38 responses to
“Roll away the stone.”

1. Carmella said on April 26th, 2006 at 9:36 am

   We went to a Leon Rus­sell con­cert in the fall of ’04 in an empty field in Corunna Indi­ana. He came out using a cane. His words were hard to under­stand, but he can still pound the piano! He played for a good 2 hours, and when he was done, he got up and left. He didn’t waste any time hob-nobbing with his fans. It was great! I told my hus­band that was indeed a Leon Rus­sell song (on Idol), not a Donny Hath­away song. Geesh.… Yes, Kel­lie Pick­ler is gone like yesterday.

2. Dave said on April 26th, 2006 at 10:13 am

   You were prob­a­bly lis­ten­ing to WCOL FM, back when those sta­tions could play what­ever the jock wanted to play. Yeah, those were the days for radio, all gone.

   First heard of Leon when he was part of some­thing called Asy­lum Choir, a stu­dio group, I’m sure, pos­si­bly circa 1967 or 68, learned of him from a record review. IIRC, the cover had Asy­lum Choir writ­ten across a roll of toi­let paper.

3. nancy said on April 26th, 2006 at 10:30 am

   Dave, that is, indeed, what I was lis­ten­ing to. (Sigh.)

4. Randy said on April 26th, 2006 at 10:38 am

   Remem­ber when Elliott said he’d never heard of Queen until the week they sang their songs?

   That’s today’s pop star — unbur­dened by the “bag­gage” of musi­cal tradition.

   Ace’s fans could not believe that Brian May would have the nerve to say “no” when Ace asked to re-arrange “We Will Rock You”.

   After all, Brian May is a has-been, and Ace is a poten­tial super­star… Well, not any­more. Oops.

5. mary said on April 26th, 2006 at 10:41 am

   Same reac­tion here when he called it a Donny Hath­away song. At least he didn’t call it a Karen Car­pen­ter song. She recorded it too. Leon Russel’s lyrics always had one or two bits that were a lit­tle quirky and intrigu­ig­ing and made you lis­ten more care­fully the next time you heard the song.

   What do you think about Tony Snow’s new job? Can’t wait to see what press con­fer­ences will be like.

6. alex said on April 26th, 2006 at 10:52 am

   Randy, I couldn’t agree with you more. Today’s so-called artists are also unbur­dened with the “bag­gage” of clas­si­cal train­ing, which is what made so many great acts of yes­ter­year so orig­i­nal, so out­stand­ing. You can’t break the rules unless you know them in the first place. Blood, Sweat and Tears is one exam­ple that comes to mind. (“You Make Me So Very Happy” was rat­tling around in my head yesterday.)

   Leon Rus­sell is the sec­ond cousin of one of my best friends, whose par­ents grew up in Okla­homa. Now that’s some­one I’d go see in con­cert. I pass through Corunna all the time on my way to the lakes and wish I’d known about his per­for­mance there, but that was prob­a­bly back when I was still liv­ing in Chicago.

7. Carmella said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:05 am

   Alex, do you ever stop at Albrights in Corunna (famous for their meat!!) Well, it was their big anniver­sary and they are huge Leon fans, so they threw a lit­tle party for the town folk. It was sur­real. I had seen him 25 yrs ear­lier at the FW Coliseum…then in a Corunna cornfield!

8. brian stouder said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:14 am

   Mary — I think Snow made a shrewd move. First, his on-air poise and pol­ish will give him the imme­di­ate boost of being an improve­ment over Scott McClel­lan (who seems to have all the flair of a slightly incom­pe­tent alge­bra teacher).

   Sec­ond — he comes in halfway through the final term, so that he both escapes the worst (or what I dearly HOPE was the ‘worst’!) of the Bush-43 admin, and is posi­tioned to bask in any upturn as the admin heads for the sun­set (and he is a basker from way back!). As low as W-43 has got­ten, an ‘upturn’ is almost inevitable, if only as a sta­tis­ti­cal correction.…and any kind of GOP suc­cess in the ’06 midterms will look a lit­tle like the result of changes at the White House

   And finally — he (Snow) will get mate­r­ial enough for at least one book out of the deal, and he won’t need to pay for the ser­vices of a ghostwriter!

9. Kirk said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:34 am

   of course, leon rus­sell was a shin­dog, the house band on “shindig,” along with billy pre­ston, glen camp­bell, the great delaney bram­lett and a few oth­ers. russell’s work with delaney and bon­nie was a long-ago favorite of mine.

