moon traveller herald

  My first encounter with the Velvet Underground was at a friend’s house – and I was put off. Can’t remember why. I might have thought they were an invention of Andy Warhol, and maybe  a put-on. Heroin was ‘too much for my mirror’ – to borrow Beefheart’s line. That Cale viola was seriously grating. Most likely the exceptionally dark and New York Noire of it didn’t fit my dharma then – there were innumerable records to listen to in 1967. From: The Doors, The Fish, The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, the Who, the Kinks, Love, Procul Harum, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. Other records I was listening to in that time frame: Canned Heat’s First, Jimi Hendrix Are you Experienced, Electric Flag. Now we get to 1968. Eden was receding. The hippie had been buried. It was the second record, White Light White Heat – that really got me. I am in high school and always doomed to be out the door at 7:30 am. The clock radio with the flipping digits would go off at 6:30 am – at this point the ...

 One by one the musicians that defined my generation are passing. I focus here on a few of these spirits that I was lucky enough to see. These are Garth Hudson, David Johansen, Barry Goldberg, Eddie Palmieri, Mark Volman, and Steve Cropper. Let's not be somber. Let's make a Joyful Noise ... I remember ... Lucky Paths Crossed ...  GARTH HUDSON - January 21, 2025 - I borrowed a bicycle to go to the ticket window at Dane County Auditorium to see The Band. They were doing the Stage Fright tour. We had gigantic imaginations in those days and cycled around the Auditorium twice, in case Bob Dylan might be found lurking. At the concert when the lights went out we joined  the crowd that ran for the front and settled in yoga positions on the floor with about a 40 foot distance to the stage. When Garth Hudson played Bach and segued into Phantom of the Opera Scale Chest Fever lead in, one could see the musical waves floating in the rafters. He was the last of The Band. I am so glad...

  October marks the 20th Year of Jack Vaughan's Moon Traveller Herald Blog. Featuring here some drawings from the site. I could imagine this might be incidental art for a podcast. Attemmpt at a daily comic. Middle panel shows me as I picture myself in my office. Mitt Romney drawn via Etchesketch. Helping foreigners in the Dallas Airport, I reimagined the Boarding Pass. Ed Bride garnered me the works of MoonDog. I made a cover for the cassette. Gifs provide Animation for Everyone. In these days I would have to do the coding. In the wake of 911 things changed. I tried to work with charcoal pens. This actually predates the World Wide Web. It imagines JP Morgan visiting Egypt. I was remembering Soulville Record Store in Racine. Jack and Norman had the Keys to the Kingdom. Also in Racine, the Journal Times truck would drop off the papers and Timmy Egan would fold them to throw. He'd let me ride my bike along with him on his route. Distribution of News circa 1957. Imagined Bob Dylan ...

  THIS IS SYNDICATED CONTENT. FOR THE REAL THING GO TO https://alcompasdelmundo.blogspot.com/ Jack Vaughan steps in "invitado" tonight. He says: The party would revolve as vinyl, where the English bands or the Motown orchestras could set the quantum strings to spinning. If it were my records at my pad, maybe with a MeisterBrau big jug, I would put forward the case for the dance of ecstasy. There would be LPs and 45s strewn. It might include some slow blues. It might end with Sister Ray, which could wake up the danced-out couch  sleepers, and remind them they should go home. This is the kind of event which I look to memorialize here. In these times, it’s the 45s that seem so especially to hold the magic light – and it’s still easy, on a Friday or Saturday night, to let records play us into a shuffling cloud of socks on the shiny floor. The Watusi, the Swim, the Hully Gully. Among the 45s in this collection are the jazz 45s of Eddie Harris and the Crusaders, of the kind to fi...

 On the passing of Luther Guitar Junior Johnson Christmas Day 2023 at 83 - I post here some excerpts from liner notes I wrote for his 1984 Rooster Record: “Doing the Sugar Too.”  He was a hard-working and riveting performer with a great sense of Time, Dynamics, Emotion, and Blues.  And a thoughtful individual I recall, as a read a bit of the liner notes.  Cringing too, as it's pretty clear I must have asked him some pretty dumb questions. But he fielded them manfully, and they tell a story. He came up from Mississippi to West Side Chicago, and played extensively with Magic Sam, but most notably with Muddy Waters, playing a role as something of a bandmaster for most of the 1980s, counting off numbers in one of Muddy Waters’ greatest ensembles. Here are some portions of the notes: Luther pursues a sound that represents his feelings. “I take my guitar and go into a sound,” he says. “I pick up an acoustic and think about different arrangements of music.” He sometimes com...

  Keeper of the Flame – JB Hutto This is something I wrote in 1981 for a publication called Sweet Potato. It was the first time I ever got paid for something I wrote. JB Hutto is a musical powerhouse. A small man in a red gabardine shirt and gray sports cap, he pops his eyes and grins to the back seats as he plays. It's late on a weeknight at Cambridge’s soon to be defunct Speakeasy, and the crowd is thinned in preparation for the next day's work. But JB is somehow spurred on, jumping from the stage with ferocious good fun. He is soon dancing on one foot, snaking through the audience and to his guitar cords’ limit. The man has his own style of playing and young guitar players typically line the stage watching his hands. He's the king of slide stylists today. Only Muddy Waters performs slide with such skill and he often plays the instrument with cold frugality. But JB’s playing is abundant and his leads map a tune’s wildest borders. Theatrical antics can mask it from ...

