// A little Nanci content, and a record review.
// Enjoy!  [BP]

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Subject: NN: San Francisco
   Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 16:54:11 +0100
   From: "Carolyn Wheeler" (CAMW@carlywheel.freeserve.co.uk>

Hi,
I'm devastated, sort of. I've waited all year for tour dates for Nanci, 
Emmylou and Bob Dylan, I couldn't find anything about any of them so I 
book a holiday for 3 weeks in November and guess what? All three are 
coming to England in November. I considered cancelling but my husband 
would have none of it!! Does anyone know of any concerts happening in 
San Francisco between Friday 14th & Thursday 20th November inc. Or can 
you recommend any clubs to hear good music. I' be very much obliged 
thank you.
Best regards,
Carolyn

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Subject: NN: Wing & the Wheel
   Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 09:46:52 -0400
   From: "Elizabeth and Nicholas" (nickandliz@starpower.net>

Not a particularly profound thought, but I was just listening anew to Dust
Bowl Symphony (which I now think is under-rated) and was struck by how
beautiful that version of Wing & the Wheel Is. Beautiful to the point of
being achingly sad, especially at the end where Nanci's lyrics take off
around the world.  Somebody posted a long time back that Nanci puts
references in her music to earlier work and then trusts her listeners to
know where she wants them to go. It seemed to me that this particular song
was almost a thank you and a goodbye. I don't know much about her health
problems, but I know she's had some and I wondered if this was recorded when
things didn't look good. Anyone know?

Or maybe I should just change what I eat for breakfast and not read so much
sentiment into things! 3D)

Liz

P.S. Anyone hear about the upcoming songwriter's tour? Nanci, Mary Chapin
Carpenter, Shawn Colvin & Dar Williams? Sounds too good to be true!

// I think it's Patty Griffin, not Nanci...
// they were in Chicago last week. [BP]

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Subject: NN: tour?
   Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 22:56:40 +0100
   From: Graham Shipley (gshipley@perioikos.u-net.com>

Did someone say a tour to UK in November? Details please!

Graham

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Subject: NN: NNC: a review (long)
   Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 22:07:51 -0700 (PDT)
   From: Deb Thornton (timpcoyote@yahoo.com>

