Monthly Archives: November 2021

Buffy Sainte-Marie has spent much of the last seven decades doing things people said she couldn’t do. Her youthful defiance comes to the fore more than once over the course of an hour’s conversation on what was—for her, in Hawaii—an extremely early morning. Her laughter is effusive, her joie de vivre inspiring as I cling to my coffee for dear life five time zones east. It’s not what you might expect of a self-identified recluse who lives “with a bunch of goats in the mountains,” but Sainte-Marie has made a career of defying expectations.

“I was told that I couldn’t be a musician,” she says. “I was told as a child, ‘You can’t be a musician because you can’t learn to read European music.’” At the same time, “I was told that I could not be indigenous. ‘You can’t be an Indian because there aren’t any more around here.’” She went home with a laugh and played “fake Tchaikovsky” or whatever she heard on the radio, “pretty happy just being [her]self.” You can still hear happiness in her voice, decades later. “I’m just like a kid who’s having fun,” she says—something she insists children naturally know how to do. “They don’t have to be told.”

But she did have a little help from her mother: “My mom told me when I was a kid that sometimes the grown-ups were wrong… She always told me that I could grow up and go find out for myself,” a refrain long-time listeners might recognize. “It was presented to me in that non-judgmental way, just, ‘You can go and find out.’ Not just music or indigenous issues, but whatever you want.” Exploration and open conversation would characterize the rest of Sainte-Marie’s career, which has spanned not only decades but a wide field of humanistic endeavors including music, visual art, activism, and education.

When I ask how she balances all her projects and personas, she makes it sound like the simplest thing in the world: “It all goes together,” she says. “My world and my lives… they all make sense together.” From the outset, her motivations have rarely wavered. Despite being the first person or first woman or first indigenous woman to do a lot of things (listed on her extensive Wikipedia page), she’s never had “any hunger of innovation” or any desire “to get a hit record for Buffy.” Instead, the unifying themes of her work are content and communication. Of her career as a folk singer, she explains, “These are not protest songs. We don’t really have a name for the opposite of a protest song. A protest song lays out what the problem is but there’s another kind of song that’s about the solution.”

Read More »

Sun City Girls weren’t girls and didn’t hail from Sun City (it’s an unincorporated retirement community in their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona). They were post-hardcore Three Stooges turned amateur ethnomusicologists, and over the course of their long career produced some of the most idiosyncratic, dada-damaged music of our time.

Sun City Girls get labeled an experimental band and I suppose they were, if you call making impossible to label music for their own enjoyment an experiment. It wasn’t like they were standing around a particle accelerator in white lab coats.

Sun City Girls produced enough studio, live, cassette, soundtrack and compilation recordings to give Mark E. Smith a run for his money, and I can’t think of any two that sound the same. You can detect traces of other bands in their music–the Minutemen, fellow Arizonans the Meat Puppets, Frank Zappa, the Butthole Surfers, Captain Beefheart, and Sun Ra all come to mind.

But unlike the above-named they spent their career producing absurdly twisted pastiches of folk music from around the globe. The Middle East, Southeast Asia, Haiti, Mexico, South America–there were very few places they didn’t look to for inspiration. But it would be a mistake to lump Sun City Girls in with the Paul Simons and David Byrnes of the world—their music was lo-fi, off-the-cuff and twisted, and there was no way they were going to win any Grammys.

Read More »

Celebrating Buck Dharma on his 74th birthday. —Ed.

Good news! You don’t have to fear the Reaper! Blue Öyster Cult were only joking!

For years morons like yours truly were so wrapped up in Blue Öyster Cult’s ethos (evil as career choice) that we never caught on to the (manifestly obvious in hindsight) fact that the band was pulling our collective leg!

That’s right. Here we hayseeds thought they were, like, a bunch of Satan-worshipping Aleister Crowleys dabbling in Nazism and S&M when in reality they were just a coupla nice Jewish boys from Long Island sniggering down their collective sleeve at the hard-rock-loving suckers retarded enough to take them seriously. As occasional lyrics contributor and full-time rock critic Richard Meltzer said of the boys’ music, “This is really hard rock comedy.”

I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m some kind of terminal moron; I caught on to the joke a long, long time ago, and would have never fallen for it in the first place if I hadn’t been spending all my time smoking pot with pig farmers. Pig farmers and bikers make up the bulk of the Blue Öyster Cult fan base, and by that I don’t mean to imply pig farmers and bikers are stupid. Most of them are in on the joke too, and love it, because not only were Blue Öyster Cult funny back in 1972, they were one hotshit boogie band writing great songs that sounded even better after you drank a bottle of Wild Turkey and popped a few Placidyl.

Blue Öyster Cult’s eponymous 1972 debut may have less laughs than some of their later LPs, but it’s heavy on screaming diz-busters, inspiring anthems, a lil taste of the rock ’n’ roll apocalypse, and one very cool psychedelic threnody to a foot. In short it’s one helluva rock record, and well deserved the plaudits it received from just about every critical luminary (Christgau, Bangs, etc.) of the time.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | The same year of his Oscar®-nominated performance in Training Day, Ethan Hawke made his full-length film directorial debut with Chelsea Walls, starring Kris Kristofferson, Uma Thurman, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Robert Sean Leonard. A fan of Wilco, Hawke approached Jeff Tweedy about scoring the film, and Tweedy agreed.

