Nothing

[manho]

"It was NOT Tom Horn, it was Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. Slim Pickens was a lawman in a small town in the New Mexico territory. Pat Garret enlisted him to help root out Billy's gang (Billy was in Mexico). Pickens gets hit and dies (Bob Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door plays here). Pickens' best line was, "This town ain't got no hat size noway." James Coburn played Pat Garret. Rita Coolige was Billy's Mexican girl friend. Other notables in the movie are: Richard Jaeckel, Bob Dylan, Chill Wills, Jason Robards, Luke Askew, and Jack Elam"

this site is a lot more interesting than any boby site i can think of:
www.shotgunworld.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=131491&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

[manho]

Elevators - going down

Will Hodgkinson enjoys Paul Drummond's Eye Mind, a thorough account of the Texan pioneers of psychedelic rock
Will Hodgkinson
Saturday January 26, 2008
Guardian

Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound
by Paul Drummond
454pp, Process, £12.99

In that brief period in the mid to late 1960s when a youthful subculture believed the answers to life lay locked in the chemical complexities of LSD, the psychedelic music that emerged from England and the US took on very different moods. While British groups typically sang of marmalade skies and model villages, American groups described Oedipal nightmares, paranoia and violence. It makes sense when you consider the social conditions of the two countries at the time. The British drug-influenced groups may have received a fair deal of hassle from the man, or the odd catcall as they paraded up and down the King's Road in their dandy finery, but they didn't face a constant threat of being drafted to Vietnam or getting decade-long jail sentences for marijuana possession, as the Americans did.

The story of the 13th Floor Elevators, one of the earliest American psychedelic groups, is a horrifying illustration of how the struggle between an emerging experimental consciousness and the old order led to nothing less than a war. Hailing from the town of Kerrville in Texas - not a state known for its enlightened attitude towards mind expansion - the band offered a powerful mix of LSD evangelism, mystical philosophy and straight-up rock'n'roll. Needless to say, this didn't go down well with the authorities.

By the end of the 60s, countless attempts to rip out the soul of the band through drug busts and intimidation finally had their desired effect. The Elevators' leader, lyricist and amplified jug player Tommy Hall, a charismatic expounder of eastern philosophies who insisted that the band perform every single concert high on LSD, ended up living in a cave. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland spent much of the 70s in jail and strung out on heroin before being shot by his wife in 1978. Drummer John Ike Walton never recovered from the acid trip he went on in a police cell in 1966 and has been treated with lithium for severe depression ever since. Other members variously ended up in Vietnam, had nervous breakdowns and underwent electroshock therapy in mental institutions.

Most dramatic of all, though, is the case of lead singer Roky Erickson.The son of an alcoholic, philandering architect father always "in the office" and an obsessively protective mother, Erickson was an immensely charming wildcard who fell under Hall's LSD-evangelising spell. While it's clear that excessive drug use didn't exactly help Erickson's mental clarity, the damage it did pales in comparison to the abuse meted out by the Texan authorities. After being caught with a small amount of marijuana - which was probably planted - in February 1969, Erickson took his lawyer's advice and pleaded insanity to avoid jail.

He ended up at Rusk Maximum Security Prison for the Criminally Insane, and the profiles of the men with whom he formed a band there illustrate the extent to which he was a butterfly broken upon a wheel. The guitarist was in for killing his mother, father and sister. The bass player had raped a policeman's daughter and killed her two infant sons. The deaf tambourine player had raped and killed a 12-year-old boy and stuffed his body into a refrigerator. Somewhat alarmingly, Rusk's recreation director arranged for this band to play at high school proms.

By the time Erickson was released in 1972 any chances of a normal life had been destroyed by the trauma of his experiences. The authorities had won the battle, but perhaps not the war. The 13th Floor Elevators went on to become one of those bands, alongside the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, whose musical and cultural influence has far outweighed their initial popularity.

Millions of joints have been rolled on the multicoloured front cover of their 1966 debut, The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and millions of young minds have attempted to decode Hall's gnostic sleeve notes after the joints have been smoked. And Paul Drummond has deemed the band significant enough to spend eight years of his life researching and compiling Eye Mind, an exhaustive combination of biography and oral history that covers every aspect of the 13th Floor Elevators' story in exacting detail.

