Brad Spurgeon | Brad Spurgeon's Blog

Brad’s Morning Exercise Music Rundown, 2d Installment: Bob Dylan, Calvin Harris, Nelle Thomas, but not Peace “In Love”

April 28, 2013
bradspurgeon

Sit Ups

My second “Morning Exercise Rundown,” – the first of which ran on 7 April – will be much shorter than the first. I simply have fewer CDs to talk about, and a vinyl album I cannot talk about. But while there may be few CDs – three of them – they are about as contrasting as is possible, so I will talk mostly about that.

Two of the CDs came from my new source: As mentioned in my first post, the Lotus Formula One team is giving out CDs quite often now to journalists and any other takers and interested people in the paddock, as they have some kind of a sponsorship deal with Columbia Records. So at the Bahrain Grand Prix, in the 36-degree heat of the paddock, they set out for the taking a CD by Calvin Harris, the Scottish DJ, singer songwriter and record producer. Entitled “18 Months,” it is mix of dance music from beginning to end, and as such, its beats and rhythms and vacuous vocals make it perfect as morning exercise music. And nothing else for home consumption. In a club, yes, that’s the stuff. My only other “pertinent” observation is the strange and perhaps “telling” fact that in the 15 tracks almost every credit is attributed to someone with an “i” in their name, or an “i” vowel sound: “Kelis” “Rihanna” “Nicky Romero” “Ellie Goulding” “Tinie Tempah” “Dillon Francis” “Dizzee Rascal” “Ne-Yo” and “Ayah Marar” It turns out that almost every track title also goes through the “i”-sound ringer. Well, so much for my structuralist analysis of Calvin Harris’s dance music – wish I had more to say…but I was in the throes of sit-ups and side-bends and toes touching, so what do I know.

Bob Dylan’s album Tempest

The big, big bad CD, the one I was happiest to receive, and least happy to talk about, is “Tempest”, the latest Bob Dylan album. This is hardly a timely review, since the album came out last year and has been massively written about in the media, and massively listed as one of the top albums of the year in the music magazines around the world. And as a Bob Dylan fan for most of my life, I had, naturally, already listened to several of the album’s tracks over the Internet. Having said that, as proof that the CD, the album, the physical collection of a musical oeuvre still carries weight and counts for something, I was very happy to take this physical CD object and put it in my Marantz CD player and listen to it over my Bose speakers, and not just on my computer’s iTunes.

Until I did, actually. Then I was struck with the biggest existential problem I have yet faced with my morning exercise music talk. How can I write about Bob Dylan’s latest album when I love Bob Dylan, when almost all of the reviews have been great, when as I say, it has made it to the top, or near the top, of the lists of the year’s best albums? And I just don’t get it? Yes, yes, yes. This album has one, maybe two or three tracks that have something really great – and the only one that really, really stands out for me is the first one, “Duquesne Whistle.” Using this old time music, singing this folksy up-tempo song, I really feel as if Dylan has written some kind of a classic here. Not, I feel, a classic Dylan song, but some kind of American classic. It was very hard for me to accept his voice on this, until I decided to pretend that it was not Bob Dylan, but Satchmo himself. I never complained about Satchmo’s gutteral, destroyed voice – why should I complain about Dylan’s? No doubt because Dylan once had a few other voices, and I liked several of those better – the original one from the early 60s, the one from Lay Lady Lay in the Late Sixities, the one from Blood on the Tracks in the mid-70s, the one from Desire at the same time, the one from some of the songs in the 80s, even…. But this Satchmo voice has never worked for me. In fact, for much of the album, I thought I was not hearing Dylan, but Tom Waits….

Another song that cannot be thrown away is the last one, “Roll on John,” about John Lennon. Come on, with subject matter like that, and you know the two knew each other…!

If Bob Dylan can’t write songs like Bob Dylan anymore what chance do the rest of us have?

