The Barryfest Chronicles

The first thing I do on the morning after a particularly eventful evening is sit down at my desk, hit the space bar to snap my computer out of hibernation and take a look at what is on the screen.  I find the remnants of any drunken, pre-pass out computer noodling a good place to start when you a trying to piece together a night that may have evaded your short term memory.  Here is what I awoke to today:

Firefox, four tabs open: George Starostin’s page on The Band; YouTube video of Bob Dylan performing “When I Paint My Masterpiece” on the 1976 Hard Rain tour; Gmail “Sent Folder” showing I dropped a line to almost everyone I know with a  link to the aforementioned YouTube video (with time stamps beginning around 5:15 AM and stretching to about half past 6); and of course this here WordPress dashboard editor filled with illegible sentence fragments about substance abuse and B-Sides.

iTunes: Playlist featuring three copies of Cahoots set to repeat.

My night began at the Hornets/Clippers game and made its way to Grits and F&M’s, so I could probably tender a few guesses about my state of mind by the time I made it home, but I will never know for sure what prompted a marathon exhibition and examination of one of the most under-appreciated albums of the last 50 years.  Suffice it to say, though, that I am eternally grateful.  Cahoots is fucking awesome.

In almost every review of this album, especially contemporary reviews that have the benefit of hindsight and historical context, there is at least one remark about the irony of the choice of Cahoots for the title.  “Cahoots” implies a sort of mischievously cunning partnership, yet by the time this album was recorded, the whole outfit was practically hulking up for a full-out cage match over “Chest Fever” royalties.  And as far as I can tell, this discord seems to be the only contributing factor to the round rejection of this album, which many peg as The Band’s weakest offering.

So if you feel the need to set the record up for a disappointing self-fulfilling prophecy, it will surely comply.  If you want to call Cahoots 45 minutes of uninspired, formulaic, overwrought attempts at recapturing the majestic glory of Music From Big Pink and it’s eponymous follow up, you will have plenty of mainstream media confederates to back you up.  Anyone with a working set of ear holes can recognize that this is no Music From Big Pink.

But I think the very fact that the performances on this record were clearly phoned in by almost everyone involved (I say “almost everyone” because, to this day, I refuse to say nary a negative word about the venerable Levon Helms) makes the finished product all the more impressive.  Tales of the epic dissension among the ranks of The Band are a dime a dozen, but I am always skeptical about how much hyperbole goes into any Behind The Music-type tale about a group of talented musicians struggling with their own limitation in the harsh face of stardom.

However, the presence of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” on this album – a song penned by Bob Dylan but bequeathed to The Band for it’s first appearance on a commercially available studio recording – makes me think that, in this particular case, not only were the rumors about Robbie Robertson’s greed and megalomania true, but the situation may have been more dire than anyone thought.  I can’t help but wonder if Bob Dylan’s motivation for passing along that gem was in any way similar to that of David Bowie when he offered “All The Young Dudes” to Mott The Hoople around the same time.

See, Bowie was a huge fan of Mott and heard through the grapevine that the group was on the verge of throwing in the towel.  To convince them to stay together, Bowie dropped off the lyrics and music for “All The Young Dudes,” a unmatched masterpiece of proto-glam beauty, and let the boys of Mott The Hoople knock it out of the park.

Was Dylan’s offering of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” – a song as perfectly composed as “All The Young Dudes” and just as likely to be a hit for the original artist if he choose to keep it for himself – a last ditch effort to create some goodwill among the members of a band that was at the end of it’s rope?

Say what you will about whether or not Cahoots represents the best The Band could offer at the point in time in which it was made (I am sure we can all agree it was probably was not), but if you try to tell me that “Volcano” would have been out of place on The Band or that “Shootout in Chinatown” wouldn’t have blended right in to Stage Fright I will tell you that you are an idiot.  Hell, if you threw an unexpected, soulful breakdown in between the second and third verses of “Where Do We Go From Here,” that shit would be a dead ringer for any number of tracks on Music From Big Pink.  And don’t even get me started on the piano coda of “Smoke Signal.”

