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Ya-Yas at 40: Deluxe Ya-Yas at Last

November 1969 was cold and dark——a damp, drizzly November in the soul of America. And the Rolling Stones descended upon the land, and they toured fifteen cities. And the Stones were in their prime, fine-tuned, full of fury. They played loud——louder than anybody had ever played before, with electric barbed-wire intensity——yet they were loose, full of soul, full of humanity, in the full bloom of youth, all-powerful, fiery and focused like some elemental force. And the same can be said of the assembled masses, swept up as they were in the frenzied ecstasy. After the last shows of the tour——the Madison Square Garden concerts that became the source for the Stones' great live album, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out——the worst was yet to come, as documented in the Maysles brothers' classic film Gimme Shelter (1970). In a word: Altamont. But not yet; not quite.

Get Yer Ya-Yas Out is an elegantly raw rendering of that "not yet; not quite" moment. The shows were well recorded and deftly edited, and thankfully the original release remains intact and untouched in the new "Deluxe Edition" of Ya-Yas. A second disc contains five previously unreleased tracks, all of which are also featured on a "bonus" DVD in newly edited outtakes from the Maysles' film. Acoustic performances of "Prodigal Son" and "You Gotta Move" are anemic and rather absurd——the sight of Jagger and Richards, two pale, skinny, long-haired English boys, one wearing some kind of leotard, a long red scarf, and moccasins, the other in a woman's sweater, concho pants, and snakeskin boots, playing Mississippi Delta Blues, fails to achieve the clearly desired aura of authenticity——but the remaining tracks are classic Rolling Stones. "Under My Thumb" melds into "I'm Free," showing off the comfortable, loose-but-locked-in ensemble playing that marked the Stones' peak years. Then "(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction" brings it all home. Rock'n'roll's great frontman is in full strut, leering and prancing, gloating and scolding. He seems to think he's in charge, and he is, to a point. Mick's in charge of the floorshow, so to speak. But you don't have to listen too hard to hear who's driving the train. Keith is at the throttle, perched in front of his giant Ampeg amps like a vulture, now standing slightly arched, wings back, then lurching forward with a menacing leer, and with light, graceful strokes of his right arm and precise chops of his right hand he's tearing off sheet-metal riffs in thick, white-hot blasts, loud, precise, and commanding. Prime-quality deluxe Keith Richards rock'n'roll guitar playing: enough to inspire second guitarist Mick Taylor to the highest moments of his career, including the transcendent solos on "Love In Vain." (Was this track recorded at the Baltimore Civic Center a few nights earlier? That issue is not addressed here.) This is the best rhythm/lead guitar duo ever to grace a rock band——and well worth the price of admission.

The other disc in the box gives us the Stones' opening acts, B.B King and the Ike & Tina Turner Review, both roughly thirty-minute complete sets featuring the best of what these pros had to offer——tight, serious rhythm & blues music. We saw Tina get hot and nasty with Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long" in a choppy sequence in Gimme Shelter, and here the uncut version is even more hilariously powerful.

The Ya-Yas box set comes with an elaborately useless book of essays and remembrances and such that is redeemed solely by a fine collection of Ethan Russell photographs, and a tiny reproduction of the famous David Byrd art-nouveau naked-lady 1969 tour poster, unfortunately also useless. But the music is primo Rolling Stones, a snapshot of the launch of the rapidly ascending rocket of their peak performing years, 1969–1973. The crash would be precipitous. But not yet; not quite.

Revisiting 1969

Stand and uncover for Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner

1969 is everywhere this summer forty years later. Watching the 40th Anniversary Edition of Michael Wadleigh’s great film Woodstock (the 1994 Director’s Cut, which features lots of great added footage edited somewhat jarringly into the fabric of the original theatrical release)——along with hours of extra musical performances and documentary material——takes you right back to that heady year. If you can get past the ridiculously elaborately cheesey packaging (the outer box is wearing a little suede fringe jacket with a Woodstock patch on it), the four-disc set is a time machine. I was only twelve in 1969, but these young people were my peers. My friend's older sister went to Woodstock with a bunch of her friends in a Volkswagon bus decorated with big flowers. For years I had a beautiful and exotic relic from the festival: a program booklet, wrinkled and billowing from having been soaked (soaked from the famous Woodstock rain, or from lying in the woods behind the U of M campus, where I found it in 1971?——I was never sure). Looking at these kids now (...and I call you kids 'cause I have children older than you. —— Max Yasgur), they all seem so young, so earnest; I watch them with some sense of sadness. It's fascinating how the specter of the Vietnam war hangs over the entire massive event, acknowledged explicitly only once in a while, most notably when Country Joe MacDonald stirringly engages the crowd in his "Fish Cheer" and "Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag." Somebody had to mention it.