Riding The Wind

He is one of my favorite desert companions. Always saying the same uncanny
things, the same words over and over, the same drama, nerve, wit, ache. Who
wouldn't want to take a soulful wiseass to the desert? The journey southward
requires three hours and unfolds in stages. First is the departure from the
valley in which I live; its denizens and critics glibly dub this granite
bowl Happy Valley; leaving Happy Valley makes me happy. The road snakes up
the canyon, following a creek and a railroad track. The canyon is a study in
contrasts. On any day, in any light, the north face of the V is covered with
pine and aspen reaching green to the sky in tall alpine surrender; the south
faces are evergreened in scrappy juniper, sparse, dotted with diminutive
rounds, taking the heat, withering in every season. The road winds past the
gateway to the canyon's north fork--seven miles back is a half-mile stretch
of red rock that will do in a pinch--past Billy's Mountain, which turned to
a liquid dam of mud that backed up drowned the ghost town from which some of
my mother's people hail. Now, five years of drought make that moving
mountain seem a forgotten dream, but Billy's face still seems shocked from
its saturated slide. On up the Soldier Summit, past the altitude sign 7477,
or some assortment of sevens and fours, past the road to Scofield, where a
mine disaster claimed more than a hundred lives, including that of my
great-grandfather, who had come down from Idaho a month earlier with his
family to try to make a better life for them, and where I once out fished my
dad and had my first look at a white pelican. Then across the spine of the
range and then winding down and down through the coal seams of Carbon
County.
     Two-fifths of the journey is over. Drivers saunter through Helper and
Price, out past Sunnyside, euphemistic names of towns whose immigrant
inhabitants gave life and lung to black holes beneath mountains. Greeks,
Finns, Russians, assorted others. You can still find good Greek food in
Price's old downtown. I'm too sandstone hungry to stop in Price; my
loyalties lie with Ray's Tavern in Green River even if they don't serve
nachos any more. The road meanders out to Wellington, climbs a few dirt
hills, then peaks. Before me is a steep decline; I almost never see it. I'm
looking out at the vast expanse of the red black grey brown desert floor
walled on the east by the Book Cliffs and stretching to the north end of the
San Raphael Swell on the west. Vegetation? Forget the nicety of anything
taller than two feet; even the tumbleweeds are stunted. Get out of the car
and crawl on your belly and see the variety of the plant life for yourself..
     I can breathe. The first breath of the north rim of the Colorado
Plateau is life-giving and alkali; the wind pierces the lungs with air
unadulterated by humidity, wasted vision, and scattered urban thoughts.
Layers of xeric earth and air assail the senses; the earth's raw flesh
carries no greeting, only the exposure of sheer being. Face it. I once drove
Blanche Gelfant, the Brooklyn-born guru of the Dartmouth English Department,
to the desert because she wanted to see the Utah landscape. She is a
visionary thinker and storyteller whose name I'd seen in the newspaper years
earlier: she made headlines at a conference by dressing down a famous male
writer who had exalted a very famous British writer's description of a
woman's sexual fulfillment. She articulately underscored the presumption of
both, asking politely what either could possibly know of that experience,
given their biological perspective. When we arrived at the beginning of the
desert descent, she burst out, "Omigod! It looks like the bottom a giant
ocean." She drank the expanse, the piles of loose eroded skurf baking on the
slightly harder red earth beneath like brown sugar on top of a picnic cake,
the whimsical sawblade ridges of the Swell slicing the vast tin-colored sky.
She said at last, "I guess it was covered by that big lake."
     "The ghost of Bonneville," I say. I don't say that when the desert
calls your name, the wind carries the summons across continents, if need be,
until you succumb; resist at your peril. Were I alone--and I was glad not to
be, that day--I would have listened to him then, journeying south and east
to blood-drenched, wind-sculpted terrain. The unexpected shapes of his words
and notes and ideas fit the uncanny landscape; my brother's coyote mind
chases through the sage, running flat out at the world, now west (lucky like
the sun), now east (watch out), sometimes in every direction at once. He
sings about the killed Norwegian mercenary, headless, stalking his killer,
fighting for years across "Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Berkeley";
the intrigue of the Middle East has weathered well in "The Envoy," a
surprising prediction of the unchanging saga and Colin Powell's nightmares.
The indomitably excitable boy spits in the eye of the grim reaper; he'll
sleep when he's dead. I dearly love the one about the man who has seen it
all in his abortive quest for beauty--and it ain't that pretty at all--and
resorts to hurling himself against the wall "cause I'd rather feel bad than
not feel nothing at all."
     I found him as the title track songwriter on Linda Ronstadt's sublime
Hasten Down the Wind, twice on Simple Dreams, and "Mohammed's Radio" on her
next one. My Stevie Nicks completist tendencies necessitated purchasing his
stuff; thereon I found the same core of musicians who worked for the Asylum
label I had listened to for years: Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Browne, the
Eagles, and the studio musicians Waddy Wachtel, Russ Kunkel. Together, they
comprise the meta-group that takes up a huge chunk of my brain's jukebox.
     And could he be tender? Oh, my. "We made mad love, shadow love, random
love, and abandoned love." What better way to describe the trajectory of a
human relationship? But to follow up the sequence with, "Accidentally like a
martyr"--pure genius.
     His range is as broad and as deep and as shockingly varied and raw as
the desert floor, where pinon grows out of bare rocks. His roots are
anchored in the hardness of air, chaotic, raucous, willful.
     I listen to his last. His approach to immanent death is
characteristically varied, and he careens through his gradual demise with
humor and honesty. How often does an artist get to call on his lifetime
friends to harmonize on his epitaph? The first three songs set the tone for
the alternately tough and tender sides of him that still don't co-exist
comfortably. He knows himself too well. But he persists in trying to tie the
disparate strands together in a work that sinks through the complexities of
love and death.
     In the first song, his shadow casts him, illuminating his "dirty life
and times," and he's "looking for a woman with low self-esteem." Then the
slow cessation of his breath is metaphored in "Disorder in the House," a
duet with The Boss sawn asunder by the latter's discordant guitar. He
resolves, "I'll live with the losses . . . and end with style," and he
laughs heartily after the guitar's final wail, as if dying were a good time.
The third song is the only cover tune on the record, an apt "Knockin' On
Heaven's Door," punctuated at the end with improvised choruses of, "Open up,
open up, open up, open up, open up for me."
     The curtain of vulnerability closes fast. He says, "Let's do another
bad one then, cause I like it when the blood drains from Dave's face," and
launches into "I'm numb as a statue" looking for vicarious feelings, perhaps
from the beleaguered woman who gets a formal nod in the next breath, when he
realizes he isn't good enough for her, and he blesses her post-him
happiness.
     The haunting centerpiece song transforms the disordered house into a
"Prison Grove," fleshing out the death sentence he faces: "Iron will hard as
rock, Hold me up for the fateful knock [on heaven's door] When they walk me
down in a mortal lock Out on Prison Grove." The song's spare arrangement
presents the facts, and the "icy wind" makes its first appearance, cutting
"through the narrow space between these "bars" like breath knifing through
the feeble slats of his ribs. At this turning point, he seeks light: "Shine
on all these broken lives; Shine on; Shine the light on me." But
impatiently. His improvised tip-ins taunt and pray. "Open up" from the Dylan
tune becomes, "Come on," voiced over a dirge chorus that includes mentors
and co-conspirators son Jordan Zevon, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne,
Billy Bob Thornton, and T-Bone Burnett.
     The core issue darkly mapped, he proceeds with jagged unironic steps
toward the end, as if he's grown too weary to juggle paradox. His heart
resolves into the twin realities of love and loss converging in one soul and
then two. He confesses his love--an odious act for any coyote--disguising it
in Spanish, still indirect about defining his love, but acknowledging deep
and abiding adoration in both languages and the simple piano accompaniment. 
     Then the drum-heartbeat quickens into a last proud, repetitive rocking
stand about partying for the rest of the night accompanied by Tom Petty and
Heartbreaker Mike Campbell. However, the song's title--"The Rest of the
Night"--carries two disparate nuances, and the percussive "Come on,"
transforms into the cosmic question: "Why stop? Why stop?"
     Up to this point, brother coyote has addressed his mortality
unflinchingly, making good on his life's promises to live to the fullest,
without apology, in the tangle of impulses and loves. But something happens
in the last three songs that open new terrain in his body of work, exposing
his being as he never has before, and perhaps that is the grace of his
illness, the unsought gift. He pushes through.
     "Why stop? Why Stop?" makes a final transition to "Please stay, Please
stay" not voiced at the end, but comprising the beginning: "Please stay,
Please stay, Two words I never thought I'd ever learn to say." The song
works on so many levels: as a straightforward love song asking her to stay
with him till the end, but simultaneously the words that the pending
survivors would say to the dying loved one. The song is so solid that the
woman can have a voice, an actual presence in the song, and nobody could do
the honors more exquisitely than Emmylou Harris. The only female voice among
the generations finest who assemble to send him off, she's with him in his
most honest moment, singing with him,
          Will you stay with me to the end?
          When there's nothing left
          But you and me and the wind
          We'll never know until we try
          To find the other side of goodbye.
But she doesn't go the distance with him. I think the gospel poet in her
soul stops her from singing the last two words, so for her the last phrase
is, "We never know until we try To find the other side," which she speaks of
in her "Prayer on Open D."
     Rock balms and vents the defiant soul, but the blues have always sought
to honor simultaneously the holy and the demonic, so the last external rush
of his soaring spirit flies on the wings of Joe Walsh's slide guitar. "Rub
Me Raw" details his search for meaning and strips
bare his situation: "Every single cure seems to be against the law." He
layers down to reality and finds his code.
       Now I'm shaking all over
       I'm a shattering mass
       But I'm gonna sit up straight
       I'm going to take it with class.
He finally moves beyond language, letting Joe finish without commentary.
       I don't want your pity or your fifty-dollar words
       I don't share your need to discuss the absurd.
       Oh no these blues are gonna rub me raw
       Oh no these blues are gonna rub me raw.
       Rub me raw.
It's a command, and Joe's tones have always been the musical match for his
lyrics.

