Something About Blacktop.

There are some songs that, the first time you hear them, feel like finding a room in your childhood home that you never knew existed. They hit you in that sweet spot of nostalgia and light that anyone who's a serious music fan has felt just a handful of times.

This one, erstwhile Byrd Gene Clark's 'American Dreamer', is one of those. It comes from the documentary of the same name about Dennis Hopper. The doc is something else (it's on youtube) -- pretty much 80 minutes of Hopper (fresh off of 'Easy Rider') sprouting his personal M.O while wandering around. Sounds tripped out and is. But is also riveting. The soundtrack is sublime, made up of Clark cuts and other same vein cosmic folk, and the whole enterprise is a deft picture of the American Cinema system in the '70s.

'Played the blues all my life. Never ever had 'em. Played 'em. But no, never been blue.' -Model T Ford

Good livin' doesn't cost money. Very apparent in this amazing doc on the Fat Possum hill country blues artists, 'You See Me Laughin'

Gonna build me log cabin/On a mountain so high/So I can see Willie/As he goes passing by.

What's it mean? Who's Willie? Where does he go? And why's that damn bird coming around every year as the dog days of summer settle down?

Friends - click for .mp3 

Following Lou Reed's exit from the Velvet Underground on the eve of the release of 1970s 'Loaded,' his band still went on tour. In fact, they hung together long enough to put to tape this little lost corner or rock and roll history. Led by later day Velvet Doug Yule (yes that's his honeyed voice on 'Candy Says'), this incarnation of the Velvet Underground included no original members and exactly one drummer from the proto-metal band Rainbow. Bizarre, no?

But it's not all that bad. Sure, it's been tarred by Velvet fans who miss the grit and grim that Uncle Lou brought to the table, but tracks like 'She'll Make You Cry' call on enough charm to make the platter downright enjoyable. It's a Doug Yule album through and through and Doug Yule just seems like a good guy. Look at him in Velvet promo photos, the angel-faced guy among a crowd of hooligans.

In other words, it's all sun and almost no spit. Which, for those even just a bit partial to the 'Who Loves the Sun,' isn't technically a bad thing.

Sure, as a whole, the album pales in comparison to the heights climbed by the Velvets, but it's been wrongly backhanded by fans because it pockmarked the Velvet Underground's sterling discography. But it's worth seeking out even if just with mild curiosity. To put it bluntly: It was the '70s, there was shit way way worse than this flooding the market at the time.

Good Rockin' Tonight - The Sun Records Story

Christmastime in the Mountains - click for .mp3

Easily the most enigmatic Christmas song I've ever heard. Honestly, what else should be expected from Will Oldham, who has spent the past 20 years half-hidden in shadow, doing whatever the hell he wants? 

The lazy Flying Burrito Brothers on downers vibe is there as Oldham spends just over 90 seconds piecing together some sort koan about playing with dogs, the passage of time, walking on sand, and the color white. There's a string that ties it together, but it's hidden and the song is all the better for it.

Recorded in the late '90s under the pre-Bonnie Prince Billy 'Palace Songs' banner, this is peak of Oldham's old time folk Yankee mystic cosmic country music throb.

Also, if you slept on last year's somethingaboutblacktop Christmas mix, 'Trim Your Own Damn Tree,' you can grab it here. Tracks from Beach House, Tom Waits, Keegan DeWitt, Greater Pacific and more.

'But I know, oh It's just a temporary thing Oh yeah, it's just a temporary thing'

Lou Reed, 1942-2013

Prophetic that the Miles Davis of rock and roll passed away on a Sunday morning. The calm before the storm that was the the Velvet's first album, this song has always been my favorite of theirs. 

She is staggering - click for .mp3

Something about the Fall makes me nostalgic for 'The Adventures of Pete and Pete' which in turn makes me nostalgic for 1990s guitar music which in turn leads me to Polaris' "She is Staggering." Probably has something to do with all of the flannel.

This song soundtracked Pete falling for Ellen before I knew what love even was.

Spurred on by too much time spent on Cold Splinters and this Dave Eggers' quote,

"The Grateful Dead, in that moment when you can push beyond all the tie-dyed parking lot bullshit, in that moment when you "get" them, are the best possible revision of Manifest Destiny, a psychedelic Americana with Walt Whitman and Neal Cassady taking the place of Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyan at its core,"

I have spent the past week sincerely giving the Grateful Dead a legitimate go. 

