The Daily Procrastinator

I’ve been a big fan of the Greatest American Rock Band series from FlashCap, but because I’m a writer, I struggle with listening to music with vocals while I’m working, especially music that I know the words to.  None of my clients want the lyrics to “Hot for Teacher” interspersed with their web content.

Therefore, I present to you my favorite mellow music: Acoustik Guitar by John H. Clarke.  This guy is good.  Period.

Watch him play via YouTube.  Trust me, it’s worth a moment of your time.

Recently, I had the good fortune to discover a talented new musician I’d never even heard of before. I attended an Old Crow Medicine Show concert, and the opening act was a performer named Justin Townes Earle. I dig OCMS, particularly their song Wagon Wheel, and I knew that I was going to love their performance. Discovering Justin Townes Earle, though, was the extremely pleasant surprise of the evening.

Just picture him with a thin, barely discernible mustache.

When Earle first took the stage, I was a little skeptical. He was dressed like a 1950s used car salesman. He wore a high-waisted, pencil-thin fitting suit with zip-up boots. His hair was slicked back like George Clooney’s in O Brother, Where Art Thou, and his mustache was barely a line above his lip. With his guitar slung so high that his belt buckle was visible beneath it, Earle approached the microphone with a nervous, twitchy demeanor that didn’t exactly raise my expectations.

Then he began to play.

Accompanied by only one other musician, who alternated between mandolin, banjo, and harmonica, Earle proceeded to put on a truly impressive display of playing, singing, and songwriting. His sound reminded me of Hank Williams, Sr. and Woody Guthrie with a modern edge. If those two geniuses were still writing songs today, they’d sound like Justin Townes Earle. The lack of percussion lends Earle’s sound an “old-timey” feel that makes me want to stomp my feet and shout “Go, man, go!” while he plays.

Before the show, I had never heard of Justin Townes Earle, so each song was totally unfamiliar to me. I got the feeling that 90% of the people in the crowd were in the same situation. Despite the unfamiliarity, the entire crowd had a blast. We danced, sang along to the choruses, and raised hell between songs.

After the show, I had to find out more about this guy. Upon doing a little reading, I discovered that Justin is the son of Grammy Award winner Steve Earle. I’m impressed that the promotions for the concert didn’t publicize Earle’s connection to his father. He never mentioned it on stage, either. Justin Townes Earle wants to make it on his own, it seems. That’s not to say that he doesn’t give credit where credit is due. In several interviews which I looked up online (here and here), Earle states that his family’s musical history has made him into the performer he is today. He also reveals some interesting details about a rather colorful past.

Further online investigation revealed that Justin Townes Earle has released two full-length alums, The Good Life in 2008, and Midnight At The Movies in 2009. I picked up the two albums as quickly as I could, and I’ve been playing them nonstop in my truck ever since. I started my listening with the more recent album, and so far, my favorite songs are They Killed John Henry (edit from BRP: DAMN, I love this song!), Poor Fool, and Midnight At The Movies. Earle sticks to an old-time feel in his songs, including the old AM radio standard of about three minutes per song, so the albums seem to fly by in a montage of images and sounds. Thus, even though it contains 12 songs, Midnight At The Movies is only about 35 minutes long. Luckily, I don’t mind if it plays again and again.

For those seeking something interesting and original in a sea of cookie-cutter pop music crap, I recommend Justin Townes Earle. The CDs are a refreshing change, and his live show is a boot-stompin’ good time.

On May 1, The Dave Matthews Band played before a packed Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in Woodlands, TX. Among the concert-goers were Pre, who you may remember from St. Patrick’s Day, Mrs. Pre, NewGuy, NewGirl, Eggroll, and yours truly, BigRedPoet. I’m not a big DMB fan. In fact, I don’t own a single one of their albums. I am, however, an avid fan of well-played live music. Everyone I know who has seen DMB in concert has always told me that they put on an exciting, tight, improvisational, and musically outstanding performance. With that in mind, when Pre asked me if I wanted to go to the show, I didn’t hesitate.

