Rick Moody and the Wingdale Community Singers

HERE at The Misread City, we’re longtime fans of Rick Moody’s novels (The Ice Storm), short stories (Demonology) and music writing (collected in On Celestial Music and posted generally on The Rumpus.) His admirers include Lydia Millett, Michael Chabon and fellow Puritan Thomas Pynchon.

But we’ve only recently caught up with Moody’s folk/modernist band the Wingdale Community Singers, whose latest album, Night, Sleep, Death, splices their music with (among other things) the poetry of Walt Whitman. Moody sings and plays guitar in a band that also includes Hannah Marcus and David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol.

We spoke to Moody about Skip James, his Taylor guitar, Saint Augustine, Brooklyn, Bob Dylan, the sounds in his head, and what the band means to a writer like him.

Let’s start out with some sense of your favorite artists within this country/folk tradition you guys seem to be plying. Who are a few who shaped your approach?

I think it has been revealed over the years that the guy all three of us love in equal measure is Leonard Cohen. Once you get past him, we diverge slightly. Hannah Marcus is really in an Old Time/Irish music kind of way, these days, and can tell you everything about Alice Gerrard or whoever is the hot new fiddler. Dave Grubbs knows a lot about innovative and experimental music, but has lately been doing guitar transcriptions of Gesualdo. He also loves, as I do, Skip James, and often seems to have such a breadth of early recorded music under his belt that one is surprised by his learning. But then he is a very brilliant guy. I probably have more mundane taste by comparison, in that I also like some well-known music in these areas. The Harry Smith anthology. Johnny Cash. John Fahey. Martin Carthy. Fairport Convention. Even Simon and Garfunkel. That guy from Minnesota. And I am not averse to contemporary acoustic music, either, if it is played with the requisite level of dread. Sam Amidon, for me, really gets to the dread sometimes. Jolie Holland. The Be-Good Tanyas.

We assume that a novelist who is in a band is some kind of showoff, charlatan, dilettante, or opportunist – it’s like the way Letterman used to be able to say “actor-singer” and we’d all bust into derisive laughter. Where did this come from?

Do you mean why is it so funny? I dunno! I always played music, lifelong, took voice lessons as a kid and so on. So for me it’s not a footnote in my life, but very central to my life. I just happen not to be as good at it as I am good at novel-writing. I understand this rubs people the wrong way, and I kept my musical interests under wraps for a long while. But I think creativity is sort of a general condition, not a genre-specific condition, and after a while it seemed stupid to me to pretend that I hadn’t given a lot of my life to music. I recommend not dismissing this work out of hand because of my writing, but I also recommend against listening to these records as the work of Rick Moody the novelist. This is the work of a band, with a very group-centered approach, and it’s a band that has been together a long time now (ten years). We know who we are and how we work together, and the individual identities are not as important in the Wingdales as they are outside of the Wingdales.

 

You’ve written that being in a band – and especially, singing harmony -- has improved your novel writing. Has it done anything to your music writing?

I’m a lot better music writer these days because I actually have experience in the studio and onstage. So I can, in fact, write from songwriting experience, and recording experience. Before I only wrote from listening experience, which, however passionate, is different from trying to write and play the stuff.  I am not a sophisticated musician—I will never score parts on a staff—but I am not a total idiot either, and that, I expect, makes me a better music-writer.

Your band has found an oddly resonant space halfway between the Carter Family and Richard and Linda Thompson. How does fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman fit into this?

Whitman is not the only guest lyricist on the new album. Andy Warhol is source material for Hannah’s song “So What?,” and Augustine of Hippo is cannibalized for “No Rest,” and one song is made entirely out of fortune cookie fortunes. The point was to disrupt the confessional lyric a little bit. We are trying not to be singer-songwriters in the usual way, we are trying to be songwriters in the more broad sense of the thing. Whitman is obviously a great touchstone of Brooklyn identity, and we are from Brooklyn, and we are all big readers, so Whitman is not a stretch. He’s someone we love, as we love Lightnin’ Hopkins or Karen Dalton. And why shouldn’t his songs be set to music? They happen to be very hard to set, because of scansion issues, but that’s part of why it was fun.

These days, nobody wants to be among those who booed Dylan at Newport. But is there something valuable and irreplaceable about acoustic instruments? (I’m aware that there is an organ or something on this new record and an electric guitar on some of the earlier stuff.)