The book has clearly become something of a holy quest for Drummond. Not only did he convince the various members to emerge from the shadows and talk about a painful period in their lives, he also sourced every piece of information on the band imaginable, from legal documents to concert posters to psychiatric reports. His diligence occasionally overpowers his discrimination - some of the concert set lists and record company contracts might have been better left as invisible background material - but this is a small criticism, given the clarity and wisdom with which he writes. He has the good judgment to let the remarkable story tell itself, resisting the temptation to put in too much conjecture, and is particularly good at painting a picture of the band's unique situation.

Being from Texas, they were more psychedelic outlaws than hippies, holing up in hill country hideouts to escape police harassment, dealing drugs to survive and never straying too far from the basic rock'n'roll template they were all schooled in. Add to this Hall's cosmic proselytising, Erickson's compelling, confused personality and the fascistic nature of the Texan authorities at the time and you have a tale that demands to be told. Eye Mind takes its place alongside Jean Stein's Edie and Andrew Loog Oldham's Stoned as a definitive chronicle of a contradictory, dangerous, endlessly fascinating period in pop culture.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[cripes]

I used to rehearse my band at Tommy Hall's flat...a roommate of Tommy's was the drummer. Tommy told me that all we needed was one good song and we'd be set. That was one of the only lucid things I ever heard come from him. He should know. The 13th Floor Elevators had *one good song*.

Now the 'forty years ago' train is looking back to a fucked up drug casualty strewn mess.

On Expecting Rain today I see that Blues queen Janis Joplin: Honored citizen of 'old, weird America.

It's now official. Music journalism is now in 'the bakinakwa era'. What stupid lazy writing.

[owen]

doesnt get any better than this - capital radio and janie jones 1977

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EUVImnHr48

[manho]

Has 'Canadian' become a racist euphemism?

Aida Edemariam
Wednesday January 30, 2008
The Guardian

Last week, Canadians discovered, courtesy of an obscure trial in Texas, that "Canadian" does not always mean what they think it means. This followed the release of an internal memo from Mike Trent, assistant district attorney of Harris County, Texas, in which he congratulates a junior prosecutor because "he overcame a subversively good defence ... that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant."

The implausibility of there being many Canadians on a Texan manslaughter jury led some to conclude that "Canadians", in this context, might mean "black people", though Trent claims he thought real Canadians were present. And, though noting in passing that the National Post, the ex-Conrad Black newspaper that broke the story, delights in provocation for the sake of it, there does seem to be some evidence that the code is in general use. It's on the Racial Slur Database, for example (yes, there is such a thing. "It's supposed to be funny and/or informational," says its creator). It is also, increasingly, on the various blogs that have picked the story up. Apparently, it's most often used among waiters maligning black patrons as bad tippers - as one blogger put it, "Hey, we have a table of Canadians ... They're all yours." But it seems the euphemism has been around for at least 15 years, according to another blogger, from Michigan City, Indiana, who remembered "none too liberal white folks" using it about "poor, primarily black sections of town". Another recalled it being used in a financial brokerage house in New York City.

Article continues
The question is why. Presumably, it was adopted on the assumption that Canadians are so anodyne and so outnumbered that otherwise unacceptable opinions can be cheerfully expressed in their name without alerting eavesdroppers. But the motivation might be more confrontational. Some visitors report that in southern states, particularly in rural areas, Canadians are actively disliked - for their liberalism, their gun control, their refusal to support the Iraq war. "Raw hate and 'we should invade those bastards and kick them out on an ice flow [sic]' rage was quite common," said one. Perhaps it's time to take a stand, for Canadians, but, more importantly, for maligned minorities everywhere.

[cripes]

Most of that is news to me.

OK--Canadians are poor tippers. I'm sorry.

Japanese people carry cameras. A lot of black people beat their kids too much. Lesbians are not always fun people. Some Jews whine a lot. Germans don't seem to laugh much. The English have sticks up their asses and bad teeth.

All you Canadians have to do to get right is figure out 15-20%.

[Some king]

That's nothing. You should know what we mean when we say "oh, look...a bunch of Americans at table 6. Spit in their beer, eh."

[cripes]

So is 'Americans' the code word for French people?

[manho]

if you thought that canadian rock & roll was bad wait till i post some french stuff.*

*translation: big mac, large fries and a giant coke.

[Some king]

No, we actually mean americans. We don't speak jive.

[cripes]

Right now Sean Penn is totally standing outside my house.

They're filming a movie about Harvey Milk. Sean has a '70s beard and ponytail.

'Yo Spicoli!'

