doomandgloomfromthetomb

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Moby Grape - RAI Congrescentrum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, February 12, 1969

A couple weeks back on Aquarium Drunkard, I wrote a little bit about Weird Herald, a fairly unknown Bay Area psych band from the late 1960s. They only had one promo single to their name during their lifespan, but Guerssen Records in Spain recently released Just Yesterday, a lovingly produced compilation of studio sessions, rehearsals and demos. Great stuff and well worth checking out — especially if you're a fan of Moby Grape. And who among us is not a fan of Moby Grape????

Weird Herald and the Grape were in fact closely linked; indeed, Skip Spence even played in an early Weird Herald lineup. Just Yesterday sent me back to those old Grape records — and to a very sweet bootleg from the band's early 1969 tour of the UK and the Netherlands. Spence had just left the band due to some serious mental health problems ... and Bob Mosley would soon leave the band due to some serious mental health problems. But the quartet version of Moby Grape sounds fantastic in Amsterdam, playing a great set of bluesy boogies and folk-rock rambles. Listen, my friends ...

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Save The Waves: People for Public Media (PBS Benefit Compilation)

With so much incredible nonsense happening on a seemingly hourly basis in 2025, it's hard to know even where to begin fighting back. But here's something you can get into — a new compilation put together by Mike "Seawind of Battery" Horn, available on limited-edition cassette and digital.

The details: Public media is under threat. Proposed federal funding cuts could devastate PBS and its 1,500+ local stations — vital sources of trusted news, educational programming, and emergency alerts for millions. This compilation is a call to action. 

A great cause! And happily, great music, too. The primarily instrumental Save The Waves is filled with Doom & Gloom favorites both old and new, from Elkhorn to Bill MacKay to Nick Millevoi to Royal Arctic Institute. There are even unreleased Prairiewolf and Golden Brown tracks! The overall vibe is dreamy and melodic; the overall intent is deadly serious. As Jennifer Kelly wrote over on Aquarium Drunkard: "Don’t buy it because you should. Buy it because you want to."

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The Feelies - The Mudd Club, New York City, December 29, 1978

How many times over the past 15 years (or longer?) have I considered pitching a 33 1/3 volume about Crazy Rhythms? Many times, let me assure you. Maybe someday I'll actually do it, I don't know! But until that day comes, there's a great Life of the Record episode about the making of the Feelies' beyond-classic debut LP. Lots of great detail from Bill Million and Glenn Mercer — the LOTR folks know how to put together a compelling, knowledgeable podcast!

If the episode puts you in the mood for some more Feelies, here's an excellent audience tape from late '78, when the band was in the earlier stages of their Crazy Rhythms trip, playing comparatively raw/feral versions of that album's tunes, capped off by covers of the MC5 and Eno. Radical, as always. The only question here is about the venue — my files say it's Max's Kansas City, but the ever-wise Feelies website says it's the Mudd Club! I'm going to go with the Mudd Club, but if you know better, let me know!

And hey, the Feelies have a new covers collection — Rewind, out today! Nothing new here, but nice to have it all in one place. And the band is playing a couple of shows in September! Will I be there?! Probably not, but I would love to be.

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Yo La Tengo - Brave New World on KCRW, June 11, 1997

Way back in the 1990s — Yo La Tengo made their way to Santa Monica College to record a brief session on Tricia Halloran's Brave New World program on KCRW. Sometime earlier that year, the band had been on campus to film the classic "Sugarcube" video — a video that is always worth revisiting. I was a regular Brave New World listener at the time, tuning in whenever I could. But I missed this particular show ... and I'd catch YLT the next night at the Troubadour, as they brought the then-brand-new I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One to the masses. I bought one of the shirts you see above ... and apparently someone on eBay is trying to sell one for like $300 right now. I think mine disintegrated sometime in the early 2000s.

