July 04, 2004
I KNOW YOU GOT SOUL
Further notes on boodley-oodley: My beef with Lay Mr. Lay is hardly his wack executive washroom blues genre. I've been in rental cars. I have found myself pulling in a station I'll never find again and hearing a band I'll never know the name of playing 1-4-5 through crap amps and feeling that this eternal seesaw could scissor me all the way to the airport. And I can't snap on his new Margaritaville guitar paint job. (His previous hideous guitar was painted by a famous graffiti artist and we can't figure out who loses biggest in that one.) I have plenty of ugly instruments. And I don't read his cluelessness as a function of age—never that. His project does not offend me, qua project. Blues rock could die tomorrow or live forever and either outcome would be fine. I'd rather hear Randy Joe Hobbs than the fricking Radio 4 and I'd rather hear the Yeah Yeah Yeahs than Canned Heat. Whatever—minor diff, low affect story. What I object to is the Pavlovian nostalgia handoff and laziness of execution. That is my beef and the butcher what sells it.
Several of sunshine's solos did start out as bonafide thoughts. You could hear motion and resonance if you strained. Silver peeked through the mud, though there was no mud. But then the monkey cheering would start, Slowhand's synapses would get the best of him and he'd drop down to muscle memories. This is pardonable. But those monkey squeaks really spavined the scene because, really, why had he bothered to tour? To make JBL a buck? Uh, maybe, sure, who knows? So Creambuddy descended as far as his tendons allowed, down to the crowd-pleasers every player fears she will be reduced to. Some are more happy than others to jump right into the shit.
Here's a parallel: I know bupkus about Derek Trucks, his Band or his past. I just received a complimentary copy of his new double live CD. I don't like his Santana-lite band or his love-the-life-you're-livin' songs that are not songs. But music drips from his goddamn fingers, and I'd like to ProTools his entire CD down to nothing but solos. I could care less that he's fifth in line after Stevie Ray and Duane and Johnny Winter and that dude who plays solos on Dwight Yoakam records. He's on fire and nobody can put him out. The package he arrives in concerns me not.
Crapton's show also sent me back to Dylan at the 9:30 Club a few months ago. Whatever may have gone wrong with Bob, whatever shortcomings are made obvious by any longitudinal comparisons, dude is not running a Happy Days jukebox, WWF announcer intro aside. His band makes a big, nasty guitar sound and the songs are, all too famously, sumbmerged inside the perversity, pehraps shortstopping some of the song's original force but also cockblocking any reflexive affirmation, which we know that Bob does not like. And and and to the and: his two guitarists, Larry Campbell and Fuzzy Zoeller, solo all night long. They never stop. You think that they will but then they do not. They think and puff and squeeze, and you know what? They kill it almost every time out. Motherfuckers are working. That is all I ask, nation of broheems. Don't put cards up your sleeve and I will find the time to salute your irrelevant ass.
Posted by Sasha at July 4, 2004 04:31 PM | TrackBack