
"The Other End of the Dominos"
1986
oil on linen
Playing For Change
The Times They Are A' Changing
75 years of the UN
PHEW!
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS - Look at Miss Ohio
again the Flackennabokk algorithm turns up trumps and found this lovely piece from David in tribute to Peter Green . . . . . .
"Peter Green wrote "I Loved Another Woman" for Fleetwood Mac's 1968 debut and played it on his legendary 1959 Gibson Les Paul — one of the pickups flipped over, giving it that haunting out-of-phase tone that nobody before or since has ever replicated. B.B. King heard Green play and said it was "the sweetest tone I've ever heard." That's not a compliment — that's a verdict. The song itself was actually the early seed of Black Magic Woman. Same chord structure, same Latin blues feel — Green refined it, renamed it, and Santana took it to the world. But the original is the one that makes the hair stand up. This is my improv inspired by that sound. A tribute to one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. ๐ธ"

(Photo by Laura Levine)
Ahmet Ertegun found out about the Gris-Gris album only after the recording was complete. The strange sounds he heard did not sit well with him. Dr. John tells the story: “I was doing a session for Bobby Darin when Ahmet Ertegun walked into the studio looking for me. ‘Why did you give me this sh*t? How can we market this boogaloo cr*p?‘ He wasted about 15 minutes of Bobby Darin’s studio time just yelling at me. And I’m thinking ‘Oh, this record is never going to see the light of day.’” But Say what you will about Ertegun, money was not his only motivation. The man had an ear and passion for music, and he agreed to release the album.
The stage performances that followed helped make the album a minor counter-culture hit: “It was a show in the New Orleans tradition. We were lucky with it, because all those love-ins and be-ins and freak-ins were happening at the same time. I got Chicken Man and some other guys that did a real voodoo show. That was too much for some people, so I toned it down when I began promoting the record. Basically, I kept the snake dancer and the backup singers and a small version of the band”. It was enough to secure Mac Rebennack four more album recordings with Atlantic. His music changed and took a different direction over the years, but the gris-gris psychedelic vibe of his debut album still remains the most enduring for me in his rich catalog.