[dino]

are you going to appear on the film, screwing at them from your window yelling 'get out of here you motherfuckers!'?

[cripes]

I took a really dark crap foto from my window. Sean is in the middle with the army jacket on. They shot this one scene where they zip up a guy in a body bag and Sean talks to some cop and then picks up something off the street. They did about five or six takes and that was it. No fans approached Sean throughout the shoot.

[manho]

sean has fans?

[manho]

don't get me wrong, what i've seen of sean i liked - one film, mystic river. he overdoes it a bit but he's ok. what i meant was that he's not the type of actor (brad, johnny, tom...) who has "fans", right?

like, does de niro have "fans"? does brando have "fans"?

[manho]

wouldn't it be funny if in 50 years time some litle fat kid discovers the actual house where sean shot the scene?

[cripes]

Sure, but all those guys are so scary that no one wants to try and get their autograph.

A friend of mine was tangentially connected to the making of the Don Juan movie and he really tried to jump through some hoops to get Brando's autograph. He was told 'the earlier in the day the better' because Marlon grew more 'difficult' as the day went on. So someone gets my friend's copy of Marlon's autobiography to sign to Marlon, and Marlon mumbled something about someone making him write that book and he wouldn't sign it.

[manho]

"someone making him write that book"

has to be either his accountant or his agent, right?

[cripes]

I've always wanted to see Tor Johnson on You Bet Your Life. Funny stuff.

[manho]

One man and his microphone

Trekking from village to village, the late Alan Lomax recorded folk music right at the source, often saving it from extinction. Rogier Kappers explains how he retraced Lomax's footseps on film
Rogier Kappers interviewed by Jude Rogers
Friday February 1, 2008
Guardian

The field recordist Alan Lomax is my hero: a Robin Hood figure who stood up for the music of poor people and passed it on to the world through his radio programmes and LPs. He gave a voice to the voiceless: to the butcher boy with the blues in his body, to the greengrocer woman with a song to make you cry, to the postman guitar virtuoso; to people well known in their own villages but not outside them. He recorded their voices so they would not be forgotten.

The story of Lomax: The Songhunter, the documentary I made about him, starts in Holland on a long winter night at the end of 1999. I had been drinking with a friend and listening to music all evening, when he pulled out the then recently-released Southern Journey CD series of the Alan Lomax Collection. These are recordings Lomax made in 1959 during a four-month field recording expedition through the south of the United States, looking for the best blues, gospel, and other folksongs.

As the recordings soared across the room, we both became more and more lyrical about their beauty. Like many of the Lomax recordings, they had an intense and open atmosphere. All the musicians seemed to be pouring out their hearts as crickets, barking dogs and murmuring voices in the background augmented their character. I remembered reading about Lomax during university, imagining a man trekking from village to village in an old camper bus, dragging a heavyweight tape recorder with him. I saw the parade of bakers, knife grinders and washerwomen who took his microphone and played their most beautiful songs.

I immediately saw the potential for a film. What a joy it could be: going back to all the places to see what was left of the music Lomax recorded 50 years earlier. I was surprised when I found out no one had tackled Lomax in documentary before, given his importance to American cultural history. So I bolstered my courage and contacted the Alan Lomax Archive in New York.

It turned out that Lomax, now 85 years old, had suffered a severe brain haemorrhage. The archive was now run by his daughter, Anna. Lomax himself was living down in Florida, his daughter taking care of him one month in three. I knew he had to be in the film: a man who had battled to preserve dying music, who was now on the verge of passing away himself.

In the summer of 2001, my producer and I stayed with Lomax and Anna in Florida for a week. He was slowly going downhill - definitely clear in his mind, but the after-effects of his brain haemorrhage meant his speech was often unintelligible and he would confuse words. But Anna understood him. She explained to us one day that when Alan meant "music" he said "Italy". It touched me that he said "Italy" very often.

We communicated with Alan through his recordings, and filmed him listening to many of them as he sat in the sunny conservatory. Anna kept saying how good it was for him, and we watched him slowly become alive again. Alan died the next year, but I am always grateful to Anna for allowing us that short encounter.

After my visit to Florida, I started my research, concentrating on his field trips through Europe. My journey led me through desolate Scottish islands, the withered interior of Spain and isolated Italian mountain villages. Sometimes it was hard to find the right people or music. At other times, I discovered true gems. Some of the best footage in the final film, and certainly the most spontaneous situations, happened at this stage.

