Rubber City Review

Since we got some of you to play along to “My First Album,” I decided to try something else along the same lines: What’s your most memorable concert experience?

The venue can be anything from a small club to an arena. And the experience can have little to do with the music being performed, as I’ll demonstrate shortly.

My concert-going years got off to a very auspicious start in the summer of 1969 when my older sister Mary took my sister Keena and me to see Janis Joplin at Blossom Music Center, an outdoor amphitheater nestled in the rolling hills near the Cuyahoga River valley. My 13-year-old synapses were fried by Joplin’s powerful voice and the Stax-influenced soul of her Kozmic Blues Band (only days after they performed at Woodstock). If we didn’t have front-row seats, we were damn close – and I distinctly remember Joplin taking several generous pulls on a bottle of Southern Comfort during the show. Opening act: Rod Stewart and the Faces. Cost of three tickets: $7.50.

A few posts back, I wrote about my good/bad fortune of seeing the Stones during their legendary ’72 (“Exile on Main Street”) tour. A month later – August 21, 1972, to be precise – I almost became an Altamont-like casualty when the Jefferson Airplane brought their traveling circus to the same venue, the Akron Rubber Bowl.

My favorite part of the show was the opening act – Hot Tuna, with Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady along with legendary blues fiddler Papa John Creach. Could’ve listened to that for about two hours: Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning Then the Airplane hit the stage and all hell broke loose. Everything was fine until about halfway into their set, when I suddenly felt like someone was choking me and gouging my eyes out at the same time. Apparently, the police had teargassed some kids at the top of the bowl, and the gas then settled on the field below, where a few thousand of us were blissfully unaware of the small riot going on nearby. Next thing I knew, someone on stage was urging us to “attack the pigs,” and then the show was over (thankfully, because I was ready to rip off my own head at that point).

The Akron Beacon Journal broke the news to all of our parents the next day with the headline at right. And it’s a classic piece of modern journalism. I’ll share with you three of my favorite items from this story:

• First, when singer Grace Slick was confronted by Patrolman R.E. Gott in a basement office, she “reached out to grab his whistle chain on her way out of the office. Gott said she made a clawing motion for his face after he tried to prevent her from pulling his chain.” Slick and fellow Airplane member Paul Kantner were arrested for assaulting a policeman, since Akron had yet to pass a chain-pulling ordinance.
• Second, the reporter quoted the band’s New York press agent by noting that “Miss Slick is not formally married to Kantner, but that ‘he is her old man.’”
• And third, a local City Councilman who opposed rock concerts at the Rubber Bowl from the beginning said “I’m not against all kinds of shows. For instance, the Osman Brothers (sic) and some other shows were not at all bad.”

Good stuff. Apparently, Slick and Kantner had to return to Akron to negotiate a deal with local prosecutors. I don’t think they’ve been back since.

Did you ever attend a sold-out show with an adoring crowd and feel like everyone else was sipping on some special Kool-Aid that they forgot to share with you?

I remember going to Bogart’s in Cincinnati to see the pride of Cleveland, the Michael Stanley Band. My overall impression of the show was that a team of scientists had successfully come up with a perfectly bland and generic strain of rock. I also noticed that every time someone jammed a guitar into his crotch, the crowd would go wild (tried that later with my own band, but it didn’t seem to work as well).

I had a similar reaction when someone dragged me to see the post-punk band the Violent Femmes at the Newport in Columbus. Again, packed house, adoring fans. They kicked things off with some lame acoustic-sounding number and I thought, give it a chance – they’ll probably work their way into a complete frenzy later on. Well, that never happened (Violent Femmes… another inappropriately named band, like 10,000 Maniacs). And by the time the show was over, I was convinced I could walk out of the club, head in either direction and find a better band playing on the street.

And, of course, there’s Jimmy Buffett. Has anyone else made an entire career out of phoning it in? Then again, if you continually play in front of thousands of fans who know every lyric to every song you’ve ever written, why would you bother breaking a sweat? I mainly remember being pissed off by the long lines at the margarita vendors, because I was convinced that being shitfaced was the only way to truly appreciate this experience… or at least tolerate it.

