This video is filled with art, fashion and accessories. Lots to look at here. Some is a bit whacky but most really cool. Paired with a little dancing. I made this song a while back but never made a video using it. The images were made using #Midjourney and animated with #VEO3. The song was made using @sunomusic It’s called Beyond The Clouds
"When you hear “If I Needed You,” many think first of Townes Van Zandt’s fragile original, whispered like a private confession. But in the late 1980s, the song found a different kind of grace when Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris sang it together.
Their duet feels less like a performance and more like a quiet promise exchanged at dusk. Griffith’s clear, earnest voice carries the song’s vulnerability, while Harris’s harmony rises like a gentle benediction, steady and timeless. Nothing is forced; every line breathes.
It never needed chart dominance to endure. In that shared moment, the song becomes something else entirely — not about longing alone, but about trust, companionship, and the rare beauty of two kindred voices meeting in perfect understanding."
Nanci Griffith & Emmylou Harris - If I Needed You
A story from last year … You know Lenny Kaye as Patti Smith’s right-hand man - guitar-slinger and co-songwriter going back to her debut album, Horses, in 1975. And also, perhaps, as the chronicler and compiler of the famous double-album of garage rock and psychedelic gems from the ‘60s released in 1972, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968.) He also published a book last year, Lightning Striking: 10 Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll, where he passionately and deeply delved into scenes, sounds and cities that were especially integral to rock ‘n’ roll, starting in Memphis in 1954. Hot spots bursting with innovation and creativity.
And this past May at the Cut club in Gloucester, Mass., Kaye capped an off-and-on tour he’d been doing for a year which celebrated the Nuggets era. He hooked up with Boston-area musicians and out-of-towner, have-guitar-will-travel ringer, former REM-er Peter Buck, who had been on the whole tour. It was Kaye’s eighth such gig. They played the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard,” the song he felt best defines the Nuggets era, the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner.”
A night before the public show Kaye – who still sports long gray hippie hair – and many of his band-mates staged an “open rehearsal” for about 100 VIP guests. He asked me to host a Q/A session before he played a seven-song set. Kaye’s quotes primarily are taken from that session, plus a few scattered interviews done over the years.
Unquestionably, Kaye’s life has been one of music. Among the hats he’s worn, (and some he still wears): fan, record store clerk, critic, working musician, DJ, historian, archivist, collector and producer.
“When you’re self-employed, you have to do everything,” Kaye says, with a laugh. “No, someone once described me as a ‘friend to music’ and I believe that truly. I love music. I love playing, I love listening, I love waking up in the morning with music on my mind.”
Kaye was born to Jewish parents in Upper Manhattan. His father changed the family name from Kusikoff to Kaye when Lenny was just a year old. He says in many ways he’s not so much different from the kid growing up in Jamaica Queens, where his family moved to during the 1950s and then Brunswick, NJ in 1960, when Kaye was 13.
“I think I’m the same,” he says. “I’m obsessed with music. I love the rabbit hole and thank you, internet. I hear of an artist I know vaguely and I just follow it along. What can I say? It’s all out there, so many artists you’ve never heard before. I just find genres. I’m really deep into ska music of the ‘60s now. I’ve spent time in be-bop. I always thought, ‘Oh, Charlie Parker, he’s a genius,’ but I didn’t know why and I didn’t hear it. And then one day, I heard a record by a piano player named Dodo Marmarosa who played on Charlie Parker’s California recordings in 1946 and later went crazy.
He pushed a piano out a window to see what it would sound like when it hit the ground - my kind of guy! But he has a song called ‘Bopmatism’ [with Parker on it] and I listened to it and it was so hooky” – Kaye scats a few notes – “that I suddenly unlocked the be-bop door. I felt the excitement of what it must have been like on West 48th street in that moment in time, Kind of like the punk rock of its day.”
Kaye, who with Smith, was part of the early days of CBGB, the dingy, narrow club on the Bowery, a spot you’d walk to while being careful to step over discarded syringes. But a club that launched, among others, Smith, Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, Dead Boys and the Cramps.
“I like these scenes where they're kind of under the radar and nobody knows what they're doing,” Kaye says, “and it hasn't got a definition yet and they're figuring it out. And all of a sudden there's a locus of energy where music, especially rock and roll, evolves. That moment I experienced it at CBGB, where you got these random renegade bands playing in a place that was about as off the beaten path as can be. And all of a sudden, you can feel the energy coalesce like space dust kind of comes together and forms a planet.
