'Rebel' Rod's Revelations - Pousette-Dart adds to stunning catalog with "Anti-Gravity"

NYC Based Folk/Rock Legend Continues Brilliant Career with Heartfelt Effort Due April 5

Jon Pousette-Dart

New York, NY—Nowadays, there’s virtue in simply being a survivor. Jon Pousette-Dart should know. As the veteran of an industry that thrives on contenders and then spits them out like so much used chewing tobacco, he’s proven he not only knows how to survive, but also to thrive, especially when it comes to nurturing his creative instincts and staying true to his muse. After seeing success in the ‘70s, opting out of the ‘80s, nudging his way back in the ‘90s and finding his niche in the new millennium, he still makes music that’s touching, timeless, and imbued with universal appeal.  Jon’s new album, Anti-Gravity (officially set for release April 5) attests to that fact. It arrives nearly forty years after he launched his namesake trio, the Pousette-Dart Band, and yet it ranks among the best offerings of his remarkable career.

Working with a storied cast of musicians, artists with whom he’s had a lengthy personal and professional history—multi-instrumentalist Darrell Scott (currently a member of Robert Plant’s Band of Joy), veteran vocalist Jonell Mosser, and longtime band mates Eric Parker (drums), Paul Socolow (bass) and Jim Chapdelaine (guitar, production) -- he stamps the album’s eight songs with a sparkle and sheen that affirms his carefully-honed craft. He shares writing credits with an equally illustrious cast of collaborators – Chapdelaine, Grammy winning producer Gary Nicholson and chart champs Angelo and Jaime Kyle. The latter also sings a duet on “Who Am I,” a bittersweet song about the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease that she co-composed with Jon and wife Dawn Young.

Anti Gravity marks another major milestone in Jon’s remarkable trajectory, eight songs graced by instantly engaging melodies… each an endearing encounter that aptly reflects the many aspects of his varied musical persona. The title track, written with band mate Jim Chapdelaine, boasts catchy hooks and reliable refrains that offer an immediate and agreeable first impression. The aching, heartfelt ballads “Me and the Rain” and “Who I Am” are anchored to their emotional core. The wide-eyed optimism of the stirring “Great Wide Open” and the pure devotion of “How Can I Walk Away” provide the album with an unquestionable clarity that resonates long after the final notes fade away. Likewise, when it comes to agile, accessible melodies, the jaunty “Words” ranks among the most effusive songs he’s ever offered. Fortunately though, as his later albums suggested and the new effort emphatically proves, Jon has never lost his passion for making music, or for that matter, the desire to create that connection with his listeners. Likewise, Anti Gravity demonstrates that his melodies are as stirring and embracing as ever.

“To me, the real barometer of success is when you can connect with someone, no matter where they’re from, no matter what their background,” Jon concludes. “The thing I’m most concerned with as a musician is to be timeless and real, and to tell stories that reflect ideals that don’t just go and change with the moment. That’s the job as I know it.”             

About Jon Pousette-Dart
For their part, Pousette-Dart Band reflected the sounds of the ‘70s, securing their place in the musical firmament by purveying that harmonious soft rock sound also advanced by bands like the Eagles, America and Orleans. Signed to Capitol Records, they put out four critically hailed albums for the label (Pousette-Dart Band, Amnesia, Pousette-Dart Band 3, and Never Enough) and a recent compilation (The Best of Pousette-Dart Band), and recruited for some of the biggest tours of the decade, including Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive victory lap and Yes’ epic Fragile extravaganza. Jon himself traveled in the same circles as some of the era’s brightest luminaries – James Taylor and the entire Taylor clan, Bonnie Raitt and Little Feat’s Lowell George among them. Yet, as times changed, and popular music shifted course and veered less towards song craft and more towards a manufactured, production line approach, Pousette Dart-Band found themselves displaced from the musical mainstream.

After an absence of several years in which he earned a comfortable living working in the lucrative world of television jingles, singing and playing sessions, collaborating with other songwriters, a producing a program for the History Channel and representing the work of his father -- the internationally renowned abstract artist Richard Pousette-Dart -- Jon resurfaced on his own. He revived and reignited his musical career, beginning with a recorded reunion with his old colleagues aptly entitled It’s About Time followed by another belated effort that was initiated with his former colleagues in the early ‘90s and eventually issued in 1998. The album, entitled Ready To Fly (later re-titled Put Down Your Gun), was an assertive statement decrying the growing violence engulfing the country. His solo career would continue in earnest with 2002’s Sample This, and Heart & Soul in 2005.

'Rebel' Rod's Revelations - Blind Pig sets CD reissue for two blues albums -

Blind Pig Records has announced a March 29th release date for two traditional blues albums from its storied past.   The label will re-issue long out of print titles from Henry Gray and Yank Rachell that were originally released as LPs.  Both CDs will carry a $9.98 list price as part of Blind Pig's midline budget series.

HENRY GRAY  "LUCKY MAN"
The lustrous Chicago blues scene of the 1950s was predominated by great pianists, and Henry Gray was one of the finest.  His rolling two-fisted keyboard work graced countless Chicago blues recordings during the '50s for leading labels like Chess and Vee Jay.  He recorded on classic sides by Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley, Little Walter, and Jimmy Rogers, among others. Starting in 1956, Henry spent twelve years as pianist for the legendary Howlin' Wolf.  The sessions for Lucky Man, his first solo American album, were recorded in 1988, and marked something of a comeback for Henry, who had recorded only sporadically in the previous two decades.  Audio magazine said that on the album, "Gray performs as if the heyday of Chicago blues never ended."

YANK RACHELL  "BLUES MANDOLIN MAN"
Yank Rachell began his recording career in the late 1920's.  Through the ensuring decades, he established himself as the finest and most revered mandolinist the blues ever produced, performing regularly with Sleepy John Estes and Sonny Boy Willaimson, among many others.  Rachell drifted away from the music scene in the '40s, but resumed performing during the folk-blues revival of the late '60s and early '70s. These sessions from 1986, where Yank is joined for the first time by a rhythm section (his accustomed way of playing for many years), find Yank in fine form, his voice and instrumental skills still strong and compelling.  Downbeat magazine called the LP "a fun, effective presentation of old-timey music in a fresh, contemporary setting."

'Rebel' Rod's Revelations, Reviews, & other things - Diana Jones' 3rd album, "High Atmosphere" on Proper American Records, combines tradition with topical

Nashville singer-songwriter brings the mountain ballad tradition
 into the present day

Jim Lauderdale makes guest appearance;

Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) co-produced.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — High Atmosphere, the latest album in the remarkable career arc of singer-songwriter/visual artist Diana Jones, hits with the force of a revelation, further deepening an unprecedented body of work that began in 2006 with My Remembrance of You and continued with 2009’s Better Times Will Come.

On her new release, due out on April 5, 2011 on Proper American Records and recorded entirely live with simpatico musicians (including Jim Lauderdale) at Quad studios in Nashville, this single-minded artist continues to hew to an austere, plainspoken aesthetic, yet its timelessly homespun frameworks are embedded with distinctly topical subject matter. As Bill Friskics-Warren pointed out in his New York Times profile, Jones “approaches the mountain-ballad tradition not as a curiosity or antique but as a renewable vernacular that’s just as capable of speaking to the human condition now as it was 80 years ago.”

“The songs I write,” says Jones, who has a second career as a portrait artist, “are informed by my experiences within a certain time frame, so they become a sort of world within themselves. For this new record, I was on the road a lot, trying to catch up to myself and the things that were happening in my life. This was very different from my previous experiences. For example, I wrote most of the songs on My Remembrance of You in a cabin in Massachusetts by myself. Then I was mining really old things, focusing on the traditional, whereas these songs happened to me as life happened to me.”

The central metaphor of the title song, which opens the album, was triggered by the most literal of experiences. “I had come home to Nashville from a tour in Texas on the night the big flood happened,” Jones recalls. “When I got to the airport in Dallas, CNN was showing news footage of the Cumberland River overflowing, and it was two blocks away from my house. Luckily, my flight did manage to come in, and we took a circuitous route to my house; all the streets were blocked off — it was very dramatic. I live in a shotgun shack that was built in 1900 on top of a hill, and I suddenly realized what an incredible gift it was to be on that hill, because people lost instruments, cars, all kinds of things, and my house was absolutely dry. It was then that it occurred to me to write ‘High Atmosphere,’ along with the fact that I was writing so many songs on planes — I’d spent the last year in the high atmosphere. That’s what was different about this project: It was about being on planes, about coming home and not knowing what you’ll find.”

Jones got the title from an old Rounder LP that her co-producer Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) had given to her; it was called High Atmosphere, and the title song was a banjo instrumental, but the phrase resonated, and she subsequently made the connection.

Jones’ back-story is itself as full of cathartic moments, ironic twists and intricate connections as her narratives. During her childhood and adolescence, she felt an almost mystical, seemingly inexplicable attraction to rural Southern music, while growing up in the Northeast with no art nor music in her home, the adopted daughter of a chemical engineer. It wasn’t until her late 20s, when she located her birth family in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee, that Jones’ deep affinity for Anglo-Celtic traditional music began to make sense.

