Kelly Joe Phelps, blues and country musician, dies aged 62

Posted on June 3, 2022 by Admin

Musician celebrated for slide guitar playing and soulful voice released a string of acclaimed albums between 1994 and 2012

Kelly Joe Phelps, the celebrated singer and guitarist whose music traversed blues, country and jazz, has died aged 62. A post on his Facebook page said he died “quietly at home in Iowa”.

Born in Washington state, Phelps was raised in a musical family and first trained as a jazz musician, but broadened his playing after being inspired by artists such as Mississippi Fred McDowell. “I wanted to figure out a way to improvise like a jazz musician would, but at the same time play a style of music that was more closely linked to folk forms,” he explained.

‘If not hope, then what?’: the musicians finding optimism in dark times

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Admin

Against a backdrop of Covid, a striking number of musicians, from hard rock to jazz, made music rich with positivity. In the first of a two-part series, they tell their stories

I had really given up on music after my mom passed away [in 2014], and then of course the record that I saw as my death rattle [2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet] got picked up in a big way. It was a very bittersweet moment where all these great things were happening in the wake of loss. I didn’t allow myself to feel that for a long time. Now I feel ready to embrace feeling.

Robbie Robertson: ‘I didn’t know anybody who didn’t do drugs’

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Admin

Guitarist Robbie Robertson helped to change music history with Bob Dylan’s backing group the Band. He remembers how the ‘brotherhood’ ended in heroin addiction and self-destruction

In 1965 Robbie Robertson was living in the room next to Bob Dylan’s at New York’s Chelsea hotel. This was when Dylan was writing Blonde on Blonde. “The television was on. There was music playing. The phone was ringing. There were people coming and going – and he was writing away on his typewriter. I thought, ‘I don’t even understand how somebody can close off the outside world like that and concentrate. This guy is from another planet,’” Robertson says. But for a while he shared that planet, or came as close to sharing it as any musician did at the time.

Robertson was the lead guitarist of the Band (then known as The Hawks), the five-piece group that backed Dylan when he first went electric: essentially, they supplied the noise that the acoustic-loving crowds booed on tour. But while the collaboration changed the course of music history, it had another, quieter and more personal effect on the Band, shifting the dynamics of what Robertson calls their “brotherhood”, the way the five of them related.

‘Groovy, groovy, groovy’: listening to Woodstock 50 years on – all 38 discs

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Admin

It was a blueprint for Live Aid and every mega-festival since. We survey a new archive box set – in full – to uncover the real story of these ‘three days of peace and music’

A few weeks back, my Twitter feed was suddenly clogged with misty-eyed reminiscences of Live Aid. It is now generally regarded as a white saviour festival of mostly dreadful music. Still, there’s much nostalgic love for Tony Hadley’s leather trench coat, and Queen’s alarming “no time for losers” philosophy. I lived through it; I remembered how a bunch of craven, ageing rock stars fell over themselves to reboot their careers. OK, I was 21, and cynical, but I was there for it, watching it all unfold on TV. I understand it.Woodstock – which celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend – was a primitive blueprint for Live Aid, and every mega-festival since. Its cultural weight has risen and fallen over the decades – depending on who you talk to, it was either the pinnacle of 1960s counterculture or the rain-sodden end of a dream. I was four years old. The soundtrack album would be in friends’ houses in the 70s, and the movie seemed to be on TV every year, so I’m part of a generation that thinks it knows Woodstock without having been there. But the movie is incomplete and out of sequence – some of the story is as fictionalised as Bohemian Rhapsody.

Out this month is a 50th anniversary archive box set – all 38 CDs of it – which presents the festival in something approximating real time. Folk-blues singer Richie Havens, who opened the event while almost every other act was stuck in traffic, would later claim he “played for nearly three hours … I sang every song I knew!” We now know he only played for 45 minutes. This is an audio vérité documentary, right down to the on-stage announcements: “Eric Klinnenberg, please call home … Dennis Dache, please call your wife … Karen from Poughkeepsie, please meet Harold at the stand with the blood pills …” I listened to all 38 discs in sequence, over three days.