moon traveller herald

 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...

Moon Traveller Herald this year took on a new tenor, while upholding our dependable topical strategy as known for many past moons. Some space science, some essays, some reporting, some poems. A mudslinging world intruded only a bit..we even took some time to think about Man's Fate and AI. But that came up short. The world in a tumble, as the cookie crumbled. Let’s review some of the best stuff! - J.V. A few pages into The Philosophy of Modern Song you realize it doesn’t neatly attach to an expectation you might venture when hearing Dylan was publishing such a selection of essays. I understand that even some of his most dedicated fans wrestle with Dylan’s writings in The Philosophy of Modern Song. Dylan can surreally obscure, conceal and  cloak at the same time he unmasks bits of reality. I tried to share what I got out of the book in this write-up. With foot still in era of the Put-on, Dylan can be Off-putting. But I say ‘Dig it!” May 13 - The Philosophy of Modern Song Di...

Been playing hooky from the School of Hardknocks lately, transferred to Bob Watt School of Inferior Poetry. There is no best. There is a year. No try. Just do. - Jack Vaughan    Bold Stump Reunion in my imagination was a little journey on music toward the "castle of heaven." - Aug 2022   Kerouac Bardo Poem - I searched the graveyard - May 2022   Al compas del mundo on the March Jim Haas onboard  - All through 2022   At night the dispatches. -War Blues Prose -Apr 2022 This stuff goes back to Shakespeare and Alexander||There may be only 10,000 sidewinder missiles in US arsenal, and replacing them means production lines like JI Case or Hingham BoatWorks set up in WW11.||The Ukrainians have been fighting this war for several years and have developed methods. and they have intangible desire.||Russian capability for cruelty astounds|| They show a city utterly destroyed by artillery… and say the Ukrainians are blowing things ...

Jan 21 2021 Happy Days Are Here Again   Tic Toc version of Happy February 05, 2021 - Edison Electric Illuminating Co.  It is kind of where he got his first real start - tho he was in New York in a few months [~] more or less. Some of his co's were HQ'd here. I think that is the case with Edison Electric Illuminating Company which still has its residue - as seen in this sign on an old power plant on Boylston St, just west of the Buckminster Hotel and Kenmore Sq and Northwest of Fenway Park near the Pike and remnant railroad yards I use to climb through on my way to work at BU. Pretty sure I had a cosmic moment meditating upon this power plant one night in time.   READ THE REST OF THE STORY.  (appearing on ProgressiveGauge blog] March 01, 2021 - Up and into the Poet Realm, you go, boy-o THE METAPHYSICAL POETS could upset you to waking sleep Set you to moanin’ all night long Secret Catholic and Anti-Catholic messages All in the service of love Flighty ruminants that fou...

Actual specific Top of the pops - Fabulous Negrito via Oakland and Jim Haasero! My year in song - Folk with mad slides rule - Big Rock Pop Staples' Return Best from the Vaults- [I heard a chord when I was 22, on a high tremolo bawling guitar by its inventor Roebuck Pop Staples. The family sang a song about Christmas. The 25th Day of December (Last Month of the Year). This chord – for now I will say was in the vicinity around an E-flat-minor 7th – was transportational – deriving a bridge out of the ether that made a path from sorrow to heaven. It led me to composition of my own - which puts it high on the inspirational meter.] Not long before he died in 1999, Staples went in the studio with Mavis and sisters Yvonne and Cleotha. This year with embellishment the resulting tracks saw light of day. Just Pops' voice and guitar and Mavis on "Better Home" which tells the greatest story ever told. A fantastic Staples Box Set also appeared in 2015. Roots of t...

E very year, well most years, the blog does a musical rundown. This year I am pulling all the samples from YouTube. Which limits things on one level but is clearly more accessible to more Moon Travellers. Stay tuned for our chronicle of this year's storms of the century. This one is dedicated to Milwaukee's late great Dr Bop.   Number 1 - Her Tenere - The most inspiring music makes you wonder 'where this comes from.' it is such with Bombino. If jimi hendrix, john lee hooker and dick dale had travelled like 3 kings through north africa in the 1960s, and set up on a flatbed truck, and played off the truck generator, and broadcast a jam over some celestial coffee grinder apparatus, that music might become a legend in a nomad camp, and spawn the dessert blues music of Bombino. Her Tenere - The desert/ I am in the desert/Full of nostalgia/ In the desert/Without water I was sitting, meditating/On the problems facing the desert.. Number 2 - Crazy in Lo...

A poem about Las Vegas comprises a collection of aphorism which illustrate the Buddhist notion of Dharma, or moral system. Found in an old copy of The Dhammapada that wandered back into the living room here. was at http://www.xtranormal.com/xtraplayr/13741376/oh-let-us-live-in-joy. What can I say about this year except that there was an election that seemed to set the tone for every living moment? I could not stomach the news shows, but woke up at 5 am on the day after the election to find out my candidate had won by a decent margin. That same morning the contrarian crew did not admit it was fair, and we were left pretty much where we started, on one level at least. I continue to get my father’s money’s worth out of a class I took at Marquette that drove home the notion of circular or mythical time , versus progressive ( as in La Follett, Christian dairy co-ops, or milk) time. As I get older, I see things “at a remove”. In terms of poetry, they were like jokes in old v...

