Tag: 240822

The truth about ‘Free Bird’

Skynyrd and ZZ Top hit Gilford

The canon of classic rock has two songs on its Mount Rushmore. How to fill out all four spots is an endless discussion. “Johnny B. Goode”? “Hotel California”? Every track on Dark Side of the Moon? Forget it, there will never be consensus. However, to question the placement of “Stairway to Heaven” or “Free Bird” would be so lame.

The Lynyrd Skynyrd song’s been shouted out at cover bands and more than a few headliners over the years. Jason Isbell may someday even perform it — he and his band played its wild tradeoff jam outro every night during rehearsals for their Weathervanes tour a few years back.

Fun fact, though: The song that most fans know by heart almost never was. More precisely, it began very differently, and became timeless almost by accident. At least that’s the story Johnny Van Zant told in a recent phone interview. Since he’s the younger brother of the guy who wrote it, Ronnie Van Zant, there’s reason to believe him.

The original demo of “Free Bird” was a four-minute ballad. “It’s one of the few love songs that Skynyrd had,” Van Zant said. “Duane Allman had died during that time, and one night when Ronnie had a sore throat, he said, ‘Hey, man, let’s do the song ‘Free Bird’ and then at the end, y’all play out for Duane Allman.’ That’s how that baby was born.”

During concerts in the mid-’70s, Ronnie would dedicate the song to Allman and Berry Oakley, the Allman Brothers Band bassist who died a year after Duane. Then in October 1977, a tragic plane crash killed Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and backup singer Cassie Gaines, along with the band’s assistant road manager. The plane’s pilot and co-pilot also perished.

Six members survived the crash, and in 1980 four of them reunited — Allen Collins, Gary Rossington, Leon Wilkeson and Billy Powell — as the Rossington Collins Band. With a female lead singer, Dale Krantz, it wasn’t a Skynyrd revival. They made two albums before breaking up.

A full-scale tour with five members of the original band –—Rossington, Powell, Wilkeson, Artimus Pyle and Ed King, who’d left two years before the crash — happened in 1987. That’s when Johnny joined, and he’s been carrying Ronnie’s torch ever since. Early on, however, he wouldn’t sing “Free Bird,” letting the band play an instrumental version instead.

The group embarked on what was to be a final run in 2018, but fate had other ideas. The pandemic turned a Farewell Tour into “farewell touring,” and when live music resumed, the mood had changed for Van Zant, Rossington and guitarist Rickey Medlocke, who’d left Skynyrd before their first album to form Blackfoot, rejoining in 1996. Recalled Johnny, “Gary was like, ‘Man, I’ve been off for 15 months, I don’t want to freaking retire. I want the music to continue.”

Sadly, Rossington passed away last year, leaving Van Zant and Medlocke to carry on. “We’re never without him, I believe that in my heart,” Van Zant said, adding a statement also true for his brother and other fallen band members. “I know this is what he would want us to be doing. Every time I get a little tired, I feel a kick in my ass. I know it’s him.”

“Free Bird” helped launch Southern rock, though at the time, Skynyrd was one of many bands playing it. At an upcoming appearance in Gilford, they’ll be joined by two of them, ZZ Top, who brought Texas boogie to the world, and the Outlaws, best-known for their hit “Green Grass and High Tides.”

Asked what distinguishes the genre from regular rock music, Van Zant had a few ideas.

“I think it was the blues country factor, the English influence, and if you listen to a band like Marshall Tucker, hell, it’s got jazz in it,” he said. “The boys were raised on that old blues stuff, and then, of course, The Beatles came along … but it could have been in the water or eating collard greens. I don’t know what the heck it was.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, The Outlaws
When: Friday, Aug. 23, 6:30 p.m.
Where: BankNH Pavilion, 61 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford
Tickets: $54 and up at livenation.com

Johnny Van Zant and Ricky Medlocke will sign bottles of their Hell House Whiskey from noon to 2 p.m. Aug. 23 at New Hampshire Liquor & Wine Outlet Store No. 56, 18 Weirs Road, Gilford

Featured photo: L-R Ricky Medlocke, Johnny Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd (Courtesy Photo).

