#1205: alphonse “bois sec” ardoin and canray fontenot - bonsoir moreau (1966, newport folk festival, dir. alan lomax)

if you’re going to watch heartbreaking and electrifying footage from more than half a century ago of the fiddler nicknamed “dry wood,” make it this one up above – or this one down below.

6:45 pm  •  3 January 2021  •  3 notes

#1204: alphonse “bois sec” ardoin and canray fontenot - eunice two step (newport folk festival, 1966)

alphonse ardoin was born around 1914, back when archduke franz ferdinand was getting himself assassinated. he grew up in a hamlet in southwest louisiana, where he was called “bois sec,” or “dry wood,” because, during rainstorms, “he was the first one who’d run into the barn,” according to this old and trusty guide to cajun music. ardoin played a kind of creole music called “la la” that’s that’s even older than zydeco. watch this and understand dry wood’s la la.

6:39 pm  •  3 January 2021

#1184: jesse fuller - san francisco bay blues (1968)

my most interesting opinion is that the kazoo is underrated, or at least one-man bands, or at least jesse fuller. 

the singing saw isn’t bad either. or accordions! or oboes. maybe i have bad taste in instruments, though.

1:01 pm  •  19 December 2018  •  7 notes

#1182: the beatles - revolution (live, 1968)

here are five things that have made life better for me in november 2018, maybe they’ll make life better for you too: (5) the remastered beatles white album, which sounds as clean as i don’t know maybe the night air in the last half hour of a snowstorm (4) pontormo’s visitation at the morgan, the most beautiful painting (3) byron coley’s 2013 profile in arthur magazine of my hero michael hurley (2) the very bad but young and hungry new york knicks (1) my plants

1:01 pm  •  12 November 2018  •  14 notes

#1170: joe cocker - she came in through the bathroom window (1969, live)

i’m sitting here on a windy and cold saturday night in new york city, wearing my long johns and watching joe cocker lose his mind in the late 60s while he transforms a mediocre song from abbey road by turning it into a riproaring stomper. just imagine my surprise when it dawns on me that cocker, squirming and waving with joy, is wearing long johns just like me. my thermal shirt is red, his is yellow. and what’s this? his organ player, the grease band’s chris stainton, is wearing a thermal shirt, too! it’s purple. pajamas are for the people.

8:03 pm  •  3 March 2018  •  3 notes

#1164: the velvet underground - jesus (1969, homemade video from 2011)

sometime last year, i was sitting with my friend roy talking about music videos, which is usually the topic of conversation among my friends and loved ones. roy mentioned that he had made a minute-long music video for one of my favorite velvet underground songs. he showed it to me and i agreed it’s a masterpiece. afterwards, i emailed him a few questions about when he made it, and why. but he didn’t write back for a while. then oprah gave her speech at the golden globes, and like magic my friend roy wrote back about his beautiful video:

“i made the jesus video sometime in the winter of 2011-2012 as part of what i called my lunch break series. found footage has been a long standing hobby – the only film teacher at my college taught us on 16mm cameras and flatbed editors and was obsessed with experimental technique. my favorite class was called ecuslomotl, a terrible portmanteau but great concept in which each film was composed exclusively of extreme close up (ecu), slow motion footage (slomo), and time lapse (tl). i’d always found oprah footage absurd and mystifying, so i found some, slowed it down, and voila. 2011 was not quite early youtube, but it was still a time when I felt like browsing around random channels, and finding weird stuff still felt new and exciting. another of my films from this time features a variety of young men who filmed themselves recreating the attempted suicide scene from the royal tenenbaums. i was working full time at a depressing production company in an office which was housed in a corner windowless room of an ad agency on park ave. the guy who ran the company was essentially making corporate promo films for his former prep school classmates. much of my job involved telling crew they weren’t going to get paid on time. during my lunch break i would heat up my lunch in the microwave and sit on my laptop in a room that did have a window and make these weird little short films. somehow this had an ameliorating effect.”

9:02 am  •  21 January 2018  •  7 notes

#1158: the jackson five - who’s lovin you (ed sullivan, 1969)

my soulful friends love the who’s lovin you that smokey robinson sang with the miracles, because after all he wrote the song and it’s a stone cold beauty. but my very best friends also know the version on the supremes’ first album, which will knock your socks off. and on top of that, my true soul mate listens to the version that lauryn hill did when she was like twelve years old at an amateur night show, nervous and shaky and then slowly winning over the audience with a voice that was there even then. but if i had to choose, if i could keep only one, the heart-rending version for the history books was done by a different child star, in a purple hat and vest, on a television sound stage, with diana ross watching from the audience.

