|
|
|
Podcast Notes Archive
September 2005
The Kerrville Folk Festival 2004.
The 2004 Kerrville Folk Festival was dear old Tejas at its hottest and most spontaneously combustible. At my sweltering sound check the afternoon of the show it was 104 sticky, unrelentingly humid degrees out there on the edge of the desert.
You can run, but you can't hide. And there ain't an air conditioner big enough to cool your car, much less the outdoor backstage jammed with my music buddies. We all periodically posed like scarecrows in front of a fan the size of an ice truck. Melting.
At the show three hours later, I bashed out some chords to the opening number as I sauntered back into the conflagration of the main stage. To add coals to the fire, there must have been forty high wattage stage lights focused on the microphone at stage center. By the third song I was so inflamingly involved the sweat was dripping...in my ears. What the hell else, so to speak, was I gonna do for an encore. As we learned how to do it in the bad old days, my smile just got bigger in the blaze.
I wear stage clothes now that don't show perspiration. So much the better. The photographers and the flotilla of fans on the front row were encouraging, and supportive right through my roasting as the sun going down burned a poker hot glare into the hill country. I pretended for a scorching moment between songs it looked like the lemon in a tall glass
of iced tea.
Vince
Many thanks to Mo Humble and Awesome Disc for recording and producing this show at Kerrville in 2004.
If you would like a copy of the unedited version of this set, and at the same time make a contribution to New Orleans musicians please visit
All profits will be donated directly to the New Orleans Musician Foundation.
© 2004 Awesome Disc. All rights reserved.
October 2005
England, part 1
November 2005
England, part 2
England was the real deal. Six dates from London to the Isle of Wight. More than six encores. Never had been there before. It's lovely to do what you say you can do from five thousand miles away. Make folks smile you don't even know. Even when the soundman forgets you're onstage.
In London an inner-city urchin sound dude charged me 20 pounds to record my show, on a DAT machine I brought. When I played it back it was distorted and unusable. Sometimes you can do everything you can...but you can't get anything done. Sounds like a curiosity of physics. Ha! I think it was Waylon Jennings that said, "I MADE every mistake in music." Onward through the fog.
At my stop at Fulston Manor, however, I lucked into a beautifully musical community in Kent. Alan Brookes, the excellent promoter, you liked the more you got to know him, the pleasure of a musically hip crowd. It was a concert setting for a show on a par with the best of them I have done over many moons now. If you play music that is about who you are, where the words are the important part, you want this gig.
One with a digitally game young recordist/soundman, Richard. He'd probably never seen a DAT machine as old as mine before. Just out of high school and looking for work, he taped the couple of sets that will run on LIVE MUSIC'S COOL AT LIVE MUSIC SCHOOL for the next two months. The worst thing on the tape is me. Hats off, pal. Whoever gigs ya will be lucky to get ya. Be like catchng a big fish.
The moral of this story. Even when you're an ocean, a couple of mountain ranges, and some downtown grab 'em, stab 'em bar from where you're used to if you give 'em a chance
the kids are just alright.
Vince
Fred Eaglesmith's "Roots on the River" is a fine outdoor festival near Bellows Falls, Vermont. Charlie Hunter and their crew outdid themselves hosting this solar powered concert.
January 2006
Windham Hotel
June 10, 2005
Our December '05 podcast was my set on June 9th, for the Fred Eaglesmith festival, "Roots On The River", outdoors on the Connecticut River near Bellows Falls, Vermont. I played on a solar powered stage, run by the exceptional, and longtime music promoter, Charlie Hunter.
On June 10th I played with several other songwriters
in an old hotel in downtown Bellows Falls.
For more on these shows and Vince's 2005 dates see his new Journal #32
February 2006
Anderson Fair 1st set
October 15, 2005
March 2006
Anderson Fair 2nd set
October 15, 2005
Guy Schwartz and I have saddled up and rode rough shod all over Tejas in the last couple of years. We've done gigs from Gruene to Galveston and back, and we've already worn out at least one guitar player. Besides being the best spirit of my bunch, ya gotta hand it to the "man with the blue hair." Anyone that can keep me AND his wife smiling from the Denny's to the gig has got my admiration.
