Author Archives: lucasgonze

hard boiled brass

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Some great old photos of musicians from the Vanishing Georgia collection. These guys look like life was pretty hard.

Cuthbert Brass Band members, Cuthbert, Randolph County, Georgia, sometime between 1880 and 1889. The trombonists look so tough they could kill you and eat your liver with beans and gravy.

The Cuthbert Brass Band used to beat the shit out of this other band and take their sousaphones. That’s why this other band got the silly Musical Wagon with horses going, because their weak little legs couldn’t run fast enough.

Monroe, ca. 1880-1890. Members of this band pose for a group photograph in their musical wagon. Doctor Hammond’s home seen in the background.

Not one of these dudes was ever too drunk to stand. Especially not the guy with the straggly beard wearing the bass drum like a papoose so that the little drummer boy can prop him up long enough to get the shot.

Jug Tavern, [Georgia], 1889. Members of what is reported to be the first band in Jug Tavern. In 1893 the town name was changed to Winder for John H. Winder. He was president of the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad which was built through this area at the time. Members of the band, left to right: Ernest Bush, N.J. Kelly, Jim Griffeth, R.L. Carithers, L.O. Williams, W.L. Bush, J.H. Jackson, W.H. Hosch, W. J. Ross, C.M. Ferguson, and Prof. J.W. McGill who was the teacher.

the first band in Jug Tavern, Georgia

Billy Goat stomp sample pack

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sample pack zip file

Here are a bunch of stems I sliced out of Jelly Roll Morton’s recording of his composition “Billy Goat Stomp.” I assume that it was his “Red Hot Peppers” band recorded in Chicago in 1926 or 1927.

These sounds have great vintage flavor which I hope will inspire you to do killer techno mixes. They’re in a minor key. The mood is fun and morbid, very Halloween. The band is tight. The recording sounds awesome. They’re nicely isolated because the original had a lot of breakdowns. I especially recommend the snare and hi-hat sounds and the two vocal bits.

These sample files are in MP3 format for easy browsing. Snarf the full .zip file for the WAVs. To get play buttons next to each sample go to this version of this post.

  1. band
  2. band 2
  3. band 3
  4. vocal bleeting
  5. vocal “man take that goat out of here”
  6. clarinet
  7. cornet 1
  8. cornet 2
  9. guitar 1
  10. guitar 2
  11. guitar 3
  12. hi hat 1
  13. hi hat 2
  14. hi hat 3
  15. horn kicks 1
  16. horn kicks 2
  17. snare 1
  18. snare 3

Any copyright that I, Lucas Gonze, have on these samples I hereby grant to the public domain, though I sure would appreciate a link back to this page if you use them.

party like it’s 1929

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A festival from the heart of LA’s arts community
to celebrate the worst financial crash since 1929.

Where: at the A+D Museum, 5900 Wilshire Blvd. (across from LACMA)

I’ll be doing two half-hour sets: On the hooverville (plaza) mainstage from 8:30-9 and then on the plaza sidestage from 9:30-10 too. The mainstage is a “stop-and-look” situation and the sidestage is more atmospheric for passerby (unless it’s way packed with people, in which case there’ll probably be a stop-and-look crowd in both locations).

It’ll be a huge party with stellar people-watching in an atmosphere of depression-era decadence, including sexy flappers and tons of booze.

Inspired by the similarity of the economic crisis of 2008 to the Market Crash of 1929, artists will seek to immerse our merrymakers in the excess of the privileged elite and the grit of bohemian urchins below.

In the ballroom our fatcat partygoers will dance and celebrate in luxury while sipping fine beverages, watching burlesque beauties tease them to the awesome grooves of ANACRON, and reveling in decadence and excess. Outside on the plaza, partygoers will slum it with Hooverville tramps and bum cigarettes from Vaudeville acts as they listen to a junkyard band. All around them will be performance environments from dozens of LA’s most innovative companies. The evening culminates in a dynamic ballroom finale where past and present collide in a mash-up not to be missed. All Angelinos are invited to discover their inner tycoon amidst the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Saturday, Dec. 13, 2008 8pm-2am. $20 admission, $10 open bar access

proto-electronics

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I went to the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco to see the vintage player pianos in person, and while I was there I got these photos of historical Americana.

