BlakeAtwood.com

Jon Foreman of Switchfoot and Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek have teamed up to create Fiction Family. I don’t even have to hear the music to know I’m going to like it. I’d buy it sound unheard. But, they’ve released one song for free.

Or you can just watch the video:

Fiction Family - When She’s Near from ATO Records on Vimeo.

I shall attempt to post a weekly NoiseTrade.com album widget for your perusal. I’ll only post ones I’ve actually downloaded. If you haven’t tried NoiseTrade, you should. It has a lot of great music and a great distribution deal - get the album for free if you recommend it to five friends via email or pay what you think it’s worth. They also appear to be adding new artists and albums every few weeks.

I don’t use it as much as I should, but that will change. Tonight’s download was to help ease me out of my bah-hum-bug-ness for the Christmas season (only because I’ve been rehearsing Christmas music for six weeks already!) Click the album cover to hear all the tracks!

I caught a little bit of Spiritualized before leaving early to get a good seat for the final two groups I wanted to see Saturday night. Spiritualized might be classified as progressive rock. I thought they might be a little Flaming Lips-ish. I’m still not sure. All I know is that they did a very inventive, wall-of-bass-reverberation, rendition of Amazing Grace. And I was standing far too close to the subwoofers; my heart was leaping out of my chest with each note.

I grabbed some grub then met my wife who had strategically positioned herself in front of the soundboard. We didn’t have to mess with people pressing in behind us or to one side of us, and the mix was excellent.

John Fogerty (of CCR fame) was first. In his early 60s, the man can still rock. His guitar skills are still as sharp as ever, and his band was fantastic. I searched Wikipedia later that night and saw that for around 20 years in the 80s and 90s he wasn’t allowed to sing his own CCR songs for legal reasons. Fortunately, and eventually, his label bought another label which owned the rights to his CCR songs, so we got to listen to nearly all of the songs one would want to hear from John Fogerty.

Then one of the highlights of the Festival came on stage: Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. They’re an interesting pairing; the angelic Krauss and the devilish Plant, the bluegrass country girl and the classic rock god. But the place from where they sing is their common ground. It’s a place of sorrow, longing, and ultimately hope.

I thought, Is Plant trying to atone for his past sins by singing with this saint? Or is Krauss falling toward the dark side in dueting with the devil? Or is this just two incredibly talented musicians collaborating and making great music? I think it’s a little of each.

Of course, another highlight was looking up at some point during the night and seeing Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters less than a foot away from me. He sat by the soundboard during the Plant/Krauss set.

So go listen to some CCR. Then buy Plant and Krauss’ Raising Sand.

After having the fortune to be chosen as a three-day, $50 ticket lottery winner following last year’s ACL Festival, I was excited to attend this year because I didn’t feel pressured to get my money’s worth. The wife and I didn’t go last year because of the expense, but now it seems like we’re living extravagantly because she didn’t even get to attend the first day, and I only saw a few acts. But heck, $50 is the price of one ticket for most of these acts in the first place.

I saw Jakob Dylan and the Gold Mountain Rebels first. He’d never been to ACL and I’d never seen him live, so we both had a unique experience today. His band started off fairly mellow, and it took the sound guys about three songs to finally get the mix right. But the group simmered for awhile until they really started to rock, pulling out a few Wallflowers songs. And yes, Jakob Dylan was more intelligible than his father. But give him another 20 years and we’ll see. (Better review here)

Then I wandered around. I started to see the rise of the dreaded, ominous, and foreboding dustcloud of doom. One would think the event planners had planned well enough to prevent the cloud. But it was happening, and it’s only Friday, typically the lowest attended day. A few years ago we saw Coldplay finish the Festival, and the cloud of dust was horrendous. I hope that doesn’t happen this year, for everyone’s health and sanity.

On a sidenote, I wanted to Twitter from ACL, but was prevented from doing that and even being able to contact anyone because my phone had no signal. Ironically, AT&T is a sponsor of the Festival. One would think they’d know their towers would get hammered. So I wasn’t able to contact a friend there, but, and this is one of the stranger things about this Festival of 50,000 people (I think?) - you typically run into your friends or aquaintances or long-lost roommates at the most random moments. It’s a swirling mass of humanity, but you’ll always find someone you know. It’s weird the first time, but expected to happen thenceforth.

So I met the friend I had tried to text earlier. Not ten minutes after we met up did her text get through to me. After catching up with her, I slung a Stubb’s chopped beef sandwich down my gullet. We met my friend’s friend at the very front of the stage for David “Same As It Ever Was” Bryne’s set. I didn’t know much of his music; I just knew he was creative, talented, and a might bit eccentric.

The set did not disappoint: from the percussionist’s fantastic syncopated abilities, to the drummer’s double-bass, double-snare, double-hi-hat rig, to the frenetic choreography throughout the set and Bryne’s own leadership in the style of cool funk, the hour-long set passed too quickly. Although I think his dancer’s were about to pass out. And when you can sing a song from an office chair while having your dancers enact the words while also sitting in office chairs?

Eccentric, yes, but there are reasons we pay to see shows like this; we need something that is not the norm, especially when the specter of WaMu and all that it now represents hangs over one of the main stages as a sponsor. The world became as small as that stage, focused on the choreographed frenzy of light, sound, and movement. (Better review here).