10. Danny said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:44 am

    For all of you who love the older groups, I too recently redis­cov­ered Floyd after not hav­ing lis­tened to them in years. I not sure if any of you know of the inter­net file shar­ing pro­to­col called Bit Tor­rent, but I have been using it for legit rea­sons for a few months now and ended up get­ting involved with a file shar­ing com­mu­nity that specal­izes in boot­leg con­certs that date back to the 1960’s. So far, I have about twenty con­certs of older bands from which I already own every­thing com­mer­cially avail­able and for which the groups at least give their tacit approval of shar­ing the non-commercial mate­r­ial that will never see the light of day (typ­i­cally for rea­sons of qual­ity). But I think the qual­ity is fine, if raw. Many of these are sound board record­ings and even the audi­ence record­ings are very good.

    Back to Floyd: I now have about five PF con­certs rang­ing from 1970 – 1977. It is cool to hear old num­bers like One of These Days, Fat Old Sun, Care­ful with that Axe (Eugene) done live. It has a very good vibe and reminds me of why I’ve always grav­i­tated towards live record­ings. One from 1977 of the Ani­mals tour is superb. The extended jam­ming and inter­ac­tion is won­der­ful. I really wish they had pro­fes­sion­ally recorded that tour and released it, because that was a great set list.

    Any­way, very cool stuff and there are lit­er­ally thou­sands of con­certs avail­able, all encoded in loss­less for­mats so as to have the best fidelity. And the com­mu­nity is very active in self-policing to ensure that com­mer­cial mate­r­ial is never posted.

    If any of you music lovers have an inter­est in this, let me know and I’ll try to help.

11. Danny said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:46 am

    I don’t know if Tony Snow made a shrewd move, but it is def­i­nitely in the inter­est of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to get him.

12. Randy said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:52 am

    Alex, good point about hav­ing musi­cal train­ing. It’s hilar­i­ous when one of the real stars rehearses with them, and is able to say “go back four bars” or some other term that shows they can read, write and com­pre­hend music.

    The Ido­l­ettes just kind of stand there, uncom­pre­hend­ing, uncar­ing, utterly igno­rant of the craft — “when can I start yelling, I mean, singing?”

13. nancy said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:53 am

    And Kirk brings up Delaney and Bon­nie, unearthing yet another painful mem­ory: One oth­er­wise unre­mark­able night in 1979 or so, Bon­nie Bram­lett and Elvis Costello got into a fight in a hotel bar in down­town Colum­bus. (Elvis, drunk, had dis­par­aged Ray Charles, allegedly using a racial slur; Bon­nie, drunk, had risen to her feet and pro­claimed that Brother Ray was a genius and one of her per­sonal heroes, god­damnit. And they were off to the races. (The two bands were play­ing in dif­fer­ent venues that night, but stay­ing in the same hotel.)

    The police were called. I can’t remem­ber if any­one was arrested, but it was writ­ten about in Rolling Stone.

    I was drink­ing in a bar maybe two blocks away, with a col­lege friend, in the mis­taken belief that I was sit­ting in the midst of his­tory, because it was an old news­pa­per hang­out. While music icons scuf­fled lit­er­ally around the cor­ner at a Hol­i­day Inn on Town Street. Missed the whole thing.

    Story of my life.

14. brian stouder said on April 26th, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    You missed it — but it isn’t lost on you .

    If I had been one of the other schlubs in the bar where the dust-up was, I would have been obliv­i­ous to the sig­nif­i­cance of it, alto­gether. (although I would have agreed with the per­son pro­claim­ing the genious of Ray Charles, I wouldn’t have had any idea who she was).

    When a notwe­wor­thy thing hap­pens, a real jour­nal­ist pos­sesses the abil­ity to rec­og­nize and trans­lates and encap­su­late it, for all the schlubs (like me) who would oth­er­wise miss it entirely — even if the event hap­pened right before our eyes

15. mary said on April 26th, 2006 at 1:09 pm

    I’m with you on Pink Floyd. I never owned a Pink Floyd album. Most of the peo­ple I knew who did were either high all the time, or were the sort who became comic book store guy on the Simp­sons. I need a name for that kind of per­son, and I don’t have one. Any­way, my kids have gone through short peri­ods of lik­ing Pink Floyd, which I under­st­nad is very com­mon. They aban­doned them faster than the other 60s and 70s band fix­a­tions they’ve had. I still hear Har­vest and After the Gold Rush com­ing out of my older son’s room pretty often. Desmond Decker and the All Stars has been on the cd player lately too. Works for me.

