Music
August 31, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Winding into a holiday weekend, it can’t be wrong to remember that Van Morrison — singer, songwriter and artist — celebrates his sixty-seventh birthday today. Morrison is an artist who has absorbed all the strains of American popular music and recapitulated them in his own unique voice. Born in Belfast, he stands shoulder to shoulder with the greats in the pantheon of the Cosmic American Music. Beginning with Astral Weeks
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August 28, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Chris Hillman was a founding member of the Byrds and is one of my all-time favorite musicians — we celebrate his birthday every year in “Time Between” — but I never thought I’d get to see him perform live, let alone in a reconstituted lineup of a great band going back twenty years. (“Time Between” is the first song Hillman ever wrote, back when he was with the Byrds.) Last
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August 19, 2012 — Scott Johnson
We went to see local jazz singer Connie Evingson perform songs from her recording Sweet Happy Life this past Sunday at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. The recording is a tribute to the songs of Norman Gimbel, and it is terrific. We are crazy about Connie, but we really loved this show with its emphasis on Gimbel’s contribution to the popularization of bossa nova. Who, you
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July 29, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Legendary songwriter Dan Penn returns to the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis for shows this coming Sunday and Monday, August 5 and 6. Penn’s site is here; his bio is here. The show is an almost unbelievable review of Penn’s almost unbelievable career at the heart of soul/rhythm and blues over the past 50 years. I have a pretty good idea what he’ll be doing at the
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July 25, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Over the weekend I raved about the weekly radio show that John Pizzarelli does with his wife, Jessica Molaskey. Both Pizzarelli and Molaskey are talented artists in their own right. We saw John Pizzarelli perform a terrific show at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis a few years ago. (We also saw John’s dad, the venerable Bucky Pizzarelli, perform a beautiful one-off show with jazz pianist Benny
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July 22, 2012 — Scott Johnson
If you love American popular music, you owe it to yourself to catch up with John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey on their weekly Radio Deluxe show. How to describe the show? Pizzarelli’s site quotes Christopher Loudon: Among radio’s greatest pleasures is each weekly installment of Radio Deluxe, two hours of great jazz and smart, sassy repartee from John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey, the hippest husband-and-wife team since Louis Prima and
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July 19, 2012 — Scott Johnson
“We Built This City” has been recognized by Rolling Stone as one of the top 10 worst songs of the Eighties and by Blender as one of the 50 most awesomely bad songs of all time. Composed by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf, and — for those whose memory has been impaired by mushrooms or time — originally recorded by the American rock group Starship, it
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June 30, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Much of what I know about music I learned from Scott, so I am reluctant to intrude on his popular music territory. Still: what the heck, why not? What is popular music for, if not to empower every ill-informed listener to have an opinion? So here goes. I had never heard of Gavin DeGraw until a couple of months ago when he played a concert at Gustavus Adolphus College, from
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June 30, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Let’s pause for a moment and add some music to our day with Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.” The song is an inventive ballad showing a side of Hendrix that he mostly kept under wraps. One of his biographers says the song is about Hendrix’s mother, who died when he was 10. “When I’m sad, she comes to me,” Hendrix sings, “with a thousand smiles she gives to me free.” Whoever
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June 21, 2012 — Steven Hayward
George Will’s column this morning celebrates the 50th anniversary tour of the Beach Boys, and brings along some excerpts from the late James Q. Wilson’s classic 1967 Commentary essay, “A Guide to Reagan Country.” (This is the essay where, among other things, Wilson said that not only did he not sympathize with Reagan, but that “even if I thought like that, which I don’t, I would never write it down
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June 18, 2012 — Scott Johnson
It was of course the team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney — as singers, songwriters, and instinctive harmonists — that constituted the organic entity at the heart of the Beatles. Today McCartney turns 70. One of McCartney’s earliest songwriting motifs was the projection of himself into the future looking back. It was a device he used to great effect in songs such as “Things We Said Today,” “I’ll Follow
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June 6, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The old Latin experession, frequently cited by Bill Buckley, has it that “Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.” Translated literally, it means: “What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to oxen.” More loosely, I would translate it: “What is allowed a god is not allowed a dog,” or something to that effect. The saying may be a recognition of the reality principle or a testament to the permanence of
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June 4, 2012 — Scott Johnson
There is a good Jim Messina and a bad Jim Messina. The good Jim Messina was a member of Buffalo Springfield, Poco and Loggins and Messina. With Kenny Loggins he recorded “Same Old Wine” in 1971 for Sittin’ In, their first album. It’s a slowly burning number about politics. The opening verse goes exactly like this: Well we give them the election They keep filling our heads full of lies
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May 24, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Today is the birthday of Minnesota native son Bob Dylan; he turns 71. He is a remarkable artist, self-invented, deep in the American grain. Attention must be paid. A few years back I visited Dylan’s old home at 2425 7th Avenue East in Hibbing. The house is a small two-story residence with a one-car attached garage on the side. The house is exactly two blocks from Hibbing High School, Dylan’s
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May 14, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Donald “Duck” Dunn died yesterday on tour in Tokyo at the age of 70. Dunn was the bassist who played on just about every great record produced at Stax in the 1960′s. He joined the Stax house band — Booker T. & the MG’s (Booker T. Jones on organ, Steve Cropper on guitar and Al Jackson on drums) — in 1964. Dunn and the crew backed Otis Redding, Sam and
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May 13, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Last week at a White House ceremony Burt Bacharach and Hal David received the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Bacharach turned 84 yesterday. David is 90 and recovering from a stroke; his wife picked up the award in his place at the White House. The Gershwin Prize is a songwriters’ award and I can’t think of two more deserving recipients than Bacharach and David. Their careers span
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May 9, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So my previous installments about Prog Rock here were really just placeholders until Brad Birzer, the maestro, so to speak, delivered the definitive treatment of the subject for National Review Online, which posted up at 4 am this morning (a good Prog Rock hour of the day, if you ask me). Lot’s of good stuff in this piece, but here’s a few highlights for the time-challenged reader (for whom the
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