This is not my photo, but it's pretty much exactly the stage setup the band used in The Woodlands.

After venturing to The Woodlands in a mini-van, we arrived early and met some of Pre’s friends, who had been saving us a great spot in the lawn seats. We were located at the corner where the sidewalk down out of the lawn meets the fence that divides the lawn from the walkway below. In other words, we had front-row seats in the grass. Almost immediately upon getting settled in our spot, I noticed two things…

First, the opening act, The Avett Brothers, was fantastic! Although I didn’t know a single song, they performed with a laid-back, bluegrass-influenced sound and interestingly constructed vocal arrangements that I truly enjoyed.

Second, beer prices ranged from $8 to $9.25, depending upon the brand of beer. $8.00! $9.25! I’m not above spending money on beer, but the roving vendors accepted only cash, which I wasn’t carrying. The concession stands, located at the edges of the amphitheater, accepted credit cards, but I wasn’t about to give up any part of my listening experience to spend 30 minutes walking over there, waiting in line, and walking back. The end result of all this is simple: I saw DMB stone-cold sober.

Once Dave Matthews Band took the stage, they stayed there for close to two and a half hours. Although I know exactly one of the following songs, I’m told it’s an outstanding setlist.

• Don’t Drink The Water
• Stay Or Leave
• Funny The Way It Is
• Spaceman
• Cornbread
• Raven
• Why I Am
• Jimi Thing
• Beach Ball
• Where Are You Going
• Two Step
• Rye Whiskey (Tex Ritter cover)
• Pig
• #41
• Anyone Seen The Bridge
• Too Much <tease>
• Grey Street

Encores:

• Everyday
• Pantala Naga Pampa
• Rapunzel

I didn’t get to sing along much, except when I could pick up the words to a chorus, but I still had a fantastic time. Every musician on the stage played outstandingly. I vividly recall fantastic performances on drums, saxophone (including one guy playing two saxophones at once!), trumpet, guitar, bass, and electric violin. The high point of the show was a song called “Space Man,” which is apparently brand new and will be released on the band’s upcoming album. I predict that the line “Doesn’t everybody deserve to have the good life?” will be all over the radio in the near future.

This is Carter Beauford. He is a beast. He can drum faster than you can drive.

As you may or may not know, The Dave Matthews Band is taper-friendly. Basically, they allow fans to record their concerts, as long as they don’t sell the recordings afterward. Those of you who have been reading The Daily Procrastinator since the beginning will recall that I own an Edirol R-09HR recorder, which is useful for just such an application. Coupled with a directional shotgun microphone, which I borrowed from WrongFoot, I was able to make a pretty good audience recording of the show. This was my first chance to tape a “big” show, and I’m quite pleased with the results!

It pains me that I can’t give a more detailed review of the show, but without a more thorough knowledge of DMB, I’m afraid it’s difficult to speak in specifics. Simply put, this band is good. Really good. Take it from a guy who doesn’t really know their music but still had a blast at the show: DMB is well worth checking out in concert.

Greetings, procrastinators. Today, April 27, 2009, marks the fortieth anniversary of one of the most legendary performances in rock and roll history. Forty years ago tonight, a young Led Zeppelin played the final show of a four-night stand in San Francisco.

The arrival of the mighty Zeppelin was foretold by humble print ads in local newspapers and music magazines.

Led Zeppelin rose from the ashes of The Yardbirds, Jimmy Page’s previous band, and they began playing together in September of 1968. The band’s amazing performances in San Francisco in 1969 are all the more impressive when the listener considers that they’d played together for just a few short months before invading America’s west coast.

You may ask, “How can you be so sure that this one particular show was great, BRP?” The explanation is simple: The April 27, 1969 show was recorded by two different fans. One recorded from the audience, and the other was able to attach his recorder to the soundboard. Both of these recordings circulate in the Led Zeppelin collecting community, separately and spliced together to recreate the complete show. I have listened to the audience tape, the soundboard tape, and the “collage” tape, and I feel confident proclaiming this show one of the greatest in rock and roll history.

