If he can't catch it, nobody can

So the good old boys at Underwater Peoples' records, they of all of your favorite vaguely folksy indie rock acts -- Real Estate, Woods, Islands, etc. etc. are planning some epic hootenanny up in the mountains this July 24 featuring all those bands and more, but they need your pledge or it won't happen. I'm broke so I can't help, obviously, but maybe you can make this happen. This event is all but guaranteed to feature flannel shirts and beards galore-- how could you say no?



Also, I don't have a car and have no idea where Saratoga Springs is, but if I'm really lucky, maybe I'll be able to hitchhike up there in the Woods Family Van. I'm stoked.

Espers @ The Bell House, 12/5/09

For a band based in Philly, an NYC visit by Espers is tragically rare, which explains why their show at The Bell House last night was so well-attended. Singer/guitarist Greg Weeks is an unapologetic, all-out hippie, complete with fringed buckskin belt-bag, moccasins, round glasses and bell-bottom trousers. The lightning rod of the band is singer Meg Baird (her first solo record, 2007's Dear Companion, would be a shoo-in if I was making a "Best of the Oughts" list, which I'm SO not). Her voice is instantly recognizable on every record she makes, and even though people like to compare it to Vashti Bunyan and Sandy Denny, she doesn't really sound like either of them. It's just that her style of singing doesn't have much of a context that current audiences can relate to. Which is sort of why it's great.

Much of Espers, in fact, is rooted in past styles that may or may not ever be relevant again. Their earlier recordings were more acoustic based and more or categorizable as freak-folk or freak-folk adjacent, but they've expanded. Their October release, Espers III, incorporates as much electric as it does acoustic (not to mention precise work from Vetiver drummer Otto Hauser) and achieves a kind of late-sixties psych-pop feel, reminsicent of Fairport Convention or even Fleetwood Mac. It's the type of music that you never really hear anymore, ever. It's too bad, too, because a couple of songs they played last night, like Tomorrow from 2005's The Weed Tree, "Children of Stone" from Espers II or "Caroline" from III, I could actually see being radio hits at a very, very specific point in musical time.

Mp3 - Espers - Caroline

Literary folk

Since I'm reading Rick Moody as we speak (Garden State, his first) I was interested when I learned that if I want, I can listen to him, too, being that The Wingdale Community Singers, his Brooklyn-based singer-songwriters collective, just released their second album, Spirit Duplicator, on Secret Shame. Moody and the rest of the foursome share the songwriting duty equally. This includes Hannah Marcus (who's played with American Music Club, Red House Painters and Godspeed You Black Emporer), David Grubbs (of Red Krayola, Squirrel Bait, and Bastro) and Nina Katchadourian. Moody also recently served as guest editor for an issue of Magnet Magazine.The album manages to sound remarkably old-timey without being cloying, exemplified by "Give it a Kiss," with its instantly memorable hook.

Since I spent the better part of semester researching the NYC folk scene for a grad school class, I've taken personal interest in the survival of folk music in New York, After the '60s revival waned, it seems most folkies have moved far away from this admittedly hyper-ironic scene. The Wingdales (like Sharon van Etten) are an incredible treasure located right here, and I'm glad they're carrying the folk torch for New York.

Actually, after, a while I realized that the Wingdales' music, springlike and rustic , full of old-fashioned harmonic singing, doesn't exactly match up to Moody's book, with its gloomy industrial spaces and early-twentysomething ennui set to the backdrop of northern New Jersey in the '80s. But hey, I prefer The Carter Family anyway, their beautiful, spare cover of which is below:

Mp3 - Wingdale Community Singers - Death is Only a Dream

The unknowable genius of Peter Stampfel

He lives in Soho and doesn't pay that much for it. He has birds and a cat named Roscoe. He has a lovely wife and daughter who were attempting to get out of the house to drive to Baltimore for an art school interview when I came in, and were still attemping it when I left. He plays in a band with Sam Shepard's son Walker (my former neighbor, schoolmate, and novelistic eponym), and used to play in a band with Sam Shepard. And he remembers the early days of Greenwich Village, playing with Steve Weber in the Holy Modal Rounders (their first gig, he collapsed and Weber left, or was it Weber who collapsed and Peter left? whatever it is, it's my recollection that's fuzzy, not his), taking enough speed to choke an elephant, and thinking Bob Dylan was only carrying a guitar around to get laid. In his book The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave Van Ronk called him "some kind of genius...I'm just not sure which kind." He single (well, multiple)-handedly gave birth to freak folk in 1976, when he recorded Have Moicy! with Michael "Snocko" Hurley and the Unholy Modal Rounders in the hills of Vermont. He's working on a compilation of recordings of 100 songs, one for each year of the 20th century, to act as a kind of lesson for the ages for those kids who have no memory of that century. And they aren't folksongs, either -- I'm talking stuff like "Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." Aside from being a genius, he's a really cool dude.

All this, and you can see him! He'll be playing with his new band, the Ether Frolic Mob, at the Jalopy in Red Hook on April 18.