This little broadcast, brought to us by the 3 Cameras and a Microphone channel, is pretty sweet. First, we get the various members of the band DJ-ing (and some moody ambient improvs as a backing soundtrack). Then, a short live set, accompanied by some groovy radio static noize; the band seems to think it's a malfunction, but it works pretty well as accompaniment. Especially good is the closing "Autumn Sweater" — it's the rarely heard quasi-Fakebook arrangement, with strummy guitar and dreamy vocal. We could slip away ...

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All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast

What the world needs now ... is a Neil Young podcast?! OK, maybe All One Song won't bring about a new era of global harmony. But I'm doing it anyway! Now that Maron is getting out of the game, there's room for a new podcast king — me! Holy shit.

The basic concept behind All One Song is to chat with various musicians and writers about their one favorite Neil Young song. We've got a great roster of guests — Steve Gunn, Rosali, Jeff Parker, Ilyas Ahmed and more! I'm about halfway done taping all of the episodes. Am I good at being a podcast host? WE SHALL SEE. The first installment will drop next week!

One cool thing is that Chris Forsyth's amazing Neil tribute band Coca Leaves & Pearls has provided some awesome Shakey-esque theme music. Chris, of course, is going to be a guest on the podcast, too. I've had a lot of help along the way, from Jason P. Woodbury, who is wrangling a lot of behind the scenes and technical stuff, and the whole AD and Talkhouse crew.

All One Song will be available "wherever you get your podcasts" — you don't have to be an Aquarium Drunkard subscriber. But let me once again encourage you to become an AD subscriber. In these dark days of independent media, I think it's a good website! Good shit, every damn day.

I'll keep you posted on upcoming episodes right here on Doom & Gloom (have I mentioned I'm also on Instagram, god help me?). I'll also be kicking off a little Summer of Neil bootleg listening thing soon ... because Neil Young bootlegs are going to get me through this summer.

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Bob Dylan - The Measure of My Dreams (Best of The Outlaw Tour, May 2025)

With all of these musical legends passing on into the great beyond, it's good to know that 84-year-old Bob Dylan is kicking off another leg of the Outlaw Tour with Willie Nelson and co. in Clarkston, MI, this weekend. The man cannot / will not be stopped!

And that is lucky for us — Bob has been sounding pretty great in the year 2025; the first stretch of the Outlaw tour saw him breaking out all kinds of rarely played numbers, debuting some choice covers and generally seeming to be enjoying himself. The Measure of My Dreams, a typically tasteful Bennyboy compilation, expertly cherrypicks the highlights of a month on the road.

Personal favorites? Well, I love Bob's tip of the hat to the late/great Shane MacGowan with the Pogues' elegiac "A Rainy Night In Soho." (Will he play "Surfer Girl" or "Family Affair" in Clarkston?!) The first "Mr. Tambourine Man" in many years is a treat, too, extremely spare and heartfelt; "Don't Think Twice" is similarly lovely. And what about the rearrangement of "All Along The Watchtower," here performed with bluegrass guitar wunderkind Billy Strings? I guess Bob decided to add a little chorus section almost 60 years later. Why the fuck not?!

The comp ends with Dylan's rendition of Rick Nelson's "Garden Party" — a song which famously namedrops Bob himself. But it's a different lyric that seems most appropriate today: "But it's all right now / I learned my lesson well / You see, you can't please everyone / So you got to please yourself."

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The All Golden - WF 94 - Chambers

The latest from The All Golden (AKA Pete Gofton) is a dreamy slice of (mostly) instrumental synth-pop, suffused with nostalgia for an unexpected site — Sunderland's Civic Centre, to be exact. But this isn't nostalgia that lets the listener drift off into a placid reverie. As WF 94 drifts along, the music grows more melancholy, gets woozier, memories disappearing into a fog. Gofton's sweet/sad melodies and use of hypnotic repetition make you feel the inevitable passage of time, the past fading like old photographs. A beautiful and provocative meditation on lost worlds.