Well, here, I’ll say an unpopular thing. I don’t think those Dylan gigs with The Band were so great. I understand it was a brilliant gesture, and I like the electric guitar as much as the next guy, but I think the acoustic Dylan is more masterful in some ways. On the 1966 authorized boot, I thought the “Visions of Johanna” recording was way better than the electric stuff.  For me, it’s about how much you can strip away. The more you strip away, the more emotionally resonant the material is. (See,Good As I Been To You, e.g.) This is true on a lot of punk recordings too. I think Suicide, for example, is an extremely emotionally resonant band, and there’s obviously nothing acoustic about that music. The fact is, the more musicians are on the stage, the harder it is to have everyone pulling toward the meaning of the song. When there’s only one personthere, then you definitely have a shot. The acoustic instruments are valid because they are really quiet, and they leave a lot of room for singer and song. This seems good to me. But those Billy Bragg albums where he plays solo electric are good. The late John Fahey recordings on electric are good. And very minimal. For me acoustic music is minimal music, and that’s what I like. 

What kind of guitar do you play and how important is it to you? Do you have any kind of models for your guitar playing?

I play a Taylor acoustic with onboard electronics, so I can plug it in. But I also have a Canadian acoustic that my brother-in-law got for me last year, a cut-rate affair with no particular legend attached, that should bebad, but which is extremely good, with excellent resonance in the lower strings. I really love it a lot. (Its name is Tex.) I am not a gear hound, at all, because I came from punk rock days, when people banged the shit out of their gear, or used really substandard gear. If I think it’s really about the song, then obviously I’m not going to give a shit about the guitar. I have a Mexican Telecaster, but it will not do what I want it to do, at all. I would like to get a Rickenbacker and will some day. My models for guitar playing would be people like Alex Chilton and Chris Stamey, who are rudimentary, but sort of ecstatic at the same time. I love Tom Verlaine too. Or Sonny Sharrock. But I will never be a player like that. For me it’s just about sketching out the chords and letting the band do what needs to be done around me.

You come from a tradition, at least in part, associated with hostility to music and the arts in general: The Puritans are famous for ripping the singers’ benches out of churches – leaving only “bare ruined choirs” – smashing the stained-glass windows, etc. How do you find yourself a musician 500 years later? Do you ever want to smash everybody’s instruments – Pete Townshend-style -- in rehearsal?

I think acoustic music in general, and especially in some of its idioms—gospel, blues, folk—are not immune to a church interior. I think God, if not the fire-and-brimstone God, then some other more sympathetic God, is not antithetical to acoustic music of the kind that we play. Melancholy is kind of numinous. But as for wanting to smash my guitar, SURE. I definitely identify with Pete Townshend’s feeling that there were sounds in his head that he couldn’t get down in song. I feel that way a lot.

Folk Duo The Milk Carton Kids

YOUR humble blogger caught a very good show at Largo last night by the LA folk duo The Milk Carton Kids. I've dug their Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings-like songs on their recordings -- their mix of old-time vocal harmonies, smooth melodies, and bits of guitar dissonance -- but the show took it all to a higher level. (Others will hear the Everly Bros or early Simon and Garfunkel.)

Beautiful ingredients: The between-song banter was somewhere between Richard Thompson and improv comedy, and the guitars were a '50s Gibson and Martin. (Not sure why THIS isn't coming up, but it's one of my favorite songs of theirs -- try it.)

I say all this not just because these guys -- whose new record, The Ash & Clay, is recently out on Anti -- are like a younger/cuter/more talented version of Slowpoke, the acoustic duo I was once in.

Don't take my word for it -- Joe Henry likes em, too.

As strong as the show was, I would have liked to see them encore with a cover -- Townes? Scud Mountain Boys? Delmores? -- or bring onstage Punch Brother Chris Thile, the godlike mandolin player who the Kids sometime open for. Their style is very sharply worked out, but I'd like to see an occasional wrench thrown in to get them moving a bit.

Also enjoyed the opener, a band of very young Tennessee kids called the Barefoot Movement, playing spirited old-time music on guitars, mandolin and double bass.

I'll be keeing my eyes and ears peeled for the Milk Carton Kids.

New West Coast Folk

SOMETHING about the cool weather, the melange of religious songs and the reflective tone of the end of the end of the year leads me to play a lot of acoustic folk music around the holidays. (And lest you jeer at the frigid winters we have in Southern California, I’ll tell you that it was in the 50s most of today and I could actually see my breath this morning. Okay, so we’re not in Yorkshire.)