Then came Jimi.

Hendrix gets about fifteen or sixteen minutes at the end of the Director's Cut. The additional Hendrix footage is the most welcome musical addition to this cut, and probably the only essential one. But it's still "The Star Spangled Banner" at the center here, as it always has been and always will be. Hendrix is completely on, completely in the moment, playing more seriously than ever, and looking more comfortable than ever, and utterly confident. The pacing of his set is meticulous. His playing is masterful. The crowd is relatively small at this point, early Monday morning, but they are rapt. As the first notes of the National Anthem ring out, everyone's concentration is focused intently——especially Jimi's. He knows where he's going with this. He's on top of the world, at a focused moment of history, and he's going to use the moment to do good. He looks at the camera for a second. He comes to the "rockets red glare" passage——and suddenly we’re on a battlefield; we're there. He's seeing it all, and we're seeing it too: he’s making us see it. What's happened to us?

Hendrix is painting his Guernica not with paint but with pure, sheer energy, with some force of nature, some great vortex of history and humanity, focused here, harnessed and channeled and fretted through that white Stratocaster. With "the bombs bursting in air" we realize we've been holding our breath this whole time. Now here's "Taps," as mournful as it's ever sounded. How did we get to this place? What are we doing to our country? For the final lines——"oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave"——the guitar tone is deep, wrenching. The notes are precise and cutting for the "o'er the land of the free" passage. Great power harnessed with amazing eloquence. We breathe again.

This...performance? It's hard to call it a performance; it's more of a ritual, a rite. We’ve witnessed a transcendent moment in twentieth century American music——in twentieth century American art. A peak of individual expression, and a deep, resounding expression of patriotism.

The rest of the film brings us back down to earth, although the new Hendrix material——after "Purple Haze"——is amazing, probing, ethereal, like music suddenly visiting from the future. Hendrix is so clearly channeling this music from another place. He's a virtuoso, with intense concentration, astonishing technique, and amazing ideas, but he's also a guru. At the Monterey festival two summers previous, Ravi Shankar engaged the young, mostly affluent, white crowd with the equivalent of what Hendrix gives us here——deeply spiritual music. Knowing what we know——that Jimi would be dead a year later——tinges his music with a certain kind of poignancy, but the music was poignant from the moment it existed, and it remains poignant and relevant and resounding, and it will always be so, whenever we need it.

We needed it then and forty years later we need it again.

Sonic Youth at 9:30 – July 6 2009

By this time the heat of the July day has worn off and the sun is angling low and casting a deep yellow glow onto the old brick buildings along V Street. As we stand in line outside the club, another fifteen or twenty minutes before the doors open, down the alley, it's Lee Renaldo's shock of white hair I notice first. There's Lee and Steve Shelley and Kim Gordon, talking with a couple of other people, smoking cigarettes, laughing, in a few minutes joined by Thurston Moore, who's a head or two taller than anyone else. They all seem loose and in a good mood. After a few minutes a jeep-thing pulls into the alley and discharges Coco Hayley Gordon Moore and a girlfriend. They all confer for a minute, then they all walk toward us, laughing and talking, stopping at the end of the alley, right next to us. They're talking about getting something to eat somewhere close by. There's the Florida Avenue Grill, or Ben’s Chili Bowl. Suddenly Kim splits off from the group and turns back, waving the others on, saying she'll join them in a minute, then disappearing into the back door of the club. The others go on across the street and around the corner into Florida Avenue. Barely a minute later Kim re-emerges; she takes a few slow steps over and stops next to me, turning back, I realize, expecting to see her friend coming with her. Kim is smaller than I’d thought, more compact, but otherwise familiar, and quietly stunning. She's wearing a loose white cotton hippie blouse, very light, a black bra, a denim mini-skirt, and suede fringe-top mini-boots. She seems full of a quiet, taut energy. Her legs are strikingly muscular and seem to be radiating some of that energy even as she stands at ease. Her skin is city-girl white. Her hair is straight and shaggy and looks silvery, with erratic bangs partially covering her eyes, which I can see are blue even as she squints in the golden sunlight. Her mouth is a fine, straight line. She looks her age, gloriously. She knows herself, clearly. As she’s turning her head to look back toward the door, our eyes meet and she turns quickly back and looks at me. I say to her, hey, smiling, and, smiling back, she says hey to me. At that moment, her friend is at the back door calling for Kim to go on without her. Kim turns to go, turns back and gives me a second quick smile, then turns away and heads across the street.

