Before and after ‘Last Waltz’: What Levon Helm and, for a short while, The Band, stood for
While never rock gods on the order of their contemporaries, The Band stood—in some pure, yet often entirely cryptic way—for the least modish, most enduring values of the ’60s. What’s more, their last concert was the subject of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, widely regarded as the finest rock doc ever made. And, for what it’s worth, a singularly dismal acknowledgement that everything The Band stood for was over, or at least had been pushed aside by self-interest, cynicism, and incredulity.
With the exception of Helm, all of its members hailed from Canada. That makes it either really easy or profoundly difficult to call The Band “outsiders,” since they so rooted themselves in America’s past, or at least a highly abstracted, symbolic version of it that was as much about internal geography as real highways and byways. Their mentor Dylan had begun his career emulating Woody Guthrie’s angry train-hopping, had thrown his id out into the world with abandon in his electric phase, and then reinvented his relationship with the tradition after a 1966 motorcycle crash.
The Band, almost more than Dylan himself, understood how the past could be rendered timeless, at once light and mighty. They themselves were an idea about how music could exist, not kids with a dream; their songs were as specific, and without direction, as the listener needed them to be. This was a finely curated innerspace of America, stretching back generations, at a time when LSD had reduced introspection to a pitched, lawless battle against the rules and norms of Kantian mom and dad.
CANT. STOP. LISTENING.
Wild - Screaming Females
Capital New York-approved band in a Capital New York-approved video.
Didn’t get tickets to see Pulp at Radio City Music Hall this week? Don’t worry, there are other shows to see! And you can catch Pulp on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” tonight on NBC (or on your computer screen the next morning, like the rest of us).
She is already beyond some of the identity branding black women have to do to make it in pop: she is already done with “the Black Barbie,” but she still gets shine from saying “I am the female Weezy.” Other women have done the simile before—Yo Yo with Ice Cube, Lil Kim with Biggie, Remy Ma with Big Pun—but Minaj is already there on an artistic level. Her flow, including the corny hashtag raps and the growls and all the other forms of play that make her simultaneously so old school and so fresh, have already shifted the zeitgeist and inspired a new generation of pop lovers in one short year. Now it’s time for her to figure out how to step up to sound like she what she says on the album’s third track: “I Am Your Leader.”
![“There was a solitary and solitude thing that informed the whole record,” he said.
That’s a contrast with The Hold Steady, whose songs are always overcrowded, and largely about being social at all costs.
“The Hold Steady’s very celebratory,” Finn said. “We go out and have a good time. That’s what I love about The Hold Steady; one of the really exciting things about my life is I get to do that. There are moments of the day when I don’t feel celebratory. The backing music’s quieter. There’s a lot more space. That way, I think I was allowed to do something a little more intimate and maybe concerned with more mundane topics. When you think about the song ‘Rented Room,’ no one’s getting shot, no one’s falling off a roof. It’s just a guy sitting in a rented room trying to figure out how he got to this place in his life. When you think of short stories—I usually think of [Raymond] Carver, who wrote all these short stories where you could argue that nothing ever happens, but a lot happens.”
Craig Finn on his new solo album Clear Heart Full Eyes. He plays at Mercury Lounge tonight and Maxwell’s tomorrow.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m069sbJEaD1qc0o3ko1_400.jpg)
“There was a solitary and solitude thing that informed the whole record,” he said.
That’s a contrast with The Hold Steady, whose songs are always overcrowded, and largely about being social at all costs.
“The Hold Steady’s very celebratory,” Finn said. “We go out and have a good time. That’s what I love about The Hold Steady; one of the really exciting things about my life is I get to do that. There are moments of the day when I don’t feel celebratory. The backing music’s quieter. There’s a lot more space. That way, I think I was allowed to do something a little more intimate and maybe concerned with more mundane topics. When you think about the song ‘Rented Room,’ no one’s getting shot, no one’s falling off a roof. It’s just a guy sitting in a rented room trying to figure out how he got to this place in his life. When you think of short stories—I usually think of [Raymond] Carver, who wrote all these short stories where you could argue that nothing ever happens, but a lot happens.”
Craig Finn on his new solo album Clear Heart Full Eyes. He plays at Mercury Lounge tonight and Maxwell’s tomorrow.
![thediscography:
(via A music podcast featuring Tom Scharpling finds fans by breaking out of the regular music-biz spin cycle | Capital New York)
I profiled Low Times Podcast for Capital New York.
“Scharpling directs indie-rock videos as well as working with indie über-drummer Wurster, and his contacts came in handy with Low Times: His first two interviews were with Janet Weiss (Scharpling directed Wild Flag’s ‘Romance’) and Patrick Stickles (Scharpling directed Titus Andronicus’s ‘No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future’). He calls Low Times an outgrowth of his ’90s fanzine, 18 Wheeler—the sort of project he’d long wanted to try again.