All that's left is his final request: 
       Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath
       Keep me in your heart for awhile.
       If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less
       Keep me in your heart for a while.
But the song's title, once again, is the real epitaph: Keep Me In Your
Heart.

Keep me in your heart. I can, Warren Zevon, because I've finally seen its
every ventricle, opening red and raw and jagged and intricate, emerging
through your soul's backcountry. May you merge with the wind and call our
exposed souls to the extremities of breath and love.

                            Deb Thornton

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Subject: Re: NN: NNC: a review (long)
   Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 06:42:05 -0700 (PDT)
   From: MUSIKERIN (musikerin4u@yahoo.com>


Whoa, Deb -- what awesome Monday morning reading!!!   Thanks so much.
I was going to talk about how excited I was about the two CD's I got
this weekend:      The Best of Richard and Linda Thompson (thanks,
Gordon -- this is just what I needed) and the new STING CD.
Spent the whole weekend running these two CDs over and over while
painting and painting and painting .....   

After reading Deb's review, I cannot even begin to elaborate in
such detail on either of these two albums, other than that I am in
total awe of Sting, as always.  He's done it again.

I had picked that particular  R&L Thompson CD because it had "Dimming
of the Day" on it, a song that Gordon introduced me to and that has
haunted me ever since.   I have listened to Bonnie Raitt's version of
it many times on her "Road Tested" double CD.   Right now, it is
definitely one of my favorites in either version.

Deb, again, thanks for the wonderful narration.   
Donate 

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Subject: NN: RE: NNC: a review (long)
   Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 19:39:27 +0100
   From: "John Graveling" (kai21@dial.pipex.com>

Beautifully written. A fine expose and tribute to one of my favourite
writers in modern music.

R.I.P. Mr Zevon

John "deeply saddened" Graveling

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Subject: NN: New Address (NNC)
   Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 22:41:39 +1300
   From: "Ken Stiffler" (ksls@kmsx.net>

For anyone who has my e-mail address saved offline: ksmsc@kmsx.net has now
become ksls@kmsx.net. The spam volume got out of control. Spammers are
slime!

Ken "But I don't LIKE spam" Stiffler


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