I will admit it's been tough going. I'm sticking to just pre-1974 and at it's core, I like the music. I really like the music. But the cultural stigma is just so large. When I listen to the Beatles, I don't think of screaming 15-year-old girls. When I listen to the Rolling Stones, I don't picture bikers and burnouts and my cooler uncles. When I listen to The Replacements, I don't imagine a bunch of people freezing in Minneapolis chugging shitty beer. But when I'm listening to this stuff, when I'm deep into it and maybe looking at stepping over the line and admitting that I "get" it, I immediately think of that girl I knew in college that ate handfuls of acid and played unironic hacky sack and was named after a type of bush and was really into "the Dead, man." 

And so summer is winding down...but not before we all go to the lake this weekend...........

Late summer sun-shocked whiskey-soaked somehow-still-alive and like-really-happy,-man stuff. 

light in my head:

1. falling rain - link wray

2. fisherman's blues - the waterboys

3. mandolin wind - rod stewart

4. motel blues - big star

5. the weight - jackie del shannon

6. wooden ships - perro

7. tomorrow night - lonnie johnson

8. hot hot hot - matthew e white

9. new partner - palace music

10. lon cheney - garland jeffreys

11. pretty saro - bob dylan

Jolene (33 R.P.M) - click for .mp3

Unsure where this came from, if not the palsied hands of the good Lord himself.

Simple premise: Dolly Parton's "Jolene" slipped from 45 to 33 rpm. Nothing more; no studio trickery, no trip hop drum breaks. The guitar lopes back in and around itself. The bass becomes elastic, hot rubber. The violin stabs become sustained cello lines. The backing choir's split harmony rattles around, slinking ghostly into the corner.  And most importantly, Parton's once-frantic vocal is transformed from bubblegum country scrawl into something approximating field holler reverence. 

East Mountain Joint - click for .mp3

This time of year, the heat burns off and the light shifts. Fuck the golden hour, we're talking golden afternoons. 

Back on a MV & EE kick after the glorious Byron Coley interview in (the recently resurrected hallelujah) Arthur magazine.

'East Mountain Joint' always sounds to me like the principal of some small town high school commissioned a group of stoners to write the basketball team's warm-up of music and couldn't do anything but laugh and shake his head when he heard the tapes.

Strange Love - click for .mp3

You're as sweet as honey... girl, I'd love to be your honeycomb.

Harry Smith - legendary eccentric and compiler of the de-facto bible for American Folk music follows, the six volume Anthology of American Folk Music from 1962. 

I PUT A SPELL ON ME: SCREAMIN' JAY HAWKINS

Rare film that catches up with Hawkins the year before he died of brain hemorrhaging at 70. Watchin' him leap out of a coffin and onto the stage lets you know that the man still had it right up until the very end.

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) - click for .mp3

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere - outside of Salina, Kansas - I pulled up to one of those antiquated motel and bar combos. It was already dark and I'd been driving all day and all I wanted was a shot, a beer and a bed.

I forget the exact name of the bar, but it was one of those ones that make's a big deal out of the fact that it's got a woman's name in front: KATHY's Roadhouse or JANE's Empty Bottle - you know the kind. Everything is wood-paneled and the Christmas lights don't come down from the ceiling when the New Year comes.

Nobody really talks in these kind of places. They just listen to the music and push their drinks back and forth between their hands on the condensation slick bar.

It's always only the drunk making noise. Yelling at the bartender, pinching asses, collecting quarters for the jukebox.

The one here was probably 50, with the kind of cheap and amazing haircut you can only get in a state with more miles of country roads than people. 

He was leaning hard on the edge of the jukebox like some paunchy Fonzi when I walked in, thumbing the button and making the racks of albums flip back and forth.

He turned to me:

"Tonight is Springsteen night!"

and then (and this completely floored me:)

"Fuck Walt Whitman. Springsteen is the new Whitman. This is America, man."

and then he played this song.

It was December 6th, almost as far away as you can get from the 4th of July and as far away as you can get from a heat-warped boardwalk on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

But it was still perfect.