To snarf the raw photos, head over to my Flickr cache. As always with my work, these are under a Creative Commons (Attribution Share-Alike) license to enable people to reuse them. Personally I plan to attach them to MP3s to serve as album art.

Josephine Baker and the “hot” style of the 20th century

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Vintage Powder Room is a blog about vintage cosmetics ephemera and vanity accessories:

My collection is comprised of items such as cardboard face powder boxes, hairnet packages and magazine advertisements from 1900-1950. It was the beautiful art that drew me to the items, and it is why I continue to add to my collection. The artists were frequently hired by the cosmetics manufacturers to develop advertisements and containers for their products. Most of the artists remain unknown to us – but their work is still exquisite. There were some famous artists who became involved in the design of cosmetics packaging – most notably Rene Lalique who designed the gorgeous Coty face powder box with the powder puff design. The Coty box and powder are still in production today. If you want to own a piece of cosmetics history you can buy one of the boxes for just a few dollars at your local drugstore.

When women first began to powder their noses in public, and to apply lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge it was up to cosmetics companies to get their attention, and their dollars, with advertisements and packaging. The advertising and packaging of cosmetics left a rich legacy of design.

It is amazing how many of these beautiful and fragile items have survived – some of them for more than 100 years. Rather than discard the face powder boxes, women frequently held on to them. Particularly during the years of the depression when beautiful things were hard to come by – for a few cents a woman could go to the drugstore and purchase face powder, lipstick, or a compact. Once the product was long gone, many women kept the containers and used them to hold safety pins or buttons.

What catches my eye here is that she is, like me, an amateur historian and collector of pop culture. There’s a fascinating essay on a Duska face powder box from 1925 — how did she find so much to say about it? But then again, how did gurdonark and I spend weeks following the journeyman guitar arranger E. Pique from Austria to San Francisco? And her essay on the powder box brings up the singer Josephine Baker:

Josephine Baker
Many of the people who came of age during the years following WWI rejected 19th century values, and its art, and earned the moniker the “Lost Generation“. Some of the Americans who gravitated to the expat’s life in Paris would become international literary superstars: Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos. Others of them were artists and performers, like Josephine Baker.

Josephine Baker embodied the hot (musical) style that was the negation of the 19th century culture of elaborate social protocol and layer after layer of manners. She was black and outwardly incredible during a time when blacks in America were forced into the ritualized cringing of the minstrel style, and she was openly sexual at a time when public sexuality was still defined by Victorian style.

Compare her mid-20s version of a tune called “Bam Bam Bammy Shore” (from Breezin’ Along ) with Thomas Craig’s 1898 version of “Old Black Joe” (from Lost Sounds: Blacks.)

And here’s a 1925 version by a pop band called “The Revellers”:

The Warner Chappell publishing company, by the way, thinks this tune is still copyrighted, which goes to show how the entire 20th century is off limits to free culture.

in the woods yesterday, on art walk Thursday

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I played a strange and amazing gig yesterday in deep woods north of LA, put on a by group called Natural Stage that describes the shows this way:

Hikes without Mics is an event usually held on the first Sunday of the month (but always check the calendar as that may change). Locations vary but generally involve a mild 1-4 mile (roundtrip) hike to a “Natural Stage” where a concert occurs. Some concerts will include a mix of short folk, jazz, classical, experimental, etc. sets by various performers.

In practice what this meant was a longish walk on a barely-visible trail by a creek, at the the end of which was a pretty waterfall with a woman standing in front of it to sing indie-rock type songs while she accompanied herself on ukelele. I did the hike with my Estralita on my back in a gig bag for bass, and instead of the bowler and brogans I usually wear I had a coonskin cap and psychedelic emerica sneaks. I ran into Pamita halfway up the path. She was rocked out in cowboy boots, a dress, and fishnets, which is an outfit that’s just slightly better adapted to scrambling over boulders than the corset she usually wears.

There was no real crowd to speak of, but there were plenty of musicians there to play and play for. The acoustics out in the forest were special and listening to the other acts was a profound pleasure.