  I was idly Web surfing and I found this in the Records of the Wisconsin Historical Society. A beautiful poster promoting Sunnyland Slim appearance at Gordon Commons at the University of Wisconsin in Madison way back in the day (Donation: $1.50; beer 25 cents). Playing with Sunnyland were my friends Harry Duncan and Paul DeMark A story to this one has to do with the billing of "Little" Eddie Taylor - one of the Chicago greats - a story that I will pass on for now. Posters were a People's Art Form back in those days. You would post them on telephone poles, you would cop them after the event, you would put them on your wall, you would study them, and think about what they meant. Posting this today especially because it is Sunnyland Slim's birthday anniversary. As we often say: "He was a man amongst men." Strong character, strong heart, strong voice. Now a strong memory. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM58549# Eddie Taylor story - Paul DeMark

  A person standing NeXT to a van. Description automatically generated with medium confidence In the category of something completely different. I found this picture of New Orleans piano great Jack Dupree yesterday, and I thought it was cool to pick up on. I never saw Jack, but I have a few of his records, which show he belongs in the pantheon of piano professors. The pic showed up in a Twitter feed that asked people to cite American blues players that went to Europe and more or less stayed there (Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd, Luther Allison are just some of those listed along with Jack). I like the picture cause, well, he has a simple kind of car but he has pride enough to stand with it. Maybe he’d have liked a Cadillac, but this one would save on gas, and it looks like it could haul equipment too.  Does it make him look shorter or taller than he would in front of a Cadillac? (Your call.) And sign says it all: Champion Jack Dupree, Blues Pianist of New Orleans, LA.U.S.A." {Little...

The first time I posted this up, the vid came down, so here goes again. The whole video is quite historic and excellent from beginning to end if you are into roots, ethnic music or just into music. Ry Cooder's number around the 8 minute point is a fave of mine. I also liked his description of encountering it.  Which follows. [I have a little NLP trascriber known as Otter that is like magic for stuff like this...] Ry Cooder on Joe Williams’ Sloppy Drunk . I bought the record in 1960 I think it came out. I was a young boy. And I used to go down to this little record store in a house these two ladies had. And they had it in an old bungalow house downtown Los Angeles, that I had to take two buses to get to. Regular bus and and electric bus. And they let you play the records on a little Webcor schoolhouse record player. I put the needle over there, took it out of the sleeve and you know and put the LP down the record itself and then put the needle on and Sloppy Drunk JUMPED OFF! Never h...

i. The news came by Internet, and then passed on by voice. Cecelia told me a great is gone. So, teardrops will fall. I am here today to mourn a most soulful and heartfelt musical talent. That is because Peter Green is dead at 73. I count him as a giant of the Blues. Certainly, among people from across the Atlantic, he was one of the bravest and brightest to contribute to the Blues. Green was the founder of what was and is now called “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac” – convenient naming as the eventual, successful, and very Californian Fleetwood Mac bore slight resemblance to Green’s blues bashing open-for-anything original. That would be the late 1960s. Green and cohorts John McVie, Mick Fleetwood and Jeremy Spenser came out of the London blues scene of 1967 somewhat in the wake of Cream. Previously, Green had replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, and had proved replacing “God” was possible, as Mayall’s band missed not a beat with Peter Green on guitar. ...

Jack Vaughan 3 · City Hospital Blues This "Talk Song" goes back about 10 or 15 years at least. The story is that my Uncle Charles was on Intravenous Feeding for 30 days in Boston City Hospital during the 1919 Influenza Pandemic. I had been listening to an LP of Cecelia's - the "Arhoolie Bad Luck N' Trouble" release, which included the haunting Essie Jenkins' "Influenza Blues"-- and came to re-imagine my uncle's illness, through the spectre of Essie's poetic rumination. So, it is her Influenza blues through the lens of a family history. I was reluctant to trot this out, though it came to mind as we are in our own COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. But I am glad to post it now along with some explaination. As we know it, the IV feed was new and experimental technology at the time. My uncle was obviously in very difficult straits. As we know it, my grandmother spent most all of the 30 days at Charles's bedside praying, and for us his rec...

By the time he died in 1995, Sunnyland Slim’s life-long efforts as a performer, gregarious ambassador, and keeper of the blues flame had made him the patriarch of  Chicago  blues. His star rests largely on his early recordings and to an even greater extent his later performances. This collection seeks to broaden the view of Sunnyland, featuring his work at sessions held in  Boston  in 1979 when Sunnyland Slim [born Albert Luandrew] was 72. In some blues histories, the Mississippi-born pianist will be remembered as the man who brought Muddy Waters to the attention of Leonard and Phil Chess at Aristocrat Records in  Chicago  in 1947. In Slim’s telling: “I got Muddy off the truck.” [Waters was delivering Venetian blinds when his relatives got Slim’s call for the Aristocrat sessions.] For reasons hard to identify, Sunnyland did not continue to record as a leader for the Chess brothers after his 1947 and 1948 sessions with Waters - after Aristocrat be...