the allman brothers – in memory of duane allman – last concert at the fillmore east 1971(bootleg)

I figured I might eventually get around to the Allman Brothers…but with a concise note from Dave on my Suggest an Album Everyone Should Hear page, I finally made it so.

Thanks for the note Dave!

Seriously. When you have a music collection that’s several hundred gigs…and not to mention the thousands of records, it gets tough trying to remember the best ones without a little help.

Recorded at the Fillmore East in 1971, this concert captures the band’s original line up of Gregg Allman, Duane Allman, Dicky Betts, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks and Jai Johnson.  It was the last set ever played at the Fillmore East before it was shut down…and around three months before Duane was killed in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Ga.  A year later a traffic accident would also claim the life of Berry Oakley. The band that remains today is good, but not nearly as young, hungry and complete as it was here.

But this concert captures what is, for me at least, the original Allman Brothers displaying what made them so special in the first place.  Excellent musicianship, amazing jams and that southern tinged jazz rock and blues that really made them famous. Even Bill Graham, the man who had seen it all in the music industry, was blown away by their performance. The guitar work here is stunning…especially on Statsboro Blues and Whipping post, but it’s the 12 minute version of In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed that really hits all the right notes.

Better yet, you get a smoking 18 minute version of You Don’t Love Me to top off the whole show.

There are a couple of recordings of this performance available, the commercial release of The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East is nice, but shortened with editing and mainly culled from the first nights show.  Then you have The Fillmore Concerts which have much more material and are more even then the first release, but are still edited down a bit and mixed from two nights.  Why record company’s insist on this is beyond me.

This bootleg version is an excellent soundboard recording and covers the real last show in all it’s glory.  If you like the Allman Brothers, want to like the Allman Brothers or even just like a solid jam session…you do a lot worse than grabbing this little nugget HERE 1, HERE 2, HERE 3, HERE 4 and HERE 5.

artists everyone should follow: dj neil armstrong

You may remember I posted Neil’s monster mix Original a long time ago…and with good reason.  Many Dj’s had taken the concept of mixing original songs withe the hip hop songs that sampled them, but none of them had pulled it off with as much flair as DJ Neil Armstrong of the infamous 5th Platoon.

But that isn’t to say he is just a hip hop DJ.  In fact, from listening to any of his many mixes, a portrait emerges of a man who just loves music…all kinds of music.  Rock, funk, pop, soul, R&B, electro, 80′s music and comedy skits.  Many of his mixes revolve around a theme…Warmfuzzy contained songs that would make you feel good, Bittersweet was all break up songs while Filthy was almost all rock and roll.  Below is a sample of what you’ll get.

But what all these mixes have in common is the quality of his selections and the care he takes in putting a mix together.  These aren’t mixes done in an hour on a laptop, he puts a lot into them…which is why he doesn’t release them as often as I’d wish.  I currently have them all…as well as a few other radio shows I’ve picked up as they’ve come along, but Neil is smart enough to ask you to pay for the work he’s done  and he has a little store where you can pick up the more ambitious titles in his catalog (they are worth it if you are wondering.)

But on a recent perusal of his website the other day I discovered a neat little page titled podcasts, which contained a wealth of mixes I hadn’t seen before.  Most are radio shows or live club shows, but also a great copy of Warmfuzzy(one of my favorites) a wedding mix he did for one of his crew and a couple of remix projects too.

He is currently the tour DJ for Jay Z, and is doing promotions for Adidas because he is a bad ass.  So if you love all music too, and want to get some ipod food for the weekend, you could do a lot worse than checking in with DJ Neil Armstrong.

Website HERE.

Mix store  HERE.

Podcasts HERE.

artists everyone should follow: pogo

I think a comment on this video said it best.  “Where other artists rape my childhood, Pogo brings it back to it’s innocence.”

VJ and producer Nick Bertke, AKA Pogo has been quietly making the scene with his remixes of Disney, Harry Potter, LOTR and HR Puffinstuff.  It does sort of capture the kind of childlike wonder that made you love these things in the first place.  His videos on YouTube (HERE) are a must see and he has  downloads of his tracks HERE.

Support this man so he will continue making magic…although Disney and the other represented entities should put this man on their payroll for making them look this cool.

Seriously!

the doors – live in hollywood 1969

So, the other week I got my best friend a thank you gift for inviting my fiance and me to Hawaii.  It was the early 90′s vinyl release of Yard Boy Ten’s – Play It Fire 12.”  It is super rare (only 500 were pressed) and no one to my knowledge has ever digitized it, and Drew has been searching for a cpoy for ten years.  So I snagged a copy off some kid in Germany.