In my previous experience with Kim Gordon, I didn’t actually see her, only her shoes. And not even her shoes, really, only a paper bag containing her shoes. Again, outside the 9:30 Club, a few summers ago. The tour bus is parked outside the front door; we're in line, a few minutes until the doors open for the Sonic Youth show, and a guy comes up to the door of the bus with a paper bag in his hands. He bangs on the bus door; after a minute somebody responds. The guy with the bag says, I've got Kim's shoes; then, louder, I’ve got Kim’s shoes! He holds up the bag and points at it animatedly. He says again, louder, Kim's shoes! The door opens, he climbs into the bus, and the door closes. Kim’s shoes that night were amazing.

This Monday night in July 2009 Sonic Youth play the best show I’ve seen them play of the half-dozen or so I’ve been witness to, well armed with strong material from the excellent new album, The Eternal (the one with the John Fahey painting on the cover), and sprinkled with great older pieces, such as an edgy, frighteningly lovely "The Sprawl" and an exuberant, supercharged "Silver Rocket." The band is focused and tight with the new bass player, Mark Ibold. They can be at once intense and insouciant on stage, and they can go from dark to light, hard to soft, loose to tight, turning on a dime, always building and tearing down and building again. A fascinating thing. Sonic Youth continue to build a deep repertoire of great American music. Their performances continue to be indispensible. This summer, as usual, it's a loud show, with a beautiful, intense light show, not for the faint-hearted, but it's a great show, perfect for a hot summer night, and one of the best I've seen this year. If you're new to Sonic Youth, start with the new album and work your way back. And go see them next time they're in town.

The Krayolas: Long Leaf Pine (No Smack Gum)

The Rolling Stones' 1965 classic Out Of Our Heads is a good model for a rock’n’roll record, from the brooding young faces glaring from the cover closeup to the casual, natural mix of styles and influences that the brooding boys so effortlessly cooked up into a tasty musical dish, simple and great. They were having fun, they were good, they cared, and it all showed. Do I get the same message from the brooding middle-aged faces glaring from the cover of the Krayolas' new album, Long Leaf Pine (no smack gum)——which cops the closeup photo style and the typeface from Out Of Our Heads? Forget the packaging. The music confirms the model and the message. Long Leaf Pine takes a leap from last year's stellar La Conquistadora and lands the Krayolas into serious contention as one of America's best new bands. Not "best new San Antonio band" or "best new Texas band"——though what the Krayolas and the West Side Horns are doing to preserve, protect, defend, explore, and expand the "San Antonio Sound" is to be noted, applauded, and treasured——not regionally, but nationally, one of America’s best new bands.

(Okay, strictly speaking, they aren’t new; they were the Krayolas when they were teenagers, pretty successfully, but the re-formed 21st century version is what we're talking about here——the mature Krayolas.)