And that's the bottom line when you're out on the road just trying to get back home with some money in your pocket. In addition to one of my oldest friends having this professional, enviable attitude and the talent to laugh about it from time to time, he's a GREAT MUSICIAN.
I always thought I should be
more like him.
vince
"I Need You Now" is from a period so early in my work it's hard to remember it. It was reminiscent of the clean finger picker, James Taylor. I always liked good finger picking. I probably played this song for an era...or two.
"Take My Chances" was the encore getter in those blow it out your a__ days. I mean, living down the block from the club in the Montrose you probably didn't live like a rock 'n' roll star, so you might as well...live like a rock 'n' roll star. Someone said Elvis was the star ELVIS, a long time before our mothers made a star out of....Elvis. I believe it. That was a cool part of those stormy years, you were who you wanted to be. All the time. You might not be what most of the world wanted, but you could be most all you could handle. At any one time.
"All Through My Days" was what you played AFTER you got the encore.
"Where the Late Night Crowd is Led" was a steady performing theme I still play.
"Even Cowboys Get the Blues" was inspired by Reno X. Nevada. He was a DJ at KSML who got his teeth knocked out at the 1st Annual Truckee, California Rodeo by a timber chopping dude that apparently spent a little too much time above 9,000 feet. I still got the button.
May/June 2006 - Held Over
The 70's, Part 2
Lazy Anne - this was one of the stalwarts of my early repertoire. An anthemic lament of lost love, complete with false ending.
All The World Knows - a reconditioned rock 'n' roller. An electric guitar part written on an acoustic guitar.
Guacamole Salad - Ahem.
Osso's Song - about the dog I left in Tahoe. I always thought I should'a been more like him.
Copacabana Song - Craig Hillis' arrangement, lavish vocals, Robin Bryan's studio in Tyler, Texas. ZZ Top recorded Rio Grande Mud, their first album, there.
July 2006
The Real Deal #1
Vince with Michael Hearne
When I moved to Austin from Houston in the early '70's Bill & Bonnie Hearne and I worked every club from Armadillo World Headquarters to the Waterloo Ice House. Mike was their guitar-slinging break player. And here we are many miles later in this month's installment of LIVE MUSIC'S COOL AT LIVE MUSIC SCHOOL from the stage of The Real Deal from Santa Fe.
Yours truly, Vince Bell,
and from Taos, New Mexico, Michael Hearne http://www.michaelhearne.com/,
and from Santa Fe, New Mexico The Bill Hearne Trio with Bonnie Hearne http://www.billhearne.com/.
The songs were recorded at The Real Deal, my house concert series in Santa Fe, NM.
The Bill Hearne Trio with Cathy Faber and Bob Goldstein
August 2006
Sal & Vince - The Real Deal
Music is a wondrous thing here at The Real Deal. Just when I thought it couldn't get any better after The Bill Hearne Trio in May, the July show featured Sal Valentino, the lead singer of The Beau Brummels. I've never been more impressed than with his ingenious take on acoustic guitar and vocal. He can blow you down with Dylan's "Isis", or Neil Young's "Long May You Run," the anthem to a favored old car. His own compositions are excellent, and equally as compelling.
And Sal is VERY cool.
For days he and I sat on the back portal drinking black coffee in the morning and hard alcohol in the afternoon. It was like sitting with an encyclopedia of the music we've been listening to from 1963 to today. It was unbelievable how much music business he knew of most anybody you ever heard of.
He said, "When we had hits on the radio with the Brummels in San Francisco, one of the new, young bands on our label was called The Emergency Crew, you know who they were?"
"No pal, who were they?" I couldn't of guessed.
And he returned with a smile, "The Greatful Dead."
Jeez.