In any case, two newish records have pushed their way into my end-of-year folk canon. Both have connections to the West Coast, which may be the best folk (and folk-rock) terrain outside the British Isles.

The first is Deer Creek Canyon, by the youngish Seattle-based folk singer Sera Cahoone. This is her third record, but she’s new to me and I don’t know her story in much detail. (Turns out she played drums in Band of Horses for a while – huh?)

I’ll just say: I don’t often hear an artist who’s able to blend tradition with a solid personality this well. None of these songs make me rethink the history of music, but all are intelligent, tastefully played and effortlessly tuneful. A few – Rumpshaker, Shakin’ Hands – are better than that.

The other album comes from a whole other generation. Bert Jasch was a Scotsman and one of the fathers of Britfolk. His show at Largo a few years back – his last American tour, I think – was one of the most riveting performances I’ve ever seen, with his peerless fingerpicking, his adaptation of traditional English and Celtic songs, and his rough-hewn voice.

Janch made a number of classic records in the ‘60s, some with John Renbourn; my favorite live record of his is the reasonably obscure Live in Australia.

But Omnivore has just released a two-CD disc that captures the late fingerpicking hero near his high point. The title disc, Heartbreak, was recorded in 1982. But even better is the second disc here, Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, which captures a 1981 solo date at the Santa Monica shrine.

Jansch opens with the old Irish song “Curragh of Kildare” and works his way through “Blackwater Side,” “Come Back Baby,” “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (a Celt folk tune by Ewan MacColl before Elvis made it famous) and a song he had special sympathy with – the darkly romantic “Blues Run the Game.”

All of this music will be ringing and chiming around my house this week. Happy West Coast folk holidays to all.

Richard Thompson's "Cabaret of Souls"

HIS tunes are famously dark. But anyone who's paid attention to Richard Thompson's between-song banter, or seen his semi-comic 1000 Years of Popular Music, know how funny the guy can be. (He was beaten only by Hendrix for The Misread City's poll of favorite guitarist.)

So we wasted no time checking out his Cabaret of Souls, a theatrical staging of the Underworld that is sort of an oratorio, sort of a rock concert with strings, sort of a medieval torture, and sort of like a talent show in hell. And while it's not quite perfect, it's also far better than I'll be able to make it sound, and either the weirdest great show I've seen recently or the greatest weird one.

I'm not going to try to describe the plot of this strange hybrid of a beast except in barest terms. The audience is swept into the narrative even before they enter the hall -- at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica (snazzy arts center, by the way), the parking attendants and ushers wore devil horns. The band -- a chamber orchestra, basically -- limps out like a gang of zombies. A costumed Harry Shearer serves a narrator.

From there, we get a series of songs, some sung by Richard, some by Welsh folkie Judith Owen, some by others, in a variety of styles. Some characters represent variations on the Seven Deadly Sins -- gluttony, pride, and so on. Among the best of these was a gangster's moll whose song, "My Dave," was both tuneful and filled with the kind of self-deception Richard's songs are known for. Is there a songwriter better at capturing the lies we tell ourselves? Cabaret of Souls took advantage of his knack for creating widely disparate characters.

The music was in a huge range of styles, and I'm glad to report that in almost all the songs, it was still possible to hear the wonderful chiming fills he got from his acoustic guitar. (Still baffled how he gets that tone -- I've even played the Lowden guitar designed for him and cannot get close.) Also at this staging was double-bassist Danny Thompson, a Brit-folk hero since his days with Pentangle and a fruitful, longtime Richard collaborator of no relation.

Some concerns: There's an archness and mean-spiritedness to some of the characters that was jarring at the very least. (A few moments recalled the moralism of, say, Roald Dahl.) This was a quasi-medieval setting, and Richard's work is all drawn from the grim and unforgiving world of British and Celtic folk music, so perhaps it was in tone with the show's origins. It was still a bit jarring.

And the piece gets going quite nicely about 10 minutes or so in, but seems a little confused at first as we get various introductions to where we are, what's going on, etc. The piece has, I'm told by friends who saw the Royce Hall performance, been improved and made more theatrical since then. It could still use a bit of refining, I think.

But Cabaret of Souls was also funny, musically adventurous and at times, perhaps in spite of itself, genuinely moving. Richard Thompson continues to confound us.

2011 in Music

IT'S always a bit daunting to have to sum up an entire year's musical output -- even the best of it -- so I'm not gonna try to do that. But I'd like to mention a few unexpected highlights.