Long Leaf is a pleasure too rare: a banquet of compelling, brilliantly written, creatively arranged, confidently played rock'n'roll, in all its richness and variety. "Marie Laveau," singer/guitarist/songwriter Hector Saldaña's brilliantly casual, concise take on a classic New Orleans tale of voodoo and a botched hanging, features some of the tightest, most creative horn charts you'll hear anywhere, by Al Gomez, and tough blowing by the fantastic West Side Horns——Gomez on trumpet and Louie Bustos on sax, an advantage extended to brilliant effect through most of the album. "Corrido Twelve Heads in a Bag" goes south of the border for a dark conjunto "contrabando" complete with accordion (Michael Guerra) and bajo sexto (Max Baca). Van Baines' snarling lead guitar teams with the horns to rip through the tough "So Happy"; "Chola Song" is an instantly infectious barrio anthem from the heart of San Antonio; "A-Frame" goes back to the band’s power-pop roots with a delightfully dark twist——and, again, those kick-ass horns! Hector’s brother David, the group's consistently solid drummer, sings lead on this and some other songs, his reedy tenor offering a good foil to his brother’s deeper Lennon-esque rasp. Have I mentioned the West Side Horns? Listen to them goose "Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time" into overdrive. Atwood Allen’s chestnut “It’s Gonna Be Easy” makes the Doug Sahm connection explicit, a solid cover that makes perfect sense. The great Augie Meyers’ “I Wanna Fall In Love Again” takes that whole thing and lays it out plain: beautiful, joyous rock’n’roll music. And these boys have a tender side, too. My wife gazes into the distance and sighs when she hears “Hurtin’ Me Baby.” I love the jangly guitars, fat Vox organ, and rock-solid rhythm section (with the superb Abraham Humphrey on bass) in “Never Been Kissed”: “Never been so happy begging on my knees/Pressed the warmth of her belly, I prayed I wouldn’t sneeze/Got snagged on a button that should have been a breeze/Never been so happy begging on my knees.”

Viva The Krayolas!

Last Word on Robert Johnson?

A new book on the life and creative/commercial afterlife of the elusive Delta blues legend, plus: The revelatory remixes of the original Columbia albums

A tall arched window with the shade less than half-drawn dominates the wall in the center of our gaze and allows a washed-out yellowish light to fill the room. A milky glass light fixture hangs from the center of the high ceiling; the room is wallpapered, framed paintings of trees hang on either side of the window and a big overstuffed blue and pink striped chair sits angled in the corner with an ashtray stand at its arm. On the adjacent wall, a light switch, and a door with a sheet of dull glass in its top half. From under the door, a dark, thick electrical cable snakes across the floor, across the muted-toned rug, to an old-fashioned microphone on a stand in the opposite corner. Sitting in a small wooden chair with his back to us is a small, dark man wearing a dark suit, leaning forward intently, singing into the microphone and playing a guitar. This, we are told by the caption beneath the watercolor image, is Robert Johnson, as he "first records in a makeshift studio in a San Antonio hotel room——November, 1936."

The beautiful, mystery-laden cover art of Columbia record album C 30034, King of the Delta Blues Singers, Volume II, had almost as much to do with drawing me toward Robert Johnson's music as the Rolling Stones did. The Stones gave such powerful readings of "Love In Vain"——in the studio (with Ry Cooder) on Let It Bleed and live (with Mick Taylor) on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (both key records for me)——that I was driven to the source, which I found in a shadowy bin at the back of the corner record store. I absorbed Volume II for a few months, listening to it over and over again, and when I'd accumulated another five bucks I went back and got the first volume, with "Crossroads" and "Come On In My Kitchen" and "Me and the Devil Blues" ...recordings that I found simply astounding, supernatural, barely fathomable at first, then oracular. The image of Johnson recording while facing into the corner of the room, it turns out, echoes real speculation about whether this might have been a recording strategy or simply the result of Robert's extreme shyness in this stressful situation. This, among other fine points, gets attention in the most recent addition to the canon of Johnson studies, Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, by Memphis writer Tom Graves.

After reading Frank Driggs' liner notes to King of the Delta Blues Singers, Volume I, over and over again, I found Samuel Charters, whose The Country Blues, 1959, is the pioneering classic in the field. I particularly treasure my tattered copy of the beautifully primitive, right-off-the-typewriter-style Oak Publications paperback of Charters' The Bluesmen, 1967, the Johnson portion of which is sourced with his own interviews with Henry Townsend and Son House, biographically sketchy and mysterious but full of brilliant musical analysis and insight. Robert Palmer writes with typical brilliance about Johnson in his indispensible Deep Blues, as does Greil Marcus in Mystery Train. Steven LaVere's extensive scholarly notes to CBS Records' 1990 release of The Complete Recordings are informative and important. The other great ones are Peter Guralnick's brief, poetic Searching for Robert Johnson (1989) and——my favorite in some ways——Alan Greenberg's visionary screenplay Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, 1994 (with a good introduction by Stanley Crouch and a foreword by Martin Scorsese, who intended to put the project into production). The book is an extremely well researched and well documented imagining of Robert's life and of the heart of his legend—highly recommended. I haven't read Elijah Wald's 2004 Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, but I recently read the Tom Graves book (and met Tom and his wife at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville).