It was like sitting among the archives of Rolling Stone magazine. Except he knew the people he was talking about personally, 'cause they all wanted to know HIM. HIS band came before all of it. Now that's a perspective.
I'm bettin' it's not the last time I see him. We'd like to play songwriter in the round again in other towns, but at the same time we're talking to a fellow in Santa Fe that could do us a show. Stay tuned.
The next night, Sal, Tommy Elskes and I did a bunch of video with Austin City Limits ex, Christopher Wright, on The Real Deal stage. We got eighteen songs in the can, and all we need for the first edition of a new video series, The Real Deal Live.
When Sal and his wife, Catherine, left I wrote:
"What an incredible fellow you are, Sal. And what an incredible woman you are to Sal, Catherine. You two are the best. And it's damn good to know ya. I met you in the sixties on an AM radio in my mother's fire-engine-red Mercury Monterey convertible, Sal. I didn't meet you again till the 2000's. Let's not wait as long
for the next visit.
vince
October - November 2006
Christmas Song
This Podcast is from another lifetime of Vince, and I performed it at Anderson Fair during the Christmas season in 1974. In those early days, music was as much a social thing we grew up in as it was the discipline we ongoingly learned. It was a time when going to Anderson Fair [Houston, TX] for lunch was one of the only things we did while trying to write our first ten songs.
My pal Reb Smith rode his bike to the Fair, carying his guitar in a cardboard case, and play for tips at the spaghetti lunches. Rain or shine. We were puppies yearning to become poets.
In this wild talking blues I mention the names of everybody at the Fair. Everyone that came through the door that year. Many inside jokes, much about us Montrose people who were Fair people too. This was when the neighborhoods were ours. If we'da lit out running in any direction even the police couldn't catch us. Lotta spirit, lotta friends to play to back when we were young, drunk, and hot to go.
So this is a kind of roast of my fellow Fair types of that era.
When I wrote it only god and vince bell knew what the hell I was talking so much about,
now only god knows.
vince
December 2006
Texas Radio
Just before I wrote my first book, One Man's Music, I lived on Bowie Street with Sarah, three cats, and a dog. One morning I sauntered over and did an interview to promote my first CD, Phoenix, with JD Rose at KFAN radio across highway 290 from the gingerbread house where we lived. JD was an excellent interviewer.
I still have Sarah, now four cats, and a dog. And I still write books and songs, make record albums, and play music all over the planet. And something that still shines from that ambitious time is that KFAN show I did in little Fredericksburg, Texas. To quote the late Jim Morrison, I played "Texas Radio" with a real fine disc jockey. And I keep it right alongside
that first CD
in iTunes.
vince
January 2007
FRITZ AND THE HELICOPTER WIRE
The CD, Phoenix, was my first. An album characterized by its incomparable musical characters. On this out-take of "60 Million Buffalo," check out the jug played by Fritz Richmond. He had played with the Kweskin Jug band, and later John Sebastian, among others. Not the 13th Floor Elevators, but with a sense of humor typically Fritz that charms this cut. Fritz stood out in the wild bunch of players that were Phoenix. No one kinder, no one better. Easy going, excellent. You never got enough of Fritz. He was, perhaps, the best musician on an album of the best musicians on this side of the planet gathered up by my producer and pal, Bob Neuwirth.
Fritz was first and formostly a washtub player since he was a kid. On the cut, "Frankenstein," he played a washtub bass of his own design that he had developed over the years. Special tub from a special store, special stick from a special tree, and, of course, a special wire, if you wanna call it that...from a helicopter. It looked like a bass piano string on steroids. Thick as your little finger and round wound. It'd take the hide off an alligator. You wouldn't have ruts in the ends of your fingers after playing this homemade instrument, you'd have SHORTER fingers.