But the problem with this CD, and maybe with why the critics give it so high marks, is that this IS Dylan. And I kept trying to figure out how some of these songs would sound when sung by other musicians…but then I wondered how many actually WOULD be sung by them. I love the fact that Dylan keeps making music, keeps touring almost every day, keeps creating. But even he said, in his fabulous book, Chronicles, that he can no longer write the kinds of songs he did in the 60s. That was in the chapter about when Daniel Lanois produced an album of his and wanted him to write the old stuff again. And that made me think of a funny line that I just kind of made up and found plopping into my brain as a guy who writes some songs too – without the success of a Dylan: If Bob Dylan can’t write songs like Bob Dylan anymore what chance do the rest of us have?

Of course, I step back from that and say, it’s got nothing to do with anything like that – we all reach our own creative peak in our own way in our own time. And ultimately, as T.S. Eliot said: “For us there is only the trying, the rest is not our business.”

Well, let’s hope Dylan keeps on trying – but I can’t really see how this CD got to the top of so many “year’s best” lists. There is a repetitiveness to the rhymes and melodies in a lot of these songs – that have also appeared in many of the Dylan albums of the last 30 years – that was not there in his classic work. The new Bowie album, by contrast, I could see if if it gets there at the end of the year….

In Bahrain I also got given a CD from a fellow Canadian musician, Félix Fréchette, who was the guitarist at the Dublin Club jam session on the Saturday night where I played – along with him and his band. The CD is a 10-track album of songs written and sung by Nelle Thomas, who is also Canadian – she is English-speaking,from Montreal, whereas Fréchette is a French speaking Quebecer – the music of which was written mostly by Fréchette. He also plays his lead guitar on most of the tracks.

Nelle Thomas

The two, as I say, were part of the house band at the Dublin Club in the Ramee Palace hotel, but this CD – called Noise Rises – they made in Canada in 2012. It is a highly professional, eclectic mix of songs, starting off with a kind of soul music and heading into some soft rock and finishing off with a song on acoustic guitar that is almost – but not quite – folk.

While there were a number of songs that just sort of passed me by – although they were beautifully played and produced – there were three that really stood out for me. “Tell a Sad Story,” has a good catchy melody and lyrics, and really hits the spot. “Never Been Accused,” with its sort of 1970 rock sound, and its ripping lead guitar by Félix Fréchette is another – oh, and there is another nice guitar solo on “One Day at a Time.” And I really love the last song on the album, “Eleven Dollars,” with the great lyrics, vocals and acoustic guitar – reminds me very much of Tuck & Patti. Certainly the best song of the album – but maybe my liking of vocals, acoustic, folky stuff. Still, NO! I love Hendrix, King Crimson, Zappa, Talking Heads, Joy Division, so what the hell – I just think this one works.

It was interesting, once again, to compare an album by a completely unknown young couple to that of Dylan, and to say, well, yeah!!!

Peace In Love

I also got a vinyl album by the British indie band, Peace, – their first album, “In Love,” which has been getting great reviews (9 out of 10 at NME) – but I am very old fashioned, and have no turntable, so I could not listen to this. Wait. That seems odd. Old fashioned? I grew up with vinyl. I had a large collection, then got rid of my turntable because CDs were better…. Right, that’s where the old fashioned bit comes in…. I don’t know ANYTHING, vinyl is better…. well, not for morning exercises – too much work putting the cartridge arm and diamond down the vinyl – and, actually, according to my research, vinyl is NOT better than digital…. but let’s leave that one alone, lest I become even more unpopular than I will be after these morning exercise “reviews” turn me into an evil “critic.”

The 2013 Edition of the Worldwide Musical Adventure Begins – An Outline….

March 10, 2013
bradspurgeon

someone’s guitar on a plane

Here it is, my fifth year in a row of traveling the world to play in open mics and jam sessions. It starts tomorrow with my flight from Paris to Melbourne, then the following week I go to Kuala Lumpur. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have been documenting my musical adventures around the world on this blog for the last three years, and for the year before that I began writing a book about it. This year I will again visit 20 countries in the next nine months, and play in a massive number of open mics and open jam sessions, and I will write about what I find here….

