After reading an e-mail from a former student who'd suggested some new bands for me to check out, I was browsing YouTube so that I could return the favor by sending links to Lou Reed's Street Hassle and Patti Smith's Piss Factory.
Along the way, I stumbled across a video somebody had done for the live-version of AFTER HOURS that appears on The Velvet Underground Live at Max's Kansas City, reported to have been the final performance of The Velvet Underground.
If the information along with the video is accurate, yesterday (August 23, 2010) was the 40th anniversary of that performance.
Legend has it that the performance was recorded on a portable cassette-machine by poet Jim Carroll (People Who Died, etc.).
It may be considered a minor work by a major band, but this was one of those recordings that changed my life. So much that has been written and said about The Velvet Underground focuses on all that "flowers of evil" nonsense.
Listen to Lou Reed's vocals--the joy, the fun, the [...]
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I received news that Dick Vitale passed away in July.
Dick was founder (or one of the founders) of Stick Against Stone. Dick had also been the drummer of The Dark, one of my favorite bands in the early days of the punk music.
The handful of anecdotes I could share about Dick Vitale, taken out-of-context, would probably not honor his memory.
A guy named Will Kreth is working on a documentary about Stick Against Stone.
(For all I know, the film is finished and has been screened all around the world. Will Kreth interviewed me several times over the phone and a couple of times on camera, but I never signed the releases so I don't expect to be in the film. I guess my memories are too precious to me to hand over to a stranger who intends to hand them over to other strangers. And I can't get myself to go to any of the websites dedicated to the music of the era. To hear those recordings only tarnishes the memory, at least for me.)
It would be nice if every person that ever danced [...]
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I would have been early for church, but a big idea popped into my head, and I had to heed the call. And you would think the church would understand, right? Even Socrates argued that beauty is divine. So when I am so blessed as to be visited by divinity (which means to me, as a Christian, The Holy Spirit), I try not to resist.
Except that now I was going to be late for church. I drove almost all the way to the church parking lot before deciding it would be too disrespectful to walk in so late. So I went to The Audubon Center, parked under a chestnut tree (I'll bet almost nobody even knows it's chestnut tree), and wrote a few lines. I figured I'd kill some time and attend the eleven o'clock service.
But the Holy Spirit was, once again, blowin' in the wind, so to speak, and before I knew it, I was running late again.
Just as I pulled into the church parking lot, I was stricken with a wave of apprehension. (In the same way that I am often hip to the Spirit, I am vulnerable to the [...]
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I saw The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition of LATE RENOIR, and something clicked for me about Jonathan Richman. (I’ve pretty much been listening to nothing but Jonathan Richman, Leon Russell and Willy DeVille, and Jonathan’s “This Summer Feeling” and “Vincent Van Gogh” had been repeat-playing in my car all the way from my apartment in Rofo to my parking space in Philly’s Fairmount Park.)
In Renoir’s later years, he was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, the pain so severe that he had to choose between walking and painting because he did not possess the energy for both.
He chose painting.
A system was devised to allow his family and assistants to raise, lower and relocate the position of his chair so he could reach various portions of the canvas. From his wheelchair, he painted. When he was almost too weak to hold a brush, he painted.
When asked why he continued to paint when he was in such excruciating pain, he replied, “The pain will pass, but the [...]
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A couple of years ago, I began a recording project that consisted of 36 six songs--some new originals, some songs written by friends and acquaintances, and a few traditional folk songs re-written to suit my mindset.
I'm told that most people don't attempt to record 36 songs at one time.
In addition to lyrics, melody and guitar chords, each song had high and low counterpoint parts. The high parts were played by me on guitar and Regina Ketter on viola. The low parts were played on guitar and bass. Lori Hitt played some piano on a few songs. And each song had both arpeggio and strummed acoustic guitars. Basically, there was a ton of overdubbing, punching in, and cutting and pasting.
With no prospect of being able to make these songs available to the public in the foreseeable future, the songs remained unfinished, stored on the hard-drives of Cycling Troll Studios in Erie, PA.
Unfortunately, a systems-crash led to the disassembling of the many recorded parts. The music exists in [...]
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