Blame It On the Boognish

OK, I understand today's the 50th anniversary of The Beatles on the roof at Apple, but that's been badly bootlegged too many times. 

If the whole Get Back thing is your scene -- and today they announced a big docu-movie of those sessions is coming from the director of Lord of the Rings -- go here, please.

Today we have something else, courtesy of one of the better partnerships in the history of the music of our age.

They met when they were in junior high school and started making music together before they were out of their teens.

For the better part of the last 30 years, they've piloted the band they formed to give voice to their eccentric music to become one of the most popular and hilarious alternarock bands ever.

What distinguishes them is their ability to sound like a different group almost every song, and to take the musical styles they love and make pastiches of them that somehow function as homage and ridicule at the same time.

I was introduced to their stuff in about 2002 and have seen them several times live since. Their legendary, occasionally marathon shows are as much fun as any I've ever attended, really.

They aren't brothers, but the fact that the characters they started 30 years ago -- and as which they both still perform, together and apart -- are brothers kind of says it all.

Of course we are talking about Dean & Gene Ween and today I'm gonna share one of their greatest shows ever, turning 21 today.

Ween

Ween Rocks the Troc

Trocadero Theatre

Philadelphia, PA

1.30.1998

CD1

01 intro

02 Dancing In the Show Tonight

03 Take Me Away

04 Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)

05 What Deaner Was Talkin' About

06 The Golden Eel

07 Waving My Dick In the Wind

08 Sketches of Winkle

09 Doctor Rock

10 Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?

11 Buckingham Green

12 The HIV Song

13 Voodoo Lady

14 Frank

15 The Mollusk

16 Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)

17 Pumpin' 4 the Man

18 Nan

19 Puerto Rican Power

CD2

01 I Can't Put My Finger On It

02 A Tear for Eddie

03 Ocean Man

04 Tick

05 You Fucked Up

06 Mister Richard Smoker

07 The Blarney Stone

08 Baby Bitch

09 Tender Situation

10 Buenas Tardes Amigo

11 Hot for Teacher

Total time: 2:27:22

Dean Ween (Mickey Melchiondo) - guitars & vocals

Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman) - vocals, guitar, mandolin & percussion

Claude Coleman, Jr. - drums & percussion

Dave Dreiwitz - bass

Glenn McClelland - keyboards

lineage says this is a John W. Busher matrix of an audience capture and a soundboard cassette, but I think the soundboard source could be a DAT because there are no tape flips or gaps in the board source that I can discern; either way it sure is mighty Brown

979 MB FLAC/January 2019 archive link

That about covers it for January from me... I shall return in February with more golden flakes off the archival iceberg for y'all.

Before the month expires though, you oughta taste the waste of this primo, anniversary Ween show, matrixed to perfection and waiting to turn your town brown with an awesome sound.--J.

Dog and Butterfly Effect

Phase Two of Ladies' Weekend commences with a post from the Heart. Or just a post from Heart. Or perhaps both.

My friend Maceo adores these gals, and he's been feeling somewhat not-so-good, so this post is for him.

This show is one of those archtypical, tremendously vintage 1970s radio concerts, where they'd cut live to whatever venue in whatever city on whatever Saturday night, and 19 stations would all simulcast it in its entirety.

It's celebrating its 40th anniversary today, so I spent the week messing with it in the headphones to make it really explode forth from everyone's speakers.

Overall its one of those classic-to-the-power-of-classic broadcasts, and until the pre-FM surfaces we have these master off-air FM reels, which are tremendous. 

There's two versions of this, but I chose to work on the 3.75 ips version that has the complete thing -- rather than the 7.5 ips reels that have the tape flip in Mistral Wind -- and not just because it was one-stop shopping for the whole show. 

After a meticulous review of each, I honestly felt the 7.5 ips sounded brittle and harsh in the high end, while the 3.75 one was more spread out and warmer, if a bit flat up top. 

I did very little to it, brightening it subtly using the Sound Forge 11 Graphic EQ and Graphic Dynamics tools. Other than that, I just moved a single track marker to begin closer to the music. 

Someday this'll crop up in a pre-broadcast version that'll obviate this iteration of it, but until then and for its 40th anniversary here I thought I'd give it a bit of work. My heart was in the right place, anyway, so enjoy!

Heart

Boston Music Hall

Boston, MA

1.27.1979

late show

01 WBCN intro

02 Cook with Fire 

03 High Time 

04 Heartless 

05 Devil Delight 

06 Straight On 

07 Magic Man 

08 Love Alive 

09 Magazine 

10 Mistral Wind

11 Dog and Butterfly 

12 Crazy On You 

13 Kick It Out 

14 Barracuda

15 Mark Parenteau commentary

16 White Lightning and Wine 

17 Rock and Roll

18 Mark Parenteau commentary

19 band introductions

20 Without You 

21 WBCN outro

Total time: 1:35:25

disc break goes after Track 09

Ann Wilson -  vocals & flute

Nancy Wilson - guitar, vocals, harmonica & keyboards 

Roger Fisher - guitar, lap steel guitar, mandolin

Howard Leese - guitar, mandolin, keyboards & vocals

Steve Fossen - bass & vocals 

Michael Derosier - drums

master 3 3/4 ips off-air FM reel of the complete WBCN-FM live broadcast

remastered by EN, Jan. 2019

660 MB FLAC/January 2019 archive link

I have one more blast of January boognish coming this week, and then it's on to the February mayhem.