Because the issue is lurking, I should point out that this was not a Grateful Dead setup like a drum circle. These people knew irony. The tactic is along the same lines as a dance party on the subway, where a group meets up at a subway car and dances to electronic music on a boom box for a few stops, then gets off and disperses. This was an acoustic flash mob.

Next show for me is on Thursday night 6:30-7:00 on the Hippodrome bus on the Art Walk in downtown LA:

WHAT: The Hippodrome, a rolling curated salon on a custom vintage school bus

WHEN: Every Second Thursday (October 9, November 13 etc.) during downtown LA Art Walk, 6-10pm nightly

WHERE: The shuttle route circles Gallery Row (Main and Spring Streets between 9th and 2nd Streets)

If you live in LA and you haven’t done the art walk, you oughta. It’s the closest thing to vibrant street life downtown. The people watching is untouchable, and hanging out on the Hippodrome gives a sense of connection and community. The whole thing is the opposite of the Bergamot Station / Santa Monica vibe for looking at art.

It’ll never make sense to play resonator guitar on a street corner or on a festival stage, but then again it’ll also never make sense to set up a drum kit in a rolling curated salon on a custom vintage school bus, or to drown out a little waterfall with electronic riffage from a laptop. I love getting to make art in these deeply un-digital situations.

last of the killer Gs

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Check out the amazing typography of the two ‘G’ characters (in “dog” and “rag”) in the headline of this sheet music title page:

cover page for 'Yellow Dog Rag'

That’s from 1914, right at the moment of change between 19th and 20th century musical styles. Scott Joplin was in the terminal stages of the syphilis that killed him, too sick to play, living on his wife’s earnings from running a whorehouse in the Bronx. The hot style had emerged but didn’t have a name yet. The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s watershed hit “Livery Stable Blues” was three years in the future.

W. C. Handy was around 40, an established musician who had made his mark as the bandleader for Mahara’s Minstrels, one of the biggest minstrel shows at the turn of the 20th century. The first formal “blues” song — also by Handy — had been published the year before, and had been a big hit. This rag didn’t sell well, and in 1919 it would be retitled “Yellow Dog Blues” and republished with a new title page that had neither of these killer ‘G’s.

livin easy @ Hyperion Tavern Thurs 9/25

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I’ll do a solo set at 10:30 tomorrow night at the Hyperion Tavern at 1941 Hyperion Ave, in Silverlake, Los Angeles, California. Also on the bill: Dick and Jane (before me) and the Homebillies (after me).

There’ll be sheet music of my transcription of “Living Easy” by Irving Jones to give out to anybody who wants to learn the song, and of course I’ll play the thing myself. This song disappeared almost instantly on publication in 1899, was never recorded as far as I can tell, and has left only three impressions in the historical record:

1) Charles Ives recalled having heard it in the early 1890s, sometime around the birth of ragtime in 1893.

2) In the mid-1890s when Scott Joplin lived in Sedalia, Missouri there was a local band named after a line in the song — the “Pork Chops Greazy Quartette.”

3) Copyrighted and published in 1899.

And that’s it. It was a hot underground ragtime tune very early on, and as soon as it got a bit of commercial support it went *poof*. Until tomorrow night in Silverlake in the year 2008, 109 years later.

Musically I’ve been on a roll lately, and if I don’t break my streak it’ll be a fine night of hella old music, so c’mon by. If you haven’t done one of these Hyperion shows the thing to know is that it’s a tiny place with cheap beers, no cover, and no electricity to to amplify the music and drown out your conversation, which is better for you than me but what the hell.

The situation is low key to an extreme. Dick and Jane and the Homebillies and myself all play there regularly, and the crowd is generally heavy on musicians and people in the music business. Here’s review of the place:

Two outlandish chandeliers, a shelf full of legal tomes, and a bathroom marked “slave toilet” are all part of the casual punk rock aesthetic of this friendly, intimate tavern. There’s no sign outside, so the crowd tends to consist of scruffily hip creative types already in the know about the space. Only open late at night, the bar uses various themes like ’60s pop culture and “Guitar Hero” video game night as a draw for the inexpensive beer.


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Here’s Dick and Jane’s flyer:

Dick and Jane's flyer for gig at the Hyperion Lounge 9/25/2008