Tag Archives: Taj Mahal

Usual Rubbish

One Long-ass road back from the Joyous lake

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Get Music Here

Think we ought to go? Nah, maybe not. Though I don’t know. Maybe we CAN go. But we probably shouldn’t. And anyway, who the hell is going to pay? Not me, man. Unless they take bottle caps. With the bottles still attached.

Hello, blog friends. It may seem like you’ve caught us in another serious controversy, but that’s not the case. We’re just sitting here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and shooting the breeze about this thing we should have done, this thing we shouldn’t, and so on. Kind of amazing that we all get along with each other so well after spending so many years with these dumb, lousy-ass fuckers. There’s a lot of love here.

Who caught the Katy?

What are we sparring about? Well, I’m gonna tell you. I was browsing the internets, clicking through the facebooks, and I saw an ad for Taj Mahal’s upcoming tour. No, I’m not talking about the ornate monument in Agra. I’m talking about the blues singer, Taj Mahal, who I started listening to as a wee lad of twenty-one, thanks to my dear friend Ellen Everett.

In our earliest incarnations of the band that came to be called Big Green, we played a few Taj covers and I always liked the dude. (We even included one of this songs on our 1986 demo, posted here.) When I saw that he’s planning to play Woodstock (Levon Helm studios), it reminded me of the time, back in the 80s, when a group of us humped our way down to Woodstock to hear him perform at a famous now-defunct club called the Joyous Lake.

Lost weekend … or weekdays

I can’t remember what year it was – maybe 1984? My illustrious brother Matt, our guitarist then, the late Tim Walsh, Phil Ross, our drummer, and I piled into somebody’s car, drove to Woodstock, had a cheap cafe dinner, and trooped over to the Joyous Lake to buy tickets. As we were standing there, waiting for the tix, I turned around and saw the man himself, Taj Mahal, having an early dinner, gabbing with Rick Danko from The Band.

Left me a mule to ride!

I remember him putting on a really good performance that night, mostly solo, playing an electric guitar, I think a drobo, and an upright piano. He kicked the shit out of Johnny Rivers’s Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu on that piano, as I recall. As an added bonus, the horn player Howard Johnson came up and accompanied Taj on a couple of songs, playing one on a tuba and the other on a piccolo. Taj also did a nice, quiet version of his arrangement for Johnny Too Bad.

Then what? I’ll tell you …

I don’t remember what happened next. We went home, we slept, we played, we slept …. rinse and repeat. Fast forward to this week, I see the ad for Taj’s gig in Woodstock, and I think, man, I should go. Only trouble is, it’s sold out at $100 a ticket for general seating. Good going, Taj! You can still pull them in.

Guess I’ll just have to suffice with another rendition of She Caught The Katy, or Fishin’ Blues, or Corrina. Where’s my non-existent dobro?

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Coverland.

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Where’s my great American songbook? I know I left it around here somewhere. What’s that you say, Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? There’s no such thing? That’s just a metaphor for everything written before nineteen sixty? Okay, gotcha.

Look at me, for chrissake. I’m turning the Hammer Mill upside down looking for something that doesn’t even exist outside of our tiny little minds. No, there is no Great American Songbook per se, though I have had “fake” books over the years – the Boston book, the Real book, the Real book with lyrics, etc., all illegal as hell. Strange thing to be declared contraband, but you had to have them …. even if you just played in a contraband. (A band that plays everything backwards, that is.) Seriously, fake books were an essential survival tool in the world of itinerant musicians.

You may well ask why I would need a compendium of old songs. And well you may. Keep asking – eventually I’ll find an answer. Yes, well … as you know, times being what they are, we need to, as the corporatists are fond of saying, diversify our revenue stream. That means selling nuts on the street corner (Marvin’s job), bilking the local vicar (Anti-Lincoln’s job), blackmailing the neighbors with anti-gravity rays (Mitch Macaphee’s job), and plunking out cover songs in the local coffeehouse / bar (ulp … my job). And like filling in for the local retail clerk, none of us are any good at our new jobs. (Particularly Marvin … he keeps over-roasting the filberts in his toaster oven.)

You guys know anything from the Real Book? No?

Not that I’m entirely new to the work. Long-time listeners of Big Green will be surprised to learn that we have, in fact, played covers in front of yawning audiences. I even have video demo tape of covers we did back in the early 1990s which I may even be imprudent enough to post someday (with some encouragement). We used to cover all sorts – Talking Heads, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, The Band, Neil Young, Taj Mahal, fuck all, you name it. What I’m doing now is more like what I did when I was 19 or 20 – folk-pop music from the 60s and 70s, which was, frankly, contemporary music when I was 19 or 20. Hard for me to believe that anyone wants to hear those songs again, but I don’t know …. maybe it’s been long enough. And I need some freaking coin in my hat, dude.

So start busking, right? Where’s my “Real Book”? I mean … someone else‘s Real Book.