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| Most excellent photos by David Watson |
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| Don's forthcoming album: Bright November Morning — first in 6 years, out Feb. 2022. Listen to the single "Now's the Place" right now. Sample or preorder this & his others at Bandcamp. |
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| Tim Finn: best widow's peak in pop |
01 Young Mountain
02 Not Even Close
03 How’m I Gonna Sleep?
04 Parihaka
05 Tears Inside
06 Birds Swim, Fish Fly
07 I Hope I Never
08 Suicide On Downing Street
09 Show a Little Mercy
The Borderline
London, UK
June 16, 1993
soundboard recording (quality: Ex-, ripped from
promo-only CD via 'Walk You Home' boot)
03 Protected
04 Many's the Time
05 Six Months In a Leaky Boat
06 Walk You Home
07 Charlie
08 Parihaka (incl. Weather With You)
09 Not Even Close
10 Protected
11 All I Ask*
12 Persuasion* (w. Richard Thompson, guitar)
*Tracks 11 & 12 recorded live on Later With Jools Holland in 1993, TV audio
ROB SEZ: Fancy a bit of Finn musical fun? If you're showcasing New Zealand talent (as I'm doing these days at the blog), you can't go wrong with either Finn brother. That said, Neil is more prolific, and it can be hard to find live recordings of Tim in good voice. Here are two for your listening pleasure. As always, my biggest thanks go to the tapers and sharers, whose names are unknown to me. Please enjoy.
ROB SEZ: Honestly, I'm not that familiar with The 3Ds, so I don't have a lot to say about this blazing live set. Thankfully, the taper and uploader, mrpember, had some comments. I quote him verbatim, with my deep thanks for his generosity:
Great set from this great New Zealand noise-pop band. Their album The Venus Trail had just been released in the U.S. on Merge Records so this was a bit of a 'showcase' for the label and it went extremely well, they got a legitimate encore which was rare for an opening band. The board mix took a few songs to dial in but for most of this set it is excellent.
As I normally did after recording bands who were on their label, I dropped a cassette of this show off at the Merge Records office in Chapel Hill the day after the show. I got a call later that day or the next day asking if I could drop off three more copies, the band thought it was one of the best shows they'd ever played and really liked the tape and each member wanted a copy.
They were the second band that night, following the Raymond Brake and followed by The Archers of Loaf (who seemed a bit intimidated to follow them).
soundboard recordings (audio quality: OK)
01 Zombies at the Door |
Hamish Kilgour (left) & Pete Gutteridge (RIP), 1984 |
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| Field Music - the live band in 2016 new album: Flat White Moon |
webstream recording (sound quality: Ex-; best-sounding webstream capture I've ever heard)
What's Wrong? Spring & RSD 2021 Bring dB's-Related Releases
• Yesterday's Tomorrow — Live 2018 N.C.-centric Release
• Chris Stamey & Peter Holsapple's Our Back Pages — on vinyl & CD
• Chris' Brand New Shade of Blue — on vinyl for RSD
Warm Up Your Wallet, Your Plastic &/or Your Crypto-Currency
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| Peter, Chris, Mitch, Will, Don & company Winston-Salem musical nostalgia at its best (details below) |
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| Digital-only delight to be released on vinyl & CD in June |
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| Act fast: just 250 copies of this one will be released on vinyl in July |
ROB SEZ: In a mystical sign the pandemic might not actually last forever, the musical gods have smiled on fans of The dB's and their cohorts. Thanks to Omnivore Recordings (what an amazing label they are), we shall soon be spoiled by an embarassment of musical riches. While two of these titles are "new" thanks to vinyl- and CD-format releases of material that saw prior digital-only release, one of them is entirely new: Yesterday's Tomorrow: Live at the Ramkat 2018. This was a one-night-only live extravaganza that saw reunions of several bands Chris Stamey, Peter Holsapple, Mitch Easter, Will Rigby, Don Dixon (etc.) were in once upon a time, many moons ago. Sneakers, Little Diesel, Sacred Irony, Rittenhouse Square and many others came together for the event, and Mr. Stamey and Mitch made sure the evening was beautifully recorded for posterity. This one's out May 7th on CD and download, with Our Back Pages (on CD and vinyl) to follow in June and Brand New Shade of Blue (on vinyl) in July, coinciding with the summer Record Store Day release dates.
sample Let's Active's "Room With a View" from the extravaganza
All righty, then: what are you waiting for?