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Brian Wilson - "Surf's Up" (Solo Version 1967)

During my freshmen year of college, 1997/98, I would sometimes take the train down to New York City — mainly just to wander around really! In those pre-smartphone days, I had almost no clue where I was going on these little day trips. I just had a few landmarks to guide me (yes, many of the landmarks had to do with Bob Dylan or the Velvet Underground if you can even believe it).

One day while stumbling through Greenwich Village, I came upon an older guy manning a table filled with cassettes. Intriguing! Upon further inspection, it became clear that these were homemade bootleg cassettes: tons of Dylan, the VU, the Beatles ... and a two-tape set marked in bold letters SMILE. At that point, I had heard bits and pieces of the Smile sessions via various box sets and reissues, but they were still fairly mythical ... you certainly couldn't download mp3s of this music, kids!

"How much for these?" I asked the guy. "Twenty bucks," he replied. $20! Oh well, I could skip lunch (and dinner). Would I have the $7 required to get back home? Barely! But I made it to Poughkeepsie, to my dorm room, to my tape deck, and spent the rest of the night listening to these hazy fragments and weird visions that Brian Wilson had dreamed up 30 years prior.

Of course, Smile has been "completed" and exhumed and celebrated in various forms since then, but I always like it more as a bunch of puzzle pieces that may or may not add up to a masterpiece. You don't need it to be a finished thing, set in stone. Every time you listen, your imagination can fill in the blanks, make new connections, strike another match. As long as the tape plays, the surf is always up.

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Sly & The Family Stone - TV Appearances (Vol. 1 / Vol. 2)

Speaking of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, their recent, exquisitely sad "Hashtag" is a song that feels appropriate this week. Written for the late Guy Clark, it deals with the grief so many of us feel when a musical giant passes away — these singular characters that loom so large in our collective imagination. Sly Stone was one of those characters. At his height, he was positively superhuman, a Duke Ellington-level bandleader, a Miles Davis-level innovator, a James Brown-level performer. A guy who shared his dreams and visions on the biggest stages imaginable. Of course, those dreams eventually became nightmares of a sort ...

But that's probably for someone more erudite than me to unpack. Sly's death this week gives us the opportunity to just appreciate the man's work. I've been making my way through an immensely valuable collection of Family Stone television appearances available via the FunkIt channel. Stretching from 1968 to 1974, it's almost four hours worth of pure bliss, the band bringing the heat to Columbus, OH, London, Madison Square Garden and beyond. So long, Sly! Thank you.

Here are the lines that are hitting hard this week, from 1973's Fresh.

If it were left up to you Would you sigh and forget it And get some sleeping to see If you live to regret it Now that it's all left up to me and you Will you try—will you try I promise from me to you … I will try

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Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - WUMB-FM, Boston, Massachusetts, May 1995

Next week, I'll be catching Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in Denver! It's been far too long since I've seen the duo, and they never disappoint — I'm even bringing my teenage daughter along. Gillian and Dave's latest, Woodland, is an absolute wonder. Here's what I wrote about it for Aquarium Drunkard's 2024 year in review:

A breakup album — but not in the Blood On The Tracks/Shoot Out The Lights vein, thankfully (though the devastating “What We Had” is a motherfucker in that regard). No, Woodland is about breaking up with yourself, breaking up with the past, breaking up with your body, maybe even (gulp) breaking up with your country. Strung together with typically timeworn melodies and cut-to-the-quick lyrics, it’s another masterpiece from Welch and Rawlings. I've been prepping for the upcoming show by digging through old rarities and live tapes from G&D — including this great WUMB radio broadcast from way back, about 30 years ago, before the pair had a record deal, or even any merch to hawk, as they note in the interview. "We've got a mailing list," Gillian admits sheepishly. And she's not talking about e-mail.

Boston, was of course, Gillian and Dave's old Berklee College of Music stomping ground, and indeed, the DJ sounds a little suspicious of these kids' ability to inhabit dusty traditional modes. People were kind of obsessed with "authenticity" back in those days, right? And while occasionally their early stuff came across more as intellectual exercises than songs, Welch and Rawlings have spent the last three decades putting any doubts to rest, making records that will stand the test of time.

