Quite a bit of activity on yesterday’s Dylan blog, as you might expect. Interesting, though, that most of the talk seems to not be about the music, but about SonyBMG’s marketing strategy for “Tell Tale Signs” – chiefly the high price being asked for the 3CD set which, as I pointed out, is certainly worth having.
Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.”
When Klaus Dinger died a few months ago, I mentioned in an obit here that I had an unpublished interview with Dinger and Michael Rother, from when they briefly reunited to promote the Neu! reissues in 2000.
I’m not, as a rule, fixated on the idea of ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ music, but still, the arrival of the third Brightblack Morning Light album last Friday was incredibly well-timed. I can’t think of a band who make such profoundly horizontal music, who create a soundtrack for being happily paralysed by extreme heat. Or, I suppose, by other stuff.
Let’s start at the end. Julian Cope is standing onstage in the Uncut Arena. The power has just been pulled on him for over-running. He has started half an hour late after a doomed attempt at soundchecking, played two newish songs and a bizarre medley of some old songs, sacrificed a guitar to the goddess, challenged God, Jehovah and Allah to a fight, and ended by announcing, “Children, tell your grandchildren that people like me once walked the earth.” No wonder, I suppose, that he hasn’t played a festival in years.
I couldn’t make it to Howlin Rain’s London show the other night, but my colleague Miles did, and came back impressed and bearing a very neat new CD that he bought at the gig. “Wild Life” has two tracks, lasts for about half an hour, and may provide some succour for Ethan Miller fans who’ve been unnerved by his transition from the flat-out psychedelic gloop of Comets On Fire to the sepia-tinted classic rock of the Rain.
