There is a little irony that Fleetwood Mac hit superstardom ten years into its existence, having jettisoned numerous guitar heroes — including the group’s founder, the inimitable and brilliant Peter Green — and did so as a West Coast soft rock band rather than the grimy British hard blues act that inspired contemporaries and was …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #94: “Gold Dust Woman” by Fleetwood Mac
In September 1971, Sandy Denny — on the heels of an incendiary contribution to “Battle of Evermore” from Led Zeppelin‘s upcoming fourth album — released her first solo record, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. It carried with it the strength and grace of her previous efforts, and featured many of the musicians with whom she …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #93: “The North Star Grassman and the Ravens” by Sandy Denny
Consider Blueshammer. Fictional, yes, short-lived, definitely (seconds at most). Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff made no bones in their film Ghost World (from Clowes’ graphic novel) about white blues musicians — that is, Blueshammer — who drowned out the source of their inspiration through sheer volume, and the thoughtlessness of the fans who followed them. It’s …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #92: “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin
For every Charley Patton putting songs to record in the South in the early decades of the last century, there were dozens who influenced the course of music without ever seeing a recording studio or microphone. One such country blues guitarist was Arnold Schultz, whose dynamic, syncopated thumb/index picking made an impact on musicians in …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #91: “Clap/Starship Trooper” by Yes
While John Fahey was working on the set of songs that included “Sunny Side of the Ocean,” for The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965), he was completing his master’s thesis in folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, the first biography and analysis of the work of blues guitarist/singer Charley Patton. It was published in …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #90: “A Spoonful Blues” by Charley Patton
Beginning in 1959, John Fahey’s “Blind Joe Death” excursions for solo acoustic guitar were the first to radically reconsider traditional blues and old-time music, extending by personalizing what Harry Smith did with the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952): rather than mythologizing what at that time was a largely unknown recorded legacy, as Smith did, Fahey …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #89: “On the Sunny Side of the Ocean” by John Fahey
In the last few years, David Eugene Edwards has taken Wovenhand — soundstreamsunday #85 — in an increasingly heavy direction, towards drone metal underpinning an utterly unique and dead serious frontier circuit preacher mysticism. The drone as tribal, the ancient tool of ascension to the Common One, and so Wovenhand’s thunderous droning riffs on 2012’s Laughing Stalk …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #88: “Oh wie nah ist der Weg hinab” by Popol Vuh
A commanding presence in British punk since the later 1970s, and creating out of that — along with Joy Division, The Cure, Bauhaus — an overpowering, dark music that came to be known as goth, Siouxsie and her Banshees moved their music towards romantic intoxication. Siouxsie brought light to the dark, deftly drawing rich melodies …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #87: “Melt!” by Siouxsie and the Banshees
It’s like they couldn’t help it, all the British bands that invented themselves in the wake of the Sex Pistols. As hard as they tried not to, they created some of the loveliest pop music one can imagine, with smarts and restraint and pretension, lots of pretension. In their willful endeavor to be a serious, …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #86: “Ocean Rain” by Echo and the Bunnymen
Like Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes — last week’s soundstreamsunday entry — David Eugene Edwards brings to American folk, rock, and country an utterly unique, instantly recognizable voice. Unlike Pecknold, Edwards toils in relative obscurity, which is a shame, as for the last 20 years he’s brought a wide-eyed intelligence to songs extending darker traditional themes, …
Continue reading soundstreamsunday #85: “Oil on Panel” by Wovenhand
Progarchy 