So the German kid mails if off to me, but sends it Deutch Post…which would be fine except for the fact that the whole website is in German and I can’t figure out how to track the package. No biggie, I figure.  It’ll get here when it gets here.

A week and a half later, I get a note in my mailbox.  “Dear Resident…blah blah blah, Sorry we missed you…blah blah.  Please pick up your package at the Post Office.

Sounds good, right?  So I head to the Post Office, receipt in hand, to pick it up,  I hand the guy behind the counter the slip and he disappears in back to find it.  Ten minutes later he reappears.

“I can’t find it.”

“What do you mean you can’t find it?”

He shrugs and tells me it’s not there, and suggests I call the central Postal annex.  I do, and I talk to the supervisor who says “Why are you calling us?  We don’t hold packages.”

I leave my name and phone number with the guy and wait. After three days , I check again and he still can’t find it.  Now I’m really pissed.  Not only have they lost the gift, but they lost a RARE gift that took me ten years to find!!!  I call the post master and leave a message, but she never calls me back.

Finally, in desperation, I leave a note for my mail carrier. While she doesn’t know where it is, she suggests I try the Marina Del  Rey Post Office.

I head over there the next day. The lady there listens to my story, but insists that the package isn’t there. She repeats over and over in broken English that anything that shows up there for another city gets sent back.  I beg her to check anyways.  She sighs and trundles off into the back.  Lo and behold, she returns two minutes later with my package.

“Here it is. I saw this the other day and set it aside…and then I forgot about it…ha ha!”

Very funny motherfucker.  So the moral is fuck the post office.  If they lose your shit, you got to find it your self.

Speaking of great  finds, you gotta go grab this recording of The Doors – Live in Hollywood, 1969. (Note: This is the Aquarius Theater recordings and not the Live at the Hollywood Bowl show)

Now, I have a few live Doors shows and most of them are okay…so when I saw this I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down.  That is until I heard it.  Culled from the legendary July 69 performances that gave us many recognizable live recordings of the Doors like “Universal Mind” and “You Make Me Real.”

This was only a month after Jim’s famous Miami incident where he supposedly exposed himself to an out of control audience…so at the time you never knew if you’d get one of the best shows of your life or a massive riot.  This show was not one of the riots though, and the band is so ON, it’s amazing.  Opening with a searing rendition of “Back Door Man” and finishing with a twelve minute rendition of “Light My Fire” this is THE live Doors album to own.

Hell, this is The Doors album to own period.

It’s only $11 on Amazon (on import) which isn’t bad…

Kutiman – ThruYOU

I was walking down second street with my lady the other week when we spotted this nutterholding a sign that said something along the lines of “REPENT!  GOD KILLS!”  Then there was some sort of website you could visit for more insanity I guess.

While I admired his guts to just stand on the street corner and let his freak flag fly, I was also amused with the flip side of the sign that read “Little Wayne is the Antichrist!”  Now, I can’t say I like Little Wayne’s musical stylings that much…but the antichrist?

Really?

You’ve probably heard me deride the current state of hip hop, and I think Little Wayne may be a part of said problem.  But as I’ve always said…DJ’s invented hip hop, and it’s the DJ’s who will save it.  And my newest DJ savior comes to us in the form of Israeli DJ Kutiman.  Yeah I know taht for most of the Internets, this is not new news, but for me this is what this site is all about.

See, original hip hop was all about taking something old and making something completely new from it.  That’s the essence of hip hop.  Now, I’ve been waiting for something like this to come along since I first heard of the advent of DVD turntables…and more recently the new video functionality on Serato.  But Kutiman gets the proverbial X-Prize for reaching the mountaintop first…with his groundbreaking work ThruYou.

Kutiman, real name Ophir Kutiel,  has been making electronic  music for some time now.  He grew up playing music …mostly classical jazz until college radio and a friend introduced him to AfrobBeat and Funk…I have his earlier work and it’s pretty funky. So anyhow he was hanging out…putting together some tracks, just chillin when he realized he needed a bass line.  Not wanting the prepackaged sounds of the music programs on hand, he decided to take a look on YouTube.

