#couchtour

(originally published 6/19/12)

Lou Reed’s 1975 Metal Machine Music is, shall we say, a difficult record. The legendary critic Lester Bangs and a cult following of devotees notwithstanding, the experimental, feedback-saturated double album has found few sympathetic listeners over the years. But in that album, multi-instrumentalist and composer John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) found the basis for Man Forever, a musical project that’s taking him all over the country and abroad.

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(originally published 6/18/12)

If jam bands were NFL teams, guitarist and singer Warren Haynes would be a first-round draft pick, maybe even #1 overall.

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(originally published 6/12/12)

CVI, the roman numeral for 106, keeps surfacing in strange places in the life of Royal Thunder guitarist Josh Weaver. For no apparent reason.

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(originally published 6/12/12)

Delicate Steve — it’s a great band name (actually, kinda brilliant), but it’s also fitting. Steve Marion’s music is delicate, and that’s saying something, considering it’s mostly driven by layers of clean and distorted guitars, overdubbed onto tribal grooves and occasionally surrounded by wordless vocal harmonies.

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(originally published 6/11/12)

Remember music at the beginning of the ’90s? The retro movement ramped up. Beatles references surfaced everywhere and jam bands thrived. Bands lobbied their engineers and sound board operators against the cathedral-like, overproduced atmospherics of ’80s music. Lenny Kravitz mixed flower power and funk, Sly Stone’s Fresh with the Guess Who. The Red Hot Chili Peppers and newly sample-free Beastie Boys revisited Curtis Mayfield and P-Funk, and the Black Crowes revived Skynyrd, Keef-tuned guitars and Delaney and Bonnie boogie. Producer Rick Rubin was everywhere, and the radio was run by people born around the time of the British Invasion.

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Song: Jimi Hendrix, “Hey Joe.” Highest chart position: U.K. Pop #4. It’s perfectly executed and brimming with confidence, even though it was the first single (with “Stone Free” as the B-side) released by the Experience after Hendrix hit London in the fall of 1966. Despite all its chauvinistic and violent trappings, what with Joe “going down to shoot down” his “old lady” and all, the Experience’s recording captured the remarkable interplay of three musical elements: 1) Hendrix’s lead vocal, thrown off so casually that its effectiveness is easily overlooked; 2) Hendrix’s rhythm guitar work, evidence that he was arguably the greatest rhythm player of his time; and 3) Mitch Mitchell’s drumming, too often overlooked for its contribution to the song’s success.

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(originally published 6/4/12)

There’s probably no better time for Hartford to land a visit from singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, who’s performing at the Wadsworth Atheneum with Amanda Shires on June 8.

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