Of course, we don’t drag ourselves away from our home theater systems to be routinely disappointed by live music. And I’ve seen plenty of powerful, life-affirming shows over the years. I’ve already touched on some of those performances in this blog – Lowell George with a fine, funky band at Bogart’s, only two weeks before his untimely demise… Danny Gatton at U.S. Blues in NYC, schooling every guitar player in the crowd… Gatemouth Brown at Stache’s in Columbus, serving as both the main act and bouncer… Bo Diddley at the Cincinnati Gardens, with yours truly backing him up on harp…

I also feel blessed to have seen Muddy Waters at the Cleveland Agora (must’ve been around ’76, with Pinetop Perkins on piano, Jerry Portnoy on harp and Bob Margolin on guitar). Even though Muddy was past his prime, I felt like I’d found my way to the blues mountaintop… the amazing sound of that voice still haunts me today. And I’ll always treasure the night that bro-in-law Chuck Auerbach and me watched Delbert McClinton and his red-hot band turn New York City’s Lone Star Café into a Texas roadhouse. We were practically giddy (as opposed to “geddy,” the feeling one gets at a Rush concert) driving through the empty streets of Manhattan at 3 in the morning – high on honky tonk soul and R&B.

More recently, I’ve watched Chuck’s son Dan and his bandmate Pat Carney destroy countless stages across the country as The Black Keys. One of my favorite Keys shows was in Manhattan at Terminal 5, with opening act Heartless Bastards. Granted, the Bastards’ Erika Wennerstrom ain’t no Janis, but she won me over with her soulful voice and tough little band as they tore through great originals like this one: The Mountain/Heartless Bastards

Erika Wennerstrom and Heartless Bastards

And what about Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, bringing back the spirit of James Brown and his Famous Flames? I’m Not Gonna Cry/Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

Then there’s West Coast Latino-rockers Ozomatli, who turned the floor of Cleveland’s House of Blues into the world’s hippest drum circle (this next cut is from their album “Embrace the Chaos”)… Suenos en Realidad/Ozomatli

I’m sure many of you can add about 20 more to this list – and I hope you will. That’s why we still drag our asses out of the house, because we never know when we’ll get that giddy (or geddy) feeling again.

Some random concert memories from family members…

Brother Jack recalls the “anything goes” ethos of the Sixties at the folk music capital of the Midwest, Ann Arbor, where he saw Jim Kweskin (without his Jug Band) going through a strange phase: ”The philosophy seemed to be that performing is bad. It’s fake and separates the audience from the performer. So he just went up onstage and sat. He chatted with the audience for a little bit but mostly just sat there. Occasionally, if he felt like it, he would pick up the guitar and play a song. In the end it was a piece of performance art. It got people talking. Some folks would say it was dreadful, boring. Others would say it was just a matter of expectations. ‘We expect too much of performers… Just go in not expecting anything and you will be satisfied.’”

Keena had an unsettling experience at a Lou Reed show at Akron’s beautiful Civic Theater. “I turned around and some guy behind me was masturbating. Should’ve been my first clue that Lou Reed was gay. I guess I was too young to pick up on the subtle nuances of Walk On The Wild Side.”

Dan tells a great story about bandmate Pat Carney (pre-Black Keys) trying to promote his fledgling music career at a performance by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Carney took a cassette tape of some of his original music to the show, hoping to hand it to Spencer. He worked his way to the front of the crowd during the band’s set and placed the tape on the stage. Without missing a beat, Spencer leapt in front of Carney and used the heel of his boot to smash the tape into little pieces. Thankfully, Pat’s dreams of rock stardom didn’t die along with it.

The floor is open… Let’s hear about some of your favorite concert experiences.

Janis Joplin at Woodstock… only days before she brought her Kozmic Blues Band to Blossom:

We now have a twitter account, which means we need to do something drastic to promote it. So we’re giving away 2 free tickets to The Black Keys’ sold-out New Year’s Eve Show at the historic Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. Here’s how you can earn a chance to win:

1. Follow Rubber City Review on twitter (link at right)
2. Tweet a 140-character (max) essay telling us why you need to go
3. Include the following hashtag: #rcrtix (OK, now you have 7 fewer characters to work with!)

Deadline for entries is midnight, December 4, and our team of editors from around the globe (our Russian judge is shown squatting at right) will pick the winner the following week. And don’t forget to check back for more goodies down the road.

