Just wanted to say that Black Mountain's new album In the Future is fantastic!  I love a real rock n roll band, especially these days, since so few exist anymore. 


They have a heavy sound with tons of drums and lots of hot vocal vibrato.  Bands that have many different lead singers rule (i.e: The Beatles, The Band), and Black Mountain has the added bonus not-so-secret weapon of Amber Webber and her super powerful voice.  The sheer confidence of her vocals remind me of none other than Grace Slick at times.  This gal won't back down and she knows how to wail! (Yeah, I just quoted Wayne's World, so sue me.)  I love how they trade off vocals during the songs.  It just adds to the overall intensity of the sound.  And it's intense, people, really.

The band is from Vancouver.  Don't we all just love Canadians? Well, I do anyway. Their first, self titled record really caught my ear a few years back-- catchy but loud as all hell crazy Zep-esque songs with  some kamikaze chops to boot!  It's truly a great record and I kept it in my cd player for months on end when it came out.  Hardly anyone puts out good effin' rock music, and these guys are tops as far as those who are trying to keep it alive.  I think this new record cements that for me.

Of course for Christmas I received the new Elliott Smith book by photographer Autumn DeWilde.  All I knew about this book previous to reading it was that it was a photo book of Elliott by Autumn, who photographed him for his Figure 8 cover and made the "Son of Sam" video. I knew it was gonna come with a CD of a Largo show.  But I really didn't have any expectations-- and now that I have read the book I'm so glad I didn't because turning each page brought a surprise.

Autumn included not only gorgeous photographs and the live CD, but also interviews with Elliott's friends.  His old friends.  The ones who truly knew him and cared for him.  Toward the end of his life, many of these friends either were left behind or had falling outs with Elliott.  As a fan, when I heard about this at the time I was wondering what the heck was going on, thinking things must have gotten really bad.  This book answers many questions.  It's not exploitative though, it's merely friends talking about a complicated person they love, in good times and in bad.


There are many fantastic stories of Elliott in this book, many that even his biggest fans have not heard before.  The interviews were fascinating for me.  With each turn of a page, there was someone else I'd been waiting to hear from since his death.  The interviews cleared up some mysteries for me, like why he and Jon Brion had stopped talking in the years before his death, and what long time manager Margaret Mittleman was going through in dealing with a highly talented but also highly addicted client.

Since I just wrote about Live, I was inspired check out another video from around the same time period I also remember loving:  Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye."

Sadly, I can't embed it, but check out the video here if you are wanting to indulge in a little early 90s nostalgia.

Oddly enough, upon viewing it fits right in with today's fashions and look!  There's flannel, scraggly good looking tortured boys, wolf/lightening/nature imagery!  What goes around comes around I guess.  Pretty incredible.

Still think it's a great song.

Just thought I would share.

When I was in high school, I was really into sincerity.  I mean, I'm still into sincerity now, don't get me wrong, but in high school I desperately clung to sincerity with the intense fervor of youth.  I think it was a natural reaction to navigating lockered halls at 15.

It made sense, then, that when popping a cd into my sound system, I pretty much only listened to sincere bands.  Bands that were serious about their music and their message. 


So it follows that I really liked the band Live.  Remember "Lightening Crashes" and "I Alone"?  Their big album was their second, Throwing Copper.  They bled sincerity and seriousness to me back when it meant the most to me, in those teenage years.

Times were simpler then.

Basically, when I think back, my enjoyment of Live taught me about musical obsession, about the intricacies and excitement that come along with absorbing one's self in a particular band.  They weren't the first band I was acutely taken by, but they did hit me hard at the time, I have to say.  I knew and analyzed every track on that album.  I was intrigued by the energy and earnestness of the band.  I learned about the transcendent quality of music, sitting in my bedroom with the sound pumping.  At the time I thought Live were trying to uphold the values I held dear:  connection, truth, and all that kind of thing. (Soooooo high school! And sooooooo serious!)  I read every article I could find about them and sought out information about the authors and ideas they wrote about in their songs.  Everything they did seemed so fraught with meaning.

At long last, Pattie Boyd has written a book!


I read it last weekend.  It's entitled Wonderful Tonight and it's quite a page turner.

You'll remember Pattie Boyd-- she's the beautiful blond who met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night and married him a few years later.  She lived the high life, literally, during the entire height of Beatlemania and beyond.  She and George discovered India and meditation together. Years after all that, Eric Clapton came a-calling, wrote "Layla" for her and soon she was Mrs. Clapton...until all that ended unhappily in divorce as well.

Her story is one that I have always wanted to know more about.  There are plenty of juicy details in this book!  Perhaps I was hoping for even more juice though, seeing as this woman lived through some of the most exciting musical times right in the vortex of the whole thing.  Her writing is a bit polite, a bit hesitant, but the book is still a good one, still highly readable.

Pattie Boyd grew up in Africa, and moved back to England when she was about 10 or so.  She ended up a model, working with Twiggy and for Vogue, among many other publications.  When she met George, she was swept away by his charm and fame.  (Who wouldn't have been?)   In the book she recounts their many years together with affection, but also notes that eventually a pattern emerged:  for a few months George would become so absorbed in his meditation and Eastern Thought that he would neglect everything around him, and then he would go completely the other direction and party so hard she lost respect for him.  Then he'd turn back to transcendental meditation again for a while, and so on.  During one of his party phases, he declared his love for Maureen Starkey, Ringo's wife, and Pattie had had quite enough. (Ringo was not pleased either.)