Back in the ‘80s when I was learning to play guitar and how to be in a band, Willie Nelson was becoming such a force in the music industry, and such an influence on me, that it’s hard even now for me to talk about him with any measure of objectivity. All I can say is that back then, he was a god to me and most of my friends.
My pick of the month for December, Willie Nelson Live At Budokan, is a snapshot of Nelson and his band —or “Family,” as they were known— at the pinnacle of their powers at that time. For my money, this was the best-ever lineup of the Family: older sister Bobbie (piano), Paul English (drums), Mickey Raphael (harmonica), Jody Payne (guitar), Grady Martin (guitar), and Bee Speers (bass), and this record captures them at the top of their game, Willie himself is also in top form, in great voice and with his signature near-total disregard for the beat on full display. You can hear him having fun.
And speaking of hearing, I want to point out that the sound quality on this recording is outstanding. As a rule, I’m not a fan of live recordings. I mostly prefer listen to studio albums, and to experience live music live. But this album sounds GREAT.
If you had the pleasure of seeing Willie and Family during their heyday, this album will take you back to that time. If you didn’t, it will give you a real taste of what it was like.
Sometime over the years we started adding chicken to this basic pasta e fagioli recipe from Fine Cooking magazine (issue #11, 1996). Sunday I decided to try making it on my grill as an entry to this month’s soup challenge on one of my online BBQ communities.
So here goes: First, I spun a chicken on the rotisserie. I made a simple injection of melted butter, salt, and garlic powder, and then sprinkled the outside with salt and pepper.
I also tossed half a lemon and two cloves of garlic into the cavity of the chicken before trussing it.
I put it on the rotisserie at 325°F, with three small chunks of cherry for smoke.
While the bird was spinning I gathered all my soup ingredients, chopped half an onion, and boiled one cup of ditalini pasta.
When the chicken was done, I dismantled the rotisserie, added more lump to the firebox, set in my heat deflectors and grill rack, and put my cast iron pot in to heat. While the grill came up and settled at around 350°F, I shredded half the chicken (and vacuum-sealed the other half for another day), and got everything set up in easy reach of the grill.
Now for the soup part. First, I sautéed 1 1/2 tsp. black pepper, 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, and two cloves of finely minced garlic in 1/4 cup of olive oil for about half a minute or so.
Then I added the chopped 1/2 onion, and cooked it until tender, maybe 2 or 3 minutes.
In with two cans of great northern beans, plus the cooked pasta.
Then three cups chicken stock, plus the meat.
With the lid on the pot and the grill dome closed, I let it come to a boil, which took about 30 minutes. Then I moved the pot lid sort of cockeyed and (again) with the dome closed, let it simmer for another 10 minutes.
Finally, I stirred in 1/8 cup parsley flakes, 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese, and a tablespoon of lemon juice.
For dinner, we served it with some leftover greens and Brussels sprouts, and a good chunk of bread.
Starting today, I’m revamping my site to make it a little easier to update and control. Eventually I hope to incorporate all the content from my previous site, and then move on from there. I imagine it will take some time, but hopefully these changes will prompt me to keep the site more current and active.
We have been attending the Newport Folk Festival every year since it marked it’s 50th Anniversary in 2009. I think it’s safe to say that it is, quite simply, the best overall musical event we’ve ever experienced. Over the years we have enjoyed performances by some of our favorite musicians, discovered new music, and forged new friendships. If you are a fan of folk, folk-rock, country, blues, or practically any musical genre related to one of these, you need to get yourself to this festival. You won’t regret it.
But when we arrive in Newport, the first thing we go see every year is completely unrelated to the festival, to music in general, or to anything else in our normal lives. After checking in to our B&B, the very first item on our Newport agenda?
Looking into the progress on the restoration of the 1885 Schooner Yacht, Coronet.
We always stay at the Spring Street Inn, and from the very start the innkeeper, Pat — who is an absolute fount of information on local history, attractions, activities, and (most importantly, perhaps) restaurants — kept suggesting to us that we visit the International Yacht Restoration School just down at the end of the street. Apparently there are fewer and fewer people in today’s world with the skills and knowhow to build, maintain, and/or restore wooden boats and ships. So in 1993, the IYRS was founded with a mission to preserve and teach the history, heritage, craftsmanship, science, and aesthetics of boatbuilding and restoration.
I do not own, nor do I have any inclination to own, a boat. To my knowledge, only two of our family members and two of our friends have ever owned boats of any kind. Unless I actually happen to see one, boats never even cross my mind. And so, for two years, we completely dismissed that particular suggestion of Pat’s without a second thought. Our mistake.
On our third trip to Newport, in 2011, as we were strolling along Thames Street, we saw the IYRS sign and for some reason (or maybe no reason) we ambled in. There’s a little museum space there, interesting enough in a pleasantly-passing-some-time-but-not-overly-excited-about-it kind of way. An attendant told us to go upstairs and check out the library, especially the harbor view from the library window, before making our way to the next building (where the students work on their projects), and finally to the building where the Coronet restoration is taking place.
While the view from the library window was, indeed, quite something, we were more taken with the exhibit of old nautical instruments on display throughout the library itself. Of course we knew virtually nothing about what any of the instruments were or what they were used for, but they were beautiful to look at and made us happy we had decided to check this place out. From there, we wandered into the school…
…And we were bowled over. There’s a classroom and a wood shop, of course. But mostly it’s a big open building where students are in the various stages of building wooden boats of all shapes and sizes.
Visitors can stand along a catwalk and look down on the proceedings from overhead. It’s pretty interesting to see, and by this point during our first visit we were completely won over.
But this is not the end of the tour.