“In the early CBGBs, there was like seven or eight bands playing and Tom Verlaine [of Television] once said ‘Each one was like a separate idea. It might have had some weird sensibility which later got defined as punk,’ and when the Ramones came around that was the template for punk and a lot of great records came out of that.”
Some of the scenes and cities he wrote about required deep research; others he experienced first-hand, like San Francisco and Detroit. As to the former, “I just wanted to go there and see the Grateful Dead who you couldn't hear because they hadn't [yet] made a record.” And the latter: “The Detroit rock scene with the Stooges and the MC5. It's so great to be a part of that when it happens and I've been privileged to be a part of it.”
If you read Kaye’s book, you find his enthusiasm for a variety of genres – even death metal in Norway! – but moreover the sense that not only does everything change, and change rapidly, but he welcomes it.
“I believe music exists in the present tense,” Kaye says. “I'm not a person that says, ‘Ooh, music was better then’ - well, yeah, it was better then - but that's then. I don't wanna see a bunch of garage bands from the year 2024 sounding like the garage bands on Nuggets, 'cause that's already been done.”
He says that in his mind Nuggets is really not all about garage rock. “It's all about these weird [songs], like Sagittarius’s ‘My World Fell Down.’ It's not a garage rock record; it's a fully orchestrated piece of musique concrète.”
Kaye’s vision of Nuggets is this: “These people are suddenly given new tools to make music - amplifiers, effects pedals, hallucinogens. And they make something that they don't even know what they're making because they're surprised and we're surprised.”
“It's music that's 60 years old,” Kaye adds, “but it still seems to speak [to us] in some weird way. It's a core of, I call it yearning and desire. It's still there, it’s what illuminated me when I was a random teenager in New Jersey. And it still seems to speak to our inner desires to break free of whoever we're told we have to be and find out who you really want to be. I feel lucky because it's how that magic spell worked for me. I was lucky to be in a time and place where I could keep on doing it.”
Obviously, Kaye has a substantial record collection. How big?
“It could be bigger,” he says immediately, with a laugh. “I'd say about maybe 3 ,000 albums, and about 3 ,000 singles, and CDs that keep multiplying. And I just got a 1950s Voice of Music console 78 player from the ‘50s. So. my interest in 78s is suddenly [there.]”
Yes, he thinks about trimming and shedding – “It's just I don't know what to do with them” – but comes around to, “I find it really hard. I look at a record I haven't listened to in 25 years, but tomorrow I think ‘Wow!’”
“I really hope to have a quiet summer this year,” adds Kaye, who left his East Village home 37 years ago for East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, just over the border from New Jersey by the Delaware Water Gap. He lives with his wife Stephanie. “I'm gonna buy like some nice sativa and spend some quality time with my records. And then I'll never get rid of 'em.”
And finally, on Patti: “Like I always say, I'm so privileged to be by her side and I've never seen Patti ever sing a false note, never go into ‘performance’ mode. She always wants to make each night unique to the audience out there.”
Believe it or not, Kaye has a life outside of music. “As [folksinger] Eric Anderson told me, ‘Life is 90 % maintenance and 10 % creativity,’” he says. So: Kaye cleans the cat box. He walks his dog. “And then there's the damn turtle, 31 years old, Squirmy. My daughter bought it in Chinatown when it was [tiny], left it with me and I learned how to take care of it. I just bought a 1961 Thunderbird – yeah baby! - so that's going to entertain me for a while. And then, like anybody, I watch TV.”
Steve Wynn
Richard “Hacksaw” Harney was born on July 16, 1902, in Money, Mississippi, United States.
Unlike many of his Delta contemporaries who used slides, Harney was a master of Piedmont fingerstyle. His playing blended blues with complex ragtime and jazz-influenced picking, often reminiscent of Blind Blake.
Fellow musicians, most notably Robert Lockwood Jr., claimed Harney was a major influence on Robert Johnson and was the only guitarist who could truly compete with him in technical skill.
While primarily remembered for guitar, he was also a highly gifted pianist. On guitar, he developed a unique “tremolo” technique that allowed him to mimic the sound of a mandolin.
