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.

Return of the Found Footage Festival

ALL I can say is, it's one of the funniest things I have ever seen. The Found Footage Festival, a collection of oddball training videos, celebrity promotions and home movies, rolls though Los Angeles every year or so, curated and presented by two Letterman-like dudes who scour thrift stores and garage sales.


One of host Nick Prueher's favorite videos from this year's festival, on Tuesday (March 1) at Largo at the Coronet, is something put together by Linda Blair called How to Get.... Revenge!


“The tips she’s offering are far too real to be anything but genuine,” Prueher says of the Exorcist star. “And some of them are illegal – like putting a hose through somebody’s mail slot. Some of them are federal offenses. We didn’t know where to categorize that one.”


HERE is my piece from the new LA Weekly.


Prueher speaks quite lovingly of VHS -- like a vinyl junky, he loves the low-fi imperfections of his medium -- and considers the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s the Golden Age. In the early '90s, movies started to be priced for sale to consumers and not just video stores and libraries, and after a few years they began to push out the stranger stuff.


"That was a loss if innocence," he says. "It cluttered video stores with endless copies of Jerry Maguire that are of no use to us."

Here's the kind of thing they go looking for.


Oh -- and legendary doc Heavy Metal Parking Lot will open the show. I grew up in Maryland in the '80s, so this verite' shot outside a 1986 Judas Priest concert at the Cap Center has a special meaning to me. Don't miss it. 

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

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!

Grant Lee Phillips at Largo

THE other night i caught grant lee phillips at what i still think of as the "new" largo. i know the phrase "underrated singer-songwriter" is almost always redundant, but it has a special meaning for phillips. the leader of a critically acclaimed but never bestselling 90s band, grant lee buffalo -- who played a kind of sweeping americana that was out of step with everything around them in the LA scene -- he has gone on to a solo career that for my money is at least as interesting as the music he was making in the mid-90s, when rolling stone voted him "best male singer." (Here he is on youtube.)

it was also one of the strangest musical nights of my life. (hang on.)

in the candle-lit "little room" at the largo, where phillips performed, the intimate, emotionally direct songs took up all the space. i was struck by how strong his voice is, with its shades of john lennon maybe a touch of hank williams and something all his own -- it's not studio effects, the dude really has pipes.  and his music comes from dylan and neil young without really sounding like either one.

most striking, though, was phillips' showmanship and wit. it takes a lot to keep an audience entertained with just a guitar, voice and a host of mostly dark songs about love gone bad. but grant lee is better than anyone this side of richard thompson at matching brooding/ doomy songs with great between-song banter and a weirdly understated sense of humor.

for a sense of how good grant lee can be, check out the song "folding" on his first solo LP, "ladies love oracle," which he made with his frequent collaborator, largo's brilliant/eccentric  jon brion. with what sounds like a pedal steel guitar and a harmonica, he plays a kind of country blues about that moment when you decide you have to break up with someone. with his poker metaphor -- okay, i fold -- he captures the sense of resignation when you wake up from "the colorful lie." i'd print the lyrics but like any great song it works with all its elements, including one of GLP's best vocal performance.

grant lee encored by bringing over fiddler sara watkins, prev of nickel creek, who'd been playing at largo's main theater... somehow i'd missed nickel creek during their years together, but that girl can play the fiddle and has a breathtaking old-school country voice. she's got a solo record next month i'm curious to hear.

the weirdness came from the openers -- the dude who played the hippie school-counselor on "freaks and geeks" (who i guess you'd call a comedian), offering bizarre monologues and a weird musical number, and a duo that played theramin and vibraphone to earnest tunes like bowie's "major tom." tho the theramin solos went on a bit too long, this oddball mix took the pretension out of an evening dedicated to sitting in the dark watching a singer songwriter. somehow it all worked.

tho i cant wait for the place to get its bar set up.

Photo credit: Flickr 550

Lambchop vs. Radar Bros at Club Largo

LAST night i saw radar bros. open for lambchop at club largo, the legendary (and newly relocated) venue that helped establish acts like aimee mann, grant lee phillips, master of ceremonies jon brion, and a whole wave of alternative comedy acts that i dont know as well. the old fairfax location, across from canter's deli, was a place you could, if you got the word in time, count on catching a seat-of-the-pants, small-room set by, say, elliott smith (as i did a few weeks after moving to LA in 97.) or, a truly astounding set by the jazz pianist brad mehldau, who i've seen in two or three other settings but never quite as startling and powerful as in the old club largo space.

so i'm glad to report that the new space is really wonderful, even to those like me who miss the old one. medium size theater with real seats makes up the main space, with a smaller spot -- tiny tables with candles on them, grotto-like space -- that recalls what was best about the old room, in an even more intimate setting. brion was standing by the door in an outlandish suit and broad smile -- felt like the old days.

the radar bros. are one of the great undersung treasures of LA rock -- in the 90s they were part of a triumvirate of "slowcore" bands that also included actetone and spain... the joke was that the radars were the only band in history who played SLOWER live than on record. last night the hall's acoustics, the gentle melodies and the weird guitar voicings put me in an almost narcotic place, much like the third VU record. it was the effect i've always craved, and never received, from their live shows.

lambchop have come into their own the last few years, and i've loved their last two records despite not really getting what the whole lambchop thing is all about. they're from nashville, so they're alt-country, kind of, by way of burt bacharach, jimmy webb, and early curtis mayfield -- i think. whatever it is, they were in good form at largo, as a six piece... with the pianist offering the strangest between-song banter i've ever heard. he could make robyn hitchcock sounds like a documentary  realist.

here is a solo acoustic rendition of my favorite song from the new LP, "ohio,"

kurt wagner's voice is one of the most distinctive in rock -- every bit as southern-weird as michael stipe's. and here is wagner solo again, covering dylan's "you're a big girl now." 

any thoughts on these two very distinctive bands or this very transformed LA institution?

Photo credit: Merge Records and Radar Bros.