Specifically, it was hanging out with her grandfather, Robert Lee Maranville, that brought on her life-changing epiphany. “He was a guitar player from Knoxville, Tennessee, who played with Chet Atkins in the early days,” Jones explained in 2009. “He told me that if he had died, his one regret would have been never to have known the granddaughter who was given away. He took me driving ’round the Appalachians, reintroducing me to where I came from. And whenever these old-time country tunes came on the radio, he’d be singing along — he knew all the words. This ancient mountain music was completely in his blood and, I suddenly came to realize, in mine, too.”

It was then that Jones — who’d recorded a pair of well-crafted contemporary singer/songwriter albums during the second half of the ’90s — decided to start anew, armed with her birthright and a newfound sense of purpose. When Maranville died in 2000, she holed up in a cabin in the woods of Massachusetts and wrote the songs that wound up, six years and many filled notebooks later, on My Remembrance of You, which she fittingly dedicated to his memory.

The album earned Jones a nomination as Best Emerging Artist at the Folk Alliance Awards, leading to tours with Richard Thompson and Mary Gauthier, appearances at folk festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, and covers of her songs by Gretchen Peters and Joan Baez. “There’s some kind of channeling from some other lifetime going on,” Baez marveled. “I don’t know the answer to these things, but all I can think of is that it must come from some mysterious part of her soul.”

Jones views her connection to this tradition, and her place in it, as “that simple and that complex. If I try to look from the outside at how my life’s panned out, it seems strange even to me. I grew up on the East Coast, and I didn’t know my life would take that turn. When I came to the South and I met my family, it started to unfold for me, which took awhile. And then I found my own voice through my grandfather; his kindness and the time he spent with me led me to something that was authentic for me — that I didn’t even know was in there. And once I started writing these songs, it wasn’t like I thought about them; they came through in what felt like a channeled sort of way, as if they’d come from somewhere else.”

While the cover portraits on her last two albums reveal Jones at her most serious, she appears on the cover of the new record with hand over heart and eyes closed in a smile of apparent contentment. That image “speaks to the internal process of writing for me,” she offers. “That the High Atmosphere is as internal as it is up there in the sky. Maybe even a spiritual place. That’s the place I write from.”

'Rebel Rod's Ramblings and other things - The voice left is back and what the heck is going on?

by 'Rebel' Rod Ames

Since immediately after Christmas my family has been blessed with the gift of silence. By that I mean I almost literally have not had a voice about 50% of the time since that post holiday week! 

I have seen my physician more in the last two months than I have in the previous five years and until this week, have not been able to figure out what the heck is going on.

This last week, he put me on a regimen of steroids and so far so good. 

I was able to do my show last Saturday night, but earlier this week, it did not look good for this coming Saturday. However, since going on the the steroids, it looks like that will change and the show will go on!

That is if I can keep from cheering at the Ingram Tom Moore Warriors Varsity Basketball Play-off game tonight in Lampasas against #10 in the state, Eastland. 

I know to keep my self from getting in trouble with the refs and my fellow fans by flashing obscene gestures, I merely sit on my hands, but how to I keep from yelling at the refs when they make a ridiculous call? I haven't come up with the answer as of yet, but one thing for sure; "'Rebel' Rod's From Under the Basement" will be on the air one way or the other this Saturday night on KOOK 93.5 in Junction, Texas from 10pm until 2am.

It's going to be one heck of show with a large dose of some classic blues you may have never heard before, along with the classic "The Real Deal" tunes including extra chili powder for flavor!

So with that, GO WARRIORS! and see you on the radio!

One more thing, my email is totally screwed up (thank you Suddenlink) so if you need to get me a message, go to my Facebook page.

RR

'Rebel' Rod's Reminders - Big Head Blues Club featuring many legends of the blues

FEATURING BIG HEAD TODD AND THE MONSTERS AND SPECIAL GUESTS
B.B. KING, HUBERT SUMLIN, DAVID “HONEYBOY” EDWARDS,
CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE, RUTHIE FOSTER, CEDRIC BURNSIDE
AND LIGHTNIN’ MALCOLM

STUDIO RELEASE, 100 YEARS OF ROBERT JOHNSON
STREETS ON MARCH 1
 

NATIONAL TOUR RECEIVES RAVE REVIEWS

““A superb musical collective…moving and wildly entertaining.” – Boston Globe

“Todd Park Mohr’s growling and moaning like he's got muddy Delta dirt under his fingernails.”
-USA Today

