Tag: bruce hornsby

Random Shuffle: Louis Armstrong, Bruce Hornsby, The Libertines, The Rolling Stones, The Blues Brothers

Originally posted on August 26, 2006.

“Kiss to Build a Dream On” – Louis Armstrong
From Sleepless in Seattle

I periodically think of myself as a great jazz lover. In fits and spurts, I try to be. Back about ten years or so I was with a friend at his friend’s house and the subject went naturally to music. Well, it went naturally there because I was checking out his CD collection. The discussion turned to jazz and I mentioned I liked Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan. Condescending with a whisper he said, “Oh so you like vocal jazz?”

I had never thought about it like that. Isn’t jazz jazz? I had just begun to listen to the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and by that, I mean I had heard talk about their frenetic awesomeness amongst deadheads. I got the knock of vocal jazz not being real jazz and split. I have since dug what this guy would dub real jazz, but it is a moderated digging. I whip out all that cosmic jazz once in a while, but I can’t take in more than smaller doses.

Louis Armstrong started in the real jazz category, being a trailblazing blower, but in the latter days became the unique voice singing such family hits as “Wonderful World” and “Hello Dolly.” This song falls straight in that camp, being off of the soundtrack to Sleepless in Seattle of all things. It’s a darn fine song though, and one I stuck on my wedding CD.

Most days I’ll take this version of jazz over the real stuff, hands down.

“Rainbow’s Cadillac” – Bruce Hornsby
From 11/06/98

There is a video on YouTube, but the embed has been disabled, you can watch it by clicking here.

I didn’t really get into bootleg trading until just after I graduated college. I had moved to Abilene, TX to start graduate school – start over really, as I didn’t know a soul. Actually I never really got to know many people and left after a semester. But while I was there my refuge was bootlegging.

During this time Bruce Hornsby played a long run at Yoshi’s in Oakland California to promote his album, Spirit Trail. The tour was highlighted by guitar work from Steve Kimock, and a couple of guest spots from Phil Lesh and Bob Weir. This was one of the few performances Lesh had given since Jerry Garcia’s death a few years back and really marked his return to music.

This run came out on tape quickly and with a fantastic sound quality. In those days we were still using analog tapes and the sound quality often degenerated quickly through each generation of recording (unlike CDs where you can get an exact copy of the music, with analog the quality of a recording digressed every time you recorded it). This was an amazing thing to me to have so much high-quality music so quickly after it had been performed.

Now that I’ve moved to the CD world and almost everything is high quality, such recordings are no longer rare. In fact, I’ve only got a couple of these shows on CD and the tapes have long since been given away. But it still brings fond memories. Some of the only ones from that small chunk of time I spent in Texas.

It’s a great performance too. “Rainbow’s Cadillac” is one of Bruce’s finest songs, and an excellent jamming song done live. He pretty much nails the sucker. The sound is great and there is an energy at these shows that this was a new Bruce. Great stuff folks.

“Can’t Stand Me Now” – Libertines
From the Libertines

Peter Doherty, lead singer of the Libertines, and now Babyshambles, is a pretty danged good musician/songwriter but has so thoroughly screwed up his life that it’s all kinds of sad. We don’t hear much about him on this side of the ocean, but in England, he’s all sorts of tabloid fodder, what with the heroin addiction, the multiple arrests, and his off-and-on relationship with Kate Moss.

The Libertines were an excellent British, indie rock outfit, that broke up in, well, tabloid fodder. This is a really great upbeat, heavy drum, pop song. Maybe that’s not very indie rock of them, but a good pop song is a good pop song. And 9 times out of 10 I’ll take a good pop song over a great classical, jazz, or obscure rock song.

“Dead Flowers” – The Rolling Stones
From Sticky Fingers

The first time I ever heard this song was through a live performance by Townes Van Zandt over the closing credits of The Big Lebowski. I hunted the song down and eventually got the Rolling Stones album. Yeah, I know I’m a little behind on the Stones, but I’m slowly catching up with them.

Great freaking song. What more can be said? One of my all-time favorites. It’s a favorite daydream to learn to play this song (when I learn to play an instrument) and please the crowd (for of course I’ll make it big as a musician) when I whip it out.