The Music Roundup 24/08/22

Local music news & events

• Green scene: Enjoy two days of traditional music in two venues at the New Hampshire Irish Festival, with free shows in the Spotlight Room (book online) including local faves Marty Quirk and Black Pudding Rovers and then main stage sets from Derek Warfield & the Young Wolfe Tones, Ronan Tynan, the Spain Brothers, Screaming Orphans and Seamus Kennedy. Friday, Aug. 23, 5 p.m. and Saturday, Aug. 24, 3 p.m., Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester, $49 and up at palacetheatre.org.

• Bee cool: Art and activism combine at the second annual Wildflower Festival. Cat Wolf plays solo during an arts market that runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and includes food and local creators, followed at 6 p.m. by sets from Winkler, Sneaky Miles and Rigometrics. The event is an environmental awareness fundraiser with the goal to build pollinator gardens and bee hotels around Milford. Saturday, Aug. 24, 11 a.m., Keyes Field, 45 Elm S., Milford, $20 at eventbrite.com.

• Close harmony: Maybe the only bluegrass band to play the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Mipso recalls Americana trailblazers Gram Parsons and Harvest-era Neil Young while keeping company with contemporaries like Nickel Creek and Milk Carton Kids. Their interplay is superb, but it’s their harmonies that grab — smooth as honey-sweetened butter stirred with a cinnamon stick. Thursday Aug. 22, 8 p.m., 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth, $20 and up at 3sarts.org.

• Bloodlines: The progeny of proto-classic rock supergroup drive Sons of Cream. Kofi Baker and Malcolm Bruce, along with a grandnephew of Ginger Baker, aren’t a tribute act, though they faithfully recall the band. Sunday, Aug. 25, 7 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $29 and up at etix.com.

• Highway stars: It’s been more than 50 years since Deep Purple released its career-defining Machine Head, and the opening riff of “Smoke on the Water” still rings in space. Ian Gillan, who sang on the album, is still in the band, as are drummer Ian Paice and bass player Roger Glover. Fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Yes open the show; guitarist Steve Howe is their only original member. Wednesday, Aug. 28, 6:30 p.m., BankNH Pavilion, 61 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford, $41 and up at livenation.com.

Alien: Romulus (R)

A rag-tag group of humans is no match for a ship full of previously dormant aliens in Alien: Romulus.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson), her android “brother” that her father programmed, are desperate to get off their dark and dreary mining colony and head to a sunny new terraformed human outpost elsewhere. But Wyland-Yutani Corporation, the evil company that runs everything, has reset the number of hours required for a trip to a better life and now Rain has to wait five to six more years.

But! A group of Rain’s friends and hostile acquaintances have spotted a derelict ship floating above the planet. They believe the ship has the cryopods and the power to get them to the sunny green outpost, if only they can steal those things. For that, they need Andy, whose androidness will help them use the ship’s computers to find what they need.

Rain is reluctant at first but decides to participate in this one shot at a better life, joining up with friendly guy Tyler (Archie Renaux), jerky guy Bjorn (Spike Fearn), Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu). They travel to the ship in a plucky little space craft only to discover that’s no moon, it’s a space station — the “ship” is a two-part Wyland station with sides named Romulus and Remus. As a landing party starts to go through the ship, they realize it’s not so much “decommissioned” as they thought but abandoned. Because they don’t know they’re in an Alien franchise movie, they go poking around in the dark — first looking for cryopods and then looking for extra power for the crypods, not paying attention to the general creepiness until, in one flooded room, Bjorn thinks he sees Something In The Water.

The movie plays all the hits when it comes to the Alien aliens — we get the big one with the creepy drippy teeth, the whack-a-mole-ish chest popper, the face sucker. And we get some not bad imagery either — people in a small shaft of light surrounded by darkness, the ship rising up off the stormy planet to the sunlight space, red or blue lights for no particular reason other than giving the scene an extra creepiness boost. I also appreciated the general griminess of this movie — this is not a Star Trek-ian sanitized space but a “corporations are jerks who exploit the working class” scuffed up version of a space future.

But these elements are kind of it in terms of what makes this movie any different than your standard college-student (the rough age of everyone here) slasher fare. Replace “empty space station” with “college campus at the start of a holiday weekend” and “cryopods” with “booze in the dean’s office” and you’ve basically got the same movie.