A young, bluesy, grungy Robert Plant and Jimmy Page on stage in 1969

Check out the setlist for the early show:

• Train Kept A’Rollin’
• I Can’t Quit You Baby
• As Long As I Have You (medley includes Fresh Garbage, Shake, Cat’s Squirrel, No Money Down, and I’m A Man)
• You Shook Me
• How Many More Times
• Communication Breakdown

As if that wasn’t enough to blow the audience away, here’s the late set:

• Killing Floor
• Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You
• White Summer/Black Mountainside
• Sitting And Thinking
• Pat’s Delight
• Dazed And Confused

The first set is a blistering, energetic salvo. Every member of the band is in overdrive: John Bonham’s drums are thunderous, John Paul Jones’ bass lines are punchy and complex, Jimmy Page’s guitar sounds like an entire string section, and Robert Plant’s wailing voice reaches seemingly impossible notes. The “As Long As I Have You” medley showcases a young band just having some fun playing the radio songs that were popular in their native England at the time.

The second set is slower and more blues-based, but that doesn’t make it any less astounding. This is the only recorded performance of Otis Rush’s “Sitting and Thinking.” Page’s solo guitar work in “White Summer/Black Mountainside” is a fine complement to Bonham’s drum solo in “Pat’s Delight,” the song which would eventually become “Moby Dick.” The evening ends with an especially dark and moody “Dazed And Confused.” By this time, the listener is completely wrung out. Live recordings of Led Zeppelin demand engagement from the listener, not just passive hearing. The band leads the audience on a 130-minute musical journey, and that journey is exhausting.

Live recordings of Led Zeppelin can be a little difficult to find, but they’re out there. If you’re a fan, do yourself a favor and hunt down the April 27, 1969 show. I’ve listened to hundreds of shows, and this is my single favorite. If you don’t look for the show, at least put some Zep on your CD player tonight and hoist a drink to the greatest rock band in history.

On Thursday, March 19, I crossed two more names off my “Musicians To See Before I Die” list. Elton John and Billy Joel performed together at the Toyota Center in Houston as part of their Face To Face Tour. My ol’ buddy FlashCap accompanied me on this excursion into musical awesomeness.

When we arrived at Toyota Center and found our way to our seats, we realized that these seats were GREAT! We were seated at floor level, no more than fifty or sixty yards from the stage. We could see the performers clearly, and we also had a front-and-center view of the huge display screens over the stage. These screens were of a sort I’d never seen before. They were made up of hundreds of strings of vertical lights suspended from the ceiling, and the lights changed colors and configurations to display images from the stage. It was pretty impressive.

Behold the amazing light/screen thing! Aren't cellphone pictures great?

As soon as the lights went down, both Elton John and Billy Joel took the stage, and they played four songs as duets, alternating between each artist’s hits. Interestingly, they also alternated singing verses within each song and sometimes harmonized during the choruses. After the initial series of duets, Elton John played a solo set of over an hour. Thereafter, Billy Joel played a set of similar length. To wrap it all up, they returned to duet mode and performed several of their most legendary songs to end the evening. As a highlight to the fantastic piano playing and singing of the two stars, I must say that the rest of the band was fantastic. I was particularly impressed by the percussionist and trumpeter during Billy Joel’s set and the bassist during Elton John’s. Check out the setlist:

Duets
Your Song
Just The Way You Are
Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me
My Life
Elton
Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding
Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting
Burn Down The Mission
Madman Across The Water
Tiny Dancer
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Daniel
Rocket Man
Levon
Still Standing
Crocodile Rock
Billy
Angry Young Man
Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)
Allentown
Zanzibar
Don’t Ask Me Why
Always A Woman
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
River Of Dreams/Deep In The Heart Of Texas
We Didn’t Start The Fire
It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me
Only The Good Die Young
More Duets
I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues
Uptown Girl
The Bitch Is Back
You May Be Right
Benny And The Jets
You Say It’s Your Birthday
Back in the USSR
Candle In The Wind
Piano Man

