THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."-Aldous Huxley
Spent the weekend seeing music, hanging with friends…enjoying this moment where things seem a bit freer if vaxxed (had to show vax card to get into one of the shows)…it was a packed weekend but a really solid one.
Saturday was all about going to Rancho Nicasio, fifteen minutes north of Fairfax, CA…spending the afternoon watching Los Lobos in the beautiful area the “Ranch” has built behind the restaurant. Barb and I (and the kids) had seen Los Lobos over memorial day weekend in Big Sur at another gorgeous place…that one more forest than patio. And while it was one of the first big shows we saw, and there were some definite high moments, it left us wanting more. The set just felt unfocused.
The Rancho Nicassio performance was the opposite, finding the band crammed into a porch-shaped stage playing off each other like the well-tuned instrument they are, vibrating from being so close together. Being there was like being at a neighborhood back yard party with Lobos acting as the local friends who were having a blast playing for all of their friends.
They jumped into their celebration with the Will The Wolf Survive, a classic from their first record of the same name. And the set they put together was filled with familiar, barn dancers representing all parts of their career, including one of my favorite tunes Emily from the Neighborhood to Asher’s favorite Short Side of Nothing from Kiko. And of course the Cumbia & Tejano numbers were just brilliant.
David Hidalgo had just gotten his cast off from breaking a bone in his hand a month ago…and played his guitar seemingly effortlessly while the rest of his band crowded around him lifting him up...and they even brought Jackie Green in as a guest to add and extra ax to a few tunes (he had been added to the band while Hidalgo was cast up).
To me, Los Lobos is a true American treasure. There is no other band remotely like them. Sure, there have been great bands that have walked the Hispanic/Rock ‘n Roll path wonderfully, like The Texas Tornados, Los Super Seven (featuring a Lobo) and many a band in East LA and East San Antonio “back in the day.” But with Los Lobos’ longevity, breath of work, and constant innovative sounds—pushed forward by the genius of Hidalgo who can play anything and whose iconic voice never ages, the multi-instrumentalist Steve Berlin, who adds incredible colors to their tones, and the always shaded Cesar Rosas, so steeped in both the rockabilly and traditional Tex-Mex grooves—they really sit apart from all others. One set from Los Lobos showcases a history of American music and all of its influences. There is nothing like them.
AYYY-YAH-YAAIIIIII
“At the Library and in the Field: John and Alan Lomax Papers & Woody Gutherie
Todd Harvey writes: “The above memorandum authorized Woody Guthrie’s first extensive studio session. Now famed as the “Library of Congress Sessions” these recordings served—for Alan and Woody—as a radio audition. Just a week later Woody debuted along with the Golden Gate Quartet on Alan’s ongoing radio series Folk Music of America, episode number 22, “Poor Farmer Songs,” a nationwide broadcast on CBS’s American School of the Air.
Rita Marley turned 75 yesterday prompting Rolling Stone to write a really sweet piece on her life and the legacy she is still building around Bob and the family. I did not realize she had a stroke over the last five years…and yet is still going strong.
Bob Moses, Crusader for Civil Rights and Math Education, Dies at 86
Thank You Harris Weinberg for sending this article my way. A true giant who, as the article points out, “developed a reputation for extraordinary calm in the face of horrific violence…a soft-spoken pioneer of the civil rights movement.” RIP
How Alma Thomas’s Radiant Paintings Plotted a New Course for Abstraction
I was just recently (like so many) made aware of the vibrant, important work of Alma Thomas. ‘Throughout her career, Thomas was clear that she always strove to create images that were pleasing to the eye. “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man,” she once said.’
The Adventures of a Turtle
BY RUSSELL EDSON
The turtle carries his house on his back. He is both the house and the person of that house.
But actually, under the shell is a little room where the true turtle, wearing long underwear, sits at a little table. At one end of the room a series of levers sticks out of slots in the floor, like the controls of a steam shovel. It is with these that the turtle controls the legs of his house.
Most of the time the turtle sits under the sloping ceiling of his turtle room reading catalogues at the little table where a candle burns. He leans on one elbow, and then the other. He crosses one leg, and then the other. Finally he yawns and buries his head in his arms and sleeps.
If he feels a child picking up his house he quickly douses the candle and runs to the control levers and activates the legs of his house and tries to escape.
If he cannot escape he retracts the legs and withdraws the so-called head and waits. He knows that children are careless, and that there will come a time when he will be free to move his house to some secluded place, where he will relight his candle, take out his catalogues and read until at last he yawns. Then he’ll bury his head in his arms and sleep....That is, until another child picks up his house....
Funny, pulled Lobos' 'This Time' out of the stacks this wknd. Lovely lovely record. I used to go see them so so much after Garcia passed away - for a while, they kinda replaced the Dead for me in those roots-song ways (ways in which neither, like, Sonic Youth/Godspeed, nor techno could).