John Lee Hooker in a Nutshell

One of my favorite websites for info about music & movies etc. is the Onion AV Club, an adjunct of well-known fake news site The Onion. Unlike the Onion, they are actually devoted to disseminating true facts (as well as opinions). Currently they're running a series that is basically old blues artists 101, so if you've heard, for example, the name Bukka White and wanted to learn more about him without seining Google's yield of possibly useful information, here's a good place to go. The current article is on John Lee Hooker, but there are links from there to all of the previously published entries.

Finding the Mainstream in American Politics

Glenn Greenwald is almost always good, but sometimes he's very good. Today he writes about what constitutes mainstream political views in the US, particularly in regards to Middle East policy.

Netroots Nation: The "Competition"

Lo, how the mighty have fallen. The once-feared Grover Norquist and Michelle Malkin are reduced to following liberals around, begging for attention.

The Flying Burrito Brothers - Sin City

So I said I'd have a full week of posts of Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel guitar. So I didn't make it--here it is the seventh day and I'm wimping out. Eventually I realized that I could either post a song that wasn't really that much different from an earlier post (e.g., yet another song from the first New Riders of the Purple Sage album) or start spending money doing research on areas of Garcia's recorded pedal steel work that I didn't already know (e.g., Brewer and Shipley). The first would offend my bloggy integrity (insert laughter here) and the second would cost money. So in lieu of more Garcia, here is something else in the same vein of early psychedelic country rock.

"Sin City" is from the first Flying Burrito Brothers album, The Gilded Palace of Sin. That album is sometimes called the ur-text of all alt.country. True, founding members Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman had as members of the Byrds appeared on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, but that album was actually, despite the Byrds' early forays into what would later be called psychedelia, basically rather traditional. It was just unusual for hippies to play such music in public. But Gilded Palace was something else: a deliberate blend of traditional country music and R-O-C-K rock. In this particular song, the music is pretty straight country, but the lyrics are a surreal vision of impending cultural apocalypse. Which, in 1969, didn't seem so far-fetched. And as with the earlier Garcia postings, here Sneaky Pete Kleinow's pedal steel guitar serves to both bow to tradition and point to an unknown future.

David Crosby - Laughing

This is my favorite Jerry-Garcia-plays-pedal-steel-guitar song. From David Crosby's first solo album, it features a cast of thousands, including what sounds like Phil Lesh on bass and Joni Mitchell on background vocals.

It's a slow and somber song, as befits its subject matter, the unexpected death of a loved one. Garcia plays in a decidedly non-traditional style--long lines and sustained notes provide cohesion for the song as a whole. It's a good example of what a selfless musician Garcia could be, playing what's best for the song and no more. The result is a mournful magic that few soloists could match.

Crosby, Still, Nash & Young - Teach Your Children

So here's the Jerry Garcia pedal steel guitar performance that is by far the best-known, although probably most people have no idea that it's Garcia. As elements in the West Coast hippie musician Rat Pack, members of the Dead and CSNY spent time together, swapping licks and God knows what else. When it came time to add a pedal steel to one of Graham Nash's songs, Garcia was the obvious choice, and the result has been a radio staple ever since.

New Riders Of The Purple Sage - Henry

Might as well make it a full week. Here's another example of Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel guitar, this one again from the first New Riders album. "Henry" was the song most likely to be played on the hippie radio stations, being about marijuana smuggling and all. If "Dirty Business" was a song with more-or-less traditional lyrical subject matter that featured hippie-fied pedal-steel guitar, "Henry" reverses that structure. Like "Dire Wolf," here Garcia plays in a style that would not be out of place in a Nashville (or Bakersfield) recording from the early 1960s. He doesn't take the solo (which is by David Nelson on a Telecaster) but provides fills throughout, and gets a nice little demi-solo on the outro.