So let’s put any ideas that this album is at all subpar to bed right now.  That being said, I get it.  I sucks when you get the feeling that someone is dogging it – whether it be Richard Manuel coming up flat on a chorus or Manny Ramierez breaking into a home run trot on what turns out to just be a long double – but if The Band can crank out something like Cahoots when they obviously don’t have their head in the game and are possibly on the verge of extinction, it should disappoint you only because it is clear they are capable of so much better, not because what you are listening to still happens to be pretty fucking good.

I think that you can tell a lot about a city by the way it rings in the New Year.  Minneapolis, for example, is a fun enough time but not really anything to write home about.  Chicago, on the other hand, offers plenty to do but your options can be limited by the bitter cold winters and spotty public transportation system.  And then there is New York, which is more or less a crowded, expensive theme park.

While especially apparent on the last day of the year, I think the statements above hold true for their respective cities at all times.  So, after getting intimately familiar with New Orleans over the past 12 months, I cut my holiday family time short to make sure I could test my “New Year’s Eve as a microcosm” theory down in the Big Easy.

Now, New Year’s Eve is nothing if it is not another excuse for revelry.  And when it comes to revelry, if you give New Orleans an inch, in one magnificent swoop she will take a mile, your favorite watch and every clean pair of tube socks you’ve got in your top drawer.  Luckily, she will return them before you know they are even gone.  New Orleans is sneaky like that. Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re drunkenly balls deep in a plate of cheese fries at F&M’s on a Thursday night, it is easy to forget that there is a lot more to Louisiana than New Orleans.  This is the “Sportsman’s Paradise” for chrissakes, and I’ve been down here for almost a year and have not actually done anything even remotely “sporting.”

To remedy this, I spent the weekend at Fountainebleau State Park with a crew of brave souls willing to endure some good old fashioned outdoor living in what could easily be the coldest weather any of us will see all year.  Yeah, the winters are pretty mild in southeast Louisiana; but the fact that the mercury doesn’t dip too far below 40 degrees over a 12 month span doesn’t make those 40 degree gusts any toastier when they are whipping across your campsite.

But the trip was a blast, and when I wasn’t gathering firewood, complaining about non-Kosher hot dogs, smoking Natural American Spirits, slugging persey bottles of Charles Shaw, pounding packets of BC, dancing on top of a picnic table to Rilo Kiley, tossing hard-boiled eggs into Lake Pontchartrain, or freezing my dick off after passing out in a tent with no pillow or sleeping bag, I engaged in my new favorite pastime: hypothesizing about whether or not Chinese Democracy is going to be any good. Read the rest of this entry »

A few blocks from my apartment, nestled on a slightly overgrown corner on the one-way stretch of Magazine, you will find The Bridge Lounge. It is one of many hidden treasures I have found here in New Orleans since I arrived six months ago.

What makes this bar so great? Let’s see. They do not serve any food at any time of the day. And they do not have a single television screen anywhere in the bar. These are normally two big strikes AGAINST a drinking establishment in my book.

And the joint also lacks a jukebox. Instead, one of the bartenders just hooks up his iPod to the bar’s sound system and lets it rip. Strike three, right? Wrong. This actually where is all starts to come together and make sense. You see, last Saturday the dudes manning the taps and the tunes played Chocolate and Cheese in it’s entirety. No joke. They played a full Ween album for a diverse crowd on a Saturday night.

The place is just off the beaten path and looks pretty shitty from the outside. And considering the fact it lacks may of things meant to attract casual passers-by – drink specials, late night food, 10 screens of NFL Sunday Ticket, for example – it should come as no surprise that the proprietors see nothing wrong with blasting Ween on a Saturday night. And that is why it is so fucking sweet. Outside of a GLBT biker bar, this place is as take-it-or-leave-it as you can get. And if you do choose to “leave it”, no need to get riled up. Even though Bridge Lounge may feel like it is nestled into it’s own universe of awesomeness, it is actually closer to Balcony and The Bulldog than you may think. Read the rest of this entry »