To recap a little, the first year was the book. The second year was the blog. The third year was the blog and a documentary film. The fourth year was the blog and me recording myself playing music with musicians in the open mics around the world, as well as a series of podcasts of people running the open mics and playing in them.

So where does this whole trans-media epic stand at the moment? Another recap: I take these worldwide trips as a journalist reporting on Formula One auto racing for my newspaper, and in my free time I seek out places to play, in these cities and countries where I would not otherwise expect to find open mics – in many cases. And each time I like to have a new project to work on to document it, or do something “else” with it. This year will be no exception. I again have projects in the works. What are they?

First, I want to say that my goal this year is perhaps more ambitious than in all the other year combined. Because my No. 1 goal will be to COMPLETELY finish all of the projects that have accumulated but never ceased to spin out. In other words, I’m still working on the book – it’s written, but I’m now editing it – and I want that finished finally by the end of the year, but hopefully within the next couple of months. I want to work with all the recordings I did and make some kind of CD – ie, the podcasts and some of the stuff of me playing with other people. And I want to finish the film, finally. To that end, I have made a number of very important steps in recent weeks, and I’m very, very excited about them, and I will write about that in the coming weeks.

For this year, I will not simply sit back on my laurels and be satisfied with finishing the other projects, but I will start one or two new ones. In addition to simply continuing to play at open mics and jam sessions everywhere I go, and recording it here on the blog, the first new project is that I will be adding a new page to the blog at every location I go to, which will be a Thumbnail Guide to the open mics and jam sessions, etc., that I know of in those cities. Having now had four years, and this will be the fifth, of accumulated and growing knowledge about each city’s open mics, I finally feel like it is time to put it all up on the blog in a usable form. Of course, my Paris guide to open mics will always be the most up-to-date, since that’s where I live and play the most. But the other pages will, I hope, serve their purpose well, and give a whole knew heft to this site.

The other project I plan to do, but this one may or may not be feasible, is that I plan to write a new song in each country and city I visit, and the song will in some way be inspired by the place. I have no idea how big a task that will prove to be, but I really want to face the challenge and try it. If it produces one good song, then that’s cool enough – the rest will just be a great exercise and discipline…. I will decide whether or not to make the songs heard on the site, but I expect that I will only manage to lay down the melodic idea and write the full text, but not perfect the song at each place – since I’m often not present in the countries long enough to do that…especially given all the work I have to do for my day job.

So that is it in a nutshell: 20 countries in 9 months; a new web of evergreen material for a worldwide open mic thumbnail guide of where to perform; 20 new songs inspired by the places I visit; and finally, all of my previous years’ projects finished and finalized to tie together the entire multimedia, trans-media, worldwide musical adventure. Sound like I’m a dreamer? I hope so!!!!

PS, here is the schedule of places I will visit, and when (although the date usually but not always represents the last day I am in the country – and while there are only 19 countries here, the 20th is France, where I will play in between times):

A 7-Minute 30-second Musical Adventure Around Paris on New Year’s 2012-13 With Brad

January 1, 2013
bradspurgeon

Brad Spurgeon at St. Lazare Metro New Year’s 2012-13

I had just finished eating a nice and quiet meal with my friend Zaza Jardim last night at my apartment and the New Year was less than an hour away. Suddenly, as I was playing a song for her on my guitar on my terrace – and attracting possibly angry looks from my neighbors – my friend said to me: “I have an idea! Let’s go out and take your guitar and go on the métro, go to the Louvre, go around Paris, all over the place, and you will sing your songs with your guitar and I will film it. It is New Year’s in Paris!” My immediate reaction that I said to myself but not to her, was: “Great idea, but I would really rather sit comfortably here and digest my meal and play songs for you. Paris on New Year’s eve can be totally mad and even dangerous.” Ultimately I just felt so comfortable I saw no reason to go out. But her idea!

It had my mind and imagination feeling possibilities. And I thought, so what am I going to do, say to her that we will just sit here like an old couple and watch life go by????? No, I thought it was potentially far more interesting to go with her – after all, what a nice offer to film it too – and I thought, well, of course, because it is New Year’s maybe people in the métro and elsewhere would be more open to craziness.

Man, that’s for SURE! So we went and spent about four hours going across and around Paris, and I sang my songs, and people danced, clapped and sang along. It was Paris in 7 and a half minutes on a New Year’s Eve, and it was wonderful. Not a single person that I played for appeared to even think for one moment that we were doing it for money. No one offered. Oh…someone offered a quarter bottle of champagne under the walkway of the Louvre where I played.

Check out the video we came up with today from last night’s events. All the scenes and the photos were all from that four hour period last night. I hashed it together as a video today.

The Adrian Henri Poems I Did Not Read at the Open Mic That Did Not Really Happen, for the End of the World That Never Came

December 22, 2012
bradspurgeon

penguin poets 10

I was fantastically excited last night because one of my favorite Paris open mics fell on the day to end all days in the history of the world. So it was that the Arte Cafe decided to have a little theme of the end of the world for what was also its final open mic of 2012. I was so excited because although I was going to bring my guitar with me and perhaps sing some songs in the jam afterwards, my main plan was to read a couple of poems by one of the favorite poets of my youth: Adrian Henri.

Henri was one of the Liverpool poets from the 1960s – and after – whose volume of Penguin Poets No. 10, The Mersey Sound, was a famous moment in such anthologies when it came out in 1967. The other two poets in the group were Roger McGough and Brian Patten. Henri was an artist, performance artist, musician, poet and friends with people like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg and others.

I met him briefly at a Toronto Harbourfront Reading series night on 25 October 1980. I remember the date because it is inscribed in my book of his poetry that I bought that night called “From the Loveless Motel.” I also recall the moment because I was so young and gauche and although I admired him greatly, I insulted him without intending to. I went up to him excitedly to buy the book and talk, and I told him that I had traveled a good part of the world in my life and as a fan of his writing I had looked all over the place for his volumes and never found any of them outside England. Or something to that effect.

My intention, of course, had been to show what a devoted reader I was and not how obscure he was as a writer. But naturally, his face dropped and he said, “Well, you’ve got plenty of them here….”

Anyway… the point of all this is to say that when I learned that the end of the world was about to come, it immediately reminded me of one of my favorite Adrian Henri poems, and I decided that I would read it at the open mic last night. I thought that as an introduction to Henri for the listeners, I would also read another of my favorite poems by him after the end of the world poem.

As it happened, a friend was also holding his annual end-of-the-year party, so I decided I would attend that first before going to the open mic. During the party I learned that the open mic at the Arte Café was, exceptionally, closing down early, for lack of its usual unfailingly loyal crowds of attendees. (Due no doubt to the Christmas holiday.) That meant my big moment as a reader – as opposed to singer – would never come. Neither, of course, did the end of the world.

But I did get to play my guitar and sing songs at the home of my friend, and that was loads of fun. And because I have this blog, I’ve decided that I can STILL read those two poems, and put them here on the blog for everyone to listen to – and then to go out and find Adrian Henri books and buy them wherever you may be. Henri, by the way, was born in 1932 and he died in 2000…on 20 December – IE, it would have been his 80th birthday two days ago, the day before the end of the world that never came.

The first poem, called, “Death in the Suburbs,” – and contained in “from the loveless motel” describes the end of the world…. which, as Henri says: “will surely come in Bromley South or Orpington.” Listen right to the end where suddenly I finish reading the poem only to have the sound of a siren emerge from outside my apartment like the end of the world has really begun after all:

The second poem, called, “Me,” is contained in Penguin Poets No. 10, and is a clever rhythmic thing which consists only of the names of people Henri would like to be, as you will hear if you listen:

August is Officially Over in Paris Open Mics – No Sweat! … Or Rather, Lot’s of It….

September 4, 2012
bradspurgeon

Returning from the cold, winter-like climate of Liege, Belgium – where I had the brilliant idea on my final night and after all these years of finally eating a Café Liegois (great!) – I had the not-so-brilliant idea of dressing the same warm way as I went to the Paris open mics last night. I arrived at the Tennessee Bar to find the place bursting at the seams with customers, listeners, but not that many musicians at that moment. So it was that James, the MC, offered that I go up right after the current performer. I went up, did four songs, and descended from the stage in a state of sweat like none I have ever experienced before.

I tend to give a lot physically when I sing and play, so I usually do sweat. But last night was the most insane thing ever. Just drenched. And my new black Paul Smith, tight-fitting shirt turned into something that looked like the satin or silken duds of a hard rock, heavy metal guru. Death. Metal. I had to try to use the bathroom of the Tennessee to wash up a little, but it was clear I would not survive what I had hoped would be a long night of music and more than one open mic.

So I had to leave the Tennessee prematurely. The singer of the band taking to the stage as I left asked my permission to sing “Whats Up!” since that was one of the four songs I sang – and probably the one that evoked the most sweat – and I thought it was cute and nice of her to ask. But I told her it was not my song, so of course she could sing it. In fact, I think she should have asked herself or the audience for permission to redo a song that had just been done. I imagine she must have been disappointed to hear me do it, as they were three or four of them and they had rehearsed What’s Up…. I caught part of it on video – and you can see how packed the place was on the return of the summer holiday goers in Paris – August is officially over.

So I decided to stop on the way to the Coolin open mic to buy myself a T-Shirt, since I could not survive the night in a wet suit, even if it was signed Paul Smith. I could only find a Souvenir de Paris store open at that time, however, and so I had to buy a black T-Shirt with the Eiffel Tower on it. The salesman had the brilliant – though not very loyal – idea of turning the shirt inside out and cutting off the tag at the collar. So it was that I looked almost passable when I arrived at the Coolin, if not exactly Paul Smith chic.

There, the temperature was much more conducive to singing energetic songs, and many people did. I chose something a little more low key to start with – “Wicked Game”. It was a wonderful night at Coolin, and afterwards, most of us went down to the Seine to jam a little more. However we might judge the first part of the evening, the second part was clearly a case of Coolin’ off…. No sweat!

Recording Music in a McDonald’s in Mannheim

July 20, 2012
bradspurgeon

Man oh man oh Mannheim, I never thought I’d find myself playing music in a McDonald’s in Mannheim, recording “Crazy Love,” with a German violin player with the Italian name of Tonio. But that is exactly what happened last night just before midnight, and just before we got kicked out….

Thing is, Mannheim is a crap place for open mics and jam sessions. I stayed here a couple of years ago while attending the German Grand Prix in Hockenheim, and I did managed to find one odd bar to play in and then a down moment in a karaoke to do my guitar and singing number. But arriving here yesterday, I felt quite demoralized, and after a nice dinner of schnitzel or some other pork-based delight, I walked out of the restaurant to find a young man looking at the menu and with a violin on his back.

My “opportunity” lights flashed brightly and I asked – with my guitar on my back – if he knew of anywhere to play in an open mic or jam. Tonio – as I would find was his name – spoke perfect English, and he said, “Heidelberg.” Yes, Heidelberg is next door to Mannheim, but there were no hotels available when I looked. So then he said he would ask some friends in a pub across the street, and each one he asked answered: Heidelberg.

Mannheim ain’t manly in the way of live music. So anyway, Tonio also told me that did like me, when he traveled, he looked for people to play music with. He had just returned from Amsterdam, where he had joined some buskers playing in the street.

Feeling somewhat defeated, I thanked him and left. But as I made my way toward the bar where I had played last year, I suddenly realized I had let slip the most important chance of my whole four-day trip to Mannheim. My project this year on the never-ending worldwide open mic and jam musical adventure is not simply to find and play in an open mic or open jam. It is to play with a local musician in every country I visit, and to record the playing. So far I have succeeded in every one of the 10 or so countries I have visited since March.

I suddenly realized that there was an interested and willing, classically trained violin player who liked pop and jazz as well as classical music, and that I had actually walked away let down. Without even asking him to play. So I ran back to my hotel, picked up my recording device – which I had forgotten there – and returned to the pub across the street from the restaurant where I had eaten. There I found Tonio again, about to eat his meal, with his sister and friends.

I arrived and told him my goal for the trip, and he said he would love to play some songs with me. So he ate, I socialized with him and his friends, had a beer, soaked up the atmosphere in this fabulous, popular, student pub, and then said: “So where should we play?”

We decided to head for the main public square, but by now it was so late it was likely to be considered a public disruption if we played there. Tonio suggested we try the McDonald’s restaurant just off the square. We arrived a bout 20 minutes before closing time, we were the only people in the McDonald’s – Tonio and two of his friends – and we ordered coffees and sat at a table. I turned on my recording device and we played “Crazy Love,” me on guitar and vocals, Tonio on violin and doing great mouth drumming sounds and then ad lib lyrics. Got through all but the final verse, and were then kicked out by the manager.

But I GOT my recording of me playing with a local!!!!! Couldn’t believe it! And in a McDonald’s of all places…. Thanks Tonio.

MCing the Galway Open Mic in Paris

July 3, 2012
bradspurgeon

Last night I got a bit of a taste of what it is like to MC an open mic at one of the long-lasting, mainstay open mic venues in Paris, and all I can say to those who do it all the time is: Respect! I had some experience doing this myself at my Mecano Sunday brunches for around six months a year or so ago. But taking over a regular venue for one night gives a whole new look at things.

I have to thank all my musician friends who showed up to play and help me, as without them I’d have had to play all night myself. Okay, what I really meant to say, was, without them, it would have been a somewhat barren affair, given that it was the beginning of the July holidays in France, and the day after a major soccer match. So lots of people stayed home.

But I had lots of performers, and I would have been able to do even more videos had I not been working out the sound feedback, musician monitor and other technical glitches that I came slightly unprepared for. I had actually been prepared by a photo taken of the soundboard on my iPhone the previous week – but after the iPhone was stolen over the weekend, I lost my crutch.

Thanks to Thomas Arlo and Brislee Adams for helping me out of that. And especial thanks to Joe Cady for turning up with his violin, to play along with me and several other musicians – and for taking that little video of me on his iPhone as I sang my song, “Except Her Heart.” Oh, and boy, there was this really cool trio that arrived for the first time, and it was their first gig together – and that was really, really exciting from the point of view of running the open mic. Check out the videos I did manage to do of them….

Next week Romain returns to do the job he has been doing so well…

A Village Voice, a Bloomsday and a Bit of Music

June 17, 2012
bradspurgeon

village voice bookshop

Hugely mixed emotions yesterday night as I had a couple of literary evenings mixed with music to attend. The first was not mixed with music, in fact, but was the most bittersweet. That was a visit to The Village Voice Bookshop, for a party to “celebrate” the closure of this Paris institution of the last 30 years. The store is closing as it can no longer survive as an independent bookshop in our Internet and ebook world. The second event was a celebration of Bloomsday, at the Swan Bar, where I was invited to play music and to listen to readings of James Joyce prose and other Irish things.

The Village Voice was one of my first Paris hangouts, and I went there in the second year of its existence, starting in 1983. I had seen many readings there, met many people, and got to know Odile Hellier, the woman who started the shop and has run it all these years. She is a fascinating woman who loves American literature, and decided to open a store with the true feel of the American literary expat bookshop in Paris – I guess she is a mixture of both Sylvia Beach AND Adrienne Monnier, who ran their stores only a few blocks away a few decades ago….

When I arrived for the closing celebration, I found that not even my personal invitation to the thing would save me from the impossibility of getting through the doors, so full was the two-floor shop of admirers and book lovers. In fact, they were bursting out into the street. All I could manage to do was glimpse inside and see Odile reading something from the staircase to the throngs below. I made a video of this, to give an idea.