One of my favourite scenes comes from Galicia. We'd been driving around all day without finding one good song, but we visited one last village as it turned dark. Very slowly, an old couple approached. I had Alan's recording from the area on a player with some headphones, and trying out my terrible Spanish, I asked the couple to listen to it. I said, do you remember this Englishman coming here to record you? The woman replied, very curtly, "He wasn't English! He was American!"

And that night, in a tiny local supermarket, a party came together. People came to listen to Alan's recordings playing over the tinny speaker, then the dancing, drinking and singing began. I experienced exactly what Lomax had noted in his field diary 50 years before: "I will never forget this little village. The people were simply transformed whenever the music began. When I left them at 3am, they were still dancing like satyrs."

Many other moments were precious too. A man from the Hebrides singing a self-penned worksong, which marked his return from the oil rigs. Looking for a singing Spanish shepherd who had featured in films during the Franco years to promote the national culture, and finding him still singing and tending his flock in his 80s. Hearing very elderly women singing washing songs that will disappear when they die, as those songs no longer have a function in modern society. When I went back in 2004 to do some larger scenes with a production crew, some of those people had passed away, which brought home the reality of Alan's mission.

It's true that some forms of folk music have disappeared since Lomax recorded them. Some forms were suppressed or shunned because of their connections with nationalist politics. But others are being given new life by younger generations. Musicologists who worry about the death of folk music rarely seem to acknowledge this development, and how the internet is a wonderful solution to keep folk music available and accessible for new generations. I hope my film will add something to these resources, too.

I also hope it shows people the experiences you can have when you're exploring folk music. There's one I come back to often that's also in the film. I'm in the small living room of a Sicilian man as an incredibly mournful folk song, recorded by Alan over 60 years ago, is starting to soar from the speakers. I watch this middle-aged man hear his late father's emotional tenor, see his eyes fill up, and feel mine do the same.

To me, that moment captures what all documentary should aim to do: capture moments that are just as real, profound and truthful.

A short history of folk field recordists

The history of field-recorded folk music has a rich cast of characters. One of its earliest pioneers was Jesse Walter Fewkes, an elderly ethnographer known for his white beard and childlike demeanour who, in March 1890, recorded Native American songs in Maine, using a primitive cylinder graphophone. Alice Cunningham Fletcher, the first female president of the American Folklore Society, did similarly with the traditional music from Omaha later that decade, helped by her adopted Native American son, Francis La Flesche.

In the early 20th century, US fieldwork continued with Alan Lomax's father, John, who began by recording cowboy songs on the Mexican borders in the late 1900s, and recorded many worksongs, reels, ballads and prison songs in the early 1930s with the teenage Alan in tow. They also recorded Leadbelly at the Louisiana state penitentiary. Alongside the work of Harry Smith, the legendary collector of 78s whose folk anthology documented the years 1927 to 1932, this work kickstarted the folk revival in the US.

Britain had its own field recording pioneers in the shape of Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles. After collecting folk songs in rural England, the pair spent the years 1916-18 recording Appalachian music in America. After Sharp's death in 1924, Karpeles continued their work alone, spending the next 30 years recording songs for the Cecil Sharp English Folk Dance and Song Society and the BBC.

Elsewhere, field recordings were not always done with the artist's rights in mind. The Georgia-born Polk Brockman took full publication rights for all the music he recorded, as if the work were his rather than the artist's. The first family of folk music, the Seegers, were more humane. Father Charles collaborated with the Lomaxes on the Archive of Folk Song for the Library of Congress in the late 1930s - with son Mike recording autoharpists, fiddlers, banjo players and singers across the south in the 1950s, and Pete and Peggy popularising them through their own performances.

Early A&R men such as Art Satherly and Ralph Peer also recorded in the field. Satherly spent the 1920s and 30s recording music in the south-eastern US states for Columbia records, travelling 70,000 miles a year. Both recorded pioneering country musicians, including Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.

There are many little-known field recordists, too. Rogier Kappers' next film is about one of them, Hugh Tracey, an amateur folklorist who spent 40 years recording music in sub-Saharan Africa. Classically-trained singer Anne Grimes is another, a woman who spent the 1950s travelling through Ohio, tape-recording hundreds of traditional songs. Then there are the unsung heroes of the Nonesuch Explorer series. Started in 1967, it comprised 92 collections from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, and still sells successfully today.
Jude Rogers

· Rogier Kappers' film, Lomax: The Songhunter is out on DVD on February 25
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008