Speaking of the Keys… You know Dan has turned into a Nashville Cat when he starts sending me videos of pedal steel players – as opposed to, say, Freddie King or Magic Sam.

Here’s a couple of his latest finds – Alvino Rey and Pete Drake. And once you get past the corn (Lawrence Welk, faux farm setting), this stuff is pretty damn tasty.

Born in 1908, Rey grew up in Cleveland and has been called the father of the pedal steel guitar. Unlike the much-younger Drake, he honed his chops outside of country music, playing mostly big-band swing. But both Rey and Drake were early pioneers of “talkbox” technology later made famous by another northeast Ohioan, Joe Walsh (Rocky Mountain High), the ubiquitous Peter Frampton (who now hides out in Cincinnati) and funkmeister Roger Troutman (Zapp), who hailed from nearby Hamilton, OH. So blame the Buckeyes for one of the more notable gimmicks of the Seventies.

In this next cut, Rey joins the Lawrence Welk Orchestra – don’t laugh: its alumni include more than a few red-hot jazzbos – on a blazing workout of the exotic Hindustan, a tune originally written in the ‘30s for the theater organ but later given the full swing treatment by Artie Shaw. No talkbox on this tune, but I love how Rey gets a very respectable wah-wah effect by manipulating his volume control (long before Danny Gatton twisted the knobs on his first Telly). Also interesting to note that Rey’s first talkbox experiments involved having his wife Luise hide behind a curtain and sing along to his pedal steel, using a specially rigged microphone.

Drake was a long-time mainstay on the Nashville music scene – “first-chair” pedal steel player for Tammy Wynette (Stand By Your Man), Charlie Rich (Behind Closed Doors), Don Gibson, Marty Robbins and a long list of other country music stars. He even played steel on Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking Nashville sessions, adding some legitimacy to the hit Lay Lady Lay, as well as on George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass.”

For the purposes of setting up the next video (and tying it in with the previous one), I’ll add that Drake played on the first international hit involving a talkbox. He recorded Forever back in ’64 – at least a decade before Frampton came alive and Zapp got more bounce to the ounce:

One more nod to the Keys… I know this video has shown up on their main website and myspace page, but I’ll post it here in case some of you missed it. It takes you inside the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio as Dan and Pat re-imagine deep southern soul in the place that practically invented it. “We got a little trashed the night before and asked our manager for a harpsichord,” Dan said. “It showed up at the studio the next morning.”

Oh, and here’s a little taste of Roger Troutman, who scared the piss out of Muffy, Bif, Scooter and the rest of the student body at Miami University in the mid ’70s with his mighty band Roger and The Human Body… More Bounce to the Ounce/Zapp with Roger Troutman

LeBron, post-LeBacle

The Cavs crashed and burned, the team’s fragile chemistry in ruins. LeBron’s making noise about leaving town. The Indians can’t hold a lead, and Asdrubal Cabrera broke his arm diving for a ball. Meanwhile, in my mom’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA, world-class whackjob Ben Roethlisberger is doing his best General Sherman as he cuts a wide swath of destruction through the countryside.

And that’s just the bad news in the world of sports. The economy’s still in the crapper… Dan of The Black Keys is thinking about moving to Nashville (Pat’s already in NYC)… Oh, and HBO’s “Treme” still sucks, for the most part – even though the music is first-rate.

I got the blues, baby, and I got ‘em bad.

Of course, the best antidote is more blues – or maybe a little old-school soul or rock ‘n roll. Anything to get my mind off this sad state of affairs here in America’s heartbreak… I mean, heartland.

Now, I won’t weigh in on the many rumors swirling around the Cavs following yet another gut-wrenching postseason in Northeast Ohio. And I have no idea who will show up to play when the team gets back together later this year for training camp. But I can’t help but think that “the plan” LeBron keeps referring to is all about getting a Ring for the King, no matter where he plays. Meanwhile, the goal of bringing the next major sports championship to Cleveland remains as elusive as Lady Ga Ga’s good taste.