I went off and ate a wonderful pizza dinner at a nearby pizzeria, where I also devoured the London Review of Books that I had bought in Montreal last week. Then I returned, sweating from that hot and spicy pizza, and found that I could now penetrate into the Village Voice. There I found the place now had enough room available for a visitor to wander around, and meet old friends. I started by saying hello to Odile outside the shop, where she was talking with someone and no doubt getting some fresh air after her various readings.

Inside, I found some old friends, including Jim Haynes, the American Paris expat supreme, whom, I recalled, I had met for the first time at the Village Voice in the back room cafe it used to have, in 1984, while I was reading Jim’s very own autobiography, “Thanks For Coming.” Jim and I kept contact over the years, I have been to his famous Sunday dinners at his atelier in the 15th arrondissement, and our lives have criss-crossed occasionally.

I also saw David Applefield, whom I had met at Shakespeare and Company in 1983 in the writer’s room, but whom I had probably seen more often in those early days at the Village Voice. David, at the time I met him, was working on the first Paris issue of his literary review called “Frank,” which would go on to have many more issues and a long life in Paris. Last night he passed on to me a book he has just published, right off the press, in a new imprint, and which was written by another Paris literary alumnus, John Strand.

Strand had started another Paris literary review in the early 1980s, called Exile, or Paris Exile, can’t remember quite. But I do remember him celebrating one of the issues at some kind of evening at the Village Voice in the early 1980s. Strand has gone on to become a multiple prize-winning playwright based in Washington D.C., and his novel is called, “Commieland.” I’m looking forward to reading it, and seeing where Applefield’s imprint, called, Kiwai Media, goes.

Unfortunately, I could stay long at the Village Voice as I had agreed so sing Irish songs at the Bloomsday evening at the Swan Bar, a newer American-culture hangout in Paris. In a brisk walk from the rue Princesse to Montparnasse, I managed to digest that pepperoni pizza and all the desert items – macarons – that I ate at the Village Voice. I arrived to find Sheldon Forrest hard at work accompanying a singer, and the Swan Bar was just brimming full of people.

This bode well, and as I waited to perform my first song, it occurred to me that I had a nice little story to tell about James Joyce, and I could connect it to the build up of my song. It was a story about how the journalist and novelist Eugene Jolas had spoken to Joyce one day and asked him what he accomplished that day, and Joyce responded that he had worked all day and managed to complete a sentence. “Only one sentence??!!!” “Well, yes,” said Joyce. “I knew what the seven words were, but I could not figure out what order I wanted to put them in.” I then told the audience that I had several songs, but did not know what order to sing them in. The one that went down the best, and which I did sing the best, was “Only Our Rivers Run Free,” by Mickey MacConnell.

There were lots of other musicians, lots of readers, and the evening was in general a bigger success – I felt – than last year’s such celebration at the Swan Bar.

I returned home, had a good sleep, got up today and finally, finally, after nearly four years finished the book I have been working on about my first year of musical adventures around the world. I also came up with a new, final, working title: “OUT OF A JAM: An Around-the-World Story of Healing and Rebirth through Music” In the end, I must say, that it felt appropriate to complete the book on such a literary weekend….

Frazier Mohawk / Barry Friedman Dies – a Remembrance

June 3, 2012
bradspurgeon

frazier mohawk self portrait

Yesterday Frazier Mohawk, born Barry Friedman, died of complications from illness related to his liver, at the age of 70, in a hospital near where he lived north of Toronto, Canada. Born in Los Angeles, Frazier had moved to Canada in the early 1970s to escape and recover from the second part of his remarkably interesting career, and to return to a path he had set out on in his first short career. Frazier went from being a teenage circus performer and television producer to producing records and putting together some of the top musicians of the 1960s and 1970s – like the Buffalo Springfield, Nico, Paul Butterfield, Jackson Browne and many others – and then back again to the circus as he set up Puck’s Canadian Travelling Circus in Canada, before founding Puck’s Farm, and creating a music studio on the farm.