First, I'm a surprised as anybody that Chapel Hill's '90s heroes, Archer of Loaf, reunited and managed to fill the Troubadour for not one but two nights. Those guys have not lost a bit of energy from the days of Icky Mettle (which has been reissued.) I'm still not sure how Eric Bachmann bulked up like that.

A record that's crept up on me over the years if Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer. I don't love everything on it -- and I find myself alternately loving and hating its baroque production -- but it's beguiling at the very least. It'd also, despite EF's Brooklyn origins, an LA record -- "Inn at the Seventh Ray" namechecks not only the famed hippie cafe, but several of my favorite Highland Park hangouts. (I spotted her at my coffee shop there one day.) She also helped Wild Flag with "Beast of Burden" for its Troubadour encore.


The Troubadour show by Sleater-Kinney sequel Wild Flag kicked about as much ass as I expected. But my favorite "new" band -- at least to me -- is Veronica Falls, a British combo that combines noise with melody in a way that reminds me of shoegaze crossed with '60s girl groups.

The first song that grabbed me on their self-titled LP, on Slumberland, is Bad Feeling, but the whole thing is strong and tuneful. If you like the strain that runs from Jesus and Mary Chain through Ride and onward, you'll like these guys.

I saw a lot of good shows this year -- old favorites like Stephen Malkmus at the Music Box and Grant Lee Phillips at Largo, new favorites like LA indie band Army Navy at the Satellite -- but the show that startled and engaged me the most was the reunion of the Jayhawks. This was a show I was told by a music-journalist friend who'd seen them play before that this show would be a snooze.

The Minnesota alt-country gods had spent the last decade or so effectively broken up, so seeing Gary Louris and Mark Olson on the same stage was a thrill from the beginning. But I'm not so die-hard a fan that that was enough, and the new album, Mockingbird Time, had not yet kicked in for me. The show's mix of warmly acoustic instruments, vocal harmonies and electric guitar was absolutely devastating, though, and new songs like "Hide Your Colors" sounded of a piece with '90s Jayhawks classics like "Two Angels" and "Miss Williams' Guitar." Wow. That new record now sounds to me pretty close to Hollywood Town Hall and my favorite of theirs, Tomorrow the Green Grass.

The record that's called to me the most this year has probably been the new Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings LP, The Harrow and the Harvest. (I spent a couple hours with the two this summer -- here is the ensuing story. The duo are also on the cover of the new issue of Acoustic Guitar.)

Quiet, downbeat, delicate and introspective, the record grabbed me first with the songs "Dark Turn of Mind" and "The Way the Story Ends" and didn't let go. (I'm now playing "Down Along the Dixie Line" every morning on guitar.) The album, and the triumphant show at the Music Box, reinforced not only how wonderful their songwriting is, but how intricate and original Rawlings guitar playing is. My only criticism is I want more from these guys. But as the eight-year wait since Soul Journey showed,  you can't rush this stuff.

Our biggest lost opportunity, here on the West Coast, was the chance to see The Feelies, one of my all-time favorite bands, which reconvened this year and played a number of East Coast dates. But they didn't make it out here. That new record, Here Before, may be there best since The Good Earth, the warm, Peter Buck-produced record that dominated my last two high school years. In any case, I keep my fingers crossed for this wonderful band to come to California.

And the musical development I'm most looking forward to is the return of Spain, the classic indie-meets-country-folk band led by Josh Haden that should have a new LP, and more shows, in 2012.

And a happy holiday to all the music fans out there, in Los Angeles and beyond.

Refracting the Tradition with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings

I DON'T think I've been this starstruck since I interviewed Martin Scorsese a few years back. Meeting Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings -- two of most distinctive and harmonically complex figures in the new acoustic movement -- was one of the thrills of the summer.

My story on the duo -- and recent years and a solo album have shown how important Rawlings contribution is -- runs today in the LA Times. (It precedes their show Thursday at the Henry Fonda Music Box.)

Part of what intrigues me about the two is the way they take the tradition of pre-rock Appalachian brother bands -- the Louvin Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers -- and cross them with a more modern harmonic language. It's all over the new record, The Harrow and the Harvest.

Rawlings, who is emerging one of the most individual guitarists of his generation, is steeped in old-time mountain music but is also informed by Gang of Four’s spiky post-punk, Johnny Marr's weeping riffs and Richard Thompson’s otherworldly chime. (Check out his recent LP, A Friend of a Friend, as Dave Rawlings Machine. The song "Ruby" and the cover of Neil Young's Cortez the Killer are good places to start.) His 1935 Epiphone archtop, often played with the capo us as high as the 9th or 10th fret, has lately become one of my favorite things to hear.

