Doom & Gloom Dispatch #40: Hidden Shadows

Anna St. Louis, Rose City Band, Grandaddy, Herbie Hancock, Sonic Youth

Anna St. Louis - In The Air

This one is Anna St. Louis’ best record yet — which is saying something, because her previous efforts have been awesome. Imagine Hope Sandoval making an Emmylou Harris-inspired country rock LP and you’re on the right path. St. Louis isn’t quite as gloomy as Sandoval, though; underneath her hushed tones, there’s plenty of wit and humor. In The Air is the kind of record where it’s hard to pick a favorite — pretty much every moment is perfectly realized. But right now, I’m going to go with “Rest,” especially for the outro, as Anna and the band drop into a laid-back groove and ride it out for the remainder. 

Rose City Band - Tubby’s, Kingston, New York, July 23, 2023 / Union Pool, Brooklyn, New York, July 25, 2023

Two excellent recordings of Rose City Band on their recent east coast tour. These guys seem to just keep getting better, stretching things out and finding some very heady spaces to explore. Frontman Ripley Johnson is a killer lead guitarist, but he seems happy to let the pedal steel of Barry Walker Jr. and the keys of Paul Hasenberg shine, creating a sweet ensemble sound. Plenty of echoes from days gone by — the Dead, of course, but also Beachwood Sparks, Neil Young, Relatively Clean Rivers and more. Amazingly, this tour was the first time RCB has hit New York … they still haven’t made it to Colorado, but let me assure you, they would do very well out here. More tour dates are forthcoming … catch ‘em if you can.

Grandaddy - The Paradise, Boston, Massachusetts, August 9, 2003

Twenty years ago, my girlfriend Dulcie and I climbed aboard the Grandaddy tour bus, which was parked in front of the Paradise on Commonwealth Ave. I was just a kid, trying to get some music journalist cred; this may not have been going backstage to interview Mick at a Rolling Stones concert, but it felt like a big deal at the time!

I chatted for a while with drummer Aaron Burtch, who was a super nice dude. Dulcie (who I would soon marry!) snapped some pics afterwards (Jason Lytle was a no show, sadly). Later, we caught the show in the very very very hot Paradise. Grandaddy was a (surprisingly?) terrific live band both times I saw them — something that’s on display on this excellent recording. It’s available on the massive Grandaddy Live Archive, which is a wonderful resource. All bands should have a page like this!

And hey, here’s the article I wrote for the long-defunct Junkmedia.org:

The execs at V2 Records were shocked earlier this year when they received the tapes for Grandaddy’s new record, mysteriously titled Arm of Roger: The Ham and Its Lily. The label was expecting big things from the band, especially following the critical and commercial success of 2000’s masterful The Sophtware Slump. But after almost a year of recording in frontman Jason Lytle’s home studio, the Modesto, CA-based group had turned in a follow-up that was disappointing, to say the least.

In fact, the new record was terrible.

Kicking off with the sonic mayhem of “Robot Escort” and closing with an offensive, if nonsensical ditty called “The Pussy Song”, Arm of Roger was nothing short of career suicide — 35 minutes of un-listenable garbage. V2 staff members spent about a week in a state of panic, thinking that one of their flagship bands had gone completely off the deep end.

Grandaddy drummer Aaron Burtch chuckles, recalling the label’s reaction. “The people who didn’t know us that well there, they were saying, ‘We’ve gotta get these guys into rehab, this is a bad situation, there’s absolutely no way we can put this record out.’” But finally, the band’s A&R; person, Kate Hyman, left a message on Lytle’s answering machine.

“OK, motherfuckers,” she said. “Where’s the real album?”

“There had just been one too many record label calls to Jason’s house, wondering where the record was,” Burtch laughingly explains, relaxing in the “smoking lounge” of Grandaddy’s tour bus a few hours before the band’s show at the Paradise in Boston. As “a kind of tension-breaker” at the tail-end of a long and difficult year of recording sessions, Lytle, guitarist Jim Fairchild, and keyboardist Tim Dryden concocted the Arm of Roger album in three alcohol-fueled nights. “They just got super-hammered and banged this really stupid record out really fast,” Burtch says. “And then we Fed-Ex’d it right over to them. It’s good to keep people on their toes. Especially record labels.”

V2 must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when Grandaddy duly delivered Sumday a week later. Picking up where The Sophtware Slump left off, the “real album” is easily one of the year’s best. While not as career-defining as its predecessor, Sumday refines the band’s futuristic pop sound and features some of Lytle’s most accomplished songwriting to date. Like all Grandaddy releases, the new album is a self-produced affair. “One hundred percent of the album was recorded at Jason’s house,” states Burtch proudly. “We’ve always, always done that. I don’t think we could do it any other way.”

Despite the comfortable confines of Lytle’s home studio, Sumday’s birthing process wasn’t an easy one. “It took a long time,” Burtch says. “There were five or six months of set-up time, starting with us getting a bunch of new gear in. Then we had to make sure everything worked. And then we had to make sure Jason knew how to work it all.” Finally, the band commenced recording, only to hit a wall about halfway through. “We had about six songs finished, but we had to take a break so Jason could get his head back on straight. He had just been down in the dungeon for months by that point.”