16. MarkH said on April 26th, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    Hey, Nancy, which was the hang­out — the Gal­le­ria down­stairs from The Dis­patch, Leather Bot­tle, Bernie’s…??

    Are you sure it wasn’t the Hol­i­day Inn up on cam­pus instead of down­town? I used to tend bar there a few years before the “inci­dent”, and that’s where a lot of the acts that per­formed at OSU stayed. Hard to believe Rus­sell would diss Ray Charles in such a way.

    Delaney and Bonnie..now THAT takes me way back. Bon­nie still sounds great. If any of you ever catch a show­ing of “Van­ish­ing Point” (1971) on tv, watch for Delaney and Bon­nie and Friends in a fea­tured role as a Jesus rock group, of all things.

    Amaz­ing that my 17-year-old has been through a lot of ”60-’70’s groups, includ­ing Pink Floyd, for a time. He has stuck with Hen­drix and Led Zep­plin the longest. Go figure…

17. Jim said on April 26th, 2006 at 2:44 pm

    Wow, Carmella … hadn’t thought of Corunna in years. Used to stop at the lit­tle bar­ber shop there on U.S. 6. What a great place. He wasn’t that good at cut­ting hair, but he was the friend­liest guy. It was worth the price of a hair­cut for a few friendly min­utes of chatter.

18. alex said on April 26th, 2006 at 2:53 pm

    Carmella, yes I love Albright’s! I actu­ally haven’t shopped there myself. I get invited to lake cot­tage par­ties where they have the most incred­i­ble deli foods and first-rate meats and cheese curds and things that come from there. I do occa­sion­ally stop at the lit­tle booze shack on the other side of the tracks on my way up, though.

    Re Pink Floyd, I wasn’t all that much into them as a kid­die, at least not enough to spend scarce money on them. Prob­a­bly too stoned to care at the time. But now I have Dark Side of the Moon and regard it as one of my all-time fave albums.

19. Danny said on April 26th, 2006 at 4:31 pm

    You’re not alone, Alex. DSotM is one of the best sell­ing albums of all time. Accord­ing to wikipedia, it spent 15 years on the Bill­board 200 and it is the gold stan­dard that audio­philes use to test high end audio equipment.

    Frankly, I haven’t been a big fan of Floyd since my teens. But through the dis­cov­ery of the new live music, they are enjoy­ing quite a renais­sance in my playlist. Now I just have to get a larger capac­ity portable player that can han­dle these 1 GB loss­less for­mat con­certs. What a sweet delima.

20. nancy said on April 26th, 2006 at 4:37 pm

    Rus­sell didn’t insult Ray Charles, Elvis Costello did. (Sup­pos­edly. He later recanted.) And this all hap­pened in the bar in the Hol­i­day Inn on Town Street, which may not even exist any­more. I was in the State & Fourth, where the press­men and oth­ers went for their cof­fee breaks.

    Bramlett’s Wikipedia entry — caveat emp­tor — gives this account, which is how I remem­ber it being reported at the time:

    In the late ‘70s, she toured with Stephen Stills, dur­ing which she gained some press noto­ri­ety for an inci­dent with Elvis Costello at a Hol­i­day Inn hotel bar in Colum­bus, Ohio. Costello referred to James Brown as a “jive-ass nig­ger,” then upped the ante by pro­nounc­ing Ray Charles a “blind, igno­rant nig­ger.” Bram­lett and friends had evi­dently been bait­ing Costello with deri­sive com­ments about British rock music in gen­eral and “sawed-off Limey”-type com­ments aimed at him in par­tic­u­lar. A con­trite Costello apol­o­gised at a New York City press con­fer­ence a few days later, claim­ing that he had been drunk and had been attempt­ing to be obnox­ious in order to bring the con­ver­sa­tion to a swift con­clu­sion, not antic­i­pat­ing that Bram­lett would bring his com­ments to the press. Accord­ing to Costello, “it became nec­es­sary for me to out­rage these peo­ple with about the most obnox­ious and offen­sive remarks that I could muster.” In his liner notes for the expanded ver­sion of Get Happy!!, Costello writes that some time after the inci­dent he had declined an offer to meet Charles out of guilt and embar­rass­ment, though Charles him­self had gra­ciously for­given Costello (“Drunken talk isn’t meant to be printed in the paper”).

