Burning Dervish

January 30, 1969, The Beatles last live performance, on the rooftop of the Apple Building in London. 40 minutes and then they were gone.

So the long-awaited first release from the Dead's new venture with Rhino is finally here...The booklet has a nice essay and set of photos and while not much has changed or improved in terms of the packaging of this vault release as compared to previous ones, I have to say that the sound is stunning. Phil, especially, sounds great in the mix.

The show itself is New Year's Eve 1976 from the Cow Palace and, as has gotten to be standard with the band, there was a bonus disc included with initial orders placed through their official online store. This one is called Spirit of '76 and includes a bunch of stuff taken from throughout the year. Personally, I am eager to dig into the Playin' > Supplication > Playin' but haven't gotten there yet...

I pretty much always skip right to Playin' whenever it appears on one of their live releases and the one posted here closed the first set (and disc one).

Enjoy.

Grateful Dead: Playin in the Band
from Live at the Cow Palace: New Years Eve 1976

FAVOURITE SONS @ JOE’S PUB
425 Lafayette Street - $10.00
With very special guest The Shorebirds playing after

www.favouritesons.com

www.myspace.com/favouritesons

"They just released one of 2006's best rock records, Down Beside Your Beauty, bursting with catchy-as-an-STD Iggy/Lou Reed-flavored full-bodied nuggets." - VILLAGE VOICE

"Swelling with dramatic hooks and Griffin's croon-to-howl, it's an album the Strokes should hope to make once they've endured a few more heartbreaks." - CMJ

"Should you be in search of another pop band that will steal your rock & roll heart then the Favourite Sons should leave you swooning in no time" - BILLBOARD

"...anthemic sound that soars on emotion and muscular musicianship. Rabid blogerati have already anointed them serious contenders for the Next Big Thing of 2006...possibly the most genuinely earnest record ever released on the Vice label." - LA WEEKLY

"All too infrequently do modern rock albums sound cohesive enough to evoke a mood or a feeling that carries through every song, while also allowing the individual songs room to change, both musically and lyrically. Favourite Sons has managed to create such an album, one reminiscent of an American western: a huge, raw, brutal, lonely and beautiful cry on a darkening horizon. Born when four members of Philly's Aspera joined with ex-Rollerskate Skinny member Ken Griffin as lead vocalist and songwriter, Favourite Sons' debut Down Beside Your Beauty examines the complexities of love, fear and regret. The band does so in such an unabashedly raw manner that it seems as though they've stripped everything down its base elements — there isn't a guitar solo or overly processed effect on the entire album, and Griffin's command of both language and imagery is chilling without a single unnecessary word. "When You're Away From Me," the album's opener, repeats its chorus three times: "When you're away from me / it makes me feel so sad / because of the things I know / about you and the world." It's an incredibly simple statement, yet somehow the start of a million unanswered questions, all set to a blisteringly pure rock soundtrack” - Stop Smiling

Been offline and the road because of work again and came home to this email from the Hulabilly Broadcast System...check it out:

Doug is back from Chapel Hill with a
new batch of expertly mixed Hulabilly
tracks, courtesy of John Plymale (Squirrel
Nut Zippers, Alejandro Escovedo, Superchunk).

Sample some at our MySpace page for a limited
time and let us know what you think. Listening
to the songs is FREE and does NOT require
registration.

Simply visit WWW.MYSPACE.COM/MYHULABILLY and turn it up.

***WWW.MYSPACE.COM/MYHULABILLY - NEW TRACKS***

We are on the email list for a great little neighborhood bookstore and this hit our inbox today...

Freebird Books & Goods

Please join us Thursday, January 18th at 7 p.m. for a poetry reading with

Jason Schneiderman,

Michael Broder

and

Priscilla Becker.

Bios:

Of Jason Schneiderman's first collection of poems, Sublimation Point, Tom Sleigh writes: "Grave, sweetly questioning, often irreverently funny, Jason Schneiderman's poems about love and death, the Holocaust and family history, self knowledge and self deception give this book a range and tonal variety that is extremely rare for any poet, let alone a first book." Schneiderman's poems have appeared in such magazines as Tin House, Grand Street, and American Poetry Review, and in such anthologies as The Penguin Book of the Sonnet and Best American Poetry 2005. For his work, he has received fellowships from Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is currently a Chancellor's Fellow at CUNY and teaches literature at Hunter College.


Michael Broder received his MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University in 2005. His work has appeared in 42Opus, BLOOM, Brooklyn Review, Caffeine Destiny, Capilano Review, H_NGM_N, La Petite Zine, Painted Bride Quarterly, roger, Softblow, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and Word for/ Word, as well as in the anthology This New Breed. He is working on a doctorate in classical studies at the City University of New York and teaches in the classics department at Brooklyn College.


Priscilla Becker's book of poems, Internal West, won The Paris Review book prize and was published in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Verse, Open City, The Paris Review, Raritan, and Small Spiral Notebook; her essays in Cabinet magazine, Open City, and Poets & Writers (forthcoming); and her music reviews in The Nation and Filter magazine. She teaches writing at Columbia University, NYU, and Poets House, and conducts a poetry workshop from her home.

Samantha Citrin
FreebirdBooks & Goods
123 Columbia Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
718.643.8484
www.freebirdbooks.com
sam@freebirdbooks.com

Its cold and rainy here in London, surprise surprise.

Just read that there is a bizarre gas-like odor seeping through Manhattan today. No surprises about that either, I guess.

New York probably wasn't a safer or better place to live on this date in 1979, but there was one bright spot, sampled below.

Stay warm, stay dry, stay safe. Home in a few days...

Grateful Dead: Terrapin
from Madison Square Garden, New York, NY, January 8, 1979

I never saw a show there but certainly have heard enough recordings of them over the years...the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ hosted shows from Adam Ant to ZZ Top with lots in between.

This website is a collection of concert programs and memories of what was once named, "the No.1 concert hall in the nation under 6,000 seats"...It is a pretty cool site.

Ever see a show there?

And that ain't old!

I caught Jonesy a few years ago as an opening act for King Crimson and he was just over the top. He had it all going on: virtuoso musicianship, great catalog to pick from (duh) and enough money and security to not care - he just played what was fun for him and that was totally apparent.

John Paul Jones got his start as a session player and producer/arranger before he got sucked into his gig with this little outfit called Led Zeppelin. They turned out to be pretty good ;-) but I always goof on his involvement with this track...this whole period for the Stones really cemented their reputation for chasing trends (something they were still doing thirty years later with Bridges to Babylon)...Enjoy.

The Rolling Stones (arranged by John Paul Jones: She's a Rainbow
from Their Satanic Majesty's Request