But today, I hope you get next to this gargantuan performance by one of the most beloved Rock bands ever. It's definitely got its Heart on its sleeve fasho 💘--J.

Roots 66

Our Saturday Evening Post tonight is the first of two this weekend where, for once, the sausagefest gets shelved and we give some love to the ladies.

Today we have the 66th birthday of someone who has -- astonishingly given that I remember when she first hit when I was in high school -- been around 40 years now. 

That's four decades establishing herself at the forefront of what she helped become this Americana/Roots genre that has 14 radio stations in every town these days.

Her music is, frankly, absolutely and consistently exquisite. Really one of the best songwriters of the era, and somehow well under the radar of many people.

She's always done it her own way, and not according to the album-tour-album dictations of the music industry.

In an era of records where the songs of value swim upstream to spawn amid oceans of filler, none of Lucinda Williams's songs ever sound like placeholders.

One of her albums is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the genre, which is surely a bold statement but not wholly inaccurate when it comes to Car Wheels On a Gravel Road.

When it comes to what Lucinda Williams show to share, there are surely many choices but I settled on this one.

It comes from the tour behind my favorite record of hers -- the follow-up to Car Wheels, called Essence -- and is a nearly-pristine soundboard capture of indeterminate origin, sourced here from a boot CD.

Lucinda Williams

House of Blues

West Hollywood, CA

7.30.2001

01 Metal Firecracker

02 Car Wheels On a Gravel Road

03 Right In Time

04 Blue

05 Reason to Cry

06 Are You Down

07 band introductions

08 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten

09 Out of Touch

10 Drunken Angel

11 Changed the Locks

12 Essence

13 Joy

14 Big Road Blues

15 Get Right with God

16 Lonely Girls

17 Bus to Baton Rouge

18 Come to Me Baby

19 Can’t Let Go

20 Positively 4th Street (bonus track)

21 Essence (bonus track)

22 Blue (bonus track)

Total time: 2:03:10

disc break goes after Track 12

Track 20 is from the Bottom Line in NYC, 1994 (from the "In Their Own Words" CD on Razor & Tie Records)

Tracks 21-22 are acoustic home demos from 2000/2001

Tracks 1-19:

Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals

Bo Ramsey - guitars

Doug Pettibone - guitars, harmonica & vocals

Taras Prodaniuk - bass & vocals

Don Heffington - drums

Jim Lauderdale - vocals

Track 20:

Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals
Gurf Morlix - additional guitar & vocals

Tracks 21-22:

Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals

soundboard recording, possibly sourced from the 2002 "At the House of Blues" bootleg CD on the Turtle label

747 MB FLAC/January 2019 archive link

The dumbass bootleggers blew it on the first bonus track -- it was missing the first few notes for whatever reason -- but I managed to get a lossless file of the complete track and substitute it. Otherwise nothing was changed.

I'll be back tomorrow with some more Superwomen, with a post about one of the classic all-time FM shows, which -- coincidentally -- I just remastered.

Today,, however, we celebrate Lucinda Williams -- born this day in 1953 -- and encourage her to please keep making music until age 166.--J.

Pole Vault

Let's get this one tossed up here, because it's a badass birthday performance by a badass birthday musician.

I was gonna post it yesterday for its 47th anniversary, only to figure out that its author's 76th birthday was coming up today.

I'm kind of a Polish Jazz and Funk enthusiast, so this guy is someone I should have tributed long ago.

In fact, after Krzysztof Komeda himself, Michal Urbaniak might be the Godfather of Polish Jazz. Maybe Tomasz Stanko wants in on that... speaking of which, I have him slated for his next b'day as well, even though he just passed last year.

Thankfully The Urbanator -- one of the first to begin to fuse hip-hop and Jazz in the 1980s, by the way -- is still alive and picking/thrumming/sawing on that violin of his.

People forget he's also a pretty damn fine saxophonist too... a fact which is very much in evidence in today's share fare concert gear.

This was taped for German radio almost exactly 47 years ago and succeeds in touching upon every aspect into which Jazz had fragmented at the moment of its making. 

There are stellar, telepathic Free sections, swinging straightahead segments, and of course several instances of pure Funk madness on offer in this 55 minutes of fun.

Michal Urbaniak Group 

Lila Eule

Bremen, Germany

1.21.1972

01 Winter Piece

02 Valium

03 Irena

04 Paratyphus B

05 Sound Pieces

Total time: 54:30

Michal Urbaniak - violin, saxophone & percussion

Urszula Dudziak - vocals & percussion

Adam Makowicz - keyboards

Pawel Jarzebski - bass

Czeslaw Bartkowski - drums

digital capture of a Nordwestradio rebroadcast

retracked and retitled by EN, Jan, 2019

315 MB FLAC/January 2019 archive link

I retracked this slightly because some of the titles were omitted, but it all kind of flows contiguously anyway, almost like one long tune.

I shall return on Thursday with something truly eccentric, but today let's give thanks for Michal Urbaniak, surely one of the five most revered, innovative and prolific musicians in the history of Poland.--J.