“If I could compare it sonically to ‘Time (The Revelator),’ ” he said abour Harrow, which he produced, “I’d say this record comes forward out of the speakers, and creates the atmosphere more in the space you’re in,” as opposed to what he calls the shy and “retiring” quality of the earlier album. “This record is more intimately recorded – we’re sitting around and gently playing the songs. The way we play when we’re not recording.”

Welch, who grew up on LA's Westside in the Reagan years and not in 1930s Appalachia, is sensitive about the issue of her authenticity.


In one key way, in fact, she had a pre-modern upbringing: While she grew up singing classic folk and country music, she never heard recordings of them: She knew the songs only through an oral tradition. Years later, she attended UC Santa Cruz, and was at first a bit lost, personally and musically – she sang briefly in front of a psychedelic surf band – but was exposed to old recordings by a bluegrass deejay housemate. 


“And I have this complete, strange epiphany,” she recalls. “I’m hearing these sounds I’ve never heard before, but they’re the songs I’ve known since I was as kid.” The experience turned her head around. “And then presto, we’re done. And then I’m just like every other person who just needed a record player, these records and a door that locked.”

Rockin in 1970

ON Friday I have a New York Times review of an interesting if imperfect new book called Fire and Rain, which looks at the year 1970 and the making of four hugely popular records -- The Beatles' Let it Be, CSNY's Deja Vu, James Taylor's Sweet Baby James and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water.

If you love all these artists, by all means pick up David Browne's book. Otherwise -- as I get into in the review -- it's a mixed success.

Browne's key records sold like crazy at the time -- but even then there were people who considered them insubstantial. "I consider his soft sound a cop out," Ellen Willis wrote of Paul Simon in the New Yorker. "And I hate most of his lyrics; his alienation, like the word itself, is an old-fashioned, sentimental, West-Side-liberal bore." (My guess is that she was rocking out to CCR at the time.)

(This BBC video of James Taylor from 1970 is better than almost anything on his albums, by the way.)

More on all this later. What's your favorite record from 1970?

Britain's "Electric Eden"

THE best of it still sounds as fresh as the day its long-haired practitioners pulled out their mandolins and plugged in the amps: British folk rock is one of the great unsung stories, at least in this country. The new book, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, gets at the movement's greatest musicians -- Vashti Bunyan, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Bert Jansch, Anne Briggs, many others -- and connects them to currents deep in British literary and cultural life, including the resistance to industry, the flight to the landscape and the search for a distinctively British (and sometimes pre-Christian) culture.

HERE is my LA Times interview with author Rob Young, former editor of Wired magazine and clearly a major Brit-folk obsessive. He was inspired to write about music by Revolution in the Head's Ian MacDonald's book on Shostakovich and sees the aim of music writing as deciphering cultural codes.

This is a wonderful and well-researched book, though like the music it chronicles, it rambles a bit. It's hard to imagine an American publisher allowing this much backstory -- William Morris, Holst, druids, etc. (The book is put out by FSG in this country but is primarily a reprint of a Faber and Faber book published previously in the UK.)


And while this was not the book's primary goal -- which was to chart the late '60s/early '70s heyday of British folk rock -- I would have liked to see a bit more on the contemporary scene. Gen X West Coast artists in particular -- Stephen Malkmus, The Decemberists, Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart -- have been voracious at consuming and reviving this stuff otherwise ignored by the marketplace. (It recalls to me the way Boomer musicians both in Britain and America helped bring black blues figures -- Lonnie Johnson, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt -- back into the light in the '60s.) 

Here are some bits from my conversation with Young that did not make it into my Times piece:

Which recordings or artists from the classic period seem to hold up best?

I guess that's a cue for some of my personal favorites. If you allow that the classic period is 1969–72, which I call the Indian summer of folk-rock, then I'd have to mention Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, Incredible String Band’s Wee Tam And The Big Huge, Fairport Convention's Liege And Lief, John Martyn’s Bless The Weather and Sandy Denny's The North Star Grassman And The Ravens. 

All very different: Drake is Romantic in the original sense, and his "River Man" is a haunting and supernatural vision, with the ghostly string arrangements of Harry Robinson. Martyn is ecstatic and almost funky, using his Echoplexed acoustic guitar for the first time in scintillating patterns. Fairport's album is one of the cornerstones of modern English folk, with rocked-up ballads and wistful, melancholic songs written in a traditional idiom. 