The androidness of Andy gets a subplot — Rain treats him like a sweet kid brother but he turns into a hypercompetent calculating, somewhat malignant presence after an attempt to give him a security codes upgrade also programs him with a whole new prime directive. Their relationship gives Rain something more to care about than just not getting skewered by an Alien tail, but it doesn’t push the movie beyond the horror standard — the Rain/Andy relationship isn’t all that different from the big sister/little sister duo at the center of the recent Scream movies for example.

Alien: Romulus is ultimately not substantial enough to deliver on the promise of its above-average visuals and its remaining franchise cred. C+

Rated R for bloody violent content and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, Alien: Romulus is an hour and 59 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Featured photo: Alien: Romulus.

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley (William Morrow, 350 pages)

The jacket of Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast promises a “deliciously twisty murder mystery,” which is more a nod to the title than a description of the book itself.

Foley, a British author who has been compared to Agatha Christie, has enjoyed success in the genre (her 2020 book The Guest List was a Reese’s Book Club pick) despite a parade of cookie-cutter covers that may be all the rage but to me suggests that the content within lacks originality.

That can’t be said of The Midnight Feast, which is complexly plotted and tries at times to deliver cultural commentary within the core mystery. But the novel suffers from an unsatisfying pileup of perspectives that prevents readers from developing any real connection with the characters.

The Midnight Feast begins at the gala opening of an opulent resort called “The Manor,” which overlooks a cliff on the Dorset Coast in southern England. The owner, Francesca Meadows, is a wealthy wellness influencer of sorts reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow, and is determined to give her guests a goopy good time despite the objection of locals who believe her dream estate has desecrated sacred ground.

Francesca, “very good at living in the now,” wears a black opal ring because the stone signifies “purification for the body and soul” and “provides you with a shield against energy.” She’s very much into crystals. Every room at The Manor has a selection of stones in it for the guests’ well-being and sticks of sage to burn “for cleansing.” The place has signature scents and a signature cocktail whose ingredients include ginger, vodka and a dash of CBD oil. The guests themselves are “carefully curated” to keep out the wrong kind of people.

Francesca, newly married to the architect who designed The Manor’s infinity pool, is introduced as something of a dopey villain. Disdainful of the locals and their spooky folk tales, she is scheming to acquire an old farm down the road where “the animals look sad, like they’re begging for a better life. They honestly do!”

She inherited the property from her grandmother, and she had treated her grandfather poorly in his last years of life, thinking that he was simply daft when he warned her repeatedly, “You must keep the birds happy; don’t upset the birds.”

The birds, of course, aren’t literal birds in this context, although there are plenty of them in the story, which is heavy-handed with the bird imagery. According to local legend, The Birds are human-size creatures with beaked faces that occupy the woods and demand sacrifices and on occasion take a life for themselves, leaving behind a feather or two.

Snippets of this are revealed as the story unfolds in staccato, told by five narrators interspersed with excerpts from the diary of one of the characters, and yes, this is just confusing as it sounds. In fact it’s more confusing than it sounds because the story also jumps around in time, from June 2025 to July 2010, and back and forth between the day before the solstice (i.e. the titular “midnight feast”) and the day after it. There’s so much whiplash here that the book could be a ride at the Big E.

The narrators include Bella, a single mother who has come alone to opening weekend for reasons that we learn right away are Very Mysterious, since she has brought with her a folder of articles about Francesca.

There’s also Eddie, a young employee at The Manor, whose family owns the dilapidated farm down the road and who is hiding from his family the fact that he works here. There’s Owen, Francesca’s new husband, who doesn’t seem to be a very happy newlywed; and a DI (detective inspector) named Walker who is tasked with investigating a fire and mysterious deaths at the property. Along with Francesca, they all take turns narrating what’s happening in real time and revealing snippets of the past that connect them to each other and to the land.

Although the language is simple (too much so, one might say) and the chapters short, the constant change of perspective is wearisome and diminishes character development. Also, for a book that is heralded for its plot twists, alert readers can see many of them coming, and there is nothing revealed at the end that will leave us mulling the story in disbelief for days afterward. More likely, the ending is likely to result in a feeling of relief — we’re glad things are resolved so we can move on to a more compelling book.

On the plus side, for a murder mystery, there is very little gore involved, and only a couple of scenes that might be problematic for PETA.