Around this time, Tweedy had collaborated with musician and producer Jim O’Rourke (Sonic Youth, Stereolab) for a special live performance. As fate would have it, O’Rourke had been working with Glenn Kotche, and O’Rourke introducing Tweedy to Kotche would lay the groundwork for the trio’s work together on the debut album by their band, Loose Fur. Tweedy also asked Kotche to work with him on an improvised soundtrack to the movie he had agreed to score. The relationships moved past Loose Fur and the Chelsea Walls soundtrack. Wilco was in the process of a creative sea change, the result of which would be the modern-day masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Kotche joined Wilco and O’Rourke mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The soundtrack to Chelsea Walls featured improvised instrumentals by Tweedy and Kotche, as well as vocal performances by Leonard (whom Hawke met when they both worked on the film Dead Poet’s Society), Steve Zahn (Reality Bites, That Thing You Do!), jazz legend “Little” Jimmy Scott, plus contributions from Billy Bragg, and Wilco themselves.

Two decades later, this influential soundtrack returns, not only with two previously unissued bonus tracks, but for the first time as a double-vinyl LP, including an online exclusive colored vinyl variant. Bonus tracks include Leonard’s performance of Wilco’s “Promising” previously only available in the film, and an extended version of Tweedy and Kotche’s “Finale.”

Read More »

The kids I knew growing up wouldn’t have known what to make of the name Van der Graaf Generator. Seriously, what the fuck was that all about? Boston made sense. Ditto Grand Funk Railroad and Bad Company. But Van der Graaf Generator? It sounded like something you’d use to recharge a Dutchman.

Van der Graaf Generator were an English progressive rock band, which is to say a fustian group of musical blowhards I’d love to see flattened by a massive chunk of flaming space junk. And I listened to their 1971 LP Pawn Hearts only to strengthen my conviction that progressive rock is the worst creation in human history. People will cite thousands of more insidious inventions, but progressive rock is the only one capable of making smart people stupid that doesn’t involve a rock to the head.

But a strange thing happened as I listened to Pawn Hearts, preparatory to consigning it to the cut-out bins in Hell. It matched every feature in my progressive rock identikit, yet I found myself compelled, like a mad ship captain irresistibly drawn to the rocky shoals of wrack and ruin, to listen to it. I cannot describe how demoralizing this was. Would I soon find myself listening with pleasure to ELP’s Pictures at an Exhibition? Would my family be reduced to locking me in the attic, a musical Elephant Man they dare not allow in public lest my horrible tastes in music be a disgrace to them all?

Don’t get me wrong; there’s plenty to dislike about Pawn Hearts. Hugh Banton’s neo-classical organ brings to mind the Phantom of the Opera on an off-day. Peter Hammill emotes like a bad Shakespearean actor. David Jackson’s pastoral flute should be put out to pasture. In short, there are parts galore when the band sounds like some kind of mutant sea creature that has dragged itself from the sea of pretension to devour rock and roll whole.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | As a former music journalist (for Creem and Rolling Stone among other periodicals), director Cameron Crowe has always put his heart and soul into the soundtracks of his films. So, it’s no wonder that the most ambitious of all his films, Vanilla Sky, sported the most far-ranging and masterful of all of his scores.

The film itself was a waking dream, subject to various interpretations; the soundtrack, too, explored shifting moods and shades, but always maintaining the surreal tone and aesthetic of the film, with a glittering line-up (R.E.M., Radiohead, Paul McCartney, Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan) of artists. The result was breathless praise for the soundtrack (the New York Times called it “a music masterpiece”) and an Academy Award nomination.

It is, quite simply, one of the greatest “mix-tapes” a film director has ever created (with some help from soundtrack Co-Producer Danny Bramson and Crowe’s then-wife, Nancy Wilson of Heart); and, for its 20th anniversary, we have created a custom gatefold cover for the 2-LP release and pressed up 1,500 copies in white with orange swirl vinyl. A sublime listening and visual experience awaits.

“Vinyl has always been something we’ve viewed as just plain cool, and arguably the best way to listen to music.”

“That opinion started forming after watching movies like High Fidelity, Empire Records, and Pirate Radio, but really solidified when we learned about the level of time and care that goes into the process of manufacturing records. The feel of it—the size, the weight, the artwork, the sound—all demands a higher sense of respect that streaming music will never have.

But it wasn’t really until the first years of our marriage that we really experienced vinyl in the way we thought it ought to be experienced. That way being how we pictured hippies in the ’60s and ’70s listening—getting high, dancing and singing along, and fully submerging ourselves in the music.

My grandparents had just moved into a retirement community and their old console record player needed a home. Nicole and I lived in a basement apartment at the time and jumped on the opportunity to add it to our humble abode. Thankfully my grandparents kept it in such good condition all those years that it really worked like a charm, sounding warm and vintage and still so clear.

Read More »