Early Recordings (1927–1928): He first recorded as part of a guitar duo with his brother, Maylon “Pet” Harney. They provided accompaniment for vocalists like Pearl Dickson and Walter Rhodes.
After his brother’s murder in a juke joint, Harney became reclusive and worked mostly as a tuner. He was “rediscovered” in 1969 and recorded his only solo album, Sweet Man, in 1972. This late-career work finally documented his fast-paced, “swinging” instrumental style.
One year after his final recording, Harney died at the age of 71 on Christmas Day 1973, in Jackson, Mississippi, from stomach cancer.
He left a legacy as one of the most technically proficient yet obscure figures of the Mississippi Delta blues.
Richard "Hacksaw" Harney was, ostensibly, a piano tuner and repair man based in and around Memphis, Tennessee. If you believe the endorsements of his musical peers, and there is no reason not to, he was also one of the greatest blues guitarists to come from the Mississippi delta area, and a major influence on a generation of artists that included Robert Johnson. Born in Money, Mississippi, in 1902, he was also a gifted piano player, spending his life as an itinerant piano tuner primarily in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, but also travelling as far as St Louis and Chicago. His nickname came from the hacksaw he carried in his toolkit (not from a early boxing career as erroneously cited elsewhere) and with which he would fashion replacement parts for pianos. When he was in his early 20's he and an elder brother worked for tips and as backing musicians in Memphis but after his brother was murdered in a juke joint, Harney took up piano tuning. Robert Lockwood Jr. claimed that Harney was well acquainted with Robert Johnson and was a major influence on him, being the only musician that could compete with him (Johnson).Harney spent most of his life in relative musical obscurity but in the late 1960's he was traced by folklorists to Memphis and in 1972 he recorded 10 tracks for Adelphi Records. In presenting their Sweet Man CD Adelphi wrote, "....... is pleased to present this ten song collection demonstrating the guitar wizardry of Richard Hacksaw Harney, the musician's musician from the motherland of American Music. Hacksaw was sought out by blues researchers in the 1960's because of the high esteem with which his contemporaries regarded him, many of whom were still awed by recollections of his occasional, impromptu appearances in Delta jukes or on the legendary King Biscuit Time radio show in Helena, Arkansas. In 1969, Adelphi's traveling studio followed the Harney reputation from Chicago to Jackson and back to Memphis, where Hacksaw was finally located, with the assistance of a posse of aging but enthusiastic blues musicians. Their persistence was amply rewarded by his sparkling and complex finger-picking playing".In the recordings Harney plays Piedmont fingerstyle blues, merging ragtime with blues rather like Blind Blake. Most of the numbers are up-tempo instrumentals, all in a swinging style intended for dancing. Sadly one year after the recordings, in 1973, Richard Harney passed away in Jackson, Mississippi.
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With Bob Dylan’s setlists fairly (though not entirely!) static, I imagine most of you do not listen to every single tape of every single show. I admit, I don’t either—but I do listen to quite a few. So, like I did last year, I’ve pulled out my ten personal favourites to share. If you need a primer, or want to experience some of Dylan’s best live moments this year in one place, here it is.
My criteria were simple: Great show, great recording. Most of the tapes I selected offer both in spades. However, a good-enough tape of a highly notable show could slip in, whereas I wouldn’t bother including a sterling tape of a crummy performance (though getting a few of Bob’s shall-we-say-eccentric electric guitar intros in soundboard quality might qualify).
Yes, that is the big word for this year: Soundboards! The first since 2009, covering both the Outlaw and Rough and Rowdy Ways tours. Half the tapes below are audience recordings—which have their own special magic, presenting the experience as it would have felt in the room—and half are soundboards.
I’ll be going chronologically through the year’s three big tours: Rough and Rowdy: U.S. in the spring, Outlaw Tour in the summer, and Rough and Rowdy: Europe in the fall. (Funny: I wrote that exact same sentence to introduce LAST year’s list. He’s a man of habit—and 2026 seems to be off the same start again.) Each show includes a download link. Thanks as always to the tapers, the secret heroes without whom none of this would be possible!
Italian, born 1968
War Souvenir No. 26 (Christmas 1944), 2005
digital chromogenic print
Size 40 x 19.7 in. [check the size of this beauty!]