Future home of RCR

Lots of theories about where LeBron will end up. I’m guessing Cleveland is now a long shot, even though the Cavs built the Taj Mahal of training facilities only minutes away from LeBron’s Dubai-scale house, which is just down the road from a large architect’s model of Rubber City Review’s new world headquarters (at right: pending stimulus grant approval). One theory has him hooking up with Dwyane Wade and several other A-listers in Chicago, where they could bring back the glory days of Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen. But I think the great bluesman Jimmy Reed knew all along where LeBron would land – so if you’re from Northeast Ohio, listen and weep… Jimmy Reed

Actually, at this point I’m sort of agnostic when it comes to LeBron and The Black Keys leaving town (in Dan’s case, it gives me another cool place to visit). But I’m also not sure how it would help advance their careers. We live in a world where some punk kid skyping in his bedroom in Duluth can become a global phenomenon. Why would anyone think that someone like LeBron needs a bigger stage to achieve his goal of world domination? Hell, he’s already there. Might as well stick it out in Akron, where livin’ is easy and people pretty much leave you alone. And besides, it’s easier to find a qualified contractor who can maintain a home that’s the size of a shopping mall.

The Tribe? I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over seeing them lose the ’97 Series – in extra innings of Game 7, no less – to this Frankenstein creation of a team from Florida. A team with absolutely no tradition. A team that was systematically dismantled the next year by its owner, like he dumped off a bunch of cats on someone’s farm after they killed all the rodents in his house. I was devastated. But I have to admit, I thought of this next song when I was sitting in a beach house in Captiva, watching Game 1 on TV with the snow falling in Cleveland… Muddy Waters

With Roethlisberger, I could take the easy way out and simply play “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but there has to be a more appropriate song… one with a lot of big, dumb swagger – preferably by a band with a strong connection to the Deep South. Yeah, I got it right here. Just imagine this tune being reworked by that big-voiced blonde chick from American Idol. Whatever the hell her name is… Lynyrd Skynyrd

I can come up with a whole slew of songs about economic hardship. How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live, Money Honey, Depression Blues, All My Money Gone, Sidewalks of Chicago, Hard Times Killing Floor Blues… But I get tired of all that bitching about not having two nickels to rub together. In these times of short-selling scam artists and massive ponzi schemes, I want songs of retribution. I want to know that, even though my ill-conceived investments have tanked, some former Wall Street wunderkind is getting passed around federal prison like a joint at a jam-band concert. Time for a sermon from Rev. Scott H. Biram… Scott H. Biram

Then there’s “Treme,” which I already complained about a few posts ago. Fact is, even a half-baked show with great music is better than anything involving real (incredibly annoying) housewives or snotty rich kids from California.

So I’ll try to end on a more hopeful note. Here’s hoping that the Cavs rise from the ashes and the Indians rise above .500 and the South Rises Again and my bank account… well, you get the picture. But when everything seems to be swirling down the drain, the best way to lift my spirits is to play me some funky brass-band music – straight from a city that makes sports heartbreak seem trivial. Funky Liza/New Orleans Nightcrawlers

Everyone’s an expert… Dan and Pat of The Black Keys weigh in on LeBron and the miseries of Cleveland sports (starting at 1:25). Excuse the commercial at the beginning:

Dear Tim:  I can appreciate your interest in long-deceased artists, but when are you going to start writing about real living, breathing musicians – preferably those who don’t qualify for AARP?  Also, your posts are too long.  Don’t you know that young folks can only process information in small, twitter-sized bites?  You’re just like your mama Jane, trying to feed people too much in one sitting.  And another thing…

OK, I really didn’t receive this comment.  But I expect to get something like it any minute, so I decided it was time to prove that I have a few songs in my library that were recorded some time after 1972.

Contrary to what my friends think, I don’t listen to dead blues guys on a daily basis (although John Lee Hooker seems to work well on Mondays).  In fact, I practically beg family members – mostly nephew Dan and brother James – to send me recent stuff that would meet my high standards for iPod-worthiness.  Then again, I’m constantly surprised when I shuffle through the 20,000+ songs on my iPod… How the hell did Boxcar Willie get on there?

Based on these and other idle ramblings, I offer you my Top Six Picks (because 10 would be too many) of recently recorded songs that have earned a spot on my “heavy rotation” playlist – and therefore should be required listening in schools and workplaces throughout the nation.

