influences

This is the first in a continuing series of posts that will explore GPTN influences. A few months ago Grace Potter submitted her list of Top 10 CD’s to radio station WTMD. Now, I don’t suspect that this list is the “all time set in stone never change ever” list - but it will certainly be fun to explore.

Lester Bangs once wrote of Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks “I only really wanted to play this record whenever I had a fight with someone I was falling in love with.” Incredibly, he meant this as a criticism: “I concluded that any record whose principal utility lay in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of self-abuse, at best innocuous as a crying towel and certainly was not going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women, myself or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to be. Which was simply not enough.”

UPDATE: Dylan has a widely bootlegged version of sessions recorded in NYC during the “Blood On The Tracks” period. Download the entire recording here.

From Jon Landau’s review in Rolling Stone

Blood on the Tracks will only sound like a great album for a while. Like most of Dylan, it is impermanent. But like the man who made it, the album answers to no one and was made for everyone. It is the work of someone who is not just seeing through himself, but looking through us — and still making us see things that we haven’t seen before.

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I like the swampy vibe on Grace Potter and the Nocturnals version

“Come Together”
Version One

Version Two

John Lennon - obscure artist, probably new to many of you

(Note: We used to joke that the “Day The Music Died” would be when I heard someone utter the following phrase in response to hearing a Beatles song - “That was Sean Lennon’s Dad’s old band”.)

Ike and Tina

For those of you curious enough, exactly what is toejam?

We’ll get more into this guy later on. This piece cracked me up . . .

It’s the most ingenious marketing plan of 2006.

While attempting to locate an elusive Tim Buckley and Judy Collins duet among dusty Elektra label master tapes, an archivist uncovered a staggeringly brilliant unreleased recording. After a chemically-inspired jolt of inspiration during Phil Lesh’s set at Bonnaroo, the label’s marketing deparment decided to release the 35-year-old album as a new independent effort by a fictional act out of Vermont named Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.
…
Anyone who listens to Nothing But the Water will recognize that not a note on it could have been recorded any later than 1976. Surely it’s an old Rory Block or Bonnie Bramlett session. It’s no secret that authentic folk-blues records with memorable songs like this just aren’t made any more. This so-called “Grace Potter”even name-checks J.J. Cale in the first song. C’mon! The album bears no resemblance to tedious contemporary “blooze,” nor does it have anything in common with the safe sounds of Norah Jones’ hits.

Just a rambling post on influences, Neil Young in particular.

More on “This Is Somewhere” via this article in Jambands.com.

To a person, they are coy about This Is Somewhere being a response to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Given Tournet’s love of Neil Young, it’s not that hard a mystery to divine. It also stems from their trepidation about moving to Los Angeles to record the album. “We do not like being captive in a city. When you’re from Vermont and the biggest town is Burlington, there’s something really strange about being in a big city,” explains Potter. “The process of making the album and moving [out to L.A.] for a half a year was a really hard thing for us.” Though it’s hard to imagine any of the four of them being overwhelmed by a metropolis, it made the band more insular and the increased trust and reliance they placed in each other manifests itself on the album. “I was dreading it at first,” recalls Dondero. “We were in our little routine. We would leave the apartment, be at the studio for 12-13 hours, then go back and crash and watch VH1 Classic. That was pretty much it for two months.” A favorite of the band turned out to be VH1’s Classic Albums series that usually runs in the wee hours. While swapping favorite moments from the show, Dondero and Tournet joke about sitting behind the production board twenty years down the road moving levels up and down while explaining the genius of what they were trying to accomplish.

More about “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”

Knowing the full story of Young’s doomed guitarist, Danny Whitten, gives an added poignancy to an album like Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Young later said that “every musician has one guy on the planet he can play with better than anyone else,” and his guy was Danny Whitten. Listen to the way their guitars meld on the dark moody drama of “Down by the River,” and you know what Young’s talking about.

