Bird Of Youth has no business being this good. Really. If writing and recording a really beautiful album was as easy as Beth Wawerna and her crew made it look, wouldn’t everyone do it? That’s sort of the story here. For most of her decade in New York, Wawerna was, in the words of her pal Timothy Bracy, “the consummate green-room insider.” Her background in journalism and her unerring taste had led to a number of indie-rock acquaintances who eventually became friends. It sounds like a pretty good time, hanging out in Brooklyn with the Mendoza Line’s Bracy and Pete Hoffman, Will Sheff of Okkervil River, Carl Newman, Charles Bissell of the Wrens, Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws and others. But it turned out Wawerna had a secret stash of her own songs, which she’d worked on and demo’d and never, ever let anyone hear. Eventually, she decided it was time to set those songs free. Her pals not only liked them, they helped her form a crack band—guitarist par excellence Clint Newman, drummer Ray Ketchem, bassist Johnny North, keyboardist Eli Thomas and accordion player Elizabeth Bracy Nelson—and recorded them. Sheff and Phil Palazzolo (New Pornographers, Ted Leo) produced. Bissell contributed a terrific guitar lead on one song. Caws sang. Members of Okkervil River and the National played. The finished album, Defender, was released in May, just in time to give your summer a worthy soundtrack. Wawerna and Clint Newman will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week, and once a day, Wawerna is having one of her famous friends guest blog. Read our brand new Q&A with her.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71nt_HXMc0c
Newman: Hey, do you guys like Stevie Ray Vaughan? I bet you don’t. That’s ok. I understand. I really do.
The poet David Berman once wrote, “There’s always been something dead inside Eric Clapton.” While harsh, I think I understand where he’s coming from. There’s a certain kind of exalted electric-guitar soloist that just invites disdain from certain inside-baseball circles, despite them being obviously gifted musicians who have put in the time and mastered whatever sort of, you know, axe they’ve chosen to grind. The kind of person who would get up onstage every night in front of 1,000 guitar-solo enthusiasts and play a set of 10 or 15 songs with practically every single one climaxing in an extended blues guitar solo consisting of more or less the same notes, the same patterns of licks, the same emotional arc, night after night, year after year. Well, one might think maybe that person has managed to flick off a certain portion of their nervous system, or maybe they’ve just let something inside them sort of wither and die. Maybe I’m projecting.
I come not to bury SRV, but to praise him. Last November, I got to play the part of Eric Clapton in a recreation of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass LP, put together by my friends Greta Gertler and Adam D. Gold. I put in the time and made sure I was extremely familiar with Clapton’s playing on the recording and was struck for the umpteenth time by the fact that the keys to what drew me to playing an instrument in the first place are the musician’s hands. The muscles in Clapton’s hands allow him to do things that not many other people can do, partially dead inside though he may be. It also may well be that Stevie Ray Vaughan is the Michael Bolton of electric blues. But the degree of what I imagine to be called “fine muscle control” in SRV’s hands remains astonishing to me 20 years after first discovering him, so maybe hands are just sort of my “thing” now I guess.
I think you could call SRV’s hands “large and stubby” and not be out of line. I never met the man or shook his hand, and I’m too scared of what I might find to do a search for “hand size” on any SRV message boards, but suffice to say that G-d gave Stevie Ray Vaughan big, strong hands. Yet they weren’t the long, slender kind typically associated with guitar or keyboard prowess. They were more like those modern hulking quarterbacks who somehow manage to still move with quickness and precision (like Jared Lorenzen!). SRV seemed to possess such an outrageous amount of relaxed strength in his hands that, when applied toward a singular obsession like the guitar, cannot help but result in a spectacularly inimitable sound.
Untold thousands of dollars are spent every year in the quest to replicate his “tone.” I myself am guilty of having my most prized possession be an old guitar I got many years ago due entirely to its uncanny (to my doting eyes) likeness to Stevie’s “Number One” signature guitar. Sometimes if I’m playing it onstage, I suddenly get paranoid and think, “Do people see me with this guitar and think, ‘Who does he think he is, Stevie Ray Vaughan?'” Not really, but it has crossed my mind. The fact remains that I couldn’t replicate his sound if I was the devil himself. Stevie’s sound was like molten glass and is rightly celebrated, but it’s refreshing to me to realize that his hands were his masterpiece.
Another video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAG-kX_IlUw