“Turn On Your Lovelight” – Blues Brothers
From Blues Brothers 2000

This is an old blues number, but I know it mainly through the Grateful Dead. Pig Pen used to do these half-hour rave-ups to it. He’d rap along about women and drinking and whatever while the Dead freaking took off behind him. If I could go back in time I’d go back to 1968-69 San Francisco and groove to Pig taking off on this song. The tapes simply can’t do him justice.

The Blues Brothers don’t do the song justice. Man I dig the Brothers, and the original movie is a classic. The sequel had some good moments but sorely missed John Belushi. I miss Pig Pen on this song. It’s got all kinds of cool bluesmen playing along, but it ain’t got no soul.

RIP Ron “Pig Pen” McKernan

Random Shuffle: July 25, 2006 – Beat Farmers, Pearl Jam, Wilco, Bruce Hornsby & Jim Croce

“Happy Boy” – Beat Farmers
From Tales from the New West

A local radio station plays this song every Friday at 5 in the PM. It’s a great, zany way to begin the weekend. It is a short little ditty with odd little lyrics (about putting his dead dog in a drawer and forgetting about him). But it is full of bouncy beats and a chorus that goes something like “hubba hubba hubba”. For Friday rush hour traffic it is just about perfect.

There was a radio station in Oklahoma that used to play “Land of a 1,000 Dances” every Friday morning to get people prepared for the weekend. It seems strange that radio stations play the same song every week. You’d think we’d all get tired of it. Yet there is something sort of comforting about that routine. It is a full reminder that the weekend is here.

Of course, radio stations have been playing the same songs a lot more often than once a week for years now…

“Dissident” – Pearl Jam
From VS

Right around the time I bought Pearl Jam’s second album, I read an article that talked about listening to one album over and over for days and weeks. Something struck me about that concept and I began listening to VS over and over again. I both took great pleasure in listening to the album and fulfilled some secret yearning to love a piece of music so much that I couldn’t listen to anything else.

Listening to the song, and album, now I’m not sure why I couldn’t give it up. My friend Eric Berlin recently posted his top 5 favorite bands of all time and asked for everyone to release their own lists. It’s a difficult thing to do. Bands like Pearl Jam would have once topped that list. For a time in my life, I loved PJ immensely. But over the years I found other bands and let Pearl Jam slip into the background. Bands that I love right now like Wilco may, in ten years, slip away as well. So, how do you choose your all-time favorites?

“(Was I) In Your Dreams” – Wilco
From Being There

My wife put this song on the only mix tape she ever made me. It was long before we were married or even dating. It was while she was living in Canada – having a miserable time in the snow – and we had become good friends with a hint of romance simmering behind the scenes.

With every song, she included an appropriate lyric and commented on why she included it in the tape. For this song, she had to not so subtly remind me that she just liked the song and that she didn’t expect me to be dreaming of her. It was very typical of her strategy at the time to give me something that hinted at something more, but then immediately take it away.

It remains one of my least favorite Wilco tunes.

“The Way It Is” –  Bruce Hornsby
From 10/09/97

Bruce Hornsby plays this song for nearly every concert he performs. Having been written nearly 20 years ago, that adds up to thousands of performances. You’d think he’d get tired of the song. Truth is, Bruce is such a cool guy he continues to play the song because he knows his fans love it. He understands that at each performance a percentage of the folks paying to see him are people who only know his hits. To make them, happy, and for them to get their money’s worth he always plays several of his big hits, and “The Way it Is” is the biggest.

To true fans eternal joy, and to not get too bored with the songs, he often changes the arrangement. I’ve heard it done slow, fast, and with weird rhythms. That and Bruce’s insatiable desire to improvise create a thousand different versions of the song for him to play.

This performance was actually with the Roanoke Symphony. For the most part, you wouldn’t know it on this song because Bruce rocks it out pretty much. He stretches it out for 8 minutes and keeps it completely interesting.

“Time in a Bottle” – Jim Croce
From Classic Hits

Another song that stirs the old memory cords. My first true love and I were really better friends than lovers. We came to know each other in what I’ll call pivotal moments in our lives. We were both teenagers and full of angst and lust and wonderment over what would happen to us in the future.