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Prairiewolf - Cloud Station, Crestone, Colorado, May 17, 2025

On our recent mini-tour, Prairiewolf pulled into Crestone, CO (pop. 141) — home of a vortex, two dozen sacred sites, a cult (?) ... and Cloud Station, the awesome cafe/community center/live music venue where we played two sets of mind-bending music for the assembled locals. At least it was mind-bending for me. By the end of it all, I wasn't sure exactly where I was or what I was doing there. But you can judge for yourself, thanks to Jeremy's excellent tape of the evening.

Prairiewolf has a busy summer ahead (relatively, at least), with a whole bunch of interesting/fun gigs on the horizon. First up, this weekend in Boulder! We're back on the back patio at the Trident, celebrating the Pearl Street bookstore/coffee shop's 45th anniversary. This will be our third time playing there (thank you, Ted!) and it is definitely one of our favorite spots. We'll kick the day off at 3pm, followed by Light Technics, Wybux, Silverwest and the Galentines. No better way to spend a June afternoon, I promise. And then a few weeks later on July 5 at Upslope Brewing Co. (also in Boulder), we're jamming the day away as part of Thundershout's Phish pre-show extravaganza. That's right, Phish! Will Trey join us for an epic improv? Yeah, probably!

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JPW + Dad Weed - Amassed Like a Rat King

There are a few indie rock standard bearers in the "FOR FANS OF" section of the notes accompanying JPW + Dad Weed's new LP — Wilco, the Flaming Lips, Elephant 6 etc. But then you squint your eyes and see some less commonly referenced influences: LEN, Gin Blossoms ... even the accursed Barenaked Ladies?!! Never fear, Amassed Like a Rat King is far from a BNL tribute record. But the LP does occasionally feel like you've tuned into some mid-1990s alt-rock radio station; indeed, I'm convinced that crunchy, hook-filled songs like "It's Happening" and "Everybody's Talking (Again)" could've been left-field jangle-pop hits back in those bygone days. This is an extremely fun collection, with JPW (AKA Aquarium Drunkard's Jason P. Woodbury) and Dad Weed (AKA multi-instrumentalist Zach Toporek) employing idiosyncratic/inventive production techniques, canny songcraft and an off-beat sense of humor to bring the whole thing to life. The JPW / Dad Weed duo sounds as if they're having a blast throughout — and that, my friends, is what it's all about.

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Herbie Hancock Trio - Live at Munich Philharmonie (1987)

The great drummer Al Foster passed away last week — the last of the Agharta crew! Together with bassist Michael Henderson, Foster was the bedrock of that earth-shattering Electric Miles band. Prairiewolf was playing Agharta while traveling around last month and Foster was consistently amazing, always able to hold things together even as chaos reigned around him.

"[Miles] told me to buy Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and Buddy Miles records," Foster recalled of joining Davis' group. "Buddy Miles was a drummer who was already famous. Miles used to say, 'Buddy Miles has one beat, but Al, he plays the shit out of that beat!' So I had to learn that beat."

Of course, Foster knew many other beats — even though his 1970s days with Miles didn't require it of him, Al could swing like nobody's business. For example, this magnificent 1987 trio performance with Buster Williams and Herbie Hancock. At the time, Herbie, too, had been spending a lot of time in the fusion end of the pool, but this under-recorded band revels in the acoustic realm. Nothing regressive about it, though — this is forward-thinking (well-nigh futuristic) post-bop, driven along perfectly by Foster's sensitive, imaginative playing. RIP!

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Robyn Hitchcock - The Chapel, San Francisco, California, May 22, 2025

Since we spent some time with Captain Beefheart's Safe As Milk this week, let's spend some time with Robyn Hitchcock's Safe As Milk. Last month, Robyn played a 1967-themed show in San Francisco — and he delivered his best Don Van Vliet impression on thrilling renditions of "Electricity" and "Zig Zag Wanderer," with Kelly Stoltz, Kurt Bloch, Rusty Miller and Pete Straus providing a more than credible Magic Band simulacrum. Killer stuff — thanks to the taper.

