conversations

Captain Beefheart--a love song

My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains is from Captain Beefhearts Clear Spot (1972)

A documentary The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel.

Grateful Dead: Visions of Johanna

From the Spectrum 03 18 1995. This is in the band’s closing years--- the final stage is '92-95 which saw the band’s increasingly erratic musical performances and Garcia’s ultimate decomposition.

The show sucks. It was nearly the end. Garcia was uninspiring and close to being incompetent. The Grateful Dead had come to the end of the road.

Garcia's vocals on Dylan's Visions of Johanna are forlorn and the interpretation is bitter sweet. Seemingly out of nowhere, Garcia pulled together a strong, beautiful, heartfelt version of the song, the last Dylan song he would ever perform.

I find this interpretation very emotional. It stands out from the sloppy, bored music they were producing.---the band played without a lot of dynamics, so that the overall energy was rather flat.

An earlier version from Berkeley Community Theater show Berkeley, CA (4/22/86). It has better guitar work:

Andrew Chapman: The Shearers project.

The picture below is from Andrew Chapman's interesting Shearers project.

Andrew Chapman, Marios chair - Marios Palace Hotel, Broken Hill, 1993, gelatin silver print

He has also done a book on The Australian woolshed Though Australia's wool industry has contracted since its 1970s heyday, when the nation boasted 180 million sheep, the architectural legacy of those days remains across the country in a genre all its own.

Chapman has been photographing sheds for many years and he says:.

There's a really big difference between going into a shed that's working - which usually happens for about four or five weeks of the year - everybody's doing something, nobody's got time to talk, it's just go, go, go. 'Those other times when you walk into sheds that are idle: you get the occasional barn owl, they are haunted and deathly quiet, a bit of wind rattling the tin or a shaft of light coming through, lighting up an old pile of wool that's been left on the floor … They are visual voyages of discovery.

The book has 400 photos of these unique buildings from across the country:

Andrew Chapman, Old Kunumbra Shearing Shed, gelatin silver print

This shed dates from 1871 when the property was first settled. The shed was last worked in 1957.