Things have been hectic at the Test of the Boomerang headquarters: I just became a father, and things have been understandably hectic. I took a break from changing nappies, though, to put together a little mix. It’s a real mixed bag today, folks — I have Jarboe’s sweet cover of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” from Swans’ out-of-print classic The Burning World, brooding folk from Neurosis guitarist Steve Von Till, King Crimson’s full “Providence” improv jam from the fantastic Great Deceiver live set, and a little taste of Merl Saunders (rest in peace, brother Merl) and Jerry Garcia. As well as some other musical goodies. Enjoy with some Fordham Scotch Ale and I’ll meet you back here in the New Year. (more…)

Free Phil!

Phil Lesh has just released a free Soundboard recording of the Phil Lesh and Friends concert at the Warfield in San Francisco, May 13th of this year. That was the first night of the run to close out the historic theater before being renovated and re-opened by new management. Fitting, since so many historic Dead and Dead family shows went down in that beautiful place. Myself, I saw everybody from Sonic Youth to The Allman Brothers there.

May 13th was the night that the band played the first two Grateful Dead albums in their entirety - 1967’s self-titled debut and 1968’s Anthem of the Sun. Bob Weir sat in that night as well for vocals and some serious jamming. A fantastic night of music and it’s all available here! (more…)

The Gospel of Bob

I’ve known some pretty serious Bob Dylan fans. They’ll talk at length about the merits of underappreciated albums like Street Legal and Self Portrait. They’ll travel fair distances to see the man perform live. They’ll defend the integrity of Renaldo and Clara. For an artist like Bob Dylan with such a great and varied body of work, such fandom is understandable.

Then there are fans like Joel Gilbert, who actually “plays” Dylan as part of a tribute act called Highway 61 Revisited, and cranks out unauthorized Dylan documentaries the way some fans make mix tapes of Desire outtakes.

Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: Busy Being Born…Again is his latest, and it’s an exhausting two-hour look at Bob Dylan’s brief stint as born again evangelical christian and Jews for Jesus poster boy in the late 1970s.

Gilbert himself appears in the documentary, shaggy-haired, wearing a western-styled shirt, driving around the American south, waving to locals, and engaging producer Jerry Wexler, session singer Regina McCrary, Dylan keyboardist Spooner Oldham, music writer Joel Selvin and others in long, rambling interviews. It’s great hearing the late Jerry Wexler talk at length about the recording of Dylan’s gospel-inflected late ’70s output, but there’s not a single note to be heard of the actual music being discussed. (All the music on the “soundtrack” is provided by Highway 61 Revisited.)

Getting through this was excruciating. 30 minutes of Vineyard Church pastor Bill Dwyer (and others) talking about the born again “experience” is way too long for even the most hardcore Bob Dylan fan to sit through. When Al Kasha (it’s cool, I didn’t know either) talks about kneeling before his television set and placing his hand on the screen to become a reformed, born-again Jew, I actually felt a little uneasy. (more…)

Its unthinkable now. A crusty old rock band packing up family and crew to play a series of concerts at the Giza Necropolis. To kick out the jams at the last wonder of the ancient world. But in September 1978, that’s just what the Grateful Dead did.

To bankroll the trip, the band planned on releasing a live album. It would have been their first live set since the abysmal Steal Your Face two years prior. The band was coming off a smokin’ summer tour and they had a new studio album, the Lowell George-produced Shakedown Street, in the can and ready for release that fall.

The concerts themselves have become a key chapter in Dead lore. The lunar eclipse the second night. The bedouins on camels, watching silently from the dunes. Merry Pranksters and Dead members hoisting a flag at the peak of the Great Pyramid. Nubian musician Hamza El Din and his ensemble jamming with the band. But, alas, the tapes were deemed unusable for a proper release. Of course in true Dead fashion, tapes of the show - recorded by the audience and the band alike (including Ken Kesey’s home movies of the trip) have been in Deadhead circulation since the band shook the sand from their guitar cases.

So now 30 years later, Rhino has finally released Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978 as a three-disc set. Two cds of music and 1 dvd of live footage. Rhino has the uneviable task of taking music that has been in free trader circles for years and trying to get people to buy it. In this case, the audio has been scrubbed clean and sounds fantastic. The dvd footage is a great improvement over the numerous bootleg versions I have seen over the years, and heck, the packaging is pretty darn cool. As with the monstrous Winterland 73 box that came out earlier this year, Rhino has done a great job of making it worth the money. The only gripe I could think of is that this is only a compilation of the last two nights rather than the full concerts (and is missing the mighty Terrapin > Sugar Magnolia from the night of the Eclipse), but this is not a Dick’s Picks release, a Vault release, but a proper live album. In the same spirit as Skullfuck, Europe ‘72 or Reckoning and Dead Set. The only difference here is that it took 30 years to be released. (more…)

I was eleven or twelve. I was riding with my dad. We were driving back from somewhere. We were listening to the radio. It was just my dad and me. All of the sudden, a strange kind of music comes on. The vaguely-Eastern sounding keyboards and guitar arpeggios sound cool enough, then the vocals start: “IF I HAD A ROCKET LAUNCHER, I’D MAKE SOMEBODY PAY.”

Whoa.

Here was a song about a guy who is singing about getting a rocket launcher — a rocket launcher — and after asking “how many kids did you kill today?” was going to make somebody pay. It was like somebody took the plot to Commando and made a song out of it. Already this was the most badass song I had ever heard, but nothing could have prepared me for that final verse.

“If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die!”

This was on the radio! The guy not only said “son of a bitch,” but he said “some son of a bitch would DIE!” He was gonna take that rocket launcher and he was gonna kill that son of a bitch! This was in a song! The most intense lyric I had heard on the radio before that was that “the union of the snake was on the prowl.”