We were the best of friends for a long time until we decided to become more. Problem was we lived some hundred miles apart and finding the time for the physical ties that belong with something more was difficult. Truth being told I had also very limited experience with the somethings more and was too shy to do much in that regard. We did spend a great deal of time writing letters (was in the time before e-mail) and chatting on the phone. Letters involved much drawing of hearts in the margins and the quoting of poetry and lyrics.

My dear once wrote the lyrics to “Time in a Bottle” for me in the margins and I treasured them dearly.

During the summer past my senior year I broke up with the young lass. In a few weeks I was headed to college many a mile away and I knew our love would not see us through. Intending to make the transition easier I ended our short-lived fling. This was during a week of summer camp and for the talent competition she sang this song to me. It was a beautiful, lovely, weepy thing, and my last true memory of the girl. A treasure for a life time.

CD Review: Bruce Hornsby – Intersections 1985-2005

bruce hornsby intersections

“Brrrrooooooooooo…”

The crowd of several thousand standing in the Atlanta Fairground shouted into the bright, hot, southern sky.

“Are they saying ‘Bruce’ or ‘boo?” Juliana asked.

“It’s hard to tell,” I replied. “I for one, am shouting ‘Bruce.’ How could you boo the spidery fingers of Bruce Hornsby? Especially during such a hot version of ‘The Way It Is!’”

“They must be yelling ‘Bruce.’”

And they were, as hundreds of thousands have yelled the same throughout Hornsby’s twenty-year career.

That night Bruce was playing keys with the Other Ones – the first Grateful Dead reincarnation post Jerry Garcia’s death. It was but one of many collaborations in a career full of imaginative, incredible ensembles including Ricky Skaggs, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, and Pat Metheny.

To say Bruce Hornsby is a multifaceted musician would be like calling Leonardo DaVinci a Renaissance man – certainly, it is true, but also rather superfluous and redundant.

With the release of the new boxed set, “Intersections Bruce Hornsby has shown just how multi-talented he really is – from piano-based power-pop to bluegrass and century’s old fiddle tunes to improvisational jazz the songs covered in this set stretch across the American songbook.

The bulk of the music presented here is culled from previously unreleased live cuts. This is not only good news for the hardcore fan who already has all the studio tracks but for the casual listener interested in understanding Hornsby’s work. As is the way for many of the artists I enjoy, Hornsby’s studio albums are often less than totally satisfying. In a live setting is where Bruce has always found his own, and performed nothing less than inspiring.

The set is separated into three categories spanning four disks. The first, “Top 90 Time” contains the hits and singles, albeit often live and in a different arrangement than what is found on the original album.

The second disk, labeled “Solo Piano, Tribute Records, Country-bluegrass, Movie Songs” contains just that. The first seven songs are instrumental piano numbers uniquely titled “Songs A-H”. The rest are songs Hornsby either played for friends and co-conspirators, movie soundtracks, and tribute albums.

The remaining two disks, named “By Request” are fan favorites and personal selections.

Interestingly, Hornsby has elected to keep most of his up-tempo numbers as the officially released studio version. It is on his slower ballads that he has brought unreleased live versions to this set. This is perhaps because fans were treated to primo live versions of his faster songs on the 2000 release Here Come the Noisemakers. Or, perhaps it is because live, his up-tempo numbers can stretch into double digits, minute-wise, which would leave few spaces for more songs.

Whatever the reason, we are still left with a tremendous collection of songs showcasing one of the more talented musicians of the last 20 years.

The boxed set is encased in a lovely three-fold binder and includes a 59-page booklet highlighting his career. It includes a personal note from Bruce about each of the songs, numerous photographs, and a tongue-in-cheek retrospective of the critical assessment of his albums (including a number of reviews completely panning his work).

Also included in the set is a DVD full of video clips (ranging from super cheesy ready-for-MTV videos from the 80s to highly stylized clips directed by Spike Lee to live performances with the Grateful Dead, Roger Waters, and even the “Star Spangled Banner” performed with Branford Marsalis at the World Series.)

This is an excellent set, filled with enough new material to please the biggest fans, and yet so accessible as to find a few new fans along the way.