Posts Tagged ‘Mojo Flucke’

  
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Monday, May 4th, 2009

Live Music: Booker T., Tupelo Music Hall, Londonderry NH, 4/29/09

by Mojo Flucke

Full disclosure: I’m a Hammond B-3 soul and soul-jazz freak, so I’m a homer here. My universe aligns around the likes of great players like Billy Preston, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Al Kooper, and Groove Holmes. Topping my list is Booker T. Jones, one of the prime architects of the Memphis Soul sound. I recently gushed over Booker’s new CD, Potato Hole, at Bullz-Eye. Also, the pictures were taken by my father-in-law, Richard Binder, who accompanied me to the show and used his celly to great effect.

booker_t_1_blog

This club gig was a stunner, for a number of reasons. First, that this guy would actually make it out to the sticks of New Hampshire. Maybe, like, an auditorium at Dartmouth or Manchester or Plymouth State…but Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry? A brutally small crowd of 80 people showed up, but like me, most of them were diehards who collectively “ooooohed” when Booker nonchalantly recited his part in music history between numbers, saying things like “My songwriting partner William Bell and I wanted to write a blues song, and we wrote this next one, ‘Born Under A Bad Sign.’ Albert King first recorded it,” and kicked into it–singing!

Another stunning part was the Hammond sound. I’ve heard many players bash it out, some of them like Tony Monaco and Bruce Katz, whose ornamental, two-handed, two-footed, flashy styles push the technical limits of the B-3’s features as they squeeze every drop of distortion and click out of the instrument. Fun stuff to watch, kind of like the musical equivalent of a Fourth of July fireworks show. (more…)

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Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Happy 70th, Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson

by Mojo Flucke

This column, sadly, sometimes looks like the blues obituary page. Well, forget that for now! This Shot, we’re celebrating the life Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, a ripping-good Chicago-style guitarist who cut his teeth with legends Muddy Waters and Magic Sam, touring with them in the ’60s and ’70s.

He still plays out–mostly in New England, where he makes his home nowadays. In fact, I and fellow Popdoser Ed Murray caught him at The Village Trestle in Goffstown earlier this month, where he rang in his 70th birthday after the gig.

Here’s a fantastic 10 minute shot of Luther in his solo rockin’ prime of the 1980s, done from a Cambridge, Mass. club. You can hear the Mississippi and N’Awlins in his voice in the interview part, but the music is pure urban blues along Memphis and Chicago lines, with Muddy and B.B. King sounds coming out of his guitar. (Bonus: The video also features awesome Pinetop Perkins footage, as he performs with Luther; that guy, by the way, is still pumping out blues in his 90s, and last I heard, was still pretty sharp):

So there you go. Still kicking and entertaining folks, Luther’s a living guitar legend, the kind of which we’re losing left and right as they all get to be that age. Go see him and support him out there on the road, the guy’s got blues running in his veins and still brings it, albeit with a few more slower, downhome selections mixed in that he used to. After the show, meet him, buy a couple CDs, shake his hand, get an autograph. He’s good like that.

Here’s a double-shot of music, “Doin’ The Sugar, Too,” the title track from his 1984 Bullseye Blues album, and “Got To Find A Way,” another title track–this one from his 1998 Telarc album.

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Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Popdose Concert Flashback: David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails, 9/16/95

by Mojo Flucke

“That guy,” my wife Kate said of Trent Reznor on the way home from this show in one of the most memorable one-line concert reviews I’ve ever heard or read, “is a grease spot on the windshield of rock and roll.”

She was there to see Bowie, obviously.

This show, like David Bowie, is an enigma wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in a rid–no, wrapped in a rancid corn dog. In my mind he is a great artist and a creative force, a visionary who understands how music works (composing, performing and arranging) on a level most other pop stars just can’t. Prince and Paul McCartney and Beck are much like Bowie in this regard; Britney Spears needs to hire 15 people to do the tasks Bowie can accomplish all by himself, when he feels like it.