If you’ve spent an obscene amount of time on YouTube, you may have seen some of these videos.  Just some guy and a camera giving a music lesson, jamming solo or something of the like.  The site is lousy with em. So anyways, he finds his bass clip..and he’s pretty stoked on it.  Then he realizes he needs a drum track and heads back to YouTube when it struck him…

Why go anywhere else?  Here it all was.  Videos of people from all over playing, jamming, singing…and he had the editing software that could tie it all together into a cohesive whole!

Compiled and produced over the course of two months, it was Ophir’s secret project.  He planned on having a big debut, sending out links to only twenty of his friends.  But his friends were not good at keeping a secret…and once something is on the web…it’s pretty much there to stay.  Through Twitter, Facebook and email it spread.

For me, ThruYOU is more than an album, but in experiment in almost global collaboration.  He gave credit to every single artist he used…and so far none have complained about the attention. This album simply couldn’t have existed fifteen years ago…it couldn’t exist without YouTube and it couldn’t exist without the Internet. Even  as I sit here writing about it, I’m adding a little bit more to the project.

What’s more is that it’s an album that isn’t meant to be owned…it simply exists on the Internet.  It belongs to everyone.

ThruYOU is one of those things that arrives incidentally one day and shows you just how far we’ve come…and how much farther we have to go.  I hope it sets off a brush fire of new music and collaboration.  It can only mean good things for us all.

Young Holt Unlimited – On Stage

Welcome everyone to the 100th post here at Albums Everyone Should Own, I’m so glad you could make it! Did you remember to bring beer?

No?  Well, there’s still time to run to AM/PM.

You know, it was only seven months ago that I started this blog with a hope to not only fill the dead space during our off season, but to inform the general public of fucking awesome music that they need.  Along they way, I’ve tried to give props to the great albums out there that most people know about, but also to some albums that not everyone knows…records that may have slipped through the cracks.

So far, I think it’s going pretty well.

I’d like to take the time to thank those bloggers who have supported my cause, so shouts out to CorrinaCorrina, What The Deuce, And Ya Don’t Stop and The Musics Over for all the great linkage.  Come on down to my bar sometime and the drinks are on me.

But, I’d also like to take the time to thank you, the anonymous Internet reader for allowing me an audience.  If it weren’t for all the hits, I probably would have lost interest long ago and gone back to my other job…drinking until I can’t feel feelings.

So keep on visiting, and I’ll keep throwing up the bomb for all who care enough to dig for it. And speaking of digging, I dug up some dusty soul jazz grooves for you today by the name of Young-Holt Unlimited with their 1967 live release “On Stage.”

Drummer Isaac ‘Red” Holt and Bassist Eldee Young were a part of the famous Ramsey Lewis Trio in the early sixties where they had a hand in creating two of Lewis’s biggest hits of the day ‘The In Crowd’ and ‘Hang On Sloopy.’ In 1966, though, they left the group to pursue their own direction and hooked up with pianist Hysear Don Walker in 1966 to form The Young-Holt Trio.

Said trio only made one album, titled after their only hit ‘Wack Wack,’ after which Hysear left the group.  After a period with Ken Chaney on Piano, he was replaced by Floyd Morris and the group became Young-Holt Unlimited.  There seems to be some confusion as to when this happened, as all the information I’ve found says the name change didn’t happen until 1968, but our album “On Stage” was released in 1967 and clearly names the group as Young-Holt Unlimited…but then again does it really fucking matter?

No, but I’m a little hung over from celebrating, and it makes me testy.

(If you’ve heard of Young-Holt, it’s probably because of their famous backing track to the Barbara Acklin hit ‘Am I The Same Girl?’ Their arrangement was so hot that the group also released it as an instrumental called ‘Soulful Strut’ with Floyd’s piano replacing the vocals.)

I’ve always loved the soul jazz genre because it had a much smoother sound than the jazz funk era that was to come, and while it had a good run, I’ve always felt they could have dome more.  This is pretty self evident considering the raw energy captured in “On Stage.”  The recording captures more than the music, but also the feel of the famous Bohemian Cavern in which it was recorded …right down to the band’s banter with the audience and the screams of delight from the crowd. No track displays this better than the medley of ‘Wade In The Water/ Ain’t There Something That Money Can’t Buy,’ part of which you’ll hear above.

Truth be told, I’m not that thrilled with their version of Mellow Yellow, but the monster ‘Yon Gimme Thum’ that closes the set pretty much seals the deal for me anyways.

I got introduced to these guys in college and their Greatest Hits album was a staple of our pool room/bar/garage hangout for the three years that we had it.  This album is highly recommended to people who have hangouts and the folks that like to hang out in them.  Grab it HERE!

And next time bring beer.