PREORDER INFO & LINKS:
• Yesterday's Tomorrow: Live at Ramkat 2018 - out May 7th on Omnivore (CD & digital)
• Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey: Our Back Pages - pre-order CD release on Omnivore HERE; read about RSD vinyl release HERE (note: CD and digital re-release will have 2 tracks not found in the original download: "Darby Hall" and "In Spain")
• Chris Stamey & Fellow Travelers: Brand New Shade of Blue - read about RSD vinyl release HERE & Omnivore digital release HERE
Read a recent interview with Peter Holsapple
about Yesterday's Tomorrow HERE
Yesterday's Tomorrow: All the Info
Live performance by reunited, iconic members of Winston-Salem scene
In a fun, Nuggets-like trip back to the Summer of Love era, Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Celebrating the Winston-Salem Sound, due out April 30, 2021 on Omnivore Recordings, shines a strobe light on the vibrant ’60s and ’70s Combo Corner rock scene of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Original members of bands such as Arrogance, Little Diesel, Sacred Irony, and Rittenhouse Square —including Mitch Easter (Let’s Active); Peter Holsapple, Will Rigby, and Chris Stamey (the dB’s); singers Don Dixon, Dale Smith, Lynn Blakey, Bob Northcott; and many others — convened on May 12, 2018, at Winston-Salem’s Ramkat club to revisit those fuzzbox years, and this remarkable live recording shines brightly with their camaraderie and precise enthusiasm for those days of yore. In the mind-blowing songs of now-vanished local legends Captain Speed and the Fungi Electric Mothers, the classic set list of the Imperturbable Teutonic Griffin, and amid the amusing scene portrayals of collectors’ favorite Rittenhouse Square, the electric guitars soar, with plenty of feedback and sizzle. With the added oomph of the Occasional Orchestra (live strings, percussion, and brass), music direction by Doug Davis (Vagabond Saints’ Society), and stops along the way for affectionate renditions of then-faves by Bubble Puppy, the Easybeats, the Music Machine, the Electric Prunes, the Beatles, and even Kool and the Gang, there’s a lot to love here.
The impetus for this extraordinary concert was that Stamey had a book fresh off the press, a song-based memoir called A Spy in the House of Loud. A portion of the book references his time in New York, but the first part remembers, song by key song, the late 1960s and early ’70s creative rock music scene in Winston. This was sometimes called the Combo Corner scene, after the title of a short-lived column in Guitar Player magazine was repurposed to ironically christen a hangout spot at R.J. Reynolds High School. A surprising number of the Combo Corner crew went on to play and produce music professionally in the decades that followed — often with one another in different configurations (e.g., dB’s, Let’s Active, or with R.E.M., Steve Earle, Matthew Sweet, Vassar Clements, Hootie & the Blowfish, Big Star's Third Live, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Golden Palominos) and in different locales. They were still in regular contact the day Stamey suggested they try to “play the soundtrack to the book.”
The band that most credit with starting the ball rolling here, back in 1968, was the aforementioned Captain Speed. Sadly, their bandleader, singer/bassist Bud Carlisle (real name Richard Moore), had died in 2010, and the psychedelic pioneers never released any music whatsoever, although their live shows (complete with flying duck) were still the stuff of local legend. In order to perform their essential songs, Easter, Borthwick, Davis, and Corky McMillan (Sacred Irony’s bassist) created an ensemble just for the event, later dubbed the Love Valets—a tongue-in-cheek moniker taken from “N.C.’s Woodstock,” a 1970 music festival in Love Valley, N.C. And likewise, the catch-all for the new big-ensemble groupings was the Royal Opposition, only a consonant away from Easter and Borthwick’s seminal 1968 surf-rock combo, the Loyal Opposition.
Chris explains: “From the ’50s R&B stylings of the “5” Royales’ “Think” through the dense mystery of Captain Speed’s “Reptilian Disaster” all the way to the future-punk of Little Diesel’s “Kissy Boys” and Sneakers’ “Condition Red” and the sophistication of Let’s Active’s “Room with a View,” there’s a ley line running through a scene and a city, one that you’ll find is worth exploring. Maybe every city has a beloved scene in its rearview worthy of celebration? I hope this is indeed the case. But this one is our story. Or at least a time-tunnel’s glimpse into a part of it. As Captain Speed sang all those years ago, ‘Our high kites do star those nights, where you can see beyond today, tomorrow . . . forever.’ ”
The concert was captured to multitrack, lovingly mixed by Stamey and Easter, and is now available as Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Celebrating the Winston-Salem Sound. A multi-decade tour-de-force, and an important document in itself, Yesterday’s Tomorrow is more than just a celebration. It’s a history lesson, with the present happily dressed up in the past, looking toward the future.
Track Listing:
