Manafonistas

1. Le Parfum De L’éxil
2. L’homme Sud
3. L’autre Rive
4. Sel Et Soie
5. Dance For Horses
6. Des Feux Lointains
7. Cortège
8. Dust And Dogs
9. Prato Plag

If you’re really seeing the little town Cicely in Alasca, where NORTHERN EXPOSURE („Ausgerechnet Alaska“) had its home, have a look if Chris‘ radio station is still there – and I imagine you will hear these songs from an old Americana mixtape (in my always failing memory, I think that Klaus had – in our school days – a copy of that Byrds double album that originally contained the long, long song „Eight Miles High“):

1) Lucinda Wiliams: Greenville, from: CAR WHEELS O A GRAVEL ROAD
2) Lambchop: The Blue Wave, aus IS A WOMAN
3) Emmylou Harris: Deeper Well, from WRECKIN‘ BALL
4) Bill Callahan: Eid Ma Clack Shaw: from I WISH WE WERE AN EAGLE
5) Gillian Welch: The Way It Goes, from HARROW AND THE HARVEST
6) Neil Young: Pocahontas, from RUST NEVER SLEEPS
7) Patti Smith: Redondo Beach, from HORSES
8) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: All You Can Carry, from HYPNOTIC EYE
9) Joni Mitchell: Coyote, from HEJIRA
10) The Byrds: Eight Miles High, from THE BEST OF THE BYRDS

Dan Michaelson doesn’t seem like a tragic character, even if his lyrics are philosophically blue. Now resident in East London, but originally from Northhamptonshire, he is blessed with a voice that draws comparisons with Bill Callahan, Kurt Wagner and – just about – Lou Reed. He claims to have no skill as a singer but as a compromise with his own modesty, employs a confessional mumble, that sometimes extends to a low croon adding a patina of tragic to lyrics that are already heartbroken. (out on August 18th)  – source: Uncut, September 2014

Some music cranks would undoubtedly pose the argument that everything’s gotten too ‘big’ these days; that the Radioheads and the Animal Collectives of the world are carrying on the same form of musical classism flaunted by bands like Yes and Led Zeppelin thirty-five years prior.

Alas, those were still the toddler days of the music biz, and that argument no longer carries much water for anyone but the most diehard purists. If anything can be gathered from nearly sixty years of rock and roll, it’s that no matter how big or small you are good music owes less to the ebb and flow of trends than it does to chance, chemistry and inimitable talent.

Live At The Old Quarter, reissued this year on vinyl by Fat Possum Records, is a simple document that bristles with just this sort of magical ‘right place, right time’ energy. Townes Van Zandt, alone on the stage, strums and picks at his guitar in front of a rapt audience somewhere in Houston sometime in the early seventies, and the product is nothing less than heartbreakingly gorgeous.

Van Zandt spends his time at the microphone proving to his audience that he can live up to the promise of “Pancho & Lefty” and succeeds admirably, peppering blue jokes between a set of originals and covers by the likes Doc Watson (“If I Needed You”) and Bo Diddley (“Who Do You Love”) and never once slipping from his disarmingly honest demeanor.

“Living on the road my friend / was gonna keep you free and clean / now you wear your skin like iron / and your breath’s as hard as kerosene.”

Townes chose these words to describe the down-and-out bandit Pancho, but he’s really imparting a little something about himself. To know that the man met his own untimely end, likewise a victim of drugs and booze, is as sad as it is unsurprising; even on laid back, jokey tracks like “Talking Thunderbird Blues,” the singer’s voice betrays a plaintive fatalism.

Townes did make big studio records, but here the man shines with his own easy glory. It’s in our own good fortune that someone was there that night to put it to put it all on tape.