Bottoms up for Larry Graham

By Al Tays

Al Tays is the ace
of bass -- not to mention
rhythm and lead --
Sundays at the Sanctuary.

Here's wishing a happy 65th birthday to Larry Graham, former bass player for Sly and the Family Stone and founder of Graham Central Station. Graham is the baritone-voiced singer of the "Dance to the Music" lyric "I'm gonna add some bottom/so that the dancers just won't hide" followed by his signature slap-bass technique. Graham is considered a pioneer of slap bass, which is familiar even to non-music fans from the "Seinfeld" audio.

I've loved "Dance to the Music," with its one-at-a-time introduction of the band's instruments, since it came out in 1968 on Epic Records. Interestingly, the band didn't care for it. They thought it was a sellout, and they weren't entirely wrong. The song came about because producer Clive Davis wanted something more commercially acceptable than the band's previous work.

He got it. "Dance to the Music" went to No. 8 on the Billboard Pop Singles Top 10.

Of course, you can't judge a song strictly by what it does on the charts. Does anyone need reminding that "Achy Breaky Heart" got to No. 4? Anyone? Bueller?

But as the lyrics say, "Dance to the Music" makes it "easy to move your feet." So get up and dig it, y'all, while "all the squares go home."

Bon fires

We were going to write a few simple words about homeboy Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, whose mystical musical path is one of the more fascinating success stories of recent years.  Then we read a bio on Amazon.com that stopped us in our tracks.  An excerpt:

First it was For Emma, Forever Ago. The soul in a refraction of icicles. A moment hanging like breath on air. And yet life – even still life – is not still. The story is not a story if it does not unravel. Your eyes you may cast backward, but the heart is locked in the chest and must beat forever forward. Bon Iver, Bon Iver is the frozen beast pressing upward from a loosening earth, one ear cocked to the echo of the ghost choir still singing, the other craving the martial call of drums tumbling, of thrum and wheeze. The desolation smoke has dissipated, cut with strips of brass. Celebration will not be denied, the cabinet cannot contain the rattle, there is meat on the bones.

A refraction of icicles? Thrum and wheeze?  OK, we're never going to get a gig writing online blurbs. We thought Vernon was just a guy who went to a Wisconsin cabin alone in winter, recorded the sublime music that would become the 2008 breakout album Emma, For Ever Ago, and almost instantly became as famous as an Impressionist painter. Now we learn with his latest release that he has unleashed "a frozen beast pressing forward from a loosening earth."  It's almost too much.

And all we really wanted to do this morning was pass along a list of Amazon.com's "Best Music of 2011 So Far"  and congratulate our man for cracking yet another Top 10 (we're pretty sure this will make many year-end lists as well):

1. Foster the People, Torches
2. The Civil Wars, Barton Hollow
3. Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues
4. Foo Fighters, Wasting Light
5. Adele, 12
6. The Decemberists, The King is Dead
7. Bon Iver, Bon Iver
8. My Morning Jacket, Circuital
9. Cut Copy, Zonoscope
10. Tune-yards, Whokill

The thrum and wheeze was recorded and mixed at a studio in Fall Creek, just up the road from our old hometown.  So close, and these days it seems, so far away.

Have your cake and eat it too

He sports tattoos, wears NBA jerseys, jocks at a Twin Cities rock station and still gets carded at bars. What's a nice kid like that doing in a joint like this? We shall see. Meet Robert "Woody" Nelson, the newest -- and easily the youngest -- former newspaper hipster to cue up at Six String Sanctuary. Good thing this isn't a No Smoking venue.

By Robert Nelson


A full Nelson: Our new guy fills the 18-35 demographic,
digs everything from jazz to hip-hop, and knows a good
dessert when he scoops one up. The real dish.


The Bailey’s Irish Cream Mousse Cake was delicious. Three layers of chocolate cake separated by two layers of mousse, and on top of a thin spread of rich chocolate frosting they sprinkled a thousand little curls of milk & white chocolate that looked like chopped walnuts and added a similar depth of texture. Truly magnificent.

Anyway, Jess and I were here for Sade.

Our ticket package included a couple drinks and some nosh at a pre-show cocktail party inside Target Center. The savory could have been better, but the liquor was hard and the aforementioned sweets, delectable, so by the time we found our seats we were primed for some good Soul. We’ve seen John Legend headline at a smaller venue. The guy doesn’t disappoint.

He played all the hits, one or two deep cuts, and a new tune, "Dreams," which, aside from the occasional swoon, hushed the arena. For a moment, we could have been at a Minnesota Timberwolves game. But when Legend turned it on again, going back and forth across the stage, to his piano, on top of it, he was dynamic. The man’s a pro. And his backup singers wore these flesh-toned tights that, at first glance, made them look straight out of King Magazine. This is what you get with a Grammy-winning undercard.