Beefheart is just the beginning, of course. The assembled crew tackles an array of Summer of Love faves, from the Beatles to the Velvet Underground to the Kinks to the Pink Floyd. Wildest of all is the epic version of the Doors' "The End," with Hitchcock surreally channeling — not impersonating — the Lizard King, waiting for the summer rain. Everyone onstage and in the crowd seems to be having a blast throughout, as is only right and natural.

"Nineteen sixty-seven finished, but it never ended," Robyn writes in his recent/recommended memoir. And at the Chapel on this spring evening, he's absolutely right. Put some flowers in your hair and tune in/turn on.

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Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Safe As Milk (Prof. Stoned Deluxe Edition)

Safe As Milk, Captain Beefheart's 1967 debut, remains one of those endlessly fascinating, endlessly classic albums. Endlessly frustrating, too, because it's also one of those LPs where, for a variety of reasons, there's no definitive edition. Stereo, mono, alternative mixes, vinyl, compact discs, etc. Following this Yellow Brick Road can be confusing.

Prof. Stoned to the rescue! His typically tasteful Safe As Milk Deluxe Edition is as wide-ranging and comprehensive as you can get, giving us a proper overview of the Captain and his OG Magic Band in their early stages, from cleaned up demos to scrappy rehearsals to killer live tapes to sparkling transfers of both the mono and stereo mixes of the album. You're going to want to download this one, even if you're intimately familiar with Milk. Thank you as always, Professor!

The Captain Says: Music is the most important medium of all of the art forms because for the kids it is the easiest to understand — it gets through to them. You can write a poem, and use the word "yellow." OK. But if you put music to it, you add another depth to the word yellow, and this conjures up pictures in the mind — and that's where it's all at, in the mind. 

(Oh and hey, from a few years later but recently surfaced — some unreal footage of "Abba Zaba" live in Paris in 1972!)

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Stephen Malkmus - Colonial Theatre, Keene, New Hampshire, May 17, 2025 / Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, May 21, 2025

From touring the world with the Hard Quartet to appearing on national television with Pavement to playing tennis with the New Yorker, Stephen Malkmus is a busy dude these days. And hey, he even had time for a few solo appearances last month, where he delighted fans with a host of rarely played numbers from throughout his career.

As part of the Thing In The Spring fest in Keene, NH, he opened by playing (slightly out of order) the entirety of the greatest EP of all time — Watery, Domestic! He even followed that up with the classic deep cut "Greenlander," which I believe is from the same sessions. Still, the highlight of that set might be an even deeper cut — a lovely reading of "Freeze The Saints" from 2005's Face The Truth, a perfect Zodiac ballet.

At Chicago's venerable Old Town School of Folk Music, the rarities keep on coming, with things like the R.E.M.-baiting "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" and the ancient "Mellow Jazz Docent" getting valuable airings. Slightly fresher, the Hard Quartet highlight "Six Deaf Rats" sounds fab as a solo electric number. The peak, however, might be the daring version of Wowee Zowee's abstractional "Extradition." "This'll be fucked up," Steve promises as a preamble. And it is!

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Repetition Repetition - Fit for Consequences: Original Recordings, 1984–1987

The Freedom To Spend label continues its long winning streak with another essential collection of strange and wonderful sounds. Repetition Repetition was the mid-1980s collab between Ruben Garcia and Steve Caton. The former musician would go on to work with Harold Budd, among others; the latter became a longtime associate of none other than Tori Amos. Together, they were a self-described “two-man electric minimalist band,” making some truly ahead of its time music that you could easily place alongside many of today's kosmische-come-lately projects. Check out "The Machinist," awesome 14+-minute track that feels like Philip Glass and Arthur Russell joining forces, or the Budd-like keyboard shimmer of "Lakeland." Repetition is part of it, yeah, but this is stuff that shifts like the sands, an imaginative wonderland to immerse yourself in.