Podcast #46 Is Ready!

Aye, another Revolver USA podcast is ready for your listening pleasure. Cast #46 features February 2011 releases with music by : A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Go Team, Beans, Ben Butler and Mousepad, Distractions, Sonic Youth, Firesign Theater, Howlin Rain, Neurosis and Refrigerator. Total time: 30:05.

Download and streaming options can be found at the usual destination:
REVOLVER POD PAGE. 

Or find this podcast and other podcasts in the Free Downloads section of Digital page on the Midheaven site. 

2006 Birdman Feature Worth Revisiting.

Here's an article about archiving obscure Delta blues that focuses on Dave Katznelson of the Birdman label. The feature originally ran in the SF Weekly over a year ago. So what if it's 2008.

From the Devil's Music to God's Country
Local label Birdman connects with divine gospel
By MIKE MCGONIGAL
Published: December 27, 2006

The folk-blues revival of the 1950s and '60s generated an awful lot of crappy music made by earnest kids; this is fact, as clearly documented in the film A Mighty Wind. But the revival also empowered dozens of people to arm themselves with tape recorders and go forth in an effort to record the source of this music, a bunch of little DIY John and Alan Lomaxes. These well-meaning folks were often part academics (taking detailed, census-type notes or tracing every single variant of individual Appalachian ballads) and part cons (perhaps adding their own names to publishing rights on songs they never wrote, or paying for a phenomenal recording with a shot of whiskey). At the risk of sounding corny, a few were simply record-collector enthusiasts obsessed and in love with American music and intent on finding its living, breathing source — or at least its remnants — and who were perhaps not against partying with and befriending these musicians once they found them.

Back in 1969, 19-year-old Bengt Olsson (who you can lump squarely in with that latter group of collector-fans) was a bit late to the folk-blues archiving game. Most surviving, documented Appalachian folk/Delta blues musicians had been rediscovered, including such stars of Harry Smith's celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music as Dock Boggs and Bukka White. But Olsson, from Malmö, Sweden, was so in love with American music, he just had to visit the U.S. After saving up money by working extra shifts at a printing plant, he headed to the States with a fellow enthusiast. The two bought a used Chevy in upstate New York and headed to Chicago, where they encountered the great electric-blues musicians Hound Dog Taylor and Magic Slim in nightclubs that stayed open almost 'til sun up. "We slept in the daytime and went to clubs at night," Olsson relates over the phone, clearly still excited about that time even though it was almost 40 years ago. After a week spent in the apartment of the guy who ran Delmark Records, the duo headed to Memphis and then further on to places in the South they'd never heard of before. Olsson returned to the region by himself in 1971 and '74.

Self-financed and operating without much of a plan, Olsson didn't always have it easy. He got kidnapped once in Mississippi, after attending one of fife and drum patriarch Otha Turner's harvest picnics, where moonshine and goat meat were as much a part of the rowdy festivities as the hypnotic, polyrhythmic sound of the music. "I was having too much fun to go back to Memphis, and told my friends to go on without me," he relates. "In the morning Otha drove me up to the highway and said a bus would come along in 20 minutes. But as this was Labor Day, it turned out the buses didn't run on schedule. So I figured I should hitchhike. I got picked up by two white guys and as soon as I got in, it was clear they were real drunk. They said they'd been up all night, and that the car was stolen. They pulled a gun and started making threats like, 'You're never getting out of this alive,' but we soon started to get followed by a police car. The boys tried to shake the police on side roads and when that happened, I jumped out and started running!"

In addition to such tastes of rural outlaws, Olsson discovered and documented a wealth of obscure traditional music over the course of two more trips throughout the South. He found blues-based musicians no one else had recorded, players of astonishing force. There were even a few overlooked greats from the '20s and '30s, such as Dewey Corley from the once hugely popular Beale Street Jug Band. "We were really interested in finding out where no one had gone before," he explains. Until recently, Olsson's recordings had only been released on a few comps on the European label Flyright in the '70s. David Katznelson, who runs the local label Birdman (home to garagey records by the Cuts, the Gris Gris, and Howlin' Rain), first came into contact with Olsson when Birdman released It Came from Memphis Vol. 2 in 2001, a disc compiled by blues scholar Robert Gordon; it contained a few of Olsson's field recordings. Katznelson, who'd put out two excellent Otha Turner albums, quickly realized the worth of Olsson's tapes and bought the rights to them.

After transferring the tapes to disc for reference, the first CD Katznelson popped in was by someone named Perry Tillis, a blind blues musician Olsson discovered living alone in abject poverty in rural Alabama. Tillis sang beautiful spiritual numbers in the style of prewar Delta blues. "I felt like I'd just unearthed a pot of gold," Katznelson enthuses. "It was almost hard to listen to; it was so real with feeling, purity, and sound. His guitar playing is like a fragile mosquito, and his long, monotonous riffs explore Velvet Underground territory." Released last month on Birdman — two years after Bishop Tillis' death in 2004 at the age of 85 — his CD Too Close is a thing of great, ragged beauty. It's amazing that Too Close is a debut album. But as Tillis himself told the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture's publication The Field in 1995, "I never did want no records much. There just wasn't enough in it. See, I could get out there with my guitar; I played the blues and I'd get out there in a club or some building and make myself $2,000 a week. I couldn't get that on records."