Honestly, I’m more of an Elton fan than a Billy fan, but FlashCap favors Billy. We had all the bases covered. At least one of us sang along to nearly every song, with the exceptions of the relatively obscure “Burn Down the Mission” and “Zanzibar.” At many points during the show, tens of thousands of voices were all singing in unison. I love those kinds of moments. I’ve experienced this “mass singing” at concerts ranging from Jimmy Page & Robert Plant to Black Sabbath and from Lamb of God to Paula Cole. More than any other event in my life, singing along to the same song as a stadium full of people reveals to me the Brotherhood of Man. When the entire crowd inside Toyota Center–black, white, hispanic, asian, straight, gay, male, female, conservative, liberal, wealthy, poor–ALL belt out “Sing us a song, You’re the piano man,” all is right in my world.

The first time Elton John and Billy Joel toured together, I skipped the show because I thought the tickets were too expensive. If they ever tour together again, I am going to attend a show. You should, too. We can harmonize.

LAMB OF GOD - WRATH

I am a huge fan of thrash metal.  There is just something about it that grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go.  The best metal of this sort has a “groove”:  riffs to kill for keeping time with hellaciously fast blastbeats, riding cymbals, and a pounding bass.   Back in the mid- to late 80s, there existed a sort of glory days of thrash.  This was exemplified by the four pillars of the genre (Anthrax, Slayer, Megadeth, and old Metallica) coupled with the “newcomers” Pantera.  Go ahead and throw in Prong (particularly Beg to Differ) and Testament as a couple of other favorites.

Lamb of God is today’s undisputed leader of the genre and is leading a renaissance of thrash.  Sure, Slayer and Metallica get the Grammys, but that is just a case of  name recognition on the part of the voters.  I was first turned on to LoG after hearing “Laid to Rest” from their album Ashes of the Wake, which was the first album I’d bought in a long time that simply ripped my face off.   And while I was never a huge fan of the “cookie monster”-style of vocal stylings, LoG just made it work for me.   Their follow-up, Sacrament, became a drop-date purchase for me, and it continued to impress.

But both albums have been eclipsed by the triumph that is Wrath.

Where do these guys get all of these wonderful riffs?  Seriously, if you don’t find yourself involuntarily headbanging during the bridge of “Dead Seeds,” you have no metal in your soul.   High points (as if there were low points) include “Set to Fail”, “Contractor” and “Choke Sermon”.    But my personal favorite is the closer, “Reclamation”:  the blues-based lick that provides the structure and, simply put, drive of this song is perfectly pieced together.  It is the juggernaut of the album.

Wrath is now the front-runner for album of the year.  It will be interesting to see what other bands are willing to put out this year in the face of this onslaught.

In the world of digital audio, few names are as respected as Edirol. In December, I started recording with their latest field recorder, the R-09HR, and I can honestly say that I now understand the fantastic reputation that the Edirol family of products enjoys. This particular recorder is designed to be a small, portable recording option for events outside the recording studio. It’s about the size of a first-generation iPod, but slightly thicker. It can be used to record meetings, band practices, interviews, and even concerts. I use it primarily for the latter.

The Edirol R-09HR is a device which is designed to record MP3 and WAV files directly to digital media, in the form of SD cards. A 512 MB card is included with the recorder, but it can accept cards as large as 8 GB, which is what I use. The R-09HR can record files ranging from relatively low-quality 128 kbps MP3s to 16-bit 44.1 khz WAVs (CD-quality sound) to 24-bit 96 khz WAVS, which are the highest-quality sound files for which anybody could have any reasonable use. At 128 kbps MP3, the 8 GB card can hold 7980 minutes of data, while 24-bit 96 khz WAV allows the card to hold about 220 minutes. I use CD-quality options, which affords me 720 minutes.