“Down By The River”

From a review of “The Soul of Mr. Soul” on why Crazy Horse was such an awful band.

McDonough provides a helpful litany of abuses: “Muffed changes. Tattered harmonies. Tempos that slow down, speed up or collapse altogether. Guitar passages that last longer than a lifetime. Songs about nothing that never end. Repetition to the point of lunacy.” David Crosby is more blunt: “They should’ve never been allowed to be musicians at all. They should’ve been shot at birth. They can’t play.”

“Cowgirl In The Sand”

Rolling Stone Review of the album

in the epics that end each album side, “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” Young and Whitten circle, prod and light into each other like boxers in a sweaty fifteen-round match, the notes stabbing in and out, answering each other in short staccato bursts while the rhythm section stolidly keeps things from flying apart. The quartet’s interplay is at once primitive and abstract, more suggestive of Ornette Coleman’s fractured free jazz than the jam-band psychedelia that was the prevailing West Coast fad at the time. Some listeners found it crude, but the gloriously spontaneous sound forged on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere would endure, not only as a blueprint for Young and Crazy Horse (even after Frank “Pancho” Sampedro replaced Whitten, who died of a drug overdose in 1972) but as an influence on countless bands, from Sonic Youth to Son Volt. (RS 819)

For you Neil Young fanatics out there, if you don’t have copies of
A Perfect Echo I’m making it available for download for a few days only. Click here to download (367MB - BIG!)

Originally from Sharing The Groove

Braden Strickler has done it again. He’s compiled and lovingly mastered, almost exclusively from soundboard recordings, an 8-DISC SET which runs chronologically from August 1967 to January 2001. It’s like an expanded version of the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Cowboy” concept, but with far superior sound.

This is a compilation of soundboard recordings from 1967-2001. The term soundboard is a bit of a misnomer. By soundboard I mean, basically, not an audience recording. Some are true soundboards, while others are FM, TV, ALD, or video-sourced recordings. The recordings were all taken from cdrs or videos that are circulating in the trading community. There are a total of 115 tracks (109 songs, as 6 get repeated). Some years were heavy with available recordings (1976 and 1989 come to mind). I tried to balance the set by not using too many songs from a single show. The entire 8 discs run in, roughly, chronological order.

This will use way too much bandwidth so I’ll have to take it down in a few days. Get your copy now!

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals covered the classic Otis Redding song “Pain In My Heart” a few days ago at Workplay in Birmingham, Alabama.

“Pain In My Heart” - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

“Pain In My Heart” was the debut single on the debut record by Otis and it also appeared on “The Rolling Stones, Now!”. As much as I love the Stones this version simply doesn’t “hurt” enough for me. This show seems to have been much blusier and soulful than a few of the more recent “rock it out jams” - any thoughts on that?

“Pain In My Heart” - The Rolling Stones

Otis Redding - “Pain In My Heart”

It’s fun to share a little background on the cover songs the band chooses to perform. “No Expectations” is from the Stones classic “Beggars Banquet” record.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals - “No Expectations” - Lebanon Opera House, 05/25/07

Rolling Stones - “No Expectations”

The slide guitar from Brian Jones competes with Mick’s voice on this one - that tension between them is what makes this song so amazing.

From SongFacts

Mick Jagger (1995): “That’s Brian (Jones) playing steel guitar. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mikes. That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing. He was there with everyone else. It’s funny how you remember - but that was the last moment I remember him doing that, because he had just lost interest in everything.” (thanks, Bertrand - Paris, France)

Note: I’m posting this under the “influences” category. Keep checking over on the right for more posts in those categories in the upcoming months.

Welcome to the “This Is Somewhere” - Grace Potter and the Nocturnals Blog.

Let’s start things out with a little Jimi Hendrix cover - “Who Knows”

GPTN - Pearl Street Ballroom, Northampton, MA - December 3rd, 2007

Video by glebefarmvt

Jimi at the Fillmore East in 1970