Now, Legend did his thing, but he wasn’t gonna steal the show. Did we say we were here for Sade? She is still more than capable of holding her own, and everything they say is true: sultry, sexy, even cute. And her voice. My god, her voice. Within the first few lyrics, you wonder how we haven’t achieved world peace or ended poverty or starvation. By then we’d all but forgotten about the cake.

Kudos to Jess for the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryt7PV2KcXc

We can dig it

It's been three years since Isaac Hayes died after suffering a stroke in Memphis, Tennessee. He had been on a treadmill and was just 10 days short of his 65th birthday. 

Now any day is a good day to celebrate the music and legacy of Hayes, as our buddy Bill "Psycho" Ward would attest. Bill delivers the best (well, most hilarious) white rendition of the "Theme From Shaft" we've ever heard.  He's also a big fan of South Park, which used the voice of Hayes for its Chef character and uncorked the hilarious "Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You)."  Click on this link to hear the song, which topped the U.K. singles chart.

But it was the sheer badness of "Theme From Shaft" -- which won an Academy Award for Hayes in 1972  -- that made a lasting imprint on our brains. We went to a lyrics site to refresh our memories and discovered there have been 383 hits this week alone for "Theme From Shaft." Three-hundred and eighty three hits. It's barely Wednesday.

Can you dig it?

Kinda fonda Wanda

The rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson was in the middle of a rip-roaring set at the Minnesota Zoo Saturday night when she paused to introduce her next number.

She said that when Jack White was producing her album The Party Ain't Over he asked her to record the Amy Winehouse song "You Know That I'm No Good." Jackson, 73, liked the the song but found some of the lyrics sexually explicit and age-inappropriate, a problem solved by White's rewrite of the offending second verse.

The song made the album, helping launch Jackson's spirited comeback, and Jackson became a fan of the troubled singer. She was planning to look up Winehouse during one of her frequent trips to England. Then Winehouse died suddenly at age 27.

"I'll never get to meet her," said Jackson, "but I'm going to keep playing this song."

Jackson and the Hillbilly Voodoo Dolls then launched into "You Know That I'm No Good" and the sky, as if on cue, opened up over the amphitheater.  Some people scurried for cover but we hung in there and took the soaking, knowing it was just one of those moments that can't be explained but must be experienced.

Front row, bright glow

David Bromberg put on a cosmic show Friday night in the venerable back room of McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica.  Our LA tuning fork, Al Tays, is still reverberating from the experience.

By Al Tays

What was I thinking, ignoring David Bromberg for more than 30 years? That's how long it had been since I last bought a Bromberg album (1975's Midnight on the Water), or attended a Bromberg show. Mrs. Assistant Music Blogger and I caught him at the New England Folk and Blues Festival in the early '80s, where I recall him being much more folk than blues and ending his set by telling the audience he had to get up early the next day to get to his violin-making class.

But all those years I kept my Bromberg albums (I also had Demon in Disguise, Wanted Dead or Alive and David Bromberg) until I no longer owned a turntable to play them on. Bromberg's covers of "Statesboro Blues," "Kansas City" and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," plus his own "Danger Man" went on my iPod.

Then I finally saw him again, Friday night in LA.

Playing two sold-out sets at the legendary McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, Bromberg brought his typically eclectic mix of humor, folk, country and blues to an enthusiastic crowd of about 150. How enthusiastic? Bromberg didn't even have to sing the chorus to "I Like to Sleep Late in the Morning." We sang it for him. Most of us even knew the proper place to interject "Fingers do your stuff," and "See, this is bass and treble at the same time."

Like George Harrison, with whom Bromberg wrote "The Holdup," Bromberg, 65, can still make a guitar gently weep. But there's nothing gentle about his electric work on "I Will Not Be Your Fool" from 1976's "How Late'll Ya Play' Til?" I still have the burn marks from sitting in the front row. Welcome back, David.

A songwriting son of a gun

It was about this time in 1964 that Roger Miller became a household name, soaring to the top of the Billboard country chart with "Dang Me." It was a crazy song for a crazy time, sandwiched as it was between Buck Owens' "Skip a Beat" and Jim Reeves' "I Guess I'm Crazy."

Miller was probably a touch crazy himself, enabling him to write other novelty hits such as "Chug-a-Lug," "You Can't Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd" (a personal favorite) and "Do-Wacka-Do." But we cannot forget some of his other less-zany classics like "King of the Road" and "Walkin' in the Sunshine." He was truly one of Nashville's greats.

One mystery surrounding Miller is the origin of "Dang Me," which he claimed he wrote in 4 minutes while holed up in a Phoenix hotel room. But Johnny Cash said the lyrics came to Miller while the buddies were visiting the Joshua Tree in California. Johnny claimed Miller just got out the car with a pencil and paper and "Dang Me" was as good as done.

With both legends long gone we'll probably never know the true story. Either way it's a clever, funny song and you should do yourself a favor today by giving it a listen.