Credit the author for managing to neatly tie up all the loose ends at the close of the novel; she had a destination in mind and gets us there eventually. No doubt some people will consider her a mastermind for navigating such a complicated plot, but it comes at the expense of the reader. C

Album Reviews 24/08/22

Bek, Derby Girl [EP] (Amber Blue Recordings)

This mononymed DJ is a well-established player in the (reportedly vibrant) Hamburg, Germany, velvet-rope scene. He’s steadily made a name for himself as a producer as well, releasing tracks on such imprints as Traum, What Happens, Ohral and Natura Viva, and back in 2015 he won the Mixmag + ANTS Ibiza DJ competition over 300 other participating DJs. With all the resume nonsense out of the way, we can proceed to what’s on this four-songer (actually three, but the label owners added a remix to the second track, “Cannibal Licornes,” a Calvin Harris-style joint that doesn’t do much other than make you wish you were sipping mai tais in the Maldives, not that we don’t need more of that sort of vice in this loveless world). The title track is a lightly syncopated bounce-along whose (actually pretty raucous) drop comes halfway though its six minutes; overall it’s a lot more experimental than what I expected. Sure, this is fine. A–

Alison Moyet, Key (Cooking Vinyl Records)

As a celebration of 40 years of releasing records, this is one for the books, a mix of reworked songs with only a pair of new ones, but the rerubs are reflective of the changes she’s undergone personally over the years. In fact, she’s outgrown some of the tunes since her days releasing her first solo record, Alf, as a 22-ish-year-old. Like Siouxsie Sioux, Moyet’s distinctive contralto has probably been mistaken for a male tenor on many an occasion; Andy Bell mainlined her music while preparing to audition for Erasure, a RIYL name-check relative to her sound. Here, she reshapes her most famous track, “Is This Love” (from the 1986 album Raindancing and featured in the film All of Us Strangers), as an epic chillout ballad as opposed to the (very) ’80s slow-dance track it’d originally been. Major hits “All Cried Out” and “Love Resurrection” are here, updated for the times; newcomer songs “Such Small Ale” and “Filigree” are nice-enough slowbie bringdowns. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• A Friday is ahead, specifically the one that falls on Aug. 23, and you know what that means: People will be crowding the malls to buy all the new albums! Yes yes, your friends will be dressing up just like the cool but awkward kids in Pretty In Pink and making fun of all the mall cops (aren’t adults so stupid, lol) and buying plenty of albums, for your Sony Walkman audio devices, aren’t you glad Stranger Things made the ’80s come back? Right, I have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m just waiting for the ’90s-rock echo boom to take over from this tedious ’80s wave once and for all, until we’re all sick of hearing bands that sound exactly like Nirvana and Indigo Girls (I’m way ahead on both scores), and in the meantime, let’s try to ease our suffering by finding something that might be relevant to our current era of music, that’d be great. We’ll start with Philadelphia electro-psych/slowcore band Spirit Of The Beehive, which releases You’ll Have To Lose Something on Friday! They’re on a post-indie trip and insist on being weird, so the video for the first single, “Something’s Ending / I’ve Been Evil,” is moderately annoying. As for the song itself, it’s a slapdash slowcore mess that’s somehow listenable, and like many bands are doing nowadays, there’s a dubstep layer in there that serves pretty well as a sort of binding force. The vocals are faraway and over-reverbed, in other words there’s government-issue oldschool-shoegaze afoot in this business but despite the performative, androgynous gloom there’s a hint of 1960s Spanky And Our Gang sunshine-pop at work as well. If all this sounds good to you, you can catch them live at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., on Sept. 24.

• Wow, it’s the first album in 24 years from Pacific Northwest-based minimalist indie-pop/cuddlecore duo The Softies, isn’t that special? I hadn’t realized I sort of missed hearing about them, and come to think of it, I never did, but I will listen to something from their new album, The Bed I Made, because I am an equal opportunity hater, just let me pop a few Dramamine to settle my stomach first. Ack, I used to confuse these guys with The Swirlies for obvious reasons; an AllMusic reviewer nailed it on the head when he said The Softies’ stripped-down, two-voices/two-guitars aesthetic was too boring to build entire albums around. But hey, maybe they’ve added some layering, who knows, let’s go listen to the single, “I Said What I Said.” Yep, it’s twee-pop, happy and upbeat and catchy in its way, and jangly and minimalist and decidedly dated, and one of the girls is wearing nerd glasses, and both girls are wearing the spring line equivalent of Christmas sweater fashion. But like I was saying, you’d better get used to this vanilla-frappe-blooded nonsense, because it’s gonna be everywhere before you can say “Oh no, please don’t, I beg of you.”