The device features a line-in option for recording directly from a soundboard. It also has a microphone-in, for the use of a range of external microphones. Most impressively, though, it features on-board stereo condenser microphones. I was skeptical of the quality of these on-board microphones, since the price of high-quality external microphones can range from several hundred to several thousand dollars. Upon taping my first concert from the audience using the on-board microphones, I learned that the R-09HR makes outstanding recordings without the use of external mics. Certainly, one could improve the quality of the sound by adding a high-dollar microphone to the setup, but the on-board mics created a warm, clear, natural-sounding recording. My only complaint is that the on-board microphones are not directional, which means that they capture sounds from all around the recorder. In effect, if the recorder is close to loud or talkative fans, their voices can become an annoyance in the recording.

When recording from the soundboard, the R-09HR makes recordings as crisp, clear, and true-to-life as I’ve ever heard. I have recorded two concerts from the soundboard, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the results. I gave a copy of one of these recordings to the musician, a friend of mine, and he intends to release it as a live album. It sounds that good. The clarity of the R-09HR’s recordings is partly due to its Isolated Adaptive Recording Circuit (IARC), which prevents any kind of digital clicks or pops from reaching the final product. The device also features no moving parts inside, so the hum and hiss which can be produced by analog recording equipment is totally avoided.

The R-09HR runs on two AA batteries, which will last through a surprising six or seven hours of recording. It has an adaptor for AC power, which is included. Also included is a cable for high-speed USB 2.0 connection to a computer, which makes data transfer quick and simple. A small external speaker allows the user to review recordings in the field, and a headphone jack allows even closer listening. In fact, the user can even load MP3s onto the R-09HR and use it for a portable music player. While the functionality of this feature is acceptable, the interface is somewhat awkward.

The only problem I’ve had with using this recorder is with the buttons which govern the input levels from the microphones. The device allows me to adjust the input levels while recording, in case the music is suddenly louder or softer, or in case I’m able to move closer to the speakers. I made use of this feature at one concert I recorded, but pressing the buttons caused loud, audible clicks in my recording. While listening, I realized that these clicks are actually the sounds of me pressing the buttons. Luckily, this situation is remedied by using the remote control which is included. When the input volume is adjusted with the remote control, no clicks are introduced into the final product.

Other features include toggles for limiter, automatic gain control, low/high mic gain, low cut, and plug-in power for external microphones that require it. All of these features were new to me as a relatively inexperienced concert recorder, but I quickly learned to use them to my advantage through the explanations offered in the instruction manual and various internet FAQs.

On the whole, I highly recommend the R-09HR to anyone who is in the market for a portable digital recorder. Priced between $300 and $400, depending on the retailer, it’s a bit more expensive than most other recorders, but the quality of the finished product and the ease with which it can be used makes the Edirol R-09HR well worth the cost.

So a bedeviled Angus Young is shoveling coal into the furnace of a jet black train speeding out of control while two scantily-dressed women stroke and lick his steadily-stiffening pointed tail (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), culminating in his throwing the wenches off the train so he can ram it through the end-of-the-line barricade in a huge explosion of lights and sound.

Subtle, these guys ain’t.

But that’s the exact point of an AC/DC show. While Angus, Brian Johnson and the crew are pushing 60, they know what the crowd wants to see and gives it to them. You want blood? You got it. And by blood I mean the hits (although the absence of “Money Talks” and “Who Made Who” was kind of glaring). Loud and with an energy that most bands half their age just don’t have the interest in putting into their shows. This was greatly appreciated by the sold-out crowd which seemed largely made up of parents bringing their 12- to 16-year-old children to experience what a “real” rock band is all about.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard rumors that this may be AC/DC’s farewell tour (and judging by the price I paid for my ticket they’ll be going out in style). Disregarding the notorious lack of reliability these sorts of rumors have (see The Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne), it was good to see AC/DC is still at the top of their game.

I paid how much for this ticket?