Futurebirds Take Flight

ONE of our favorite newish bands, here at The Misread City's sleekly refurbed listening room, is Futurebirds, from Athens, Ga. Some listeners compare them to My Morning Jacket and Crazy Horse -- I certainly here that, too. But to me they're a mix between the two great chapters of Athens music -- the southern shamble of early R.E.M. (especially the echoey Fables-era band) and the neo-psych Elephant 6 bands like Olivia Tremor Control.

Photo Jason Thrasher

Of course, a lot of groups have smart influences. But these guys have the songs as well, complete with great melodies and hooks.

Here's their song, Virginia Slims, from their record Baba Yaga (Fat Possum). It takes a minute to build, but ends up in power-pop heaven.

Catch Futurebirds at the Echo this Tuesday night.

Robyn Hitchcock and Joe Boyd at Largo

THURSDAY night sees one of the season's most intriguing bills: Joe Boyd, who produced folk-rock gods like Richard Thompson and Nick Drake and wrote a wonderful book about his early years, which I described here, will appear at Largo with neo-psych demigod Robyn Hitchcock. Both will appear -- with Boy's reading and telling stories, Hitchcock playing the songs described -- at the Largo at the Coronet.


(Both men have a pretty strong R.E.M. connection, as well.)


I've been into Hitchcock's surreal, chiming music since I was a teenager in the mid-'80s, and it was a pleasure to speak to him a few years back for this story:

"I tend to sing about things I like the look of," he says earnestly. "I sing about segmented creatures, like crabs and lobsters, wasps and bees, things with a head, thorax and abdomen -- that kind of thing."

"And imagining, if people were transparent, what their digestive systems would look like, or what it would be like seeing babies gestating inside other humans. Sometimes the whole thing horrifies me, other times it's rapturously beautiful."


Let me again commend Boyd's chronicle White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. I concur with Brian Eno that this is one of the best books about music in ages, and its charting of the social rupture of the period is among the best I've ever seen.


Photo courtesy Yep Rock

R.E.M., Britfolk and White Bicycles

A lot of us are excited that Fables of the Reconstruction -- R.E.M.'s most poetic and mysterious album -- has just gotten a deluxe reissue complete with remaster and new material. Much of the weird, echoey Southern Gothic mojo on that 1985 album came from Britfolk producer Joe Boyd, and I'm reminded how great Boyd's memoir of the '60s and early '70s, White Bicycles, is.

In fact. I will second the statement of Brian Eno, who calls it "a gripping piece of social history and the best book about music I've read in years."

I knew Boyd's name for his work with Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson, Vashti Bunyan and Nick Drake. Boyd was an American college boy who went London while very young and helped invent British folk rock. He met Drake when the sad poet was a lost Cambridge student. He also ran the London psychedelic club UFO which helped birth Pink Floyd.

What I hadn't known was that Boyd got his start as a teenager -- whose friends had discovered that the great Lonnie Johnson was working as a cook in a Philadelphia hotel, tracked him down and invited him to play a house party in Princeton before they left for college.

Within a few years he was accompanying Muddy Waters and Coleman Hawkins through Europe as part of the early '60s boom in blues festivals... And Boyd became stage manager for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival at which Dylan notoriously plugged in. The book puts him close to much of the action, in a kind of Zelig-like way.

Of course, all of this would be a kind of glorified name-dropping if Boyd could not write and observe so well. White Bicycles is as good a document as I know on the social revolution of the '60s -- the utopian dreams and musical possibilities as well as the drug casualties and damage done by kook religions.

In any case, here is one book where I am quite eager for the sequel.

Let me close with Fables for a second. This was the first R.E.M. record whose release I was aware of -- and I remember the bizarre, muted beauty of songs like "Green Grow the Rushes" and "Maps and Legends" on the local alternative radio station, and the weirdly understated video for "Driver 8." It was around time I started to open my own taste up from the steady and fervent diet of Beatles-Stones-Dylan to the music of my own time.

And while R.E.M. went on to put out at least two records I feel strongly about, there's something on Fables they never captured again.