• New York City-based industrial metal/noise-rock fivesome Uniform release their fifth album, American Standard, this Friday! They’re my kind of dark-futurist-type guys, having used samples of gunshots and explosions to produce rhythm tracks, why haven’t more bands done stuff like that? The single, “This Is Not A Prayer,” is psychotic, deranged and awesome, like “Stumbo” from Jim Thirlwell’s Wiseblood project. That’s another thing, why haven’t more bands ripped off Wiseblood?

• Lastly let’s check out Sabrina Carpenter, a nepo singing person who used to be on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World; her aunt is Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons. “Espresso,” the single from her new LP, Short n’ Sweet, is disposable Britney bubble-pop. I’m sure 6-year-old girls would like it, aren’t they growing up so fast these days (world’s loudest eyeroll)?

Corn on the cone

If you’ve ever gotten ambitious with your cooking or baking and have tried to share something new that you’ve made with friends or acquaintances, you’ve probably seen a visible reluctance on their faces to take the food you’ve offered.

“It’s OK, I’m fine,” they’ll say.

“I didn’t ask if you are fine,” you might say, if you weren’t restrained by politeness. “I asked you to accept this gift of food that I made myself, as a symbol of how much I like and value you.” But you don’t, and at the end of the day you end up bringing your miso brownies back home with you.

The frustrating fact is that most people don’t want interesting food. They want comforting food.

Here is a really interesting food that — assuming you can get them to try it — will become their new comfort food:

Charcoal-Grilled Corn Ice Cream

  • 6 leftover corn cobs from eating fresh sweet corn
  • 1 quart (946 ml) half & half
  • 1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk

As ice creams go, this one is remarkably straightforward. You don’t have to worry about tempering egg yolks, or melting chocolate in a double boiler, or ordering Bolivian bee pollen, or anything. There are three ingredients, and four or five steps, and the level of technical knowledge involved is about the same as in making a grilled cheese sandwich. The most daunting part of making this ice cream is deciding to do it.

Whisk the cream and condensed milk together and pour it into a medium-sized airtight container. Snap the lid on, and store this in the refrigerator.

Set up your grill, light the charcoal, and get your grilling equipment — a plate, tongs and a beer — ready. Wait until the coals are roughly half gray, half black, then grill your corn cobs. Treat them like you would sausages; turn them from time to time, until they are consistently grilled — golden brown, with just a little bit of char. This should take just about long enough to drink your beer. If you are a fan of grilled foods with a heavy char, leave the cobs on the grill a few minutes longer. Remove them to the plate, and take them back into your kitchen.

(It would be a shame to waste the still perfectly good coals, so you might want to grill some actual sausages or Almost Burgers at this point.)

Put the grilled corn cobs in your cream mixture. Completely cover them with liquid, if possible. If not, put the top back on, and swirl to completely cover the cobs. Return the container to the refrigerator to rest for 24 to 48 hours, swirling occasionally. The fat in the cream is really good at absorbing flavors. Remember that time the butter tasted funny after your brother-in-law left mackerel in the fridge after his fishing trip? Same concept. The corn and smoke flavors of your grilled corn cobs will infuse into the cream. Because this is going on in your refrigerator, you don’t have to worry about gently heating the cream or anything. Shake it and leave it.

After the cream mixture has infused for a couple of days, remove the cobs from the container. There will be suspiciously less cream left than you think there should be. Everything delicious comes at a price. In this case, the corn cobs have absorbed some of the cream as a sort of souvenir. If there are any distressing bits of char in the cream, strain it through a fine-mesh strainer.

Churn the mixture in your ice cream maker until it has pulled together into a stiff, soft-serve consistency, then transfer it to freezing containers, and harden it off for a day or so in your freezer.

While this looks like vanilla ice cream, it is very much its own thing. It is sweet and slightly smoky, with a rich, corny aftertaste. You wouldn’t think that sweet and smoky would go together, but grilled peaches or pineapples are delicious, to say nothing of barbecue sauce, so it shouldn’t be surprising how delicious this is. If you wanted to complicate things, you could top it with a spoonful of lime marmalade (lime goes extremely well with smoke and corn) but one of this ice cream’s biggest assets is its delicious simplicity.

And , of course, how interesting it is.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

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