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Steve's Blues

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Steve's Blues

Before the Steve Miller Band, there was the Steve Miller Blues Band.  Before the Joker, before the Space Cowboy, before Maurice, there was Steve – guitarist extraordinaire, young, beautiful, and insanely talented, with an intense affinity for and knowledge of American Blues and Roots music.  This Steve, in conjunction with Jazz at Lincoln Center, has been responsible for shining a bright light on the important historical and artistic roles that Blues guitar has played in American history - and, stemming from that, the role that Blues guitar has played in Steve Miller’s artistic journey.  Some musicians seem to move further and further away from their creative roots and influences as they become more and more grounded in their lasting legacy, a legacy that propels itself into the future.  But Steve is smarter than them; he always was.

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The Storyteller’s Story: Testimony: A Memoir by Robbie Robertson

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The Storyteller’s Story: Testimony: A Memoir by Robbie Robertson

“He got what he wanted but he lost what he had.” Rock writer Greil Marcus, aficionado-scholar of American music, cultural history, and of The Band, uses this Little Richard quote as a jumping off point to tell the story of American rock ‘n’ roll music in his 1975 work Mystery Train.

Little Richard’s line is the quintessential punishment that often seems to accompany American success stories, like those of Jay Gatsby or Charles Foster Kane. It doesn’t seem to apply to that of Robbie Robertson however, co-founder, main songwriter, and lead guitarist of The Band. (Robertson is Canadian after all.) From a reading of his recently released autobiographical work Testimony: A Memoir, one can conclude that Robertson got a great deal of what he worked for and managed to not lose everything that he began with.

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The Undersung Heroes of Music: Soundbreaking (A DOC NYC Review)

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The Undersung Heroes of Music: Soundbreaking (A DOC NYC Review)

What defines a quality music producer? Well-informed and developed artistic taste? Phenomenal technical prowess in the recording studio? Is it someone who stands off to the side of the musicians, supporting and supplying yet allowing complete artistic freedom? Or is it someone who tugs, digs, bends, and sometimes breaks a top-marks result out of the performers concerned? To each his own, seems to suggest the brand-new eight-part PBS series Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music, the first two episodes of which premiered at this year’s DOC NYC Festival (full episodes are available for viewing here). 

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Derailed, Sooner or Later: Warren Zevon’s Warren Zevon (1976)

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Derailed, Sooner or Later: Warren Zevon’s Warren Zevon (1976)

This is the material world and if one vice doesn’t do you in, another one surely will.  If nothing else, there is the obvious and ongoing erosion of each present self, the sly voice within us that lurks beneath the most laudatory of our triumphs.  Mortality renders the measurability of our accomplishments to be largely at our own discretion.  Sometimes this reaches us during the overwhelming silence of 3AM insomnia, sometimes during the most blissed-out of moments, when we’re trying our hardest to keep this knowledge at bay.

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America's Gerry Beckley, The TVD Interview

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America's Gerry Beckley, The TVD Interview

“Days, where’d you go so fast?” Gerry Beckley asks in “Bell Tree,” his bittersweet beauty-soaked song on America’s Hearts album. The band’s fifth studio recording, which also featured Beckley’s chart-toppers “Sister Golden Hair” and “Daisy Jane,” was produced by George Martin and released in 1975. Beckley’s latest solo record Carousel is due in stores next month (September 9th) via indie label Blue Élan Records. Over the course of the album’s nine original tracks and three cover songs, Beckley offers up more seasoned articulations of his “Bell Tree” question. The irresistibly-catchy “Tokyo,” the Beatles-ish “Lifeline,” and the poetic “Once a Distant Heart,” all deal directly with our mortal inability to transcend the weight and power of time passed, passing, and soon-to-be-passed.