Dirk Hamilton classic: The Sweet Forever

David Gans joins for Boris Garcia for Northern California dates

Cosmic troubadour David Gans opens for hot jam wizards Boris Garcia on four California dates this week.
Thursday, November 5, 9:45pm: Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut Street, San Francisco
Friday, November 6: Harvest Hoedown – Willits Center for the Arts, 71 E Commercial Street, Willits CA
Saturday, November 7, 9:30pm: Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA
Sunday, November 8: Humboldt Brews, 856 10th Street, Arcata CA. 707-826-2739

Boris Garcia and David Gans Northern California Tour

Revolver remastered is a disappointment

Hi Greg,
Broke down and bought Revolver at Borders the other night.  Listened down three times, and here is my report:
1. It’s clean and clear, but no improvement whatsoever over my 1982 British-press vinyl release on Parlophone.  That’s not to say it isn’t great, but that pressing from ‘82 was always the one to beat, to my ears.
2a. The big advantage of digital technology is not clarity, but dynamic range.  Analog can be (and typically is) perfectly clear and defined, but has limits, especially in the case of vinyl as compared to tape, with big shifts from soft to loud.  The CD, when it came out, was touted as being able to accurately reproduce the dynamic flow that is present in all great music.  Instead, it quickly became a “convenient” and “portable” medium.  The compression that had to be used on records to make them fit (on vinyl) was transferred, intact, to CDs.  Occasionally you will find artists and producers, like Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who understand and exploit this aspect of digital, but generally it has become the norm to use a lot of compression– because it has a certain sound, the sound of pop music on the radio.
2b. Revolver, and I’ll wager, all the rest of the Beatles remasters, is highly compressed.  Bummer.  Tomorrow Never Knows, Good Day Sunshine, And Your Bird Can Sing, Eleanor Rigby– should breathe with the dynamics of live performance.  Instead, they are crystal-clear but canned.  This a too bad.  The same team that did a great job on Let It Be…naked, which is a step in the right direction dynamically, did these remasters, but all they’ve achieved is to make them sound like first-press vinyl.  Again, there is nothing “wrong” with that, but it is so much less than it could be. They could have put us in the room with the Beatles.  Instead, here we are in 2009, listening the Beatles on the radio, the DJ spinning a very good pressing.  Just like old times.

Rubber Souldiers: birth of a band

January 22, 2009 – Berkeley, California: Rubber Souldiers live at Ashkenaz.  Three guys in front, Lorin Rowan, David Gans and Chris Rowan,  singing their hearts out and throwing down the jam.  It’s the Beatles catalog, songs everybody knows, but this is different.  This is deconstruction– shifting time signatures, riffs morphing into improvised rivers of tone, a hail of electric guitars join mandolins where pianos once played, but always that great singing.  This is the Rowan Brothers folks, with their new brother David, and those boys got the pipes.  The audience is up and dancing four bars into the first song, the driving Dr. Robert.  Rubber Souldiers they are, and plenty of 1965 is here: Girl, The Word, Norwegian Wood.  N-Wood shows what this band can do, departing from the original but always finding the handle again and giving us our Beatle kicks.  Zac Matthews, late of Hot Buttered Rum, joined in here, in fact wrote the arrangement, and lays in some ripping mando leads along with brother Lorin.  As the night grew deeper, darker, we felt the mood expand, and by the time they came through with the cosmic Day Tripper to close out the evening, we knew we had seen the beginning of something big.

Souldiers captured at Ashkenaz 1/22/09

Steve Goodman Rides Again – at Moe’s Books

IMG_4208 steve goodman jim and david

Originally uploaded by Look.

David Gans and Jim Rothermel rock the house on Steve Goodman’s “Elvis Imitator,” part of a touching and informative reading/rocking/remembrance of the late great Goodman. Spur of the event was Clay Eals, whose new book, “Facing the Music,” gives the garrulous Goodman his due—  four pounds worth. The whole affair was in the house at Moe’s Books, Telegraph Ave Berkeley, Monday July 28, 2008.

Finished Guitar

W the Cecil

Originally uploaded by Monem

Roll Your Own – Building a guitar from scratch

Halfway there

Originally uploaded by Monem
Here we have the halfway mark on a Chris’s senior project: a mahogany/maple semi-hollow three pickup electric guitar (only two are laid out here, Gibson humbuckers.  The third is a Tom Anderson). This is an original design, Chris and I working it out on a sketchpad before cutting.

The Cold War: PMC 7067 XEX 709/10 Mfg. in UK ©1968

McLeod is a joker. Freckle-faced, a mess of red hair, he has no work habits but gets straight A’s. He whispers answers to me in English class, “…it’s Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn,” even though I never ask him. His father is the superintendent of our school, SAS, so he knows everybody including all the teachers. He hangs out with the watchman, a Sikh with hair down to his ass, and Yusoff the custodian, a Haji with many tales to tell. McLeod is fearless, talking to them in pigeon Punjabi or Malay; knows all the dirty words. I am his disciple since I am new to the island.

Last week in Change Alley a skinny Malay with long fingers steps in front of us and says we should go with him. McLeod pushes past him, dragging me along, and whispers “boonta” as we emerge onto Raffles Place.

“Homo,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Boonta. Boy homo is boonta; girl, woonta.”

“Oh.”

We stop at a cart and get a coke which the cartman dispenses by opening a bottle, pouring it into a clear plastic bag attached to a nylon string, then dropping in a chunk of ice for cooling. We hold our drinks by the string, sipping the fizz through plastic straws. McLeod looks up at the grey sky and begins talking.

“It’s the Cold War, man. Songs of the Cold War.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“That album. That Apple album.”

“I don’t get why they call it the Cold War.”

“Hot War– two armies, bang bang, winner, loser. Cold War– spies, missiles; they’re behind East Germany, we’re behind West Germany. Chess match, no bang bang.”

“That’s what the record’s about?”

“Yeah. The spy with the perfect American accent gets called back to Moscow from his post in Miami where he’s infiltrating the Cuban counterrevolution. But he might be a double agent ’cause when he’s home he says ‘honey disconnect the phone.’ That’s it– he’s a double agent.”

“What about the others?”

“Other what?”

“Songs.”

“Cold War. Obvious. ‘Blackbird fly into the light of the dark black night’– that’s telling someone behind the Iron Curtain to escape.”

“What is the Iron Curtain?.”

“Eastern Europe. The Soviets won’t let them watch movies or read a newspaper.”

“How come you know so much?”

“I know nothing and you know less.”

“Thanks.”

“No, you’re smart, but you’ve got to start looking around.”

“I’m trying. What about ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’ That isn’t about the Cold War.”

“Totally about the Cold War.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Obvious. ‘I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping, while my guitar gently weeps.’ A wise man looks at the people of the world, enemies, who are really brothers, and is so torn up he cannot even weep. Only music can express the sorrow.”

“Man, you’re so full of it! The record’s rock’n'roll, just songs, it’s not that fancy.”

“Yeah? Whoever heard of a rock song called ‘I’m Back in the U.S.S.R.?’”