Crossroads is ideal for the general reader, rather than for the blues scholar, with plenty of space in the slim volume given over to background and context, and also to some contemporary pop-culture packaging of the Johnson legend——the beautiful, mysterious, deeply American crossroads legend, the central, Faustian moment of which is when the Devil grants the young man his astonishing musical prowess in exchange for poor Bob's mortal soul. Graves leaves no stone unturned in his survey——in fact, occasionally and convincingly debunking some of the accepted tenets of the legend. But whether or not you're one of those who prefer to "print the legend," no debunking will diminish the hold that Robert Johnson's story has on the American imagination, and nothing can diminish the extraordinary, elemental power of his music. In that department, Graves turned me on to a great, if belated, discovery: the 1998 remixes of the old Columbia King of the Delta Blues Singers albums——the songs sequenced the same way they are in my memory (no alternate tracks interspersed) and the sound far superior to even the 1997 remix of The Complete Recordings. It's been out for 11 years, but it's a new revelation to me.

Remembering Blaze Foley

Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley, by Sybil Rosen (Number 2 in the University of North Texas Press’ Lives of Musicians series) arrived in my mailbox this gray, rainy Saturday morning, courtesy of Amazon. The rain fell and steam rose from my coffee and the book drew me in. Sybil lived with Blaze in the seventies, during a time of transformation in both of their lives. He wrote his best-known song, the beautiful "If I Could Only Fly," for her. Her relationship with Blaze may have been, as she describes it, a "fleeting idyll" in the grand scheme of things, but as she looks back from the distance of years through the uncertain filter of memory, through the light of Blaze’s subsequent notoriety and stature, she finds deep, resonant meaning. And this journey into her personal past also illuminates overall the vibrant times of these southern hippies, artists and musicians living the underground life in the seventies and eighties, and takes us down some of the little-known backwaters of the Texas music scene of the period, providing a depth and color missing from many accounts of this rich, creative milieu. And, on top of everything else, Sybil Rosen is a skilled writer of beautiful, moving prose. This book is not only a welcome addition to UNT Press’ fine Lives of Musicians series, but also to the literature of Texas music and to the literature of the counterculture. It is a fine memoir of a sensitive soul.

Krazy & Ignatz

Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books publishes a stunning catalog of comics-art books——notably, the beautiful, indispensible Complete Crumb Comics series, now at 17 volumes, which covers R. Crumb’s complete published output, from his earliest work for American Greetings though the classic San Francisco years, up now through the late 1980s——an amazing body of work by a great American artist in a beautifully designed set of books. But Fantagraphics’ latest and greatest venture is the now-complete 10-volume series of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat Sunday comics, covering from 1925 up to Herriman’s death in 1944, first in black and white, then, starting in 1935, in bold, rich color. The series editor and guiding light is Bill Blackbeard, and the series is a brilliant tour de force on his part, but it’s the design work of Chris Ware that makes these books such a knockout——the paperback as objet d’art, as palpable and as beautiful as the old Sunday funnies used to be. Ware’s bold designs are perfect reflections of Herriman’s artistic vision, incorporating and distilling the distinct elements of the Krazy Kat landscape into motifs that beautifully complement the brilliance of the strips themselves.

The poet E.E. Cummings speaks to the substance of the Krazy Kat strips in his 1946 essay on the subject:

The plot elements are few and pure, as are the visual elements. The language is organic, poetic, and purely American. The infinite variety that the interactions of these elements can generate is nothing less than a wonder of 20th century art. I keep the Krazy & Ignatz books next to the bed and frequently dip into them before I go to sleep, or whenever I need a purifying reading experience. Again, here’s Cummings:

Indeed, now, could anything possibly be clearer?

