Archive: 2010

AC/DC: High-Voltage Rock 'n' Roll: The Ultimate Illustrated History by Phil Sutcliffe is all that you want out of a hardcover/coffee table book:  pictures galore.  And like AC/DC’s power chord repetitive formula, this illustrated history is quite simple to read: big letters, big pictures and big pages.

Oftentimes bands lose steam after a year of promoting an album, tapering off at the end from the weariness of touring and media appearances, but this was not the case as Stars winded up their last tour to support Ghosts in November. Instead, they burst with energy and ended the era on a serious high note.

Several Shades of Why (due March 15)  is J Mascis’ first solo studio record, and it is an album of incredible beauty, performed with a delicacy not always associated with his work. Recorded at Amherst Massachusetts’ Bisquiteen Studios, Several Shades… is nearly all acoustic and was created with the help of a few friends. Notable amongst […]

Big IV Productions is proud to announce details for the 15th annual Suwannee Springfest. The perfect way to kick-off festival season, the event will take place March 24-27, 2011 at Live Oak, Florida’s Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. Voted “Florida’s Best Live Music Venue” in 2009 by readers of Florida Monthly Magazine, the park […]

As we saw our first snow flakes here in New York City yesterday, there is nothing that gets us through the winter faster and thinking about the warm months ahead, than the constant barrage of music festival lineup announcements. Last Friday, the fine folks behind Summer Camp revealed the first round of artists that will […]

On Saturday afternoon, we told you about the first night of Hot Tuna’s two-show celebration of Jorma Kaukonen’s 70th birthday in which the band was joined by a cavalcade of guests including Bruce Hornsby, Warren Haynes and John Hammond at NYC’s Beacon Theatre. The second night featured a new set of special guests, namely Bob Weir, Oteil Burbridge and Steve Earle.

[All Photos by Vernon Webb]

For Saturday’s show, Hot Tuna also invited a few former members of the band to the stage to fete Jorma – guitarist Michael Falzarano and keyboardist Pete Sears. The two-set performance started with the group playing four songs unaccompanied before the guest spots started and continued through the end of the show. Weir sat in on Big Railroad Blues, Bowlegged Woman, Walking Blues and When I Paint My Masterpiece as well as Come Back Baby and the Baby What You Want Me To Do? encore.

• More on Saturday’s Show: Shakedown Blog, Jorma’s blog and Jambands.com

READ ON for the complete setlist from Saturday night’s performance plus more of Vernon’s stunning photos from the evening…

We got a big kick out of the following video for the same reason we loved mixing six different sodas together in our Big Gulp cup at 7-11 when we were kids. Eighteen Billy Joel songs – the entirety of disc one from The Essential Billy Joel – enter this musical version of a pit […]

New York City venue Sullivan Hall will celebrate its third anniversary on January 1st with a show by a supergroup worthy of the word “super.” Guitarist Steve Kimock will be joined by keyboardist Nigel Hall and bassist George Porter Jr. along with legendary Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The performance is billed as a “post […]

[Originally Published: August 17, 2010]

For Mr. Marshall, who, when he heard I was penning this column a couple of years back, suggested this rather cleverly-written film as a possible Hidden Flick. Well, Big T, here it is at long last. Better late than tomorrow, eh? As always, the wordsmith was right.

And so the Merry Prankster hands me some dessert, which I appreciate since I’ve been eating salty food, and taking drinks from a monstrous soda, and jaysusHcrist!! When did Phish start playing a 45-minute Light?! This is bad ass porno funk, just like ‘97. Kneeling nearby, resting, at peace, content with the flow of the planets, and oblivious to nothing, her deep gaze resting upon me, forcing its own mysterious link, is a shy woman reading Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance. She smiles, I smile, and as I walk out through the in door, a tall and amiable lyricist follows, matching me stride for stride. We head to my European car—ever onwards, of course—to a destination he has plotted, as we shoot out towards Belgium, in our next edition of Hidden Flick, In Bruges.

Although In Bruges did minor business in the States, it garnered numerous international awards, and better box office overseas. Nee bother, of course. Who cares? We, of course, at the Hidden Flick factory are more interested in the hidden truths buried ‘neath the surface of these little celluloid gems, and buried below this little ‘two hitmen hide out in Burges, Belgium caper’ surface is a dark truth about humanity. What if one chooses the path of the cold-blooded, gun-for-hire, mercenary in a bloodless society, and someone who isn’t on The List, the Unholy Writ which Determines who is Slain and who Isn’t, gets nailed, tagged in the head with a stray bullet, and dies. Well, what if that innocent bystander is a child, a young boy, a young wandering soul with all his life, hopes, ambitions, dreams, and world-yet-to-be-conquered-aspirations still ahead of him?

Indeed, therein lies the entire surface details about the film co-starring Colin Farrell as the hapless upstart Irish hitman who runs way fucking afoul in his first job, killing a priest and a young boy, and also co-starring Brendan Gleeson, his senior hitman, and one who quickly takes him away to Bruges, Belgium, due to the specific instructions of their evil boss, Ralph Fiennes. The script is taut, pristine, profane, politically incorrect, and joyfully hilarious in every way. It is also sad, profound, dead right in wrong ways, and oddly reminiscent of what makes humans so divine and soulless all at the same time.

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick, In Bruges…

Blessed, the stunning new album from three-time Grammy Award-winner Lucinda Williams is set for release on March 1st by Lost Highway. Considered by many to be one of America’s greatest living songwriters, Williams lives up to that and more by delivering 12 new songs that cover an even wider emotional spectrum than her previous work, […]