So, he played the washtub bass wearing a leather glove with nickels slotted into the insides of the fingers. As the nickels wore down through their centers when he slid up and down the string he would drop another into one of the small pockets he sewed into the glove
and carry on.
vince
February 2007
PANCHO, LEFTY...AND ME
Townes Van Zandt, David Rodriguez, and I had known each other since the early '70's and a little coffeehouse on Richmond Avenue in Houston, Texas called Sand Mountain. The folk club served cherry cokes with whipped cream on top, and potato chips. I had to play there for six weeks, Monday through Thursday, for no money 'til the owner, Mrs. Carrick, would hire me...for a Thursday night.
On this recording, twenty years later, the three of held court in a theatre in the Rice University area of Houston. It was surely a miracle to be in the same town and have musical friends like these you could have so much in common with so many years later.
This performance was the only time my mother got a chance to hear and meet the good fellow that named a kid after me
and Wrecks Bell.
vince
March 2007
RESTLESS
Wash Hamilton is a great Texas bass player, and has been since the '70's with a big, beautiful voice to match. I've known him since the bad old days in the Montrose of Houston. He's always been as good a musician as they come, and humble as most wished they were. After a while, you can tell the really good musicians like Wash. It's not what they play, it's what they don't play.
This podcast features a booking tape we made with Tom Roudebush of Analog Records in the late '80's. Wash is keeping the rhythm section together on my Austin band, "Restless," with his bass guitar and background vocals. Ronn Dixon is on drums, Abel Josephson is on break guitar and vocals with Wash, and I'm in there on a couple of instruments. We're all...following Wash.
Lemme let you in on something, in a lost kind of way when we all were young at the discipline of music, we dreamed we were gonna meet, and even like the personalities we would come in contact with along the way. Well, so much for that shit.
So I'll tell ya, one of the best reasons there ever was to start playing music was you just might get in a band with a musician like Wash Hamilton. The only thing better than one of him, was two of him. And you know -- all these bands and scenes and musics later -- the best reason to KEEP playing music are those same folks just like my pal,
Wash.
vince
Where The Late Night Crowd is Led is a song he wrote 30 years ago or so, and recorded in the late '80's on The Sun and Moon and Stars, The Musical. There are three versions here: from the 1970's, the 1980's and 2007.
Read Journals #35 and #36
for Vince's description of recording the new CD, Recado.
Here Vince looks at one song, Done That Too, and some of the production choices that were made during it's recording, mixing and final version.
July 2007
Vince and Charles Bukowski...being reasonable.
When I lived in Lake Tahoe, California I saw Charles Bukowski read his poetry in a North Beach Gymnasium down in San Francisco. He got a well deserved encore. He was gruff like he had a sore tooth and was late for a dentist appointment. He was worshipped by a full house of us a third his age.
The snippet of a podcast this month is of me getting an encore at the Outpost Performance Space in Albuquerque, NM thirty years later. So I proceeded to relate the particulars behind the accolade for that Beat poet so many years before. As I finished explaining a couple made for the door to be the first into the parking lot...
So, it's the 2nd of July in Santa Fe and Eric Taylor calls from his place in Texas. He asks what I'm doing for the 4th.
I say, "¿who wants to know?"
And he says, "Well, come to Houston and help me record a tune at Rock's. Fromholz is a go. We'll put a little FlatLINErs on my latest CD."
Good enough.
I show up in that bayoutown at Hobby Airport a day later. It's raining like it always is raining there. Houston, the town I grew up in and learned how to play the guitar in...the first time. I check in to the DoubleTree Hotel downtown overlooking Allen Parkway. The parkway has been blocked off for preparations for the Fourth of July. The west facing wall of my 17th floor room is all water-beaded glass and looks down on the festive location.
Bob Felder picks me and my guitar up the next day in yet another noontime rain in a Toyota pickup truck the size of Manhattan. We laugh it up till we pull into Rock Romano's driveway in the Heights. Bob has said he doesn't quite know where the studio is all the way here. I think he finds it by sense of smell.
Like Fromholz said to me once, "the fun don't start till we get there."
We park under a big tree. The drops of water that fall on us are bigger than the raindrops that day. Glub, glub in the Calcutta of the western hemisphere. Inside below the roof and above the mold are Rock, Eric, Susan, and Alex smiling.
