SOUNDTRACK: DAN MANGAN + BLACKSMITH-Live at Massey Hall (February 28, 2015).
I know Dan Mangan from a Tiny Desk Concert. I also had an opportunity to see him opening for Stars a month or so ago, but I couldn’t make the show. I was bummed about that and am even more so after seeing how great Mangan is live with a full band.
He says his family flew in from Vancouver because Massey is like Canada’s Carnegie Hall. Or should I say, Carnegie Hall is like America’s Massey Hall.
Then his bandmate says: Charlie Parker played here. That’s ridiculous!
Neil Young played here. That’s ridiculous!
We’re gonna play here. That’s ridiculous!
Wilco played here; Arcade Fire; Joni Mitchell; Peabo Bryson (you know what I’m getting at–Peebs!); James Taylor; Dizzy Gillespie.
Massey Hall is from the days before there were mega rock concerts–when things sounded better. The soul of that has been lost. Music was made about the art and the music and not about being in the same room as someone famous. There’s something about that soul of rock n roll has been lost.
“Mouthpiece” is a dark acoustic but fast, shuffling song. It builds rather quickly to a noisy rock–which Mangan specialized at with some great drumming from Kenton Loewen.
“Vessel” opens with some screeching feedback and cool staccato piano riff. Mangan’s deep voice works perfectly with this spare musical landscape. The backing singer singing “it takes a village to raise a fool” works perfectly as the keys and trumpet build behind them. I love how every few lines some other new piece of music is added, like the wailing guitar solo that runs through to the end.
“Rows of Houses” has a great building backing vocal section. I love the quiet intensity of this song before it ratchets up to a loud stomper. There’s s long noisy jam with trumpet (JP Carter) and keys (Tyson Naylor) blaring and a wild raucous bass (John Walsh) and a crazed guitar solo which ends with Gordon Grdina hammering the back of the guitar neck creating a wall of feedback and distribution
“New Skies” opens slow, but after a verse the band kicks in and it, too, rocks.
He says he needs everyone to sing the “oooohs” and he’s pleased with everyone’s response. He sings some verses and then band starts singing the ooohs and he says “I forgot to tell you that’s where you come in.”
As the song moves along, there’s mostly a keyboard solo but then Grdina comes in with a pretty wild, sloppy but emotive solo. Then Dan takes the mic and gets the crowd to sing along. He exhorts: “When people stand they tend to breathe and sing little louder.
It works and it’s a great set ender.
He (and they) puts on a great show.
[READ: February 5, 2018] “The Burglary at Stormfield”
This excerpt is from a previously unpublished section of his autobiography. When he died in 1910, he requested that his autobiography not be published for 100 years.
This excerpt is about his house outside of New York City. He says he named it Innocence at Home but his daughter, Clara, called it Stormfield–“it is high and lonely and exposed to all the winds that blow.” He concedes hers is a better name.
He got the money to build the house “out of a small manuscript which had lain in my pigeonholes forty-ones years, and which I sold to Harper’s Magazine. The article was entitled Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.”
The focus of this essay though is burglaries. He says that Stormfield has been broken into many times and he is surprised that the New York architect should have overlooked adding a burglar alarm to the building. New York City is only an hour and a half away…”it contains millions of people, and most of them are burglars.”
The burglar enters through the lower floors where no one sleeps, but hey made a lot of noise and woke up the secretary who immediately called the police. The burglars were eventually caught as they and the police went to the same train (their footprints were easily followed/ Sheriff Banks saw the two men and said “hold up your feet!” to see if their soles corresponded to the footprints they had been following). They both immediately fled, proclaiming their guilt. All of the silver was recovered.
But he goes on to talk further about burglaries saying that those who break and enter quietly are less damaging than those who wake yup their occupants. Since that night of being woken up, Clara has fled to New York, the secretary can’t sleep and the cook and maids have resigned. Those who have stayed seem to wake form terrible dreams.
He says he would make the penalty light for noiseless burglary and remorselessly hang the burglar who disturbs the peace of the family.
It ends with a notice to the next burglar that he put on his front door. It says where the stuff is and to please be quiet while taking it.
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