21. Connie said on April 26th, 2006 at 6:32 pm

    All it took was the name Leon Rus­sell to turn on his “Detour” duet with Willie Nel­son in the sound­track of my mind. And that album is some­where in the two boxes of vinyl in the base­ment. Old­est album? The Mon­kees. Last 3 vinyl albums: Billy Joel, Cyndi Lau­per, and Stray Cats.

    Remem­ber “Wayne’s World”? And the great video of them in the car doing Queen’s Bohemian Rhap­sody? The high school kids that worked for me at the time were talk­ing about the video and were shocked to learn, first that some ear­lier rock band had done it, and sec­ond that boss lady owned their album.

    You know this is the sec­ond time in a cou­ple of days I’ve men­tioned a stoner movie. Shall we make it 3 and dis­cuss “Dude, Where’s My Car?” Sweet.

22. MarkH said on April 26th, 2006 at 6:59 pm

    Costello, yes. Obvi­ously, I read your post too fast, or typed mine too fast, or what­ever . It does make a lit­tle more sense, now.

    I was still in Colum­bus at the time, work­ing in radio, and for the life of me, I can’t fig­ure out how I could have been so obliv­i­ous to this inci­dent. Either that, or my 50+ brain just buried it. Do you sup­pose FOCUS mag­a­zine did a piece on it? Writ­ten by J.C. perhaps?

23. alex said on April 26th, 2006 at 10:30 pm

    Regard­ing Tony Snow, he’s sim­ply mak­ing a lat­eral career move by leav­ing Fox for the Bush White House as a spinmeister.

24. basset said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:24 pm

    You would be amazed at the 60s records Leon Rus­sell played on… Leon and Glen Camp­bell were on a good many Beach Boys hits, Camp­bell even toured as a Beach Boy for awhile.

    my 16-year-old son is a big Bea­t­les fan, as are quite a few his age, I under­stand… we watched “Con­cert for Bangla Desh” and “Con­cert for George” the other night, and I started adding up how many of the “Bangla Desh” band were no longer liv­ing. Carl Radle, dead… Jesse Ed Davis, dead… George Har­ri­son, dead… half of Badfin­ger, dead… surely there are oth­ers, just can’t think of ‘em right at this minute.

    and a vis­i­tor in our house, close to my age, pointed out that “Bangla Desh” was “half a life­time ago.”

    as indeed it was.

    If Nance is feel­ing old, though, I must be pos­i­tively fos­silized… have never seen “Amer­i­can Idol” and don’t care to, no idea who Kel­lie Pick­ler might be and based on what I see above I’m bet­ter off not knowing.

25. Danny said on April 26th, 2006 at 11:39 pm

    I agree, but bas­set, might you be inter­ested in some­thing like the following:

    Yes, Le Col­isee, Que­bec City, PQ, Canada, April 18, 1979
    Yes, Roo­sevelt Sta­dium, Jer­sey City, NJ, USA, June 17, 1976
    Yes, Reunion Arena, Dal­las, Texas, USA, Sep­tem­ber 27, 1980

    That last one is the Drama tour and is a not so hot audi­ence record­ing, but def­i­nitely one of the best from that tour.

26. basset said on April 27th, 2006 at 7:56 am

    def­i­nitely would be inter­ested in the 1976 show… I think they were in their Trevor Horn/Geoff Downes period in 79/80, though, right?

    so explain to every­one how this file-sharing works and we’ll go try it.

27. Tracy said on April 27th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    Carmella — I was at the Corunna con­cert, too. Wasn’t he great! You could tell on some songs that Leon’s voice had lost some of its punch (yes, even with his voice), but on oth­ers, he sounded as great as ever. He seemed to rely too much on canned com­puter music, which wasn’t nec­es­sary con­sid­er­ing the great band he had, but those are quib­bles. Leon play­ing his best songs to 400 peo­ple in a field, his daugh­ters singing backup. It was great!

    RE Elvis, he was very young back then.

28. Carmella said on April 27th, 2006 at 9:34 am

    Tracy, it WAS great! There was just some­thing so…intimate about it!

29. Danny said on April 27th, 2006 at 10:41 am

    In order to get bit­Tor­rent work­ing, do as follows:

    1) Down­load a free peice of client soft­ware. There are many of them out there. I have tried a few of them. My cur­rent favorite is “utor­rent”. Go to utor​rent​.com and get that one.

    2) The absolute hard­est part is the next step. After you install the soft­ware, to really make bit­Tor­rent work, you have to set your com­puter to have a sta­tic IP address and you have to con­fig­ure your router (assum­ing you have one) to allow port for­ward­ing. There is a lot of places to go for help that explian just what to do for each OS and each router (by part num­ber). One of the best places is at port​for​ward​ing​.com.