My dad and I got home and I ran into my room, totally energized with pre-adolescent macho awkwardness. I turned on my radio and slowly, very slowly turned the knob up and down the radio dial until I could catch that song.

Well, days went by, weeks went by, months, years. I don’t think I ever heard the song on the radio again. Then, ten years ago, I remembered the song and I went looking for it on Napster.

(more…)

On the bonus DVD included with the new reissue of Graham Nash’s Songs for Beginners, there is a gallery of the artist’s photography. One of the photos is of an old car, trundling down a rural one-lane road towards foggy pines in the distance. The caption reads, “Neil (Young) going home to Broken Arrow Ranch, Northern California.”

I know the landscape where the photo was taken, in the rolling Santa Cruz Mountains, somewhere off of Skyline Boulevard, along the Pacific Ocean. Neil Young lives in Woodside, California, an affluent mountain town with Skyline as its main thoroughfare. A two-lane mountain road that I drove back and forth from the San Lorenzo Valley to work in San Francisco — and where I rolled my car in an icy morning frost. I was upside down and crawled out the passenger side door. I still have the ambulance bill hanging over my head. It’s an interesting personal footnote to what originally seemed a trivial bonus. The rest of the photo gallery features portraits of the likes of a jolly David Crosby, a pensive Stephen Stills, and a glowering Neil Young. But to the music: This album, Graham Nash’s first and, arguably, finest, sounds brilliant in its Rhino two-disc reissued form. The DVD features the album in 5.1 stereo, but the main disc sounds just as good. (more…)

I. Report from the Land of the Dead
It has a been a busy time in Deadland. Most notably, tickets went on sale this past weekend for the Deadheads For Obama show on October 13th at Penn State. Many of you will remember that earlier this year, Phil, Bobby, Mickey and friends got together at the Warfield for the first Deadheads for Obama concert. This time out, Bill Kreutzmann and Mr. Soulshine Himself, Warren Haynes, will also be in attendance.

Phil Lesh’s son is a volunteer for the Obama campaign, and he got the old man involved. While the formally “non-partisan” band stumping for Obama did cause some bad vibes among some ‘Heads (especially the Ron Paul contingent) the important thing here is to let the show speak for itself.

II. Bill Kreutzmann/Oteil Burbridge/Scott Murawski Trio
Quietly on tour earlier this year was Bill Kreutzmann’s new musical brigade. There was some debate as to what the name of the combo actually was, but Kreuztmann, Burbridge & Murawski became the standard. Some people call it the Kreutzmann Trio, others call it ‘3,’ but whatever you call it, it’s a tight, dynamic outfit.

There aren’t any shows up at the LMA yet, however, many recordings of their shows can be found (in beautiful lossless FLAC) on http://bt.etree.org. I did find this (along with several other clips) on YouTube. Here is “The Bill Kreutzmann Trio” live, 4/20/08, at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago for the Earth Day Festival: (more…)

Another sad day in Floyd land.

“The Violent Sequence” (early version of “Us and Them” from the Zabriskie Point sessions, 1970)

“It Would Be So Nice” (single version, 1968)

“Remember a Day” (from Saucerful of Secrets, 1968)

“Summer ‘68″ (from Atom Heart Mother, 1969)

“Embryo” (from Picnic: A Breath of Fresh Air, 1970)

“Stay” (from Obscured by Clouds, 1972)

“Any Color You Like” (live, 1974)

Since the world is about to end, I figured I would get into the spirit and post this — the first Test of the DOOOOMERANG!!! DOOOOOOM is the serious bidniss, as we will learn today.

I used to work in San Francisco. After work, I would get a vegan raw almond milkshake at Cafe Gratitude and then go over to the fantastic Aquarius Records on Valencia Street. I would spend hours in that cool little shop and look through the new releases. Crazy reggae dub records, crazy experimental stuff, crazy field recordings, and some seriously intense metal and psych records.

That’s where I learned of the mighty Sunn O))) and the sonic sitar drive of Lamp of the Universe. I was set hip to Kiss’ prog rock album (produced by none other than Bob Ezrin and featuring additional lyrics by Lou Reed, no less) and I bought my first Jesu records.

I also discovered Monarch.

Monarch are, or were actually, a French drone/dooooooooom band fronted by a young lady named Emilie Bresson. This three (sometimes four)-member unit of unholy sludgemerchants poured out the slow and lumbering death-lurch like so much black sticky hash resin. They released a handful of records — three full-lengths, some EPs, a few platters split between other artists, and a ‘Best Of’ release. It was unusual for such a slowwww and doooomy band to have a female vocalist, but Emilie has seemed to attract quite the following. (more…)

Hi Kids. Welcome to post #7 of Test of the Boomerang. I’m glad the Popdose crew have decided to keep me around. The weekly Popdose beer busts have been great. The getaway weekends at the Popdose resort compound have done wonders for my complexion and have really augmented my beard growth. My office at Popdose HQ is slowly coming together…okay, so it’s a janitorial closet, but it is way more “office-like” now than it is “closet-like.” There is no utility sink and only a couple brooms, but that’s it. Sure, I’m currently “sharing” the office with Tony the Custodian, but he’s like, never there.

Anyway, as summer draws to a close, the Man is burned, New Orleans prepares for Gustav’s arrival, and John McCain travels the country showing off his Inuit granddaughter, I decided to make a mixtape. At first, I thought about some brooding, introspective stuff to greet the days of fall, but I went ahead with something different. Some summery tunes to keep the summer vibe alive through the colder months, without the goddamn mosquitoes. There’s something for everyone here. Play loud and in any order you like. (more…)