Hidden Track

[Originally Published: 04/28/2008]

Stanley Kubrick knew the secret pearl of storytelling. One doesn’t bring the vague and blurry messages to the audience. A filmmaker, like a musician, painter, poet, and street corner dude on a milk crate, painted silver and doing robotic dance movements, accompanied by a battered boom box, makes the crowd come to their bit of strange art.

No doubt, if ten people were asked to list their five favorite films by the towering American expatriate who lived the bulk of his adult life in England (like another crazed Yank genius, Terry Gilliam), you’d get five completely different lists. And that’s fine. I have my own favorites, but I don’t hold them to my chest like they are minemineMINE.

Hell, if you still don’t get the god-like majesty of 2001: A Space Odyssey or marvel at how well Kubrick fooled the audience in Eyes Wide Shut, because it was, in fact, almost all a dream, and you needed to track the weird, non-linear jumps in the story to notice that the brilliant and underrated Tom Cruise was given the ultimate mind fuck to fuck with his yuppie mind while he watched…well…how to do that fine sexual task properly, then long-ass segues aside, you were missing Kubrick’s point and need to look again.

Secret societies abound, no secret there, and it is no secret that Eyes Wide Shut carried with it a legion of references to Kubrick’s other work and, in fact, the life he led with his wife when they shared a New York apartment before making their permanent home across the pond in the UK. It was his last film and the links with his other cinematic masterpieces span all the way back to this week’s Hidden Flick, The Killing—a 1950s race track heist gone wrong cobbled together by two titans of non-linear storytelling. READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

We’ve been honored to run reviews and mixes from Of The Week’s Neddy since the early days of Hidden Track in 2006. Neddy recently published his Top 69 Albums of 2008 list and we wanted to share it with you…

The Top 10 (alphabetical):

Apollo Sunshine — Shall Noise Upon

A real masterpiece of an album. Not sure how a band that is so loose and carefree on stage can put together something so crisp and concise. I’ll be writing more about Apollo Sunshine in the near future.

Marco Benevento — Invisible Baby

This one came out real early in the year (as his next one will in 2009) and has had plenty of time to stew in my soul. I believe Marco has been in my top ten by himself or with the Duo for several of the past year. Not much more I can say about the guy.

READ ON for the rest of Neddy’s Top 69 Albums of 2008…

With the Phil Lesh & Friends / RatDog two-night Bay-area New Year’s run barely a week away and the leak of a mini-doc about The Dead’s Penn State reunion show, it’s a good time to be a fan of the music of the Grateful Dead. With that in mind we thought we’d once again offer […]

Winter is officially upon us, and this week’s Stormy Monday celebrates the season with a mix of jam-centric seasonal favorites. First is Phish at IT with a soulful Army of One, a tune that never got enough stage time. Even so, Page McConnell’s bleak original sparkled right out of the box, and hopefully it will […]

“I’ll state my opinion any time I fucking choose.”

Those aren’t the exact lyrics to Light Is Like Water, my favorite Jerry Joseph song, but that’s how I’ll always remember the verse from the last time I heard Joseph do it live (sometime around Stockholm Syndrome’s inaugural tour in 2004).

That line sounds exactly like Joseph, the incisive folk-rocker with the serious songwriting chops and the lived-in voice, best known for Little Women, the Jackmormons and numerous other solo projects, not to mention his longstanding association with Widespread Panic. And the song’s overall attributes might describe Joseph himself, as well as his curious career: longwinded, tender, pointed, hopeful, irascible, cynical, soulful—and singular.

Hidden Track caught up with Joseph at a snowed-in tour stop in Salt Lake City late last week. His 2008 is far from over; having revived the Jackmormons name with a modified lineup, he’ll close out the year in his adopted home of New York City, booked for Dec. 29 and 30 at Crash Mansion and New Year’s Eve at the Delancey Lounge. If you’re in the area and haven’t yet made your plans, well, we’d be remiss if we didn’t recommend it.

Hidden Track: In recent years you’ve been doing New Year’s gigs in Portland and also in Costa Rica and other far-flung locales. Why New York for 2008?

Jerry Joseph: Well, I live there, for one. Originally this year we were supposed to do a bunch of Colorado shows and I think one of them was planned for after Panic, but I just wasn’t into it. So we decided to say fuck it and do this and our New York City friends were all holy shit, holy shit. This has kind of been thrown together more last minute than we usually like, so we’ll see what happens. Lots going on in NYC that week and I’d love to say we have the same fanbase as My Morning Jacket [laughs], but that’s just not true. We’ll see what happens—I know it’s been moving pretty quickly but I know a lot of people are flying in for it too.

READ ON for more of Chad’s interview with Jerry Joseph…

Last week,  my shitty cable company finally added MTV’s Hi-Def channel, Palladia, and it rivals sister-station VH-1 Classic as the best cable network for music fans. Just this weekend I got to see highlights from Rothbury 2008, a couple of episodes of Soundstage and Jay-Z’s Storytellers all in glorious HD. Be sure to shout at […]

Each year, moe. and Umphrey’s McGee headline the Summer Camp Festival in Chillicothe, IL and next year will be no exception. For the 2009 edition on May 22-24, moe. and Umphrey’s play each night of the festival and will be joined by Medeski, Scofield, Martin and Wood, Girl Talk, Keller Williams, Dark Star Orchestra, Cornmeal, […]

The Black Crowes ended an extremely busy and successful 2008 with a bang in San Francisco last night. Chris and Rich Robinson’s band of brothers finished a five show stand at the Fillmore Auditorium with a three song encore featuring legendary bassist Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Most accomplished bands would take a rest […]

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t be happier to put the last full work week of 2008 behind me. I’ve been burning the candles at both ends and my tank is near empty. Before I take off, I’ve got more one more post to do: Friday Mix Tape. I went personal with this […]

As I was trolling through YouTube looking for some tasty clips for our second Grateful Dead themed week, I stumbled across a rather interesting video of a young Joni Mitchell performing the Bobby cowboy classic Me & My Uncle – a song that up until now, I had always thought was a Dead original. After […]