‘[When] the podcast explosion, or whatever you want to call it, took place, I was already well into my radio career,’ he said, adding that Low Times ‘made sense as something that could be self-contained and kind of shaped to capture the spirit of what fanzines were to me. And it was definitely a podcast—it’s not a radio show. It’s meant to take advantage of the form. It feels like podcasts were the perfect medium to pull off what used to be a fanzine.’”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m04awga1Aq1qb0720o1_100.png)
I profiled Low Times Podcast for Capital New York.
“Scharpling directs indie-rock videos as well as working with indie über-drummer Wurster, and his contacts came in handy with Low Times: His first two interviews were with Janet Weiss (Scharpling directed Wild Flag’s ‘Romance’) and Patrick Stickles (Scharpling directed Titus Andronicus’s ‘No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future’). He calls Low Times an outgrowth of his ’90s fanzine, 18 Wheeler—the sort of project he’d long wanted to try again.
‘[When] the podcast explosion, or whatever you want to call it, took place, I was already well into my radio career,’ he said, adding that Low Times ‘made sense as something that could be self-contained and kind of shaped to capture the spirit of what fanzines were to me. And it was definitely a podcast—it’s not a radio show. It’s meant to take advantage of the form. It feels like podcasts were the perfect medium to pull off what used to be a fanzine.’”
A page from Bruce Springsteen’s lyric notebooks, currently on display at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Amy Winehouse wore her self-destruction on her sleeve, but ultimately, that means her music only illuminates a particularly nasty universal. Winehouse’s addiction in itself made her more ordinary; it was her ability to express addiction, like other singers do love, that mattered. It’s a given that drugs don’t make the music. What they do, though, is give some artists another banality to mine and transform.
Houston’s music and her voice weren’t built for that task. Or, rather, that voice was so regal, so full of grace, that it was hard to imagine it troubled by any kind of grimy, worldly constraint. Maybe this is Whitney’s gospel pedigree shining through. She had plenty of demons, like all of us. Church was meant to dispel them, to look beyond the everyday struggle. That may sound corny, but it’s the formulation that has kept faith going for who knows how long.
STREETS OF YOUR TOWN: Want to see a show this week? Check out our guide, featuring Gotye, the Darkness, tUnE-YarDs, Jay-Z, and more
Leonard Cohen is in Times Square (via).
He is also on our homepage because Rick Flom wrote a genius review of his latest album, Old Ideas, which takes the singer back to a good, old idea: Melody.
In May of 1891, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was on his way to Niagara Falls when, changing trains in Utica, he composed a letter to his brother, Modest, that read in part: “ginger bread and toy soldiers have started dancing in my head.”
These images were to become the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” part of The Nutcracker, one of the most familiar works by the Russian composer, who was going to see Niagara Falls—then considered one of the Wonders of the World—at the end of a 20-day stay in the United States.
For Gino Francesconi, those 20 days are a door between the past and present of American culture, and the relationship between European and American culture. To him, it began with Carnegie Hall, where he is the gatekeeper of history.
The origin of The Nutcracker’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and other New York secrets discovered by a Carnegie Hall archivist
Happy Birthday Philip Glass. We are excited and honored to be publishing his memoir next year!
That’ll be on our reading list. But for tonight, Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 9 is set to have its U.S. premiere at Carnegie Hall, as part of his “75th Birthday Concert.” Check out Seth Colter Walls’s interview with Glass over at Capital New York:
“There is a special political agenda [of mine] which can be seen, not in every piece … . But there’s a very strong, I would say, awareness of the way in which entertainment and theater and film and opera and music can participate in an active dialog with public.”
“Active,” Glass repeats immediately for emphasis. “Active!”
Maybe it’s unfair to reduce Etta James to one song, especially one that links her directly to Celine Dion. Yet, as inescapable as “At Last” has become, it’s impossible to exhaust. All the traces of what Etta James had done, and where she was headed, are present in that song, if only in trace form. It may not be all there was to her as an artist, but James wasn’t hiding anything there, either. And if her bitter life story and musical evolution are any indication, “At Last” tells it all, backward and forward. - Bethlehem Shoals
Sharon Van Etten’s melancholy of influence
How does the action of a body help us hear a voice? We look at someone on a stage and, however meaningless or programmatic the impulse, we expect a certain sound and gesture. Take a child who sings melismatically, with a deep growl, thrusting a hip and looking fierce: it’s unsettling, a depth of feeling we think children cannot have, and an eros they ought not to even know about. With Sharon Van Etten it’s the opposite. What we assume we will get when we see her on stage is some version of the incredibly tender, aching voice and shuffling indie arrangements that dominate her recorded work, and really shine on her heartbreaking new album, Tramp (out February 7). Instead, on the stage at Mercury Lounge, where she debuted the material from Tramp last night, the young Van Etten’s voice and stage presence was deadpan at best and self-loathing at worst. - Read more from Daphne Carr
