Jeff Rogers:

Heard the Podcast and you sound great!  Congratulations! I am downloading Terry Reid live at the Bottom Line right now. I Have never heard him before.

Also have you heard of Glide magazine.  On-line mag with some live mp3s. For the last week all I have been listening to is Neil Young at the Royal Festival Hall (Feb. 27 1971) just before the release of Harvest.  It is AMAZING!!!  It is worth it to listen to what he said on stage alone.  The music is beyond reproach.  Here is the link: Glide Magazine

Maybe east of here the sun is out.  But on this Friday in Santa Monica, the second day of Fall, it’s overcast.  The kind of way it is on the east coast.  When you’re prone to introspection.

Friday was always my record buying day.  I don’t know whether it was about reward or the free time, but every Friday afternoon I went record shopping.  To Artec Distributors in Burlington, Vermont during my college days or Grammy ‘N Granny in Westwood during law school.

And when I got home from the store, I’d shuffle through the five or six albums I’d acquired and decide what to play first.  Usually the record of someone I already knew, who I was eager to hear the latest opus of.  Oftentimes not the most famous of acts, I saved those records, but my personal favorites.

The sun would set.  I’d be sitting on my couch.  With this experience of the new.  Reveling in the sound.  Maybe, after the initial rush, reading some magazines.

This is what I liked to do most in life.  Other boys may have had girlfriends to fill up the time, I had my music.  It was there in a way I hoped a girl sometime would be.

I almost never go to the record store anymore.  But last Saturday night, before the penguin movie, I took Felice in hand and sauntered over to Amoeba.

The clerks were like the old days at Tower.  Heroin chic.  The racks after racks of CDs did nothing for me.  I was headed to a special place in the back of the store.  The vinyl department.

As I fingered the LPs I got that seventies rush.  Especially when I stumbled across albums by Be Bop Deluxe and other bands that were my special favorites, that I thought only I knew.  This was my life.

Felice went with her mother to the Hollywood Bowl tonight.  I was updating my computers, doing some laundry, and then I sat down to catch up on some e-mail.  And that’s when I came across Jeff Rogers’ missive.

Old man sitting by the side of the road with the lorries rolling by
Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load and the buildings scrape the sky

I was jolted back to freshman year.  But this live version of "Don’t Let It Bring You Down" breathed in a way that the original didn’t.  It wasn’t studied.  It was like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And scroll I did, down to the bottom of the page, where I found a concert by Ryan Adams.  There it was, the very last track, "Winding Wheel".  This is what sold me, this is what keeps me listening to Ryan.

I have better renditions on my computer.  Ones where Ryan is playing the guitar less sleepily.  Still, maybe if you listen you’ll get the magic.

Now I was excited.  My heart was beating in that way it does when you spy a girl across the room, no, when you’re having a conversation and you realize you have traction.  I’d found a TREASURE TROVE!

It appears that the artists and the labels have separated.  The labels are freaked that revenues are down, they’re suing everything that moves, they’re trying to jam product down people’s throats.  Whereas the musicians, they’re doing what they’ve always done.  They’re playing.

Today’s music is not a live medium.  The records are a studio concoction.  You want to buy the clothing, the jewelry, but you don’t want to see the artists in concert.  Whereas back in the day, that was the ONLY thing you wanted.  Not to SEE them as much as HEAR THE MUSIC!

Today’s acts release remix records.  Just the same song sounding a different way.  The acts of yore released live albums.  Not that every one did.  The labels said it wasn’t good for one’s career to have too much music in the marketplace, they stomped on all the bootleggers feeding consumer demand.  But now things have flipped.  The real artists make their money from the road, they want ALL their music in the hands of the consumer.  And, they’re making it available.

Click to hear Mark Knopfler from 2001.  I started with "Romeo & Juliet".  It was good, yet I didn’t tingle.

Then I clicked on "Telegraph Road".  And even though I’ve already sent you two missives today already, I had to send a third.  "Love Over Gold" wasn’t as good as what had come before.  "Telegraph Road" almost seemed TOO long.  There wasn’t enough MEAT on the album.  But that’s how we felt in the eighties, when the record was released.  Fifteen years on, with the modern context, with hindsight, we can see that "Telegraph Road" possesses a soul that today’s music doesn’t.  It’s that flourish that starts the track.  After the acoustic intro, when the piano chords go to your soul and Mark starts to WAIL on top of it all.  Not in guitar hero way, rather as if he and his instrument have merged, BONDED!  And when the ivories tinkle, bringing you into the first verse, you think that there’s someone else in your world.  Someone who feels, someone who cogitates, who knows it’s about soul, rather than flash.

Listen.

Go to: http://www.glidemagazine.com/downloads45.html

And remember, on a Mac, to download to your computer as opposed to streaming in your browser, hold down the Control key as you click on the track and select "Download Linked File" from the pop-up menu.