As most of you know, I stand in awe at the talent that is everywhere. So I’m always on the lookout for art done just for the love of it. In this regard, I recently discovered a guy by the name of Whitty Whitesell. In 1993, he put out an album 57 by Whitty Whitesell & the Life Parade. I have only heard the song, What Does The Word Mean? It’s very compelling power pop — reminiscent of the first ‘Til Tuesday album, but with more musical clarity and a better hook than Aimee Mann was writing at that time.

Well, Whitesell is middle-age now with a career and family. But according to his website, he was listening to his album with his kids and decided that he didn’t want it to be his final musical legacy. So with the encouragement of his family, he wrote some new songs and recorded them. They are simple in a sense: just him with his 12-string guitar and occasionally harmonica. It is all well-crafted, beautifully performed, and without pretense. (I have one of his songs stuck in my head.) Personally, I would prefer the songs with less processing — but I’m sure I’m in the minority with regard to that. It is impressive how it sounds like a whole lot more than just a guy and a guitar.

I’m particularly fond of “St Lucy’s Flyin’ High,” “Breathe,” and “Infamous Maggy.” But he’s created a video for another song, “Dying to Myself.” Whitesell encourages you to download the whole thing for free and burn a CD (he’s showing his — and my — age). Or you can listen to the whole thing directly from his website. It is well worth checking out.

The thing about Disco is that it is fun music. It never took itself too seriously. I appreciate it more and more as I get older. Unlike so much highly polished music that came after it, it doesn’t lack for a soul. There is a profound difference between the flashy indifference of a performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” and the flashy silliness of “Disco Inferno.”

So this morning, we listen to Commodores doing “Brick House” off their self-titled album. There is a very funny — and dare I say feminist — video and remix of the song from the 1990s. It’s worth checking out. But I present the band here live (but I think they’re not really playing), in all their 1970s silliness. It’s mighty mighty:

As you may know, I have a special fondness for Geeshie Wiley. She was the young and apparently volatile blues singer who traveled around the south with Elvie Thomas. They are both legends — in both senses of the word. I wrote about them in some depth last year, Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. They must have been quite the pair. Thomas was a lesbian of about 40 and Wiley was 20 years younger and murdered her husband. It is thought that it was in self-defense, because Wiley did not go to jail for it. But you can imagine the great movie Russ Meyer could have made out of the bare facts.

Geeshie Wiley’s best known tune is Last Kind Words. Of course, there is no actual video of her performing. In fact, we only have a single picture of Elvie Thomas as quite an old woman, which you can see in the article mentioned above. But I’ve heard countless other performers do the song. And recently, I came upon a guitarist named Christine Pizzuti, out of Germantown, New York. I’m always amazed at the incredible talent you find everywhere. And her version of the song is really compelling. She doesn’t know all of the lyrics, but that’s understandable. Check out Wiley’s Skinny Leg Blues — a song no one can seem to agree about the lyrics.

Anyway, I just love Pizzuti’s playing. And she manages Wiley’s voice pretty well too!

This morning, we do something different. Instead of music, I thought we would do a little comedy. But not just any comedy — Firesign Theatre comedy, which is much more than just skits. In general, I find I have to listen to their albums many times to get a majority of what’s going on. My first introduction to the group was finding Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him that someone was throwing away. I was blown away. I had never imagined that such things were possible. The first track of the album is, “Temporarily Humboldt County.” It tells the story of the western invasion of the Americas in a brilliantly incisive way. Listening to it today, it’s a bit ethnocentric. But given it is comedy, it does a better job than most Americans today do. (I found this in the comments to my article, Ayn Rand and Indians.) Unfortunately, I mostly just find the track sad — brilliant, but sad.

Today, I want to highlight their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. The second side of the album consists of “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” — a 28 minute long parody of the hard-boiled detective radio play. It slips back and forth between the story and the telling of the story. And as usual, it is filled with puns. My favorite part is where the character Rocky Rococo — who has the voice of Peter Lorre — says, “I’m dead! This hasn’t happened to me since M!” Brilliant stuff.

Will sent me a French language documentary about Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. I’m very fond of them both, but I must admit to being more of a fan of Reinhardt, even though my understanding is that it was Grappelli who really influenced Reinhardt. Sadly, there isn’t much on YouTube featuring Reinhardt. Part of the problem is that he died so young. Grappelli lived to be almost 90 years old, and he was performing almost to the end.

I remember my first introduction to Grappelli. I was at a garage sale and there was Paul Simon for one dollar. This must have been around 1980. I had never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan. But that first Paul Simon solo album was something entirely different. And on that album was an instrumental, “Hobo’s Blues” with Simon on guitar and Grappelli on violin. It was my first indication that those French had something special to offer.

Here is a nice international trio: Martin Taylor on guitar from England, Jon Burr on bass from America, and Stéphane Grappelli on violin from you know where. And they are playing in Australia. And they are doing the Rodgers and Hart classic, “Blue Moon.”