Among the sound baffles and mic stands there are posters, playbills, and paintings all over the walls in a very busy looking art space crowded with the most unpredictable things scattered in no particular order door to door. In a corner of high dollar mics, cords, and music stands is a computer...and a shovel. Underneath the vividly colored collection of photos like a New Orleans French Quarter burial procession is a grand piano, somewhere.
Rock works quick as a hiccup. Dashing here, pushing sliders there, saying "Hello, long time, and ¿how are ya?" in mid-step. He never touches the ground. And he's an excellent sound engineer, as well as the band leader and bass player I've known since the 1970's.
Then Steven and Jenny show up. There are more hugs and hellos till we three dead-eyed hombres chasing the same star sit ourselves across from one another and sing a verse apiece of "Rally 'Round The Flag." Steven, Eric and me. Good day for it despite the deluge that makes the walkway into the studio look like an East Texas slough.
When it's all said and done everyone at the studio got to sing chorus style. And some of the best we did for our buddy, Eric, may well lie in between the notes. FlatLINErs are, plain and simple, funnerthanhell.
So, wham bam thank you, ma'am. Bob and I jump back in the cab of the aircraft carrier with mud flaps and head back to the hotel before we realize that I forgot to get my boarding pass for the next day on Rock's computer. Fudge.
Then it dawns on Bob, "I've got friends in this neighborhood somewhere. They've got a computer. Call 'em up! Maybe I can find where they live too." I think Bob just likes to say that.
In short order, I'm riding in the window seat for my flight back to Albuquerque tomorrow. Y'gotta love Bob.
When I return to room 1724 the rain is actually slowing down to a trickle. The wall of my room becomes invisible. Folks by the parking lot begin to filter into the western edge of downtown. After just a moment there begin to be lines of people parading into the roped asphalt of the six lane parkway. Even more preposterously, the rain that has been falling for
months stops altogether like it was a stage prop intended to disappear just as the show begins.
Below me there's confusion aplenty street-side, with fleets of folks mucking about, filing into the fireworks display for the city. Others are putting the final touches on stages for the music. Some are setting up and running a carnival of booths lining Allen Parkway for a half a mile.
There's a volleyball court several feet deep of sand in a grassy field next to Buffalo Bayou. The competitors are hard charging women in tiny, two piece bathing suits. No quarter asked, no quarter given.
Music starts to come from those half dozen stages scattered from interstate 45 to Taft Blvd. There's cotton candy and soda, T-shirts, and hotdogs. There are dragsters from the car companies, and tanks from the military. There's a line of Port-a-Pottys a block long. Everything is on display and everyone wants to talk about it. The cops are in Stetsons and cowboy boots riding horses, or in helmets and shorts on bicycles. They look more like Tour De France racers than the law west of the Pecos. It seems like everyone there is already enjoying themselves.
As the sun goes down I return to my room and crank the AC down to a Rocky Mountain temperature. 65 degrees, no humidity. I prop myself up faced into the glass wall with my cell phone at the ready. As the first cannonade of fireworks thunders through the empty streets of downtown I begin to snap frames. I didn't stop shooting photos, as fast as I can, until the whole of the display was over and done 45 minutes later. When it stopped I had used within 5% of the total memory of my Razer. 73 photos.
I went down to the hotel fern bar to grab a nightcap after a great little session with some of my oldest pals followed by ¿who'd of guessed it? front row fireworks on the 4th of July. I reached for the Corona beer chaser and noticed
my thumbs ached.
vince
Over the last almost two years of podcasts, I've run various out-takes from my CDs. This month it's "For Once In My Life," a rowdy little number Robin Eaton and I initially chose for Texas Plates, featuring Maura O'Connell. Funny what ends up on the cutting room floor.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Subscribe to Vince's
podcasts by copying
this link and entering
it into your podcast
client.
(iTunes 4.9 + compliant)
 Photo by Arthur Woods
|
|
|