    3) Next, find a file shar­ing com­mu­nity and join (very easy and free). The two I belong to are thetrader​s​den​.org and zomb​tracker​.the​-zomb​.com. There are other sites that don’t make you join and that have mil­lions of tor­rents ava­iable of every vari­ety, includ­ing copy­wr­ited mate­r­ial like movies, books, tv shows, soft­ware, etc. I don’t mess with that (except I have down­loaded an episode of 24 once when I for­got to record on the VCR). But for live music, the two I listed are great and they take requests too.

    Like I wrote, step 2 can be a pain, but it isn’t too bad and it is absolutely nec­es­sary because in order to be a good peer in a point-to-point (p2p) net­work, one has to be able to share parts of the files they down­load with other peers that need those parts.

    Wikipedia​.org has a great primer on bit­Tor­rent and that would be a great place to start for an overview of how it works.

    If worse comes to worst and you feel all of this is too much, email me and I can either help you fur­ther or just send you the con­certs on disks through reg­u­lar mail. (dfsmithjr at aol dot com)

30. basset said on April 27th, 2006 at 10:39 pm

    It’s def­i­nitely too much. nobody over forty can do that kind of stuff.

31. Danny said on April 28th, 2006 at 10:03 am

    Don’t sell your­self short. I’m over forty and I can do it. And I’m not an IT guy.

32. basset said on April 28th, 2006 at 9:44 pm

    “…you have to set your com­puter to have a sta­tic IP address and you have to con­fig­ure your router (assum­ing you have one) to allow port forwarding.”

    OK, if it’s so damn sim­ple, walk through it with me from my point of view…

    I know what an IP address is.

    Don’t know where to find out what mine is, or how to con­fig­ure it.

    That box over there is a router, no idea how to con­fig­ure it or even where to start.

    Don’t know what port for­ward­ing is.

    Sum of it all… any attempt on my part is doomed to fail­ure… at which point I won’t be any closer to tor­rent­ing or what­ever the hell you call it, and I get to be frus­trated and embar­rassed on top of it. Bad game, not gonna play it.

33. Danny said on April 28th, 2006 at 9:59 pm

    OK, email me. I’ll send you the con­certs in the reg­u­lar US post. You will enjoy them, I think, and I really don’t mind. No cost asso­ci­ated, so don’t worry.

    Man, I almost had a heart attack today. Dri­ving home, some­one on the radio said that Steve Howe died in a car acci­dent. Then they men­tioned that it was the base­ball pitcher.

34. basset said on April 28th, 2006 at 10:51 pm

    OK… how do I get your address off this page? (while lurk­ers by the dozens send a flurry of emails offlist… “can you believe that idiot, not only can he not con­fig­ure his router, he can’t even pull an address off this page…”)

    gonna see the more inter­est­ing Steve Howe Sat­ur­day night at a bar in Nashville, betcha he plays “Mood for a Day” at some point…

35. Danny said on April 29th, 2006 at 10:23 am

    bas­set, as I wrote above, it is dfsmithjr at aol dot com. Replace the words with the appro­pri­ate sym­bols (I type it that way to keep spam­bots from scour­ing the net to har­vest my email addy).

    Regard­ing the con­cert, have fun, I wish he was com­ing to Cal­i­for­nia. I really love his play­ing. One of my prized pos­ses­sions is a 1953 Mar­tin OO-18 that is 14 ser­ial num­bers away from Steve’s. There is a very good chance that it was made by the same luthier. I haven’t prac­ticed much lately, but I ‘ve played Mood for a Day since I was a teenager and I can play a pretty good approx­i­ma­tion of Clap (I know all the notes, it’s just I can’t play it as cleanly as him at speed in a few places).

36. basset said on April 29th, 2006 at 4:40 pm

    (while lurk­ers by the dozens send a flurry of emails offlist… “can you believe that idiot, not only can he not con­fig­ure his router, he can’t even read…�?)

37. basset said on April 29th, 2006 at 4:40 pm

    (while lurk­ers by the dozens send a flurry of emails offlist… “can you believe that idiot, not only can he not con­fig­ure his router, he can’t even read…�?)

38. pink floyd said on May 30th, 2006 at 5:43 pm

    D. bowie joined mem­bers of pink floyd on stage to per­form 2 songs mon­day night! see the video, pic­tures and review at http://​www​.out​side​the​wall​.net