The music consists solely of Tillis' voice and guitar, with occasional percussion caused by his feet stomping the loose floorboards in his house. From the first song, his take on "God Don't Like It," a track that advises against drinking moonshine, to "Kennedy Moan," a rousing political number, it's all stirring stuff. Most folks into this music see the "sanctified blues" of the '20s and '30s (Ed Clayborn, Blind Willie Johnson) as a stillborn bridge from the devil's music to God's, between the sound everyone knows is the blues and the stuff we all recognize as gospel. But if you look for it, it's obvious that bluesy, visceral gospel music was made on into the '50s (Ola Mae Terrell, Utah Smith), the '60s (Staple Singers, Rev. Overstreet), the '70s (Charlie Jackson), and even today (Rev. Isaiah Owens). Asked about this music's rarity, Olsson says, "I think sanctified blues as a tradition lived on as long as 'regular'] blues," but surmises that maybe "sanctified people didn't buy the records as much, plus you didn't have sanctified records on jukeboxes except for maybe Sister Rosetta Tharpe."

Too Close is one of those releases that not only redresses historical wrongs by giving this unheard artist broad release, but that also should be listened to on repeat. It's astonishing stuff. Birdman plans to issue multiple discs culled from Olsson's recordings over the next few years; there's a lot to dig through. If the other releases — by the likes of Lum Guffin, Perry Tillis, and Lattie Murrell — are even half as good as Close, it'll be cause for serious celebration for fans of roots music. Olsson admits he was a little shocked at the interest in his recordings. "But when I listened back, I was pleasantly surprised," he adds. "[The tapes] sounded better than I imagined!"

Shjips Feature On Drown In Sound.com

DiScover: Wooden Shjips
By Him Tall
Artists: Wooden Shjips
Online feature

San Francisco will probably always struggle to shrug off the 40-year-old 'Summer of Love' weight of history that hangs over one the most beautiful and chilled of US cities. We've had punk, Bay Area thrash metal and hardcore since, but the love and peace era personified by the Haight-Ashbury hippie revolution and the Golden Gate Park 'Be-Ins' of 1967 continue to fascinate.

Recently a handful of bands loosely based in and around the city have taken the free experimental spirit of '60s bands such as the United States of America, the Velvet Underground, Silver Apples, and the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and filtered their sound through the motorik shuffle of krautrock and the discordance of obscure minimalist composers. I spoke to Wooden Shjips guitarist/vocalist and founder member Ripley Johnson via the magic of e-mail and asked him to explain a few things about their retro-futurist sound.

When I listened to the recent Wooden Shjips track on last month’s Mojo cover-mounted CD I got the track listing mixed up and initially thought I was listening to the early Soft Machine demos when in fact it was your track! Anyway, it piqued my interest being one of only two contemporary tracks on the CD. Is it possible to explain how the band came to be and how its original improvisational style mutated into the band’s sound today?

“Ha ha! I don’t really know much about Soft Machine either, though I’ve read good things. The original plan was to integrate elements of different genres of music: the minimalist movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, especially the music of Angus MacLise, Terry Riley and John Cale; primitive rock, a la the Velvet Underground, Link Wray, the Seeds; and the improvisation of jazz and psychedelic rock. Originally we just jammed together and felt our way forward. No real songs. We did that for about nine months before playing our first show.”

From an admittedly unseasonably warm autumnal London it's easy to romanticise a San Francisco/West Coast scene in which you're swapping riffs with Howling Rain, Earthless and Assembled Head in Sunburst Sound. Is there any reality to this at all?

“Ha! Unfortunately, no. We opened a Roky Erickson show with Howlin’ Rain earlier in the year, and we have a show with Earthless coming up. That’s about the extent of it so far.”

Whilst referencing some classic ‘60s and ‘70s psych/kraut and experimental bands, your music (to me anyway) seems equally informed by a more ‘80s aesthetic of taking these influences and spinning them (I’m thinking Loop, Spacemen 3, Scientists etc here). Does my shoddy theory have any relevance? I'm not saying you're stuck in the ‘80s!

“Actually, no. We’ve gotten those comparisons before. Obviously, we need to go record shopping. I really like Loop, but it’s a relatively new discovery. I don’t think the other guys have heard any of those bands. I suspect that they were influenced by the same music as us: Velvet Underground, Stooges, 13th Floor Elevators, etc. I think it’s just natural for bands to want to beat a riff into the ground over and over. It’s always been that way. Whether krautrock, or the electric Miles Davis bands, or ? and the Mysterians.”

In this age of blogs and MySpace sites I was, after hearing your track on the Mojo cover mount, able to track down a lot of info about you very quickly. Do you think this loss of any intended or accidental mystique is a good or bad thing?

“It’s just different. I grew up deciphering album covers for little clues about a band, and referencing the Harmony Encyclopaedia of Rock for discographies. Hunting for records used to be more of a sport. If someone really wanted to remain a mystery today, I think they could. It would take a profound commitment. The flipside is that you can be relatively obscure and have a substantial audience. That’s good for everyone.”

You've released some hard to find, over here anyway, singles: is the plan to keep releasing odd singles with various labels?

“Absolutely. How we’ll release them, I don’t know. In some ways it’s easier to do it ourselves because we can keep the overhead low and the turnaround quick. We just co-released one with Holy Mountain to benefit Food Not Bombs. The first pressing proceeds will go to them, the second pressing will go towards our rent. We like that model and are thinking of doing a holiday record in a similar way.”

Could you describe the Wooden Shjips live experience and are there any plans to bring the Wooden Shjips over to Europe/UK to play in the foreseeable future?

“From my perspective on stage, I would describe it as loud and loose. We would love to come to the UK. We’re hoping sometime next year!”

Let’s hope they do! Wooden Shjips’ debut album is released on the mighty Holy Mountain label and is in the shops now.

Words: Him Tall