By Leigh Novak

My dad was 10 sheets to the wind by the time my friend J.R. and I arrived at FitzGerald’s. I rolled my eyes at the old man; the night was barely underway. My dad grabbed us in the direction of the bar to ensure that we too were properly groovied. Knowing how fun it is to be the only saucy among the sober, I sympathized with his immediacy. Soon enough, however, Shawn Phillips would be the only mood enhancement we needed.
We sat down in front of the bartender, who was already well-familiar with my dad and his running tab. But I guess, to my dad’s credit, he was a sort of V.I.P. on this particular night. He did, after all, shelter Shawn on his trip to Chicago (as he has done many times before), fed him well for a couple of days, and personally delivered him to Fitzergald’s the day of the concert, ready to rock. And again, then, knowing this much, I must also give credit to his pre-show drunkenness being the product of arriving at the bar hours ago, while I was still at work, counting the heavy Friday minutes.

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Posted on September 25, 2007

By Don Jacobson

My favorite member of The Band was always Levon Helm. I was never a huge fan of their music, just as I was never much of a Bob Dylan fan compared to a lot of people I know. But for some reason, I liked the Band songs on which Helm took the vocal lead a lot more than the others. He just seemed so damn real – to me, his voice was the main connection that The Band had with the painful, soulful heritage of American roots music. Even though Robbie Robertson wrote the songs, he and the late Rick Danko and the other guys kind of seemed more like rock stars in comparison.
Helm, now 67, a cancer survivor and sometime movie actor, is getting set to release his first solo studio album in 25 years, and from the buzz, as well as from a few audio clips available pre-release, it seems to reinforce his role as the voice that perhaps most personified The Band’s current of proto-Americana, and is also a pretty amazing performance for a guy who, for years after his 1998 throat cancer diagnosis, could not speak, let along sing.

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Posted on September 19, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Our latest playlist comes from The Casbah. Being taken away to this Casbah means a trip not to North Africa but to Garageland and its musical neighbors – Punk Point, Psychedelic Surf City, Shoegazeville and Cool Jazz Junction. It’s a mysterious and surprising journey guided by DJ Brian Parrish of San Antonio’s KSYM 90.1 FM, who uses his exquisite and extensive taste in these kinds of grooves to produce one of the best such radio shows and podcasts in the land every week.

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Posted on September 10, 2007

By Don Jacobson

To anyone who grew up admiring the values and raw energy of punk rock in the late 1970s and early 1980s, yet didn’t get a Mohawk or pierce up, there’s always been a (sometimes strident) tone of condescension toward we more mainstream fans from the true believers who spent long days fighting the man on streets of the big city, then, exhausted from their virtuous struggle, taking their well-deserved rest on the floor of whatever coldwater squat they could scrounge. These guys always wanted to make punk rock less a cultural movement than some kind of meritocracy: “You have to prove you’re good enough to listen to our music, man.”
We were poseurs.

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Posted on September 4, 2007