Primus performing at the Asheville Civic Center, Asheville, NC on October 6, 2010. Concert Photography by David Oppenheimer
You have to hand it to Nick Kent on a couple of levels: first, anyone who can write a memoir that includes folks like David Bowie, Chrissie Hynde, Lou Reed, and Keith Richards and never comes off as a name-dropper must be telling a pretty good story, wouldn’t you say?
Hill Country Revue are at the vanguard of a new generation of Southern rockers and, like their illustrious forebears The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the band blends blues and country music with hard rock hearkening to 60’s icons The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream. HCR’s no-nonsense attitude makes the mix work without allowing themselves to slip into the caricatured stance that afflicted generic Dixie rock of the Seventies.
After 16 years, Phish finally returned to New Hampshire tonight for a performance at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester. Tonight’s first set was filled with bust outs and tour debuts.
In an age of Facebook, Twitter and any number of social media outlets capable of documenting the minutia of your day to day life, sometimes something as simple as the lost art of the phone call serves as the best way to connect with someone on a personal level. For their latest social activism campaign, HeadCount is doing just that by taking a back to basics approach in order to remind people to head to the polls to exercise the Constitutional right to vote in next Tuesday’s mid-term elections.
The non-partisan organization, that was founded in 2004 by Andy Bernstein and Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein, and has helped register over 175,000 people, has enlisted a impressive roster of musicians from the indie to jam world, that includes Jim James (MMJ), Willie Nelson, ?uestlove, Matt Berninger (The National), Jon Fishman (Phish) and Warren Haynes (ABB, Gov’t Mule) to not only pre-record reminder messages, but also make live personal calls to a select number of the approximately 25,000 people who have made a “Pledge to Vote” via HeadCount.
In a media conference call yesterday to talk about the inventive initiative, HeadCount board member Bob Weir (Grateful Dead/Furthur) stressed the importance of a “Vote For You” mentality, saying that young people need to take the future into consideration and participate instead of letting a bunch of “crusty old folks” made the decisions that have direct impact on their lives and those of future generations. Weir, who joked that his call list was so large he better get to work on it immediately, said that would seize the opportunity to talk to people to help figure out where the organization’s efforts will be centered in the future.
READ ON for more from HeadCount’s conference call…
Lawyers, Guns & Money is the closing track on Warren Zevon’s seminal 1978 classic Excitable Boy
The Contestants:
Widespread Panic: According the Everyday Companion the Southern jam titans first covered LG&M all the back in 1987, playing the song semi-regularly for a two-year period before shelving it for almost all of the ’90s – busting it out just twice for Halloween shows. The song returned back into rotation in 2000, and has stayed there since. Source: 10-4-2010
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/wsplawyers.mp3]READ ON for more covers of Lawyers, Guns & Money…
Yesterday, Jeff focused on the Buffalo Springfield reunion that was part of last weekend’s Bridge School Benefit concerts. Today, we wanted to share video of the event’s finale, where all
Smack in the middle of what is already being regarded as a focused, exploratory Fall tour, Phish returned to the campus of UMASS Amherst to play perhaps the most anticipated pre-Halloween shows of their East Coast run.
The 1st annual Project Acoustic kicks off Friday, November 5th with local and non-local musicians coming together for an experience that you won’t find outside anywhere else! Eight bands will take the stage at historic El Rey Theater in Albuquerque, NM to support local music programs and raise awareness of music appreciation.
HT’s Dan Alford continues his look back at the Phil Lesh Quintet in which the Grateful Dead bassist was joined by John Molo, Rob Barraco, Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring. Part One looked at the unit’s start in 2000, Part Two looked at the group’s rise in 2001 bringing us to 2002…
By 2002, The Q had become a mainstay of jamnation, reliable like no other band for night after night of marathon sets and mind-bending improvisation. The chemistry was profound: Warren Haynes’s effect-laden guitar serving up wicked, fiery leads and funky rhythm (not to mention his growling, soulful voice); Jimmy Herring’s lightning fast barrages of a thousand notes at a time, or slower, searing solos (his solo on the new outro jam to Unbroken Chain could knock you to your knees); Rob Barraco’s absolutely fearless piano (few keyboard plays could plunge into such a thick stew with such expressive voice and effect); John Molo’s insane elasticity, equal parts slick subtlety and propulsive fervor; and of course Phil himself, the grand conductor, with his bouncy, shifting bass lines and playful shuffle step that started every show.
Each element alone was worth the price of a ticket, but put them together and something truly otherly happened. Thrilling, jaw dropping performances drawn for the best possible songbook. And just as the performances matured from 2000 to 2001 so did they again in 2002, becoming more stylish, the jamlets even more distinct, the ideas pushed to more extreme ends; the drama of some shows, even single songs, was almost overwhelming (Check out the I Am the Walrus > Millennium Jam from Charlie Miller’s recording of 3/30/02, only the second date of the year. Whew!)
The year began with a series of West Coast dates, The Warfield followed by a run in the Rockies, with the band continuing a trend it had begun in 2001, unveiling new, original material, material that would become There and Back Again, a strong album, if a little unbalanced. Warren’s material is certainly the strongest, whether written alone (The Real Thing, Welcome to the Underground) or in collaboration (Night of a Thousand Stars), but everything has merit. Columbia Records, however, didn’t get behind the promotion in the same way it did for Jorma Kaukonen’s (admittedly entirely stunning) Blue Country Heart released at the same time, and the album, whose title is a reference to Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fell from consciousness. The songs stayed around however, growing and blossoming like everything else the band played, so that by the summer, they were staples buried deep in the heart of jams or closing sets in uproarious fashion.
READ ON for more on the Phil Lesh Quintet in 2002…