ISB are on a personal quest, and their album pulls in all kinds of ethnic and exotic instruments in a panoply of world religions and spirit codes. Denny's LP is loaded with omens and her songs are autumnal, washed by the unruly sea of fortune. I could have chosen many more but this is a radiant selection that couldn't have come from anywhere else but Britain. 

The Incredible String Band

Where can we hear the legacy of this period in contemporary music? Did it leave any traces in mainstream – or not so mainstream – culture or thinking in Britain or the States?

Well, I hear it in all sorts of unexpected places -- the weirder side of Kate Bush, the pulverising, organic avant rock of late Talk Talk, even the uncanny electronic reveries of Boards of Canada. But this is not too much about the folk tradition any more, more a shared set of sensibilities that tap into the complex British relationship with the landscape, with memory and nostalgia, the constant longing to reconnect with a more innocent age. 

Interestingly, the musicians who I find most convincingly replicate the sound world of classic folk-rock tend to be Americans -- Joanna Newson, Devendra Banhart, Espers, Matt Valentine's various projects... There seems to be an empathy in musical terms there – whereas it's hard to find current British folk music that doesn't sound trite, but which preserves some of the mystery, the occult presences that the best folk contains. 

Making "Winter's Bone" a Reality

ONE of the best films of 2010 was Winter's Bone, a kind of little movie that could which ended up with an Oscar nomination for star Jennifer Lawrence and her very tough performance as a determined Ozarks girl. (The actress just showed up in various states of undress in the latest GQ.)


Tonight the wonderful country-folk band that plays throughout the film performs at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery as part of a national tour.


It's easy to forget that this movie came close to not happening at all; it was largely due to the determination of its director and producers -- and some good luck -- that it saw the light of day. Here, in an exclusive for The Misread City, is how it happened. 

Much of the praise that greeted Winter’s Bone – Debra Granik’s lean, mean tale of a determined girl on the trail of her reckless father – focused on its setting in Missouri’s poor, isolated Ozark Mountains: This was not the kind of film Hollywood is often accused of making, in which a film crew condescends to or caricatures a region far from Brentwood or the Upper West Side.

“The last thing we wanted to be,” says producer Alix Madigan-Yorkin, “were tourists dropped into the Ozarks. Every aspect of the life was really well observed before the production.”

Part of what led to the nuanced treatment of the setting, oddly, was the long uphill climb to financing. “The fact that we couldn’t find funding for three years,” says Anne Rosellini, both a writer and a producer on the project, “was our best friend.”

As the New York-based filmmakers – who had come together over their love of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone novella and the subsequent scripts -- waited for this or that source to come through, “We kept going down to the Ozarks to do research – with our d.p., bringing back look books,” that captured the region’s cabins, ponds and hillsides, and the beauty that survived the poverty and ravages of crystal meth.

“If this thing was going to convey some tone and flavor,” says Granik, “we needed to get our asses down there. And to marry the screenplay to lived reality. Find a house, a school, that [heroine] Ree would really inhabit.” There was no way to rush it."

“We were able to take a really deep look,” Rosellini continues. “And we shot the film on location, on people’s private land – that took years to line up. Two New York women can’t just show up and do what we did.”

Winter’s Bone has also drawn enormous acclaim for Jennifer Lawrence’s staring role. The Louisville native plays the implacable teenage girl who marches over fences and across frozen ground, defying violent neighbors in an effort to track down her father, who is wanted on bond and quite possibly dead. This aspect of the film, too, would have turned out very differently if its funding path had been more conventional.

“We went through the standard way of trying to get this off the ground,“ Madigan-Yorkin says of the early stages of development. “Trying to attract an actor who could draw funding.” One early potential funder, “was pushing us toward names that were more familiar.”

When expected financing fell through, on Halloween 2007, it was devastating, says Granik. “This company eventually said, ‘We’ll lose our shirt.’ It was truly dreary at the end.” She felt such a sting at her American story being rejected by American financiers that she wished she could flee to Europe. “You feel like one of those disenfranchised jazz musicians. We felt throttled down.” 

But the financing they eventually landed – which was modest -- offered a major advantage: “We could cast who we wanted, Madigan-Yorkin says. ” And for the viewer, “You could disappear into the film: Actors faces and names weren’t jumping out at you.”

By the time $2 million in funding came through – mostly from a group of New York based private investors – the team was ready to make the film their own way.

The resulting film developed significant buzz after its first Sundance screening, attracting Roadside Attractions to distribute and winning the Grand Jury Prize.