Bowie’s also a great collaborator, having worked with everyone from Jagger to Iggy to Lou Reed to Luther Vandross to Stevie Ray Vaughan to…Trent Reznor. He understands how to make the sum greater than its parts, musically. He also knows how to glom on to the coolest music of the moment, which in the mid-1990s was….wait for it…industrial and its son, post-industrial waste.

And, sadly, he’s also had his musical slumps, like the great Derek Jeter and his 0-for-32 a few years ago. After the fumes of the brilliant Let’s Dance gave way to clunkers like Tonight and Never Let Me Down, Bowie dusted off his crap machine, recycled some more spineless pop junk, and tried to make a silk purse out of sow’s ear with some upbeat soulful jazz arrangements and noisy rhythm, putting together his Black Tie White Noise CD. Its hit single, “Jump They Say,” showed a little promise (no video embedding, just linking, the Bowie Marketing Machine decree-eth).

Then came 1. Outside, whatever the heck that was (for the record, a concept album rumored to be the first in a trilogy but so half-baked that Bowie’s never recorded the second or third part). Funky, here and there, but it sounded like warmed-over Happy Mondays or bad jungle techno in too many spots, with some jazz sounds tossed in here and there so’s we can tell it’s sophisticated. (more…)

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Friday, April 17th, 2009

CD Review: Allen Toussaint, “The Bright Mississippi”

by Mojo Flucke

If I were Allen Toussaint, I’d have taken a decade’s hiatus from making solo records, too. While the great New Orleans pianist—right up there on the city’s piano Mount Rushmore with Professor Longhair, James Booker, and Dr. John—got his Rock Hall induction in 1998, the jackasses up there in Cleveland put him in as a non-performer.

Huh?

Sure, the guy helped the Meters become the Booker T & the MGs of the Crescent City and a national funk power in the 1970s. He wrote some great pop songs that others took to great heights, such as “Working in the Coal Mine” and “Southern Nights.” But the offhand dismissal Toussaint’s of recorded work must have felt like a hard slap, the equivalent of calling Prince a non-performer on the merits of sponsoring Apollonia 6 and writing “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinead O’Connor and “Manic Monday” for the Bangles. Bunch of ig’nant losers, those Rock Hall powers that be. Mojo wept.

Toussaint’s w-a-a-a-y too cool to complain about people unaware of his own five-decade span of wonderfully Creole-flavored R&B, soul, and funk that evolved with the times. After all, he’s the one that summed up the Golden Rule with musical elegance in 1972 on Life, Love and Faith and reprised on his gritty 2006 The River in Reverse collaboration with Elvis Costello: “The same people that you misuse on your way up, you might meet up—on your way down.” (more…)

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Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens

by Mojo Flucke

Be still my soul. Lawd have mercy. When soul first came out, so many social issues made so many people so PO’d (civil rights, Vietnam, rioting in seemingly every urban area, drug abuse, the specter of nuclear war) that retreating into gospel-sounding soul music was a welcome respite–and a way to constructively vent the emotions that otherwise might drive a man or woman to commit an act that was, er, socially nonconstructive.

Welcome to 2009, the post-Bush wasteland of scorched-earth economics, war and pestilence, terrorism, drug abuse and bad, bad pop music. Along with acts like Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, James Hunter, Amy Winehouse and a fistful of other neo-soul artists my peers have been writing up on Popdose (Ken Shane’s Black Joe Lewis piece is one example), Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens have come to rescue us from the stuff we hear about on the radio and see on the TV and flat-screen computer monitors that just plain don’t make no sense. Like a shooter going off in Binghamptom at a facility whose sole reason for existence was helping noncitizens become citizens here in our land of milk, honey, and executive bonuses. I mean, WTF? (more…)

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Friday, April 3rd, 2009

The Popdose Interview: Gary “Dream Weaver” Wright

by Mojo Flucke

Gary Wright, The Dream Weaver, has two new EPs out, Waiting To Catch The Light, a set of new-age compositions, and The Light of a Million Suns, several cuts that harken back to 1980s pop in the new-jack swing vibe as well as Mr. Mister and soul stylings of the era. Our own Mojo Flucke sat down with him to discuss his greatest hits as well as where he’s headed in 2009.

Tell me about the remake of “My Love is Alive” with your son Dorian on The Light of A Million Suns–what inspired that?

I had always liked the song, and there was this producer that I knew …he had done more real pop, kind of hip-hop things, and he was crazy about the song and so he actually put a lot of the track together for me. I thought his take on it was really cool.

My son Dorian’s got a great voice, and I wanted to do something with him, so I decided to do a duet. I think it really turned out good. Eric Clapton did something like that with “Layla” when he did a remix. Sometimes songs are good but they just need a dusting off and they need a new kind of look. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, and people don’t like it, and other times, you know, it’s good. So I just took that chance.

What was the feel you were striving for? A Michael Jackson/Justin Timberlake/new jack swing kind of thing?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tell me about your new record, Waiting to Catch The Light. How would you describe the sound and style of music?

That was actually done quite a while back–10 years ago or something. I had always wanted to make a kind of spacey, meditation-inducing kind of an album, and a lot of the New Age stuff I heard was, like, people that weren’t even musicians. They’d buy an instrument and they’d just hold the note down and, you know… And I thought, because my background was really in synthesizers — I was sponsored by Moog and was really the first artist to ever get involved with technically cutting a Mini Moog down and then wearing that thing around my neck when I was performing. (more…)

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Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Setting the Record Straight on Etta James

by Mojo Flucke

To the hardcore fan of 1950s blues, R&B, and soul, Etta James can be vexing. To anyone following the news lately, her calling out of Beyonce for singing “At Last” at an Obama inaugural ball was completely annoying–especially since Beyonce probably did more to increase awareness of the great soul singer among today’s pop fans through her depiction of James in the Chess Records movie Cadillac Records.

Just to get the obvious comparisons out of the way, here’s Etta:

Here’s Beyonce:

Clearly both are gifted singers, one a currently popular diva and the other a well-traveled soul singer with more breadth, depth, experience and nuance than any current diva will likely ever have. In fact, some people could argue that James blazed a path through the music industry so the Beyonces of today could be successful. If we were talking baseball, Beyonce might be Grady Sizemore–who might some day be an all-time great–but Etta James is Roger Maris. Or Frank Robinson. Or Reggie Jackson. (more…)

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Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Popdose Flashback: Tin Machine, “Tin Machine”

by Mojo Flucke

Tin Machine was flat-out great, featuring fierce guitars, edgy lyrics and even edgier production. The world thought it stunk, and threw stuff at David Bowie and his noisy bandmates when they took the stage and played its songs. For this critic’s CD-buying money, the two records Tin Machine did—this 1989 debut and the 1991 Tin Machine II followup—are still the finest post-Let’s Dance material Bowie’s made.

Tin Machine’s main fault was that it refused to pump out another tired Ziggy Stardust nostalgia cruise on stage—with some Low, Lodger, and Young Americans stuff interspersed to keep it real—that hardcore Bowiephiles wanted. Instead, Bowie forsook his brand and Tin Machine played originals like [video embedding prohibited—so we link] the cut after which the band was named, “Tin Machine.”

How dare he play dissonant songs, charged with aggressively political and at times angrily anti-religious lyrical content? The words were a good-news, bad-news proposition: Popdose colleague David Medsker claims that a couplet from “Crack City”—”They’re just a bunch of assholes, with buttholes for their brains”—is one of the worst couplets in rock history.* Hard to disagree with that. Some of Tin Machine’s lyrics, and for that matter, the feedback, seem gratuitous.

The point is, we remember those words two decades later. Can anyone give me any couplet, good or bad, from Black Tie White Noise? Or from 1. Outside? Does anyone even remember those Bowie album titles? Nobody? The prosecution rests, your honor. (more…)

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Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Popdose Concert Flashback: George Clinton & The P-Funk All-Stars, 4/22/95

by Mojo Flucke

“Incongruous” is the only way to describe this night. First of all, UNH is perhaps the whitest venue in the whitest state in the union. Furthermore, the Godfather of Funk shared a bill with…The Samples? A quirky jam band more popular in Colorado than in all of the territory east of the Mississippi? Makes me wonder who was in charge of booking. It was out of place as the Jonas Brothers opening for Ice-T.

A buddy called me up and wanted to take me along to gets us a little funk education. He didn’t know much of George Clinton beyond “Atomic Dog” and the funny hair. En route, his schooling involved mostly learning the chants (“Make my funk the P-Funk, I want my funk uncut/Make my funk the P-Funk, I wants to get funked up”) and yelling them at the top of our lungs in the cah on the way to the cohn-suht.

He later got busted carrying a switchblade into the gig (are you kidding me?) but, since New Hampshire is close to Canada–the land of Rocky & Bullwinkle and the home of the nice–the pleasant security officers checked it at the door and let him have it back on the way out.

The show was worth at least twice the $15 general-admission cover, and that’s counting having to endure the Samples, which to my ears sounded like one long droning synth chord and cute harmonies sustained for oh, about four hours. In reality it was probably just a little shy of a two-hour set, but I’ve endured a lot of jam-band shows and these guys had to have been the worst, ever. Look up “stultifying” in the dictionary, and The Samples picture will be there. This band was such a peculiar opening act for the P-Funk All-Stars–they had no funk whatsoever, unlike the area jammers from the area like Lettuce and Jiggle The Handle, whose grooves could make us shake all the junk in our trunks.

Basically, while there were probably more than a few UNH students who knew what they were doing and some actual adults in the crowd who understood the whole funkifications of George Clinton and his branch of the rock family tree with Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell, it felt like this crowd had no idea what was about to transpire when the house lights dimmed and Dr. Funkenstein came out to throw down an absolutely magnificent set. Few of the guys behind Clinton were recognizeable, but according to Wikipedia, Kidd Funkadelic and Billy Bass would have been in the house. Both of them—and Clinton—made the Rock Hall in 1997, for what it’s worth. (more…)

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Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, “Gonna Get Old Someday”

by Mojo Flucke

Even in these crushing economic times, blues fans can count on three things: Death, taxes, and until they spend every last red cent they fish from the ashtrays and couch cushions in Mississippi, Fat Possum Records gonna dig up, record, and release records from obscure originals performing the blues, whether they’re commercially viable or not.

Enter Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, whose juke joint The Blue Front in Bentonia (home town of blues legend Skip James) dates back to segregation times and is now on official stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail (below: Duck and his crew celebrate).

His new record on Fat Possum, Gonna Get Old Someday, finds Holmes sharp of spirit and handy with the acoustic guitar. A casual player up until the last few years, Holmes preferred to work the Blue Front, which has been open since 1948, when he was one year old and his father launched it. No doubt Duck himself helped move a bottle or two of his dad’s famed bootleg ’shine.

Today, however, he’s a working musician, and his style is way-gone old skool but his voice is clear and beautiful, as evidenced in “Hurry, Hurry.” It’s not really important that Duck isn’t a longtime fixture on the circuit, someone with a pedigree of B.B. King or Buddy Guy. What he is doing is preserving a fiercely local blues style that James created and Duck’s in a position to understand–and feel.

And in these economic times, we know for sure that he’s doing it out of love for the blues, because there’s no money to be made playing Skip James style during boom years. Bless you, Duck and Fat Possum. Keep it real. You too can keep it real by checking out Jimmy “Duck” Holmes at his MySpace and at his Mississippi Arts Commission home page.

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