Continue out the back door, and you’ll find yourself in front another building, constructed right on the very edge of the water solely for the purpose of housing the restoration of the aforementioned Coronet. The scope of the project is evident immediately upon entering the door. This thing is huge.
It was huge when we first saw it in 2011.
From 2011
And it’s only gotten bigger since then.
From 2012
Again, visitors look down from a catwalk at the workers below.
From 2013
At the very beginning, when the Coronet was brought in, it was completely disassembled. Piece by piece, board by board, everything was taken apart, cataloged, and numbered. Many of these items are sitting about on the catwalk or hanging on the walls, waiting to be put back into place (or to at least serve as templates for their newly-constructed counterparts) when the time comes.
Hopefully, these guys who are working on the restoration will fare better than the men who originally built her:
From 1896
I don’t have the knowledge or vocabulary necessary to write intelligently about what they’re doing in this building. Again, in my regular life I am not a boat guy; all I know is that they’ve taken a really big, really old one apart, and now they’re fixing it up and putting it back together again. And it is utterly fascinating to watch.
Starting off the New Year, as we have, I’ve been thinking. Here’s one of my conclusions: Things change.
Back in the ’90s, when I first got Internet access, people were afraid to use their real names online, much less disclose personal information of any kind. Thus my implementation of the name Brick Pig for all my online music-related endeavors. Ten or fifteen years earlier, my friend Jim Hodge and I made up the name one boring day at work; you know, one of those “this would be a good name for a band” conversations. So it seemed like the perfect username when I submitted my first entry to SongFight!, and the Brick Pig moniker has been with me ever since.
But we live in an altogether different world now, don’t we? With every Tom, Dick, and Harriet broadcasting every thought, dream and idea that comes into their head, cyberspace no longer seems like the mysterious place it used to be. Heck, anti-social as I tend to be, even I have learned to appreciate –if not exactly “like”– what Facebook has to offer.
And so, with this blog entry and the recent re-vamp of my websites, I’m TEARING DOWN THE WALL!! Ready? Here’s the big reveal:
That’s right, folks: The rumours were true! Monty Smith and Brick Pig are one and the same! And now this fact is reflected by an integrated website (only the welcome pages differ), and henceforth within the pages of this blog.
But wait! There’s more!
As my long-term readers (if I have such a thing) will know, I started this blog in ’08 with the intention of documenting the build of my first-ever custom guitar, and to chronicle my progress with my first-ever formal guitar lessons. Although I was never particularly strict in adhering to those two topics, the thrust of the blog shifted after I took delivery of said new guitar in June ’09, and even more so after I mastered the instrument —ahem— and stopped taking lessons that following December.
Effectively this space has become an amorphous, rambling account of whatever thoughts I’ve had about whatever music-related subjects are on my mind at any given time — concerts I’ve seen, festivals I’ve attended, and of course my own activities with friends, with 3TK4, and with Tori Erstwhile & The Montys. But amorphous and rambling is cool, and I’m fine with it. So fine with it, in fact, that with this post I am officially sanctioning the change.
If any of my (probably imaginary) long-term readers happen to also be sharp observers, they will note that I’ve shortened the blog title and that the subheading has been changed from “My Ongoing Quest for Deeper Musical Knowledge and a Really Great Axe” to “Messages from Monty.” This change reflects the aforementioned unification of my online personalities, while simultaneously welcoming the current-but-not-originally-intended nature of the blog.
I hope the new year brings other changes, as well. I hope to resume my guitar lessons. (That earlier bit about how I had mastered the instrument was a lie!) I hope to write and/or record some new songs. I hope to continue to discover new music, see more concerts, and go to more festivals, and perform more. And I hope to write about it more often here. Stay tuned….
At the beginning of August my wife Suzy and I attended the Newport Folk Festival for our first time, joining in the celebration of it’s 50th Anniversary. I suppose it’s only tangentially related to the topics of this blog, but it was such an enjoyable musical experience that it made me want to jot a few lines just to mark the occasion.
The festival is held in the Fort Adams State Park, where essentially the entire venue is surrounded by water. Boats are sailing by both far and near, many pulling up just off the shore to drift and listen to the music from the main stage. It was a blazing hot weekend, but the venue was so gorgeous and the festival was so good there could be no cause for complaint.
In purely logistical terms, it was easily the most manageable outdoor festival we’ve ever attended. The crowd was large, but not overwhelming. The three stages were far enough away from each other that there was no discernable noise interference between them. Yet they were close enough together to make for very quick and easy maneuvering back and forth to catch the all the acts you might want to see. And three stages was just the right number; enough to offer a variety of performers at all times, but not so much that you got the nagging feeling (a la Merlefest in NC) that you were always missing something important somewhere else.
Most importantly, of course, the 50th Anniversary lineup of performers was excellent: Legends and festival icons like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Musicians of all kinds from across the decades: Iron & Wine, Mavis Staples, Del McCoury, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Neko Case, Guy Clark…. Practically every name on the list was an act we wanted to see, and none disappointed.
NOTE: All performances from this year’s festival are available for listening and/or downloading on NPR’s website. I would especially recommend the sets by Gillian Welch, Iron & Wine, Billy Bragg (beware curse words and political veiws), Guy Clark, and David Rawlings Machine (whose cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ was a standout of the whole festival for me).
This was also our first time to visit the town of Newport (and the state of Rhode Island, for that matter), and we loved it. Our B&B, the Spring Street Inn, was pleasant and very comfy, and was conveniently situated just down the block from an excellent coffee shop called Spring Street Espresso. A very short walk toward the harbor was the main drag of interesting restaurants and shops on Thames Street. Basically everything we could want, all within an easy few minutes’ walk in any given direction.
Simply put, we enjoyed everything about the trip. So much so, in fact, that we’ve already booked the same room for next year.
Again, visitors look down from a catwalk at the workers below.