I left the show thinking, Now if only I could be as cool as David Byrne when I’m older. Now I’m thinking, If only I could be as cool as David Byrne now…

It was a good first day, a nice way to ease into the Festival. Tomorrow brings John Fogerty and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

If you’ve got a spare $2,900, please consider buying me this:

That would be a handmade, musical drum table. Video at the link too.

Tunefind allows you to search by TV or Movie title or artist for songs recently featured on television shows or movies. I stumbled across it because I was looking for a song used in, yes, you guessed it, the opening episode of this year’s Friday Night Lights (Fridays at 8pm on NBC). The song, by the way, that I found within three seconds of finding Tunefind is Wilco’s Muzzle of Bees. I have no idea what the song it about, but I sure do love the sound.

Stark. Contrast. Black and White. Maybe by going simpler on the design, I can focus more on the content. If only my lazy mind could awake from its slumber. There have been far too many days recently when I’ve felt oblivious to the world around me, and it’s a very large world.

The change of name is an homage to Zach Lind of FindingRhythm.com and, possibly more noticeably, the band Jimmy Eat World. It’s a recent blog find that I enjoy, for the twin facts of his drumming skills and Christian worldview. And he posts some killer drum videos.

And, not that I need to tell you O Learned Reader, but the rest of the name change is an homage to the late, great Douglas Adams. If you’re unfamiliar with the man’s work, do yourself a favor and start reading.

I never thought I would see Bob Dylan in concert. He’s too old. He seldom tours Texas. Tickets would be too hard to get or too expensive to afford. These were my rationalizations. Then, somehow, despite not getting Austin City Limits Festival tickets for the third year in a row, and one in which Bob was closing the event, the stars aligned, I hit refresh at the right time, and I was afforded the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Bob Dylan play a relatively intimate show at Stubb’s in Austin.

I’d only heard the stories, read the books and interviews, and, of course, heard the songs. I even spent a semester in college studying the man, the lyrics, and the myths…for credit! After that much buildup, the concert experience was a little surreal. Considering his age (66), his immense catalog, and his indelible and pervasive effect on American culture, the legend loomed larger than the music on this night.

I was more than annoyed with the college kid in front of me with the bushy mane that couldn’t stand still. Sure, you should enjoy Bob’s music and dance for every song, but not when you’re in my line of sight. Eventually, my prayers were answered, and he somehow danced off to one side. Then my twelve-rows-back, standing room only spot provided me one of the best visual and auditory experiences I’ve ever had at a concert.

I recognized half of the songs from his set, but, even then, they were nearly unrecognizable.This is not to say that they were bad - far from it. Bob’s current vocal stylization may be described as spoken-word-country-staccato-rap. A rapid delivery with a dry voice at the beginning of each phrase somehow winds its way to the denouement everyone in the crowd is expecting, except no one knows, really, how or when he’ll get from Tangled Up in… to the closing tag of that chorus, to the point that you think the old man might run out of breath, but, instead, he flashes a quick grin to the audience, then looks knowingly at his phenomenal band, and finishes, in a rhythm that’s all his own, surprising everyone who’s already finished the lyric for him (as if he forgot!) with Blue!

Possibly the highlight of my concert going career was the closer, the encore, the song I hoped to hear, but didn’t want to hope too much for fear of major depression setting in should the dream not come true. After reading Jimi Hendrix’s biography and watching some of his performance at Woodstock, I was thrilled when Bob decided to close with All Along the Watchtower, which, after Bob heard Jimi’s take, began to prefer and to play that version. The version from this concert, however, was somewhere in between the original, Jimi’s take, and Bob’s current sound. And even though the words and rhythms were all Dylans’s brand-new creations, the song was as powerful in it’s nebulousness as it was in it’s timelessness.

I attended the show with my brother-in-law, a good guitarist. As an average drummer myself, I turned to my bro-in-law during the middle of the show and after more than a few delectable drum fills, and promptly told him I was going to cut my hands off. There are musicians that, when seen and heard and felt, make you feel as if all of your hard work is for naught. He felt the same way about Dylan’s lead guitarist. I rationalized that these guys were much older than us, and we still have time to get better. The music was stellar.

As for Dylan, even though he didn’t do much, I couldn’t help but stare. He barely said three words the entire night, aside from introducing the band at one point. He just played music. Course, he’s just a song and dance man, right? It was hard to fathom that someone so elusive and talented and close to me at that moment in time has had such an impact on American music and culture.

Dylan’s the epicenter of a still-radiating cultural earthquake. He meant so much to so many early on in his career, but he was never afraid to go his own way, to be an artist. Maybe all artists, in order to maintain integrity, have to be salmon-driven, fighting the stream to create something new, only to die after having done so, then to do it all over again. He not busy being born is busy dying.

And Dylan, the cultural chameleon that keeps reminding us of what we look like, is always busy being born.

——-

The Set List

Bob Dylan (Sept. 15, 2007, Stubb’s)

1. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat

2. It Ain’t Me Babe

3. Watching the River Flow

4. You’re A Big Girl Now

5. The Levee’s Gonna Break

6. Spirit on the Water

7. Cry Awhile

8. Tangled Up in Blue

9. Workingman’s Blues #2

10. Honest With Me

11. Beyond the Horizon

12. Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine

13. Nettie Moore

14. Summer Days

15. Ballad of a Thin Man

16. Thunder on the Mountain

17. All Along The Watchtower