On 29 January 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer shot at children waiting to get inside the Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. She killed two adults and injured nine others. She did all this from her house that was located right across the street from the school. When a reporter asked her why she did it, she said, “I don’t like Mondays — this livens up the day.” She claims she has no memory of saying that, but doesn’t question that she did. She was sentenced to 25 years to life. She’s been in prison 36 years now, and will not be up for parole again for another four years. I’m very much in favor of forgiveness. But I’m afraid that Spencer is insane. I question whether she should ever be released.

The shooting took place when The Boomtown Rats were touring the United States. So Bob Geldof wrote the international hit, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” which was on their album, The Fine Art Of Surfacing. I think the song could be a whole lot better written. But it works really well because of Geldof’s emotional vocals and Johnnie Fingers’ amazing piano part.

I really wanted to listen to Merle Haggard’s “Working Man Blues” this morning. But the truth is that Haggard rarely passes up an opportunity to annoy me. He’s a demagogue. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was all about pitting the white working man against those other less noble members of society. He’s most explicit in attacking hippies for their drug choices, even while he was privately doing the very same drugs. In “Working Man Blues” he talks about never being on welfare. That’s a common myth that middle class people believe, even while they have their mortgages subsidized by the government.

But no one ever wrote better drinking songs than Merle Haggard. So here is a live performance of “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink,” with a kick-ass band. I do wish he would lose the hat. He looks stupid in it.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was absolutely crazy for American Music Club, there was another band that was doing very similar work, Codeine, which I totally missed. It’s probably because AMC is from San Francisco and Codeine was a New York City band. Also, AMC has a sense of humor about its despair that is mostly missing from Codeine. Still, that band is totally amazing.

Sadly, Codeine broke up in 1994 and never really got back together. So there isn’t much in the way of live performances of them on line. They did briefly get back together in 2012. And the following video is from that tour. It is one of those shaky camera phones videos, but the sound isn’t too bad. They are performing “Tom” off their third and final album, The White Birch. Even better, their entire first album, Frigid Stars, is available on YouTube. Check it out!

In my second novel, the narrator, Brian, shows his ambivalent feelings about Elliott Smith. As he makes his way out of Oregon, Rachel complains about the unrelenting stream of sadcore that Brian is playing. He tells her to put something else on:

She hit eject and grabbed a random tape from a stack at her feet. The radio growled with static. She shoved a new tape in. Elliott Smith’s voice came over the speakers, “Your hand on his arm, haystack charm, around your neck. Strung out and thin, call some friend trying to cash some check. He’s acting dumb, that’s what you’ve come to expect. Needle in the hay…”

After some unrelated dialog, it continues:

“Falling out, sixth and Powell, a dead sweat in my teeth,” Elliott Smith continued through the speakers like he knew what he was talking about.

Smith’s work is highly poetic and not the sort of thing that Brian — who has lived a very hard life — appreciates. He feels it co-opts his life. And especially in “Needle in the Hay,” Smith is describing the kind of life that Brian knows to be not at all poetic — and something he is fleeing.

Still, pretty song.

Michael Stickings — my colleague at and founder of The Reaction — brought my attention to the Norwegian band Gazpacho. I have to admit that I really hate it when bands pick nondescript names. Enter their name into Google, and you will get many fine recipes for gazpacho. I would find this annoying, even if I was a fan of the dish. But it isn’t especially my thing. And even “Gazpacho band” only gets you so far — there are other bands with that name.

(When I was young, I really liked the band Salvation Army. It was a great name. Just the same, it was really confusing. Eventually, the old Salvation Army sued the band and the new Salvation Army became The Three O’Clock. I hear they are back together, but I stopped being interested in them long ago. “Airplanes fly and yet I feel so low.”)

I don’t know much about Gazpacho. It’s made up of six people who can really play and they create interesting sound designs with lots of dynamics. They remind me of what Roger Waters wants to do but doesn’t have the self-assurance. Just the same, they don’t have the intense narrative strength of his work. In fact, they strike me more like a group making music for films. But I mean that in a good way. And the following video of “Black Lily” from their 2012 album March of Ghosts features a really great stop-action animation:

I don’t generally like it when someone recommends a singer or a song. Usually, it is just someone with a slightly unique voice or more often well produced sound. And while I appreciate all that, it means nothing to my life. There are lots of people with great voices and there are even more great producers. What I crave is honest music simply performed. I would choose Jules Shear’s The First Freeze After The Fall any day before The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star.

It is in this context that I present to you Dayna Kurtz. She is an amazing talent — both as a writer and a musician. And here she is off her DVD, Postcards From Amsterdam — Live in Concert. She’s doing the song “Touchstone” off her album, Otherwise Luscious Life. I especially like the simple slide guitar work:

H/T: Ryan Hall