Frederick Knight :: I’ve Been Lonely For So Long
Freddy, Frederick, Fred, Night, Knight, Nite, whomever you are, you made Stax a better place. I don’t even know if people liked you or if you made a lasting impact on the Motown of the South. All I know is you’ve made a day or two for me, and you sure as shit could sport a leather coat. There isn’t much info out there about you but I kind of like it that way. Hell, I don’t even know if you’re alive. All I can say is you made a small, indelible mark on lonely people everywhere while tossing us a wink and a smile with your charming slide guitar. It shakes and shines like the first glimpsed grin after a long, long cry. Thank you Frederick.
I’ve Been Lonely For So Long
Frederick Knight (Stax site)
Molasses :: Saint Catherine (Idiot’s Waltz)
It’s the middle of the week in the middle of February, and all of us in Chicago have been enduring single-digit temperatures — a dry, biting, stinging cold. Even through layer upon layer of wool, cotton, and synthetics. Even when there’s no wind. The cold just meanders its way through the spaces in twill, and waffled cotton, and nylon; it finds the skin.
The city, certainly, is still busy… not like Spring, though. A cold like this still evokes a certain sparseness and bleakness for me.
So please, enjoy this Americana from these Canadians. Perhaps, by the time this is posted we will have experienced one of those anomalous, 70-degree February days. But for now I must shake the rats from my hair…
Saint Catherine (Idiot’s Waltz)
Molasses (label website)
the Who :: Baba O’Riley
The organ bloops. Townsend windmills. Moon tenderizes the drums. Daltry is whipping the mic around. Jon Entwistle stands stock still and straight faced while his blurred fingers dance across the strings and the fretboard.
It’s less than two years after Woodstock, ten months after Altamont. Everything’s gone south. The Weather Underground left a bomb for the NYPD. Vietnam drags on. And there is unease in the counter-cultural. In a year Townsend will write “Long Live Rock”, but today he travels in doubt.
The line is around the block. Another one sold-out. There are fucking fifty-thousand people out there.
It’s only teenage wasteland.
Baba O Riley
the Who (homepage)
(PS — you know the long solo at the end, that’s a viola, not a violin.)