Another disturbing development was Modesto’s burgeoning reputation in the media as a hotbed for shady activities. “It’s become the capital of young missing women, which is kind of scary,” Burtch says of the central California tract-housing sprawl Grandaddy calls home. “There were the Yosemite Murders four years ago, and then the whole Laci Peterson thing happened. It’s terrible, but if you live there, you just think, ‘That fuckin’ figures’.” Still, he has no plans to relocate. “It’s a weird place, for sure,” he admits. “But I’m not gonna move, as far as I know. That’s because we’ve all kind of built our own little oasis there that’s separate from everything else.”

Not that the band will be spending much time stoking the homefires in the coming months. With a tour itinerary that began in April and stretches well into December, they’ll be lucky to spend more than a weekend off of the road. “This,” says Burtch, pausing to gesture towards the cramped confines of the band’s tour bus, “is not what we do. We make music, and we’d like to play shows, but we don’t want to play a show a night for a year and a half. Radiohead has it down. They put out their record, play forty shows and then they go home. It’d be neat to be afforded a luxury like that. That would be the ideal. Big records, not so big tours.”

Grandaddy isn’t at this level yet — not by a long shot. Still, the band is selling out most of their club dates, and is greeted rapturously by fans. Upcoming shows in the UK and the US with Super Furry Animals will see the band reaching an even larger audience. “That’ll be really cool,” says Burtch. “Super Furry Animals had us come out and open for them in the UK in 1998, before anyone knew who we were out there. We’ve been friends with them since then. And that was the first time we’d played big places, with proper sound equipment and all that. So we owe them a huge debt.”

Of course, the current tour was almost over before it began. During the band’s spring stint as the opening act for Pete Yorn, guitarist Fairchild was literally run over by a tour bus carrying production equipment. After a few too many post-concert libations, he stumbled down some stairs and found himself beneath the wheels of the 18-wheeler. Miraculously, Fairchild only broke some small bones under his shoulder, and was onstage performing (with his arm in a sling) a few days later. “Hey, shit happens,” says Burtch of the incident. “Sometimes you almost die, sometimes you don’t. You put a bunch of skateboarders in a bus and tell ‘em ‘You can’t do this and you can’t do that, and you have to be back here at one o’clock’ — you’re fuckin’ asking for it. Shit happens…”

Herbie Hancock & Mwandishi - Strata Concert Gallery, Detroit, Michigan, February 20, 1972

I’ve probably said it before here, but I’m mystified as to why there haven’t been more (any?) archival releases from Herbie Hancock’s vaults. Especially from his early 1970s Mwandishi era … like this epic Detroit performance, for example. It rules — and hey, they put out a fantastic Mingus collection from the same venue a few years back. The show kicks off with a monumental, 40+-minute rendition of “Hidden Shadows,” which would appear the next year on Sextant. It’s a wild ride, the band finding total unity, riding a neverendless groove, taking you higher and higher.

Herbie Says: We try not to push the music any certain way, we just let it happen the way it happens. I’ve played with some fantastic soloists but there’s a thing that I think is more important than solos. I think music is supposed to make you high, to give you an experience so that you can transport yourself from wherever you are and that whole physical contact with the world so that you can gain a little more consciousness-inner consciousness. I think it would be impossible for most of my early music to do that, just from the very nature of the material; but my new music is set up to do just that. It’s set up to make you high.

Sonic Youth - Tivoli, Utrecht, Netherlands, June 29, 1993

We’re getting deeper and deeper into the 1990s on our #SonicSummer expressway through Sonic Youth’s live life. By the time the summer of ‘93 rolled around, the band appeared to have grown tired (for the moment anyway) of their most recent albums — Goo tunes are absent entirely and Dirty is generally under-represented during this set in Utrecht. Instead, SY take the opportunity to debut a fair amount of their next album, which was well underway — it even had a title at this point, announced by Thurston: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.

As is usually the case with in-progress new material for Sonic Youth, the music is more or less firmly in place — the lyrics less so. The verses of Experimental’s eventual big single, “Bull In The Heather,” are just Kim intoning “Ten, twenty, thirty, forty …” But that sweet Steve Shelley beat is firmly in place.

Elsewhere, SY dig back into their now quite big back catalog, finding some gems to dust off: “Secret Girl,” “Pacific Coast Highway,” “Stereo Sanctity” and “Total Trash” among them. I especially love the seething version of “Flower,” Kim howling over a furious drone. Like our show from last year, Lee Ranaldo doesn’t take any lead vocals here, but he sounds absolutely killer on guitar here, his harsh/beautiful tones leading the way; he’s particularly rad on “Starfield Road.”

Following this European tour, Sonic Youth would take an extended break from touring, barely playing live at all in 1994 …

Bandcamp | Merch | Concert Chronology

From the Doom & Gloom Archives

The Band - The Music Inn, Lenox, Massachusetts, September 26, 1976

I’m trying to will some of that autumn feeling into existence by listening to this late-September Band gig, just about 45 years ago — listen to the rice when the wind blows ‘cross the water. In a few short months, The Band would be dancing its Last Waltz, but they all sound as good as ever at the Music Inn, as captured on a very nice audience tape. Danko in particular is on fire, vocally and instrumentally, and the mix gives us a little bit more of Manuel’s piano as a treat. Some relatively rarely played tunes, too — the opening “Ring That Bell,” “Twilight,” and a version of “Forbidden Fruit” that threatens to get a little bit jammy at the end. Stay til the very end to hear a dog in the crowd barking his approval as the final curtain closes …

Photo: Patrick Burke

Currently Reading: Trouble Is My Business by Raymond Chandler