The Unreleased Recordings of Hank Williams

A newly discovered trove of pristine live studio recordings made for radio broadcast by Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys at their peak in 1951...seems like a dream. But it’s real, released last year as a three-CD box set by Time-Life. Williams' biographer Colin Escott says, "It’s as if we only half knew Hank Williams until now." Besides representing a 50 percent increase in the body of Williams’ recorded work, these 54 songs, many with spoken introductions and between-song chatter and hijinks, provide a view of Hank, particularly of his working life on the road, that the classic studio recordings are unable to convey. As in the shows he played nightly as he barnstormed the South, headed for ruination——and immortality——Williams’ originals are sprinkled throughout sets heavy with popular songs of the day, with old-time "parlor" songs, and with gospel material. What Hank introduces as his first performance of "I Can’t Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)" is a highlight here, as is a heart-wrenching "Cold Cold Heart," but also thrilling are tight, dead-on, emotional performances of "On Top of Old Smokey," "Cool Water," and "I'll Fly Away." And, a true revelation: the Drifting Cowboys singing great backwoods harmonies on old-time songs such as "Drifting Too Far From The Shore." The recordings are excellent: Hank’s voice is crystal clear and ultra-present. Colin Escott's text and notes are also excellent. If you think you know Hank Williams, listen and learn.

The Hackensaw Boys

These six wild boys from Charlottesville, Virginia, all lined up straight singing wild, loose harmonies, playing acoustic guitar, standup bass, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and a washboard-and-tin-can percussion contraption, these boys grab you from the first note and don’t let go. It's white-lightning-fast hippie bluegrass, mountain music on speed, a crazed backwoods revel, but these boys are all real nice fellas, not clean-cut, so much, in fact, highly creative in the facial-hair department in some cases, but earnest and exuberant, fine musicians, and exuding a truly inspired communal vibe and a roots rhythm that had everybody on their feet and dancing throughout the extremely engaging and energetic live show in which I participated (in Bristol, Tennessee), everybody from the locals in spit-shined shoes and overalls and new hairdos and Sunday dresses doing real dance steps, to the Deadheads (do you still call them Deadheads? What are they called now?) in flowing tie-dyed regalia with hula hoops (hula hoops!) doing what they do, still, apparently. Go see the Hackensaw Boys, and like the song says, "Look Out Dog! Slow Down Train!"

The Krayolas: La Conquistadora

The San Antonio sound is alive and evolving with the Krayolas, who have taken up where Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet left off, stirring a mixing bowl full of British Invasion-era rock'n'roll, Texas blues, horn-driven R&B and soul, and border music, and adding the razor-sharp writing of rhythm guitarist/vocalist/ frontman Hector Saldaña. La Conquistadora (Box Records, 2008) is a joy, from the packaging——the cover painting by David Zamora Casas, the brilliantly evocative sixties-style hallucinatory-declamatory liner notes by John Phillip Santos, and the great interior action-shot of the memorable Jovita's gig where I first discovered the Krayolas in March, with Augie on the Vox——through each song in the varied playlist. The three scattered Augie Meyers songs——including the infectious "Little Fox"——lay a firm foundation in joyous organ/accordion-based rock’n’roll. Saldaña’s songs go deeper, exploring relationships, personalities, and situations in simple, succinct, straightforward, yet magically evocative language: "Alex" evokes both longing and barely restrained bitterness; "Deceiver" brings together lust and, if not guilt, then conscience; "Nolan Street Bridge" is a time and a place and a character brilliantly drawn; the love songs——I particularly like "Your Doorway Darling" and "I’ve Wished You Well"——are both tender and imbued with a mature, if not jaded, wistfulness. All this in a set of three-minute rock’n’roll songs as well crafted as they are imaginative and varied.

I spoke briefly with Augie Meyers at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer, and he told me he’d just recorded some more tracks with the Krayolas ("They’re great," Augie said, "aren’t they?"). I’ve been listening to those tracks this week (thanks, Hector!), and they are killer, taking the group’s sound into bluesier territory, with a harder edge. The writing is top-notch, and "Long Leaf Pine" immediately takes its place among the band’s strongest performances. "I Want to Fall in Love Again" is another lost gem from Augie, brought exuberantly alive. Whereas only one track on La Conquistadora features horns, both these tracks make superb use of the kick-ass West Side Horns: the baritone sax on "Fall in Love Again" will grab you and not let go.

Stay tuned here for lots more about the Krayolas.

Garden & Gun

As the choir and band cooked up a chills-inducing spiritual, Diddley’s casket was wheeled in, followed by more than forty family members chanting "Hey, Bo Diddley" and led by his oldest daughter...who danced maniacally behind the slow-moving casket....

...And Diddley was truly sent out in style. As his longtime backing band...softly played his signature song, "Bo Diddley," his casket was wheeled out into the steamy Florida sun.

From "Goodbye, Bo Diddley" by Matt Hendrickson, Garden & Gun,
September/October 2008