Winter’s Bone – which was on the regional film festival circuit for months -- also won something that may be more valuable, Madigan-Yorkin says. “This earned most of its money in the heartland. The people in Missouri, where we shot it, really embraced it. Usually you make your money in the standard art house circuit,” in big cities on the coasts.

Rosellini credits that resonance to the respect they showed that setting and the time they had to sink into it. “You get financing from a production company and you don’t get the luxury of that kind of research,” she says. “If Debra and I could have been in development forever… That’s the most fun time. In this case there was no one to tell us no.”

“If we’d gotten the funding earlier – and we were pretty far down the path with someone – who knows.”

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

The Return of Levon Helm

LAST night I was lucky enough to catch Levon Helm, former drummer for The Band and one of the great comeback stories in rock music. The show was about as stirring as any I've seen lately, and ended as a kind of celebration of American roots music in its many guises and -- especially thanks to an appearance by Steve Earle -- made explicit Helm's role as a father figure to the alt-country movement.

Helm, who led a 11-piece band complete with horn section, opened with "Ophelia" and played a number of Band classics ("The Shape I'm In," "It Makes No Difference") as well as Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues," Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell," and some New Orleans number led by the pianist playing in a Professor Longhair/ James Booker style.

He's still suffering some of the effects of throat cancer, so the Arkansas-born Helm sang only a few the songs. Even in the old days of the Band,  of course, Helm was one of several singers, and only the leader of the group in a symbolic sense, since he was the only American in this group dedicated to reviving lost strains of American music. And the group, which was built out of the Midnight Rambles held at his Woodstock farm, featured several good singers, with fiddler/guitarist Larry Campbell often taking the lead.

The big surprise for me was Steve Earle. I've always respected the gruff troubadour's songwriting genius and politicized anger -- it's hard to disagree with his anti-corporate point of view in these troubled times -- but found him sometimes too harsh for my taste. Last night he played on only a few songs -- including a stirring number from a recent Helm record and the Stones classic "Sweet Virginia" -- and he was biting and gracious in equal measure: I'll see the dude again anytime.

The encore brought Earle back, as well as -- you guessed it -- Harry Dean Stanton, to perform big, moving versions of "The Weight" and "I Shall Be Released." Punk and post-punk bands made fun of this sort of thing, but rarely has it seemed more justified.

Jenny Lewis, best known for her leadership of Rilo Kiley, warmed up for Helm after an opening spot for Jim Bianco (which I missed.) Lewis was better than expected, performing in front of a 7-piece band with a combination of sultriness and indie diffidence almost shading into hostility. Her new song, "Just One of the Boys," was among the best, and her band closed with a lovely a capella song that made a perfect final note before Helm's appearance.

This was a show about an important musician who has not performed in LA in three decades, who has beaten what could have been a fatal disease and outlived several members of a star-crossed group. It's very hard to explain what the sensation was of seeing this 70-year-old demigod drumming, playing mandolin, straining to sing his old songs. It was -- a term I almost never use -- an evening of triumph, and the kind of thing where you really had to be there. I'm very glad I was.

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.

Bert Jansch at Largo

SUNDAY night I was lucky enough to catch Britfolk guitarist Bert Jansch at Largo. It may've been the most stunning display of acoustic guitar I have seen in my life -- and I have seen legendary axe-man Richard Thompson at least a dozen times. Now I know why Neil Young calls him the Hendrix of the acoustic: The shadings and nuance this stolid and unremarkable looking man coaxed out of his instrument while sitting quietly onstage were close to head spinning.

Jansch, a Scot who broke in mid-'60s Britain as a solo artist and as one of several dazzling jazz-influenced folk revivalists in the band Pentangle, has experienced a revival of his own lately. His last record, The Black Swan, was released on indie-hipster Drag City and saw cameos by Devendra Banhart and Beth Orton. He's been acknowledged not only by his peers but by Johnny Marr of the Smiths, who build some of the band's signature shimmer from Jansch's style, and younger musicians like Noel Gallagher and the Libertines' Pete Doherty, with whom he played in London not long ago.

A serious illness caused Jansch to cancel a tour recently, and as he's approaching 70 I'd given up on the chance to see him perform.

But Jansch just completed a short tour with St. Neil, who idolizes him also. I will let the readers do the math to note that Pegi Young's band -- she is the man's wife -- opened the Largo show. Overall this was generic alt-country, including Lucinda Williams' lovely "Side of the Road," which highlighted the limits of Ms. Young's singing. But the band itself, was terrific, strong all the way through with standouts being Anthony Crawford on a Gretsch White Falcon (!), Nashville pedal steel legend Ben Keith (Patsy Cline) and storied soul man Spooner Oldham (Percy Sledge, Aretha) on keyboards.

With all the alt-country high spirits I thought Bert's solo acoustic set would seem dour by comparison. But while many of the songs were gloomy, introspective Celtic ballads, my heart was racing nearly the whole time. He played a number of trad songs (introducing "Blackwaterside," whose chords were stolen by Jimmy Page much as Paul Simon took Martin Carthy's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair") and made several references to Anne Briggs, the enigmatic angel-voiced folk goddess with whom he once worked and lived. If memory serves he also played, on Sunday, "Rosemary Lane" and "Angie." Gracious and laconic between songs -- praising the Largo audience's reverential silence -- he gives off a distinctively understated vibe. (A friend who saw him in the '70s recalls him as being both rude and smashed -- this was a very different Bert.)

The sound system at what's now called Largo at the Coronet was perfect for the gentle fingerpicking Jansch favors, with its bends, weird voicings, hammer-ons and pull-offs. (He played almost the whole show, for what it's worth, with a capo between the 2rd and 6th frets.) By the time he encored with the frightening suicide ode "Needle of Death," which may be his best song, I was ready to explode. I have much of Jansch's recorded work, and own a recording of almost everything he played that night, but had no idea how genuinely moving and quietly virtuosic this show would be.

All hail Bert!

Artifice and Artlessness With Bonnie Prince Billy

The other night I accepted an invitation to see the Kentucky singer-songwriter Bonnie "Prince" Billy at McCabe’s Guitar Shop. I came out of the show realizing that this enigmatic figure, whose work I’ve known for about 15 years, is vastly more talented as well as much weirder than I had ever thought.

First, the show: The artist formerly known as Will Oldham appeared in McCabe’s 150-seat room, lined with string instruments, with sidekick Emmett Kelly. I would happily pay to see the baby-faced, angelic-voiced Kelly play his understated mix of folk, acoustic country and classical guitar solo.

Oldham, wearing a plaid shirt, khakis he kept rolling up and a pair of slippers without socks, has to be seen to be believed. With his long, scraggly beard, weathered voice and devotion to the Appalachian folk tradition, he seems like the kind of cat who would be obsessed with “authenticity” and the plainspoken quality of mountain and hill music. I expected him to sit in his chair and brood.

But Oldham, a trained actor who appeared as an earnest boy preacher in John Sayles Matewan, has the body language and delivery of a Shakespearean. He’s a recluse who refuses to give interviews to his hometown paper, but onstage he was both gracious and weirdly excited. I’ve rarely seen an indie artist so committed to his material. Between the actorly impulse, the supposed naive quality of rustic music, and the multiple monikers he’s used – I think Oldham was calling himself Palace Brothers when I first encountered him -- there’s a weird play on artifice and artlessness going on here. (Is it all an act? A friend who lives in Louisville talks about seeing him in slovenly dress around the coffee shops, looking like an escaped mental patient, and Oldham himself mentioned that he’d glimpsed himself in the dressing room mirror and thought, “Who is that homeless person?”)

The other thing: Oldham’s voice is as rich an instrument as I’ve ever heard. It sounds good on record – including the new “The Wonder Show of the World,” recorded with Kelly – but in that tiny room it was a whole other thing entirely, raw and piney but with great emotional shading. He opened with the album’s first track, “Troublesome Houses,” singing while Kelly played guitar, and then played a song he called “ a Norwegian folk song. It was written by Norwegian folks.” Both were tense and devastating.

Well, I could go on from here but the magic and intimacy of the night will be hard to recapture. I only hope this is one of those shows McCabe’s chose to record. (The second night’s show, apparently, was recorded without mics, which Oldham said he prefers.) The album is my favorite by him in years, and pretty stripped down, but like much acoustic studio recordings it is a little overproduced and some songs have an instrument or voice too many.

One of the advantage of seeing a show there is being able to check out the instruments and book collection on the way in and out. I was able to strum Lowden’s Richard Thompson model acoustic guitar (!), and picked up an old Leadbelly songbook put together my Lomax and Mo Asch. Also met and spoke to Lincoln, who manages the shows, very cool guy and a serious music lover. In any case, quite a night and I will return to this shrine to the strummed and plucked as soon as I can.