Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me
July 27th, 2009 | 12:30 pm est |
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The reclusive and enigmatic Fred Neil really didn’t care one hoot about the machinations of the music business, and while it is tempting to compare him to someone like Nick Drake, whose bouts with depression kept him away from the limelight, it would appear Neil suffered instead from a severe case of personal and creative sanity, an ailment extremely rare in the music industry. And Neil knew how that industry worked very well. He was a Brill Building songwriter for a time. He played sessions (he was a session guitarist on Bobby Darin’s 1958 hit “Dream Lover,” for instance). He certainly knew how the publishing end of it worked, since the publishing royalties from Roy Orbison’s version of Neil’s “Candy Man,” a B-side hit in 1961, gave the unusually frugal Neil the freedom to do as he pleased in both his personal and creative life from that point on.
The American medicine show came into its own shortly after the Civil War with the rise of so-called patent medicines and the almost complete lack of regulations concerning the ingredients that went into them, and any number of noxious tonics, elixirs, and nostrums with trumpeted healing powers were hawked by silver-tongued pitch doctors to the audiences who flocked to see the various acrobats, dancers, fire-eaters, snake handlers, comedians, and musicians who entertained at these free extravaganzas. As a cost efficient way of merging entertainment with merchandising (and where manufacturing meant mixing ingredients in a bathtub), these medicine shows successfully traveled the so-called “kerosene circuit” of rural and small-town America until the dawn of the 20th Century, when the rise of radio and movies and the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act combined to render them obsolete. The medicine show blueprint of offering free entertainment to attract audiences and then using intermissions to push products on them has hardly gone away, however, and is still the driving force behind radio and television in the 21st Century, and it’s the basic elixir for commerce all over the internet, too. The musicians working these colorful traveling medicine shows were professionals, at least professional enough to leave their home communities and take to the road, and luckily several of these musicians were still active in the 1920s and early 1930s when the fledgling recording industry was just getting off the ground, and numerous commercial 78s by former medicine show entertainers were issued in the prewar era.
We were deeply saddened to learn that Scottish songwriter, guitarist, and true legend John Martyn passed away early on January 29, only weeks after being awarded Great Britain’s OBE (Order of the British Empire) — not bad for a rebellious lifelong Scotsman. His website announced his death with the words: “With heavy heart and an unbearable sense of loss we must announce that John died this morning.” As of this writing, the cause of that death is unknown but it hardly matters. What does is that in place of that gruff, slurring, dark, smoky voice and stunning guitar playing completely of his own design, is the silence, the gap, the void, the damn black hole in life that he filled by singing those unbearably emotional songs of his.
Priscilla Ahn - 
Joan Baez - 
James Blackshaw - 
Bon Iver - 
Paul Clayton - 
Eliza Gilkyson - 
Jolie Holland - 
The Horse Flies - 
The Kingston Trio - 
Kathy Mattea - 
Pete Molinari - 
Morley - 
Pete Seeger - 
Otis Taylor - 
Vetiver - 
James Yorkston - 
Various Artists - 
