blair Helsing, a new Internet pal who drums in the San Francisco jazz combo Echo Beach Band, and some graphic depictions of Dante's Inferno, while I read from the book. Kim Cooper read parts of her narrative about Neutral Milk Hotel and showed an artist's rendition of the lyrics to "Holland, 1945". We had a pleasant Q&A with the audience and signed some books. I had a number of great friends who showed, plus my brother flew down from the Bay Area. All in all, a wonderful experience. Thanks, Hammer Museum!

Also want to mention that it's 33 1/3 pitch time! Get your pitch together.

Reading in LA TOMORROW!

I can hardly believe it myself, but I will be reading from my book at the Hammer Museum in LA tomorrow evening at 7.

Incidentally, I learned a lot from this article, and I think you can, too. (Thanks to the RT List!)

Screengrab Review: Six Man, Texas

I'm proud of this review. It has some clunky writing, yep. But it's not too far from how I pictured it. That means everyone else will most likely hate it.

Plus, I forgot to post it, but here's a column about My Neighbor Totoro from last week.

Remember that these are at Nerve.com, which has some smutty content (although not on this blog). Browse accordingly!

Music Library: Ben Vaughn, Benko, Benny Goodman, Benoit Charest, Bernard Herrmann, Bernie Worrell, Bert Jansch, Bertha Lee and Charley Patton, Bessie Smith, Betsy In The Gene Pool, Betty LaVette, Beulah, Bevis Frond

Ben Vaughn - "Dressed in Black" and "I Dig Your Wig." These are from Halloween mixes by David Smay, I think. Pretty good bluesy-swamp rock.

Benko - An International Affair. This is the debut EP by Benko, a very interesting and fun Austin trio of drums, bass, and vibes. At Obscurity headquarters, we love Benko! But this reminds me that I have as yet failed to pick up their first full-length album, which came out at the end of August. Will do so soon!



Benny Goodman - "Sing Sing Sing." Swingin'!

Benoit Charest - "Belleville rendez-vous." Funny that this should crop up right after Benny Goodman, as there's certainly some familiarity between the two. This is the song from Les Triplettes de Belleville, the delightful, but deeply weird animated film from a few years ago.

Bernard Herrmann - Vertigo Original Motion Picture Score. That's cinematic! I am now filled with a vague sense of foreboding and an overwhelming need to sit down.

Bernie Worrell - Pieces of Woo: The Other Side. Surprisingly un-funky, this is a mostly jazz-oriented affair. It's - unsurprisingly - produced by Bill Laswell and has a lot of his influence in the sound. A few tracks are collaborations with Fred Wesley, who was James Brown's bandleader for a very long time. Some have Buckethead on guitar.

Bert Jansch - Dazzling Stranger and The Black Swan. Jansch is one of the greats of Brit-folk, the John Fahey to John Renbourn's Leo Kottke and Richard Thompson's... uh, Richard Thompson. Dazzling Stranger is a compilation of Jansch solo and tracks with The Pentangle, Jansch's eclectic 60s folk-rock band with Renbourn, Danny Thompson (who tours with Richard Thompson now and fronts the jazz-fusion band Whatever), Terry Cox, and Jacqui McShee. He's dabbled in blues, hippie folk, swirling rock, and lots of gorgeous fingerstyle acoustic guitar. Neil Young once said that Jansch had done for the acoustic guitar what Hendrix did for the electric. There's lots of standout tracks over the course of his career, but the tops are "Needle of Death" (recently a frequent cover of Yo La Tengo's), "Blackwaterslide" (covered by Jimmy Page on Led Zep's first album), "Reynardine" (more familiar from the Fairport Convention version), "When I Get Home," and "Train Song," (both of which I'll discuss more when and if I get to the Pentangle before I die of old age). I should mention how much I like Jansch's voice, too, which is not just world-weary and craggy but also lilting and pleasant. The Black Swan is a Drag City album from 2006 with Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart popping up, probably hoping to do for Jansch what Banhart and Animal Collective did for Vashti Bunyan: make this underappreciated 60s icon a touchpoint for younger music lovers. It's a killer album.

Bertha Lee and Charley Patton - "Mind Reader Blues" and "Yellow Bee." I'm not sure why these are under Bertha Lee instead of Charley Patton. Excellent early folk blues.

Bessie Smith - The Collection. More early blues from one of the all-time great blues singers.

Betsy in the Gene Pool - "Slow in the Left Lane." An alt-country band from North Carolina who moved to Texas around the time I did, but then vanished. Decent song, but I don't remember whether they had more that would stick around like this one.

Betty LaVette - "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got." Here's a gaping hole in my music collection. This is the only song I have by Ms. LaVette, who has a wonderful raspy soul voice and uses it to powerful effect on this cover of Sinead O'Connor's a capella tune.

Beulah - John Peel Session 4/20/2000, The Coast Is Never Clear, Live on KCRW 9/25/2001, Netherlands Radio 8/26/2001. So that's one studio album and three live shows? Weird. I got the live shows from that site that used to post Elephant 6 bootlegs. Does that exist anymore? I don't know. Beulah plays horn-heavy, somewhat-psychedelic power pop. You make music that could be described that way, and chances are I'll like it.

The Bevis Frond - He'd Be A Diamond. This is a compilation of the psych-rock band by my friend Jon B. They sound a bit like one very ambitious guy covering every song on the Nuggets box.

3 from 33 1/3

That's hard to read. Lemme put this on a different server so it will be clickable for a larger image.