The fiddle breaks into the intro. We walk into the eternal honky tonk. James Hand is singing In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox. In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox My favorite mourners and I talk about these old hard knocks our lives are measured there by the bars clocks In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox So step in side where live has died and you'll sure find me with sadness and a haunted face that's bound to be Hidden behind the door that sorrow locked In the Corner at the Table by the Jukebox. Do you know a place like that? Where people start out young honkytonkin and then retreat backwards into the old shadows? James Hand nails this like Poe in his Rounder record debut. He's past football playing age, James is. Comes out of Texas and says Willie: "James Hand is the real deal." It is that simple. Waterfall tradeoffs on pedal steel and guitar. James Hand sings from deep down within. And he is trying as h...

Maybe you can point to Link Wray or someone else. But there is a certain fuzz bass sound that I associate with Chicago, especially a period of Muddy Waters’. It was a raunchy discovery of electronic music, and it was taken from the Chess labs and leveraged by – made them, really - the Rolling Stones in the Triad of Last Time, Satisfaction and Get Off my Cloud. So it is weird but it is this type of sound that animates this year’s Checking on My Baby by Mick Jaegger. It’s on a greatest collection, and I believe, just laid in the vaults for a dozen years. – but it is great stuff, and makes you wonder what could have been if the Rolling Stones had missed the stadium and arena era and remained a bar band. Mick pays homage to the original Sonny Boy on this. I think he did this with some L.A. blues band in the ‘90s – hell if I know. Perfect slurs and careful misdiction and stutters. It is out there! I hope he didn’t bust a button on his trousers during the making of this small epic. http://ww...

Mary Weiss . Name don’t ring a bell? How about: The Shangri-las? Okay now I got your attention. Bad birls, chewing gum – a girl group, but with the long-straight hair look. Not bouffants. Maybe black leather. And not New Jersy. No, Staten Island. Dark eyed girl children of the damned that paved the way for…oh.. I don’t know…let’s say The New York Dolls. Mary Weiss was the singer. And she has come back. Little Steven [ of Little Steven’s Underground Garage] hipped me to this one. Enter a pool parlor of youth. Racing nights. Figuring out the rules of love. Wondering about Juanita and saying why not. The record plays. My Heart is Beating. Big chords and castanets. Brill Street beckons. But this is now and that was then! When you held me close That’s when I knew Chilled me though and through I couldn’t let you go I couldn’t let it show Got a buzz guitar. A doo-wap chorus bit sound. Her voice has the same plaintive tone. Her teen self sings through the filter of adult pain. And this whole ...

“It feels like 1960.” That’s not me talking, that is Mavis Staples on her 2007 record, “We’ll Never Turn Back.” She’s running. She’s trying to make 100 – percent, you know: complete and total inspiration – religious, that and more - in the middle of any day. Not a portion. Not an almost full portion. It is a full monte portion of God stamping on the serpent’s throat. This is a startling voice, one that found you when you were addling moronically through the supermarket. The voice is Mavis and it describes a God that wilo smite and smote and that’s what He wrote down a God that is about justice now. God’s characteristics.. such as Freedom God, conceptually mirror the Freedom movement. It’s also about Gospel crossing over to Soul. With a little Japanese guitar, and a marching male and female chorus . . this is a hit! First heard the mix from Wilson Picket, but of course it has roots in the Highway Travellers [friend of the Moon Travellers] and this is a new take, a new song, the song is ...

Ray Price spans the early original country western era (early 1950s) to the baroque countrypolitan period (early 1970s) and, thankfully, beyond, creating a mess of great music along the way. At 81, he hit the hastings this year with Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, and the noble trio did a CD too. Beginning as a somewhat Texas style troubadour, with equal parts Hank Williams (he befriended the drifting Hank and provided him a home during the last year of his life) and Bob Wills. Over time, he morphed, with a bit of laid back Eddie Arnold matinee crooner part added in, into his own self. Hits along the way truly numerous: City Lights, Crazy Arms, Heartache by the Number, Please Release Me, Invitation to the Blues, For the Good Times, Help Me Make It Through the Night, and more. For my fathers day gift we saw Ray on tour with Willie and Merle. What a night. Merle Haggard was really strange and so wonderful, and he could play for hours without covering half of his oerve’s crème. Willie wa...

Big hair big heart - Up unto a point, Portner Wagoner for me was big hair and wild Nudie suits. Like out of Altman's Nashville. Porter and Dolly. Kind of a period piece. Only recently I actually got hip to this incredibly soulful muiscian. Wagonmaster is a 2007 release - produced ably and caringly by Marty Stuart - that showcases Wagoner's depth of talent for the ages. The single on this one for me is "I'm Just Passing Through." Writ from the heart, and sung from even deeper. It's the story of a street person who has something of a satisfied mind. He is philosophical about our ulitmate temporal evaporation and ascent to heaven. He takes a gift from a passer by and explains: "Im just passing through wearing holely clothes and shoes .. " He is an walking buddha and it is all history to him. And Jesus is at his side. His body, he says, is: "Just a place to hang my hat til I gets home." Echos of Ginsberg's "Ballad of the Skeletons...