#86: Frequency Moderation

Alex Amen | Real Young & Lazy Horse | Wet Tuna in the Sand

Welcome back to the Ambient Audiophile, where there’s no static at all.

So, yeah, I’m taking a break from radio for a while. How long this hiatus is, is anybody’s guess but I didn’t arrive at this decision lightly. To be completely honest, the biggest reason is it just hasn;t been fun to do for a while. Every week, Saturday would come around and I would feel a massive dread about blocking out hours to put together a show. On lucky nights when the kids go to bed easy, I could maybe hope to be done by 9pm and get an hour to myself to play a record or catch up with my partner. But the truth about young kids is there are no rules and as a co-sleeping, screenless family, there isn’t a lot of adult time until the dreams start to creep in.

Another reason for the break is I’ve been giving away this hard work for a long, long, long time. It’s great that freeform DJs around the country can dedicate their time and resources to their stations and audiences but I just can’t justify keeping an internship up in my 40s. Personally, I think that model needs to be tweaked so that at the very least programmers get reimbursed for commutes/tolls/etc. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Money is tighter than ever for so many of us, and time I’m not riding bikes or hiking or swimming with my kids needs to be spent figuring out how to make ends meet and go beyond. These kids are growing fast and I’m going to be with them as much as I can with any non-working time I’m lucky enough to get. Late stage capitalism puts hard choices in front of parents and I’m always going to land on the side of hanging out with my kids.

My hope is to build this newsletter out and bring some new features into it so that we continue to grow our paid subscriber base. I started putting some archives behind the paywall and those hardly get listened to. This tells me you paying customers are here for the Substack content, so I’m going to step it up here and make it worth your hard-earned money.

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July was insane for show going. Incredibly, I got to hit THREE concerts and they were all truly exceptional.

First was singer-songwriter Alex Amen at Tubby’s. Amen just released his debut full-length via ATO and a lot of it reminds me of Bruce Cockburn’s early records minus the hardcore Christianity. Alex is a fine singer and guitarist, vibrating very much in a early 70s way with a buddy on secondary acoustic and it was a very nice and warm evening of tunes. Looking forward to hearing more from this young man. It looks like he’s embarking on a West Coast tour soon, so I highly recommend checking him out if you’re in the area.

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My second show of the month was a week late at a midtown dive called Madison Square Garden. Thanks to the incredible generosity of a head in this community, I was able to hit Phish’s last of five nights in NYC on their Summer Tour. The band were doing somewhat thematic shows, playing only songs available to them in the years 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996 as these shows were their 92nd, 93rd, 94th, 95th, and 96th at the venue. When this tour was announced I was pretty pissed there was no SPAC or, better yet, Bethel on the itinerary. For me, summer tour means amphitheaters, cheap lawn tickets and dusty shakedowns. Not even Mamdani can make MSG a chill place to be in the summer for a Phish show. But as the tour kicked off and the tapes started coming out, it was clear the band was playing really well and jamming in new and creative ways. So, I decided I needed to hit a night. And seeing as how my first show was 10/21/96, it felt only right that I make it to the 29th. I saw some old friend walking in but I had a solo seat in sec 212. I quickly hit it off with my neighbors and the vibes were great in our area through the whole night. The first set was fun in that it contained a lot of the beloved, proggy early material but the improv was scant. And, at the ned of the day, that’s what I see this band for. The second set came and I got exactly what I wanted with not one, but two monstrous, multi-faceted and dynamic jams. The first came out of You Enjoy Myself, the band’s defining song. The other came appended to Crosseyed and Painless, the one song that has remained (relatively) in rotation since the band covered the Talking Head’s ‘Remain in Light’ on Halloween 1996. Both jams featured Trey ditching his guitar for a few minutes to play a min-drumkit (as he did in 1996)—an excellent addition that I hope sticks around for a while. It was in C&P that keyboardist Page McConnell and bassist Mike Gordon stepped up and directed the jam into massively dank and trippy dub and sci-fi zones. It was one of those “what the hell am I witnessing” moments that only this band can deliver and when the jam ended I could only stand there speechless shaking my head.

There’s some pretty solid video/audio from the crowd, check it out.

The third show was technically on August 1 and it was ascendant (and only?) Neil Young tribute act Real Young and Lazy Horse. The quartet was playing a free show at Rippers in Rockaway so we took the opportunity to cruise down and hit the beach and soak up some Horse jams. This band is pretty buzzy, especially after a recent Rolling Stone article on them. And it’s easy to see why–these guys do an amazing job honoring Shakey and his longest running collaborators. When the band started up I was deliriously happy (not just from sunstroke) to hear them jamming on ‘Ramada Inn’ from 2014’s Psychedelic Pill. Not only do I think that it’s his best record of the 21st century, I think its in the top 10 of all time. The kids were wilding out on the sand and playground so I was in/out of the show but caught real ripping versions of another underrated gem ‘Scattered’ (off 1996’s Broken Arrow), Albuquerque, and Mansion on the Hill. I think thanks to all the great Dead cover bands we have around, the resistance to seeing tribute acts has really worn down and allows us to hear amazing interpretations of some of our favorite artists. RY&LH definitely sound like the OGs but they aren’t just photocopying. There’s real character and nuance to their jamming and they will let a groove ride for a looooooong time. Really excellent. Just today they announced two more shows at Rippers on August 14 & 15th and they will play Garcia’s in Port Chester on August 27th. Definitely check them out. There isn’t any recent stuff on YouTube but this video from last year is ok. Just trust me, go.

Even before the Lazy Horse show I’d been listening to a lot of Neil and one the way home from the gig I wanted to revisit some of the Neil-less Crazy Horse albums. The self-titled from 1971 wasn’t doing it for me so I went to the following year’s At Crooked Lake (Epic, 1972) and it is like ten-thousand times better! The tunes and arrangements are just massively better on the second LP and it even features Sneaky Pete on two cuts! It’s a great front to back listen and the recording is awesome. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, just really well played folk/country rock in the vein of CSNY, Blue Mountain Eagle and even post-Elektra Love.

The song ‘We Ride’ is by far my favorite on the album, not just because it sounds like a chonkier Tim Buckley. Do you have a favorite Crazy Horse LP? Let me know in the comments.

I wasn’t able to get it together for a big Bandcamp Friday round up this go around but what a pleasure to get a notification that Wet Tune dropped a new EP today. Maybe everybody is high on Neil these days because what is on offer from MAtt Valentine & Co. is a blissfully jammed out version of ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ slyly disguised as “Cowboy in the Sand.” The track starts a little more old school MV&EE style with some electric guitar wrangling and reverb before a big phat riddim comes riding in. The tune trots along recognizably for a while until this Green Mountain crew starts to stretch it out into their own special, fractal space.

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I don’t know if it was the year it was released or the pants, but I never bothered checking out 1989’s Freedom before this week. Well I’ve really been missing out! The whole record is great but this cut especially is knocking me out lately. What a great recording, too.

Maybe 80s Neil has more to offer than just Trans!

More soon.