“The kind of musical event that the modern music world is waiting for.” -The Examiner

May 8th, 2011 marks the 100-year anniversary of blues legend Robert Johnson’s birthday. In celebration of the most influential bluesman that ever lived, the Big Head Blues Club – an ad-hoc collaboration featuring Big Head Todd and The Monsters and special guests Hubert Sumlin, Honeyboy Edwards, Cedric Burnside and Lightnin’ Malcolm – has been touring coast to coast playing the material of Johnson. The tour, which has been garnering rave reviews, wraps up on March 8, just after the studio album, titled 100 Years of Robert Johnson, hits the streets (March 1, 2011 - Ryko/Big Records).

100 Years of Robert Johnson is a stirring collection featuring 10 potent interpretations of some of the most vital and durable music of the past century. In addition to the above-mentioned artists, 100 Years of Robert Johnson includes performances by blues greats B.B. King and Charlie Musselwhite, as well as keeper of the blues flame Ruthie Foster. The album was recorded at the legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis, and produced by Grammy award winning blues producer Chris Goldsmith (Blind Boys of Alabama), 100 Years of Robert Johnson will be released in early 2011.

For Todd Park Mohr, who founded Big Head Todd and The Monsters with Rob Squires (bass) and Brian Nevin (drums) nearly a quarter-century ago, the project has served to re-introduce him to the iconic music of Johnson, whose songs provided many of the pioneering blues-rock bands—Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Cream, Canned Heat, etc.—with some of their most popular material.

100 Years of Robert Johnson features several inspired takes on Johnson’s best known compositions. For Mohr and Goldsmith, the challenge in recording the tribute was to give new voice to Johnson’s music, to avoid copying the countless cover versions already extant. “In so many of the takes on Robert’s stuff, you don’t get the depth of emotion that’s in the lyrics and in Robert’s voice. That’s one thing that Chris and the band and my voice were able to bring to it. Chris had great ideas about how to represent the stuff, and all the musicians were just so good at what they did, the unique arrangements just came naturally.”

Robert Johnson’s story is the stuff of myth and legend alike, and his music has fascinated blues fans and musicians for more than seven decades. Born in Mississippi in 1911, Johnson recorded only 29 songs, all during the years 1936 and ’37. His unique guitar style and haunting vocal phrasing, and the evocative, often mysterious nature of his lyrics, made him a popular artist during his short time in the spotlight and has continued to intrigue since. A persistent tale that as a young man Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in order to become a more proficient musician has been attached to his biography since his untimely death at age 27—the alleged victim of a poisoning incident at the hands of the jealous husband of a woman with whom Johnson had been flirting.

A hundred years after the birth of its greatest artist, it looks like the blues itself is about to be reborn.

BLUES AT THE CROSSROADS: THE ROBERT JOHNSON CENTENNIAL CONCERTS tour featuring Big Head Todd and The Monsters and special guests David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Hubert Sumlin and Cedric Burnside & Lightnin’ Malcolm is as follows:
Jan. 28              San Francisco, CA                      Regency Ballroom
Jan. 29              Costa Mesa, CA             Orange County Performing Arts Center
Jan. 30              San Diego, CA (2 shows)            Anthology
Jan. 31              Santa Barbara, CA                      Campbell Hall / UCSB
Feb. 04             Austin, TX                                Paramount Theatre
Feb. 05             Dallas, TX                                 Lakewood Theatre
Feb. 10             Ann Arbor, MI                          Hill Auditorium / U of M
Feb. 11             Chicago, IL                               Orchestra Hall
Feb. 12             Kansas City, MO                        Uptown Theatre
Feb. 13             Meridian, MS                            Riley Center / MSU
Feb. 16             Chapel Hill, NC                         Memorial Hall / UNC Chapel Hill
Feb. 17             New Bethesda, MD                     The Music Center at Strathmore
Feb. 18             Boston, MA                               Berklee School of Music
Feb. 24             Ridgefield, CT                           Ridgefield Playhouse
Feb. 25             Princeton, NJ                             McCarter Theatre
Feb. 26             Blue Bell, PA                            Montgomery County Community College
Feb. 27             New Bedford, MA                      Zeiterion Theater
March 4            Milwaukee, WI                          Potowatomi Casino
March 5            Omaha, NE                               Holland Performing Arts Center
March 6            Minneapolis, MN                       Orchestra Hall
March 8            Urbana, IL                                 Krannert Center – Tyrone Festival Theatre

www.bigheadtodd.com