I met Frazier in Toronto when I was 18 and he hired me for his circus. I dropped out of that quickly, but we remained lifelong friends, and he was an influence up to today, including with my return to music in recent years, which led to the existence of this blog and my worldwide musical adventures.

I have written a personal remembrance of Frazier, outlining his life, and drawing together the threads that joined our paths over the years. Located here on this link in the same area of this web site as the story I wrote about Frazier for the International Herald Tribune in 1997, it is a personal look at one of my closest friends, Frazier Mohawk / Barry Friedman. It can also be accessed in the menu above by clicking on “Blog Articles (As Opposed to Posts). Written very quickly today to get it up immediately, I will no doubt return and add links and clean it up a little occasionally – so keep posted, and please share your own memories of this remarkable man, if you are lucky enough to have any.

From a Quick Brad Concert to a Quick One with Le Mépris and The Agency

March 11, 2012
bradspurgeon

Three concerts to report on, one being my own: Friday night I had a sudden concert to do at a place called Evidence Bar, in Paris’s funky 20th Arrondissement. After learning that the bar was minuscule and that the sound system was even less copious, I got really worried – only to arrive, set up, realize that thanks to the small size of the bar I could perform without a mic and not lose my voice… and so it not only all worked out okay, but the atmosphere was fabulous, the layout of the place was super cool – spectators could listen inside at the bar or outside on the terrace and hear just fine – and the biggest icing on the cake was having Félix Beguin play along on lead, and add chorus vocals. We had a GREAT time.

And thanks also to my friend Chloé, who offered to make some videos of the gig, although I should have switched on the “night” lighting control, as it is very dark, and the sound of my voice is somewhat cancelled out by the ambient noise…but still…. Thanks also to Calvin McEnron who passed my name on to the bar talent coordinator for the show…. All in all, it was a wonderful Friday evening on a night where I had nothing planned….

I DID have something planned for Saturday night, though, and that was the very special concert introducing the new band of a couple of the members of the French band called Neimo, which has recorded a couple of albums and is working on another – having recently signed with Sony Music for a new album. Neimo’s high moment of the last few years was recording an album called “Modern Incidental,” at the Shangri La label in the U.S.

But now Bruno Alexander, the singer, and Camille Troillard, the Neimo lead guitarist, have put together a band with a drummer and bassist called, Le Mépris, and last night they tested their music for the first time in a concert. It had quite a different feel than Neimo, who I saw in concert last year, and there were some nice inventive things to this. It was a little like seeing some well known band that plays its new music when you’re used to the old stuff – you’re not entirely sure what you think of it, even if you like it. Which I did.

And now, having listened to it on the recordings that I made on my Zoom Q3 HD, I find it is sensational stuff. Really great. I must confess that having to stand next to the speak to record the stuff, I wore earplugs last night to preserve my hearing – my brain does not have the automatic level control that the Zoom has….

I first met Bruno and became aware of Neimo more than three years ago at Earle’s open mic at the Lizard Lounge, and there I also met the members of and became aware of the music of another band, The Agency, which has been building up its style and repertoire steadily ever since. Last night they played after Le Mépris, and it sounded like they had taken yet another step forward since the last time I heard them, sometime last year.

Oh, and to step back a little, that brings to mind that last time I saw The Agency was at the Maroquinerie last year when another of the bands was Natas Loves You. One of the songs Natas played on that night – and one they often sang at open mics – was King Crimson’s haunting, “I Talk to the Wind.” I was floored last night to hear Le Mépris doing the same song – this very cool song that has come out of the deep dark passages of my memory from my youth to young bands today in Paris…. It’s hardly a rock standard, but it bears resemblance to the sort of stuff that recent bands like the Fleet Foxes do….

This evening concert with Le Mépris and The Agency was, by the way, organized by a small, independent record label in Paris called, A Quick One, which specializes in producing vinyl albums for a large number of the top new groups in France. It also sells the music on its Quick One Internet site. The concert took place in a small room called Studio Campus, in a place that looked almost like a community center – I thought I’d arrived at the wrong place….