Tom Watson

Now Be Thankful

Some hippie-dippy British trad-rock Celtic goodness circa 1970 from Fairport Convention on this Thanksgiving Day, 2009 - written by Dave Swarbick and Richard Thompson - somehow seems fitting in the pre-turkey mists of morning.

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

Rock-and-Roll Data: Those Audio Lists

I use a lot of music web services but I don't like to invest in this sector. Nonetheless, it's an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I've written endlessly on this blog about the music web services I use, why I use them, and where I think the music web is going.

The most interesting music web service to me has been audioscrobbler (aka last.fm). I'm not all that interested in last.fm as a social network, but I am obsessed with it's value as a data asset. I report all my music listens to last.fm via the audioscrobbler technology and it has built a deep data asset on my musical listening habits (and therefore musical taste).

via www.avc.com

I use audioscrobbler too, but not as deeply as Fred Wilson
, one of the best tech bloggers around. If you look on the lower right-hand side of my blog layout, you'll see a chart that's tied to the last.fm API - click on the blue arrows and you can scroll through the recent faves (the ones I've listened to via iTunes and on my iPod , anyway). Warning: acres of classic rock.

Out Here on the Field

The Who have agreed to play during halftime at Super Bowl XLIV, a source close to the performance confirms to Rolling Stone. “It’s 100 percent the Who,” the source says. “They signed a long time ago.” (Update: Sources later clarified that while the official contract is still unsigned, a deal is expected to be finalized shortly.) The official announcement from the band and the NFL is expected on Thanksgiving Day, according to another source familiar with the deal. The game, which will take place February 7th in Miami, will be broadcast on CBS.

via www.rollingstone.com

What's the setlist? Who Are You, Can't Explain, Won't get Fooled Again - or do they end with iconic/ironic My Generation, replete with shattered Fender merch?

Si Mi Sangre Piden, Mi Sangre les Doy

Here's a great Los Lobos cover from the early 80s of the traditional Mexican revolutionary ballad Carabina .30-.30:

Tongues Talk Fire and Eyes Cry Rivers

Richard and Linda Thompson, circa 1975, and the evocative (and ironic, for them) Heart Needs A Home.

Like a Waring Blender

Here's a clip from a rather famous Warren Zevon show at the old Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey back in 1982 - a double track: his classic Poor Poor Pitiful Me and a cover of Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch. Zevon was one of the great live acts, as well as true melodic poet and rare wit. I remember this show like it was yesterday.

Redeemed Through Pain

For a bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York...check that...for a Catholic bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York, Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy was canonical, a bass-charged liturgy of the word - if the word descended from the Beats and Allen Ginsberg, its bearer transfigured into a poetry-pouting punk rocker with an angry hit record. The record's cover hangs framed in my basement rec room, near the Rock Band video game set-up and my 14-year-old's drum kit. Nearly 30 years ago, it was always in the stack on the turntable and the Jim Carroll Band's shows at the Ritz always brought out the punk royalty, from Patti Smith to Stiv Bators to Richard Hell. At least in my (somewhat gauze-wrapped) memory, they were real events and Carroll - who couldn't really sing per se, but still knew how to sell the story - was treated like an archbishop.

And based on that one record, it didn't seem too much to bend and kiss the ring. It was great, from the iconic People Who Died to the title track (which I quoted in a Lenten post earlier this year).

I was a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
And not through joy

Carroll died of a heart attack at 60 last week, and my friend Gerry Howard has a moving tribute in Slate (via Jim Wolcott):

Cognoscenti of downtown culture knew Jim as a literary prodigy who was publishing his poems and diaries in the Paris Review in his teens. He was a fully paid-up member of New York's hip aristocracy, Lou Reed's peer, Patti Smith's lover, Allen Ginsberg's acolyte, Robert Smithson's friend, permanently welcome in the Valhalla of Max's Kansas City's back room. And I had the pleasure of publishing most of his work when I was an editor at Penguin in the '80s.

Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is. The line of succession runs from Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker through Emmett Grogan and Al McGuire. In the '30s they would have cast him immediately as a Dead End Kid—he certainly had the unreconstructed accent for the part, an urban rasp that was sweet music to my aboriginal ears. He came up athletically in an era when New York produced the best basketball players in the country—and a lot of them were white. Despite playing his high-school ball for a Manhattan prep school, Jim could more than hold his own on some of the toughest playgrounds in the city against the likes of Lew Alcindor and Dean "the Dream" Meminger. But his street-kid affect never quite hid his essentially generous and vulnerable nature and his poetic soul.

I love that line about the Dead End Kids and Carroll's place in their ranks. Though a literary darling as welcome in the back room of Max's as any of the downtown cognoscenti, Carroll's work covered a different New York entirely. Still, his death does mark yet another great name leaving a city that used to house voices that stirred many a poetic soul. As Wolcott says:

"With his passing, another link to the Beats and the St. Marks poetry scene and the Warhol Factory joins the posthumous fraternity of the starry Kerouac night."

Here's a video of the Jim Carroll Band hammering through People Who Died on Friday's (h/t Dennis Perrin):

And the Moon Rose Over an Open Field

Here's David Bowie opening the incredible Concert for New York in October, 2001 with one of my favorite Paul Simon songs. One of the things that struck me about this show (which was the moving cultural experience of my life) was deep appreciation of New York City and its position and role in the world by British musicians like Bowie, Jagger and Richards, Townshend and Daltrey, Elton John, Clapton, and Paul McCartney, who organized the concert. In some ways, their emotion and empathy drove the entire evening - and provided a release to the cops and firefighters who packed the Garden. It's almost as if - like the Queen, who ordered the Star-Spangled Banner played at Buckingham Palace - these British rockers really took the meaning of "America" (as they call call it) to heart. Anyway, Bowie:

What's Wrong with You ... You Stupid Child?

I've always been a total sucker for Squeezing Out Sparks, the hook-filled 1979 release from Graham Parker and the Rumour. It wasn't punk and it wasn't really New Wave (Parker being a hair older than those dudes), but it fit the times as perfectly as this record's eight-track fit the ride out to Jones Beach. Here's Local Girls, a wry commentary on man's innate (and ultimately unsuccessful) drive to remain cool and aloof, and a spiffy old school music video besides.

A Song for Senator Kennedy

In honor of the late Edward Kennedy, a bit of vintage Billy Preston, dedicated to the Senatorial soldier in the war on poverty:

So much has already been said, I figured this does the trick. Those who came closest to my feelings about Edward M. Kennedy: Dennis Perrin and Chuck Butcher. The last lion, indeed.