1:28 pm  •  5 November 2017  •  53 notes

#1157: the rolling stones - child of the moon (1968)

one of the relatively minor but still sad consequences of the way things have been going in 2017 is that music videos, my favorite art form in history, don’t move me the way they used to. you’ve got to go really deep, really high, really far, i mean way up, to make me feel that old feeling. thank god i just discovered that the filmmaker michael lindsay-hogg made a lost music video for the b-side to jumping jack flash, an extraordinary song called child of the moon. 

when i tell you that the whole thing looks like cindy sherman at her most beautiful photographing mick jagger at his most beautiful, i really mean that the video looks like the untitled film stills series. but this was 1968, the final days of brian jones’ life and the beginning ones of the best run in rock and roll history – beggars banquet, let it bleed, sticky fingers and exile on main st. i’m not sure i’d take anything from those masterpieces over this witchcraft. it sounds like the ghost of the beatles’ rain, and it looks like the best movie you’ve never seen.

6:27 pm  •  28 October 2017  •  9 notes

#1135: toots & the maytals - treat me bad (c. 1962)

in my life, i have watched old music videos and new music videos, rap videos, rock videos, country videos, jazz videos, pop videos, blues videos, live videos and videos by the band live. but i think this one i just found of toots & the maytals playing when toots hibbert was about 19 years old, filmed live for an early-1960s bbc documentary about ska, is one of the best music videos i have ever seen. in one of the other finest moments in music video history, lil uzi vert says “yah” six times in a row. that is nothing! in the peak of this masterpiece, the number of consecutive times toots says “you don’t know” is 29.

10:26 pm  •  7 February 2017  •  6 notes

#1132: skip james - crow jane (1967, live)

these are times for sad, strange, angry, lonesome, ominous, violent, mysterious songs, and skip james knew how to sing those.

11:02 pm  •  29 January 2017  •  8 notes

#1127: the flying burrito brothers - hot burrito #1 (1969)

the snow is falling on the saturday streets of new york, and those streets are empty except for some stragglers and dogs with generous owners. indoors, there’s nothing better to do than put on two layers of socks and watch gram parsons and his flying burrito brothers sing hot burrito #1 in 1969. 

you might think country music would only be right for the summertime, but you’d be wrong. “you may feel sweet and nice, but that won’t keep you warm at night,” gram sings while sneaky pete kleinow’s pedal steel guitar weeps. 

“i’m the one who showed you how to do the things you’re doing now,” gram says, putting on his sunglasses, like a country-western version of hotline bling but 46 years earlier. hot burrito #2 is almost as good, but that one’s for the springtime.

5:14 pm  •  7 January 2017  •  10 notes

#1121: lee dorsey - ya ya (1966, live)

the only good song lyrics: (3) “fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, your turn, my turn, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, your turn now” - otis redding (2) “wah-wah, you’ve given me a wah-wah, and i’m thinking of you, and all the things that we used to do, wah-wah wah-wah” - george harrison (1) “oh well i’m sitting here la la waiting for my ya ya, uh huh” - lee dorsey, the king of good song titles

12:08 pm  •  28 October 2016  •  4 notes

#1112: johnny cash - how high is the water, momma? (pete seeger’s rainbow quest, 1965)

“johnny cash recorded some of my songs early on, too, i met him in about ‘63, when he was all skin and bones. he traveled long. he traveled hard. but he was a hero of mine. i heard many of his songs growing up. i knew them better than i knew my own. big river, i walk the line. how high’s the water, mama? i wrote it’s alright ma (i’m only bleeding) with that song reverberating inside my head. i still ask, “how high is the water, mama?” - bob dylan

“hey all you kids out there! welcome to three feet high and rising! now, here’s what we do.” - de la soul

9:14 am  •  23 May 2016  •  24 notes

#1103: prince buster - wash wash (1964, live)

if each ounce of coolness was squeezed out of every good moment of north american music made in the 1960s – which i guess would include elvis and bob dylan and ray charles and aretha franklin and dusty springfield and johnny cash and otis redding and the beach boys and phil spector and harry nilsson and leonard cohen and joni mitchell and thelonious monk and gram parsons – it would make for a very tall glass of water. but prince buster is a swimming pool of cool, and wash wash is at least a tub. watching him play early ska in jamaica in 1964, wearing what i think is a cincinnati reds cap and a pinky ring, makes you cooler by osmosis. prince buster was so cool he could segue into old man river.

11:06 pm  •  24 February 2016  •  1 note

#1097: percy sledge - warm and tender love (1966)

in a few weeks, it’s going to be the first anniversary of percy sledge’s death. if you were too sorry about the demise of this gorgeous alabama soul singer to listen to his music in the past twelve months – or, on the freakish and horrible off chance that you never got to know it in the first place – now’s the time to watch and hear him sing warm and tender love. otis redding, aretha franklin and sam cooke and all the other truly ecstatic american soul singers have the kind of magic that the right combination of pain and pity and glee and warmth and showmanship create. but only percy sounds like a man who’s on the verge of exploding. his voice was a grenade, the prettiest grenade in the world.

6:20 pm  •  30 January 2016  •  1 note