Townes Van Zandt: Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas

Townes Van Zandt:  Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas (1977)

Adam: Legend (by which I mean Wikipedia) has it that the Old Quarter could “Comfortably accommodate 60 patrons” and that “More than 100 jammed into the room” for this week of shows in July, 1973.  Now, being the middle of July in Houston, it was tremendously hot.  Early on the album, Townes mentions something about the air conditioning being off, and how it’s really hot.  Thus, this album is best experienced on a sweltering summer night with no air conditioning.  In addition to the music (which I’ll discuss in a minute) the ambiance on this recording is second-to-none.  During quiet moments in the performance, we often hear beer bottles clinking together, and at one point a telephone rings.  These ambient noises do not detract whatsoever from the performance; they aren’t that loud.  In my opinion, the extraneous noise adds to the performances, in part because it allows one to understand how quiet those hundred hot, thirsty people had to be to allow those faint sounds to be audible on the recording.

Andrew Beckerman on Destroyer

One our goals with this newishly re-booted So Well Remembered blog is to highlight excellent music writing around the web. Here’s today’s entry: a brief review of the new crop of Destroyer reissues.

“Destroyer is involved in the same exercise but in a different medium: world-building. Not a world in which there is necessarily a narrative to tell, but rather one in which patterns are created and fleshed out, a world in which connections are made between songs and albums, where characters and words repeat, and repeat often enough that they gain meaning with each repetition.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Destroyer’s Rubies has been a favorite for me since it came out, and this article explains why.

Posted by Glenn

Rancid: …And Out Come the Wolves

Rancid – …And Out Come the Wolves (1995)

Jeff: What, you might ask, is the prestigious and well-esteemed SWR blog doing reviewing a derivative 90’s pop-punk-revival album? The answer is multifaceted but the first component of it is that it’s an amazing album. Another part of that answer is that I for one first began coming of age in musically the mid-’90s–the major labels were well into their signing spree of “alternative” bands, and MTV was playing music that was like nothing else I’d ever heard (it’s not Debbie Gibson, it’s not Guns ‘n’ Roses, it’s something else entirely). Weezer, Green Day, the Offspring, and Hole seemed like a breath of fresh air to a kid who wouldn’t hear indie music for another four years.  It was an exciting time to be a 7th grader.

Neil Young: Tonight’s the Night

Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night (1975)

Glenn: There’s a spot on I-77 between Fancy Gap, Virginia, and Lambsburg, just north of the North Carolina border, where the road rises sharply to summit the Blue Ridge. The interstate clings to the hills and winds along steep edges and narrow passes for 10 miles. The air gets wet up there — fog seems to rise out of the rock — and if you are lucky enough to be heading south and riding shotgun you can look southeast from the hills, out over the flatlands of Carrol County, Virgina and Surry County, North Carolina. It’s farms and gas stations and exurb subdivisions — very few lights — but at night, just after dusk, from the height of I-77, the long stretch of dark land sometimes looks like Los Angeles, as viewed from Mulholland Drive. A sparsely populated L.A., an L.A. without smog or skyline, without superhighways. You’ll have to trust me here. Because even though the rural counties of the N.C. Piedmont are nothing like L.A., this stunning view kindles something in the collective memory to remind you of the L.A. you know from movies, from books, from hints, from mid-’70s rock albums maybe most of all. The sheen and glamor, the nightclubs and stubble, the cocaine, the hazy smoggy dawns and the never-night of streetlamps. The stars holed away in the hills. This is what I think of when I descend from I-77 headed south toward home.

Tonight’s the Night captures all that.