Month: January 2013

Blues guitarist Chris Antonik seems determined to prove the adage that every note counts. While his song structures are familiar, his playing keeps them from being cliche.

The opener, “More To Give,” is nothing fancy – just a ninth-chord funky blues. But Antonik’s punchy fills and his solo immediately show his innate ability to pick the right note at the right time; a minor-chord played during a key modulation keeps things more than interesting.

From minor-key slinkiness to pop/soul to shuffles, and even the prerequisite slow blues, the songs here cover the gamut. Antonik sings on just one cut, otherwise, vocals are handled by others, and if there’s a knock, it’s that the soul in their voices can’t match that in Antonik’s playing. On his take on “She’s a Burglar” – a song usually associated with Freddie King – Antonik spins a solo in and out of a bed laid by a killer horn section that pays tribute to King and helps show off his soulful playing.

This debut demonstrates Antonik is one to watch in the blues. He writes well and plays wonderfully.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s July ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

There’s a solid old-school thump to Amy Black’s modern, acoustic-guitarbased blues. Sometimes (as on “Stay”), she leavens her music with a rockabilly flavor with the help of fiddler Dan Kellar, who gets some of his best moments on the title cut and the dark “Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold My Body Down).” Adding to the flavor is electric guitar from Jim Scoppa, who sounds greatly influenced by the solidbody electric country-blues pioneers of the late ’50s, and contemporary players like Vince Gill. Some of Black’s originals come straight from the hills; “Molly” is lit up by dobro from Roger Williams. So are a fresh version of Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” and the lonesome “You Lied.”

Williams takes MVP honors, overall, but Black is a fine acoustic player. She teams with producer Lorne Entress on dulcimer to provide a hearty thump on the country-gothic “Run Johnny,” a 21st-century mountain murder ballad, and generally gives the rest of the musicians a solid base on which to operate.

One Time is a particularly well-paced album that will catch the ear of a broad audience.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s July ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

There have always been singer/songwriters in rock (from Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry to the Beatles and Bob Dylan), but from 1968 to ’75, L.A.’s Troubadour helped launch the “singer/songwriter” as an entity, a genre, and a movement. This 90-minute documentary revolves around King and Taylor playing the venue’s 50th anniversary in 2007.

Through interviews (sans narration), the evolution of the movement is traced from the mid-’50s rumblings of what became the Folk Boom through its folkrock intersection with the British Invasion and on to the blossoming of its leading lights – many of them superstars to this day.

We hear from several usual suspects (Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Elton John) but also some atypical inclusions, like Steve Martin, and such behind-the-scenes figures as multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow (whose zillion credits include playing fiddle on Sweet Baby James), King’s writing partner, Toni Stern, guitarist (with both Taylor and King) Danny Kortchmar, and Henry Diltz, a member of the Modern Folk Quartet before becoming one of rock’s most prominent photographers.

The scene of Taylor in his stacked guitar room – pulling out the Gibson J-50 he used to write “Fire And Rain,” “Something In The Way She Moves,” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” – is something fans would never see otherwise, and there are great close-ups of the hands of this woefully underrated guitarist. Likewise, the home movies of King and discussion of her years as a Brill Building tunesmith are fascinating.

The editing – for example, from Taylor playing a snippet at his home in Massachusetts to performing onstage with King – is so excellent, you’d think the filmmakers carried a they went. However, the editorial shift to the story of Troubadour founder Doug Weston is clumsier. The club could make or break an artist, and the eccentric ts sign a contract binding them to continue to play the club after they’d hit the big-time. Such antics led record moguls Lou Adler and David Geffen to open the larger (and more successful) Roxy, and when Weston died in 1999 at age 72, he had little to do with the Troub’s operation.

Of course, one’s interest in the film comes down to musical taste. There are detractors, like The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, who credits himself with coming up with the term “El Lay” (how clever) for Los Angeles; never mind that both King and Taylor hail from the East Coast. At the other extreme, Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn naively declares that the singer/ songwriter movement was “as exciting as rock and roll itself was when it began.”

The documentary premiered in March on PBS, and the DVD includes a pledge-drivey 35-minute CD of 10 songs that any fan of the genre probably already has. But the package is easily found for less than the $20 list – and would actually be a decent buy at full price.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s July ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Following British Invasion bands like the Yardbirds and Rolling Stones, but mostly fizzling before 1967’s Summer Of Love, bands that straddled the transition from garage rock to psychedelia don’t get much respect. These one-hit wonders weren’t even invited to the party at Monterey Pop.

Though they were no threat to Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and others they aped, there were some decent guitarists in these bands with goofy names like the Electric Prunes, Syndicate Of Sound, and the 13th Floor Elevators. There was the Count Five’s John Michalski, Mark Loomis of the Chocolate Watch Band, and the Leaves’ Bob Arlin. Bronx’s Blues Magoos had Mike Esposito, who cowrote and provided the ascending riff of triplets and bends on “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet,” which climbed to #5 at the end of 1966. His solo in the song, following a repeat of the ascending riff, is a mere 13 seconds, but it’s a brilliant barrage. Actually, “solos” (plural) is more accurate, since he’s double-tracked throughout the break – a la Drake Levin’s dual-solo a year prior on Paul Revere & The Raiders’ “Just Like Me.”

Elsewhere on Lollipop, the Magoos’ ’66 debut, Esposito’s aggressive assault helps transform the Nashville Teens’ arrangement of John Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road” into a Yardbirds-style rave-up. On blues pianist Big Maceo’s eight-bar “Worried Life Blues,” his rudimentary blues playing is on a par with rockers like the Animals’ Hilton Valentine. But the brief, emasculated bursts he manages to squeeze into James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy” are almost comical.

Though it didn’t yield any hit singles, the band’s follow-up, Comic Book, is both more confident and self-indulgent. The originals are strong, Esposito is more animated, and the de rigueur cover of Them’s “Gloria” surpasses most of their contemporaries, including the Shadows Of Knight’s hit.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s June ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.