I confess that I didn’t know a thing about Raphael Saadiq before his 2008 release, “The Way I See It.”  I’d heard of his first band, Tony! Toni! Tone!, mainly because it was fun to say.  But now he really has my attention, thanks to the neo-soul groove of 100 Yard Dash.  You could argue that most of “The Way I See It” is just a slavish reproduction of the Motown sound, and I probably wouldn’t put up much of a fight.  But I’ll challenge anyone who questions the integrity of 100 Yard Dash – a song that seems to live in some R&B utopia, far from the land of auto-tune and automated beats. 100 Yard Dash

I had the great pleasure of meeting the Heartless Bastards when they opened for The Black Keys at a couple of sold-out shows earlier this year at Terminal 5 in NYC.  Dan and Pat brought the Big Apple to its knees – but I loved watching the Bastards win over about 5,000 jaded New Yorkers with their relentless, rootsy drive and the powerful voice of little Erika Wennerstrom, the pride of Dayton, Ohio.  James and I were so impressed, we even schlepped their equipment!  Here’s one of two standout cuts on their latest release “The Mountain” (to fully appreciate what these Bastards are all about, play the opening of the title song at maximum volume… after you buy it here, of course).  And credit goes to Pat Carney for hooking up the Heartless Bastards with the Fat Possum label. Out at Sea

How does one describe the Wood Brothers?  Americana?  Too narrow.  Folk?  Nah.  Blues?  A little.  Maybe it’s just a soulful mix of everything that’s right about American roots music – from the Stanley Brothers to Mississippi John Hurt to a hundred other streams running from the same deep river.  It’s hard to believe these two guys hail from Boulder (no offense, Caroline!)… They sound like they grew up in some backwoods cabin in the deep south.  Chris is the bassist for the futuristic organ combo Medeski, Martin & Wood, and Oliver cut his teeth playing in Atlanta blues bands.  Together, they’re a brother band with a bad attitude – and dark secrets that even the Louvin Brothers wouldn’t think of sharing (and they killed the Knoxville Girl!).  “Sometimes the tip of my tongue is the barrel of a gun, and it’s loaded”… I think we’ve all been there. Loaded

You can always count on the U.K. for new rock bands with lots of swagger, like the Duke Spirit.  I just missed their steamy set at one of those mega music festivals earlier this year, but came back home with their new release, “Neptune.”  My teenage daughter quickly ran off with it… but not before I had a chance to sneak this little slice of nasty onto my own iPod, where it seems to live comfortably with Link Wray, Morphine, the Cramps and other masters of menace.  The Duke Spirit’s main attraction is their mighty frontwoman, Liela Moss.  She may owe a small debt to the Rubber City’s Chrissie Hynde, but she makes a very big statement of her own on The Step and The Walk.  The Step and The Walk

My vote for one of last year’s best albums – “With Blasphemy So Heartfelt” by Jessica Lea Mayfield – won some positive notice in the music press, but not as much as I thought it would.  I’d argue that Jessica, who started recording “Blasphemy” at Dan’s Akron Analog studio when she was only 15, is misunderstood by many of her peers.  Her voice is timeless, colored by the deep, lonesome twang of hard country (she started performing with her family’s bluegrass band at the age of 8).  And twang ain’t exactly what the indie nation wants to hear.  I think Jessica is poised for much bigger things… as soon as she finds the right audience.  In the meantime, I’ll just keep listening to this perfect opening to “Blasphemy.”  Kiss Me Again

Latin soul, done right, is a beautiful thing.  Salsa, meringue, Afro-Cuban, rumba, even that funky boogaloo that Fania Records put out in the ‘60s…  I’m no expert on the many forms of Latin music, but I know what I like – and I’m definitely sold on “San Sebastian 152” by Bronx River Parkway.  BRP’s myspace page notes that the project brought the New York-based band together with “a crew of legendary salsa musicians that make their home in San Juan.”  The album was recorded with old-school equipment in a 200-year-old former ballet school in Puerto Rico.  It’s another classic melding of soul and salsa – with the kind of propulsive rhythms that ruled the dancefloors of New York City during the reign of El Rey del Timbal, Tito Puente. Agua Con Sal

Bonus track… This one was sent in from Santa Rosa, CA, where the Aces seem to have a fresh take on the blues (one song ends with a blast of sitar!).  They do it “Hound Dog” style… no bass — just two guitars, a drummer and a pretty fine harp player blowin’ like mad on top.  I’d like to catch these guys at a roadhouse bar on a Saturday night — maybe I should book a flight!  Find out more at acesfan.com. Shed Some Light On Me