Pain, Me and the Voodoo Doctor

By M.D. Spenser

I lay face down on the treatment bed whilst a man I’d met only a few minutes before used his forefinger like a hammer to drive needles into my flesh.

He chatted all the while, trying to divert my attention.

“What do you do for a living?” (Thwack!) “Oh, that’s so interesting.” (Thwack!) “How long have you been doing that?” (Thwack!)

I’m a sceptic by nature and a bit of a traditionalist. I like things that have proven themselves over time, like old shirts, my favourite running shorts, and what some people refer to as “the germ theory of disease.” I shy away from change, the occult and medical treatments that smack to me of shamanism.

Yet here I was with my face lodged in a hole in the bed, letting some guy try to fix my hamstrings by using the pin cushion theory of treatment. How, I wondered, had it come to this?

The story began months earlier. Training with Julian Goater, a former world-class runner, I had gotten into my best shape in a dozen years. The training improved my mental toughness, too. In the Taunton Marathon on April 2, I flogged myself through the final six miles with what I realized in retrospect was not mere fatigue but genuine injury.

I took time off from running after the marathon, of course. But when I returned to the familiar routes around Frensham Ponds, I could not get my hamstrings sorted no matter what I did.

I rested. No luck. I tried to build back up. No luck. I saw a physiotherapist who inflicted painful deep tissue massage and prescribed stretches. (I had neglected flexibility in my training; by this time, I’d had a stiff neck for months.) But the pain persisted. Week by week, my hard-earned fitness left me.

One evening, as I ran through the woods with the club, a fellow member of Farnham Runners, the club to which I belong, came up behind me.

“Are you injured?” she asked out of the blue.

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“You’re running sideways,” came the reply.

It was a shock to realize I was sidling down the path looking more like a pretzel than an athlete. I had to do something.

Months earlier, Julian had recommended that I see David Reynolds, a registered osteopath, acupuncturist and Chinese medical herbalist with an office in Cranleigh, in southern England. The sceptical part of me had rejected the idea out of hand. But the just-in-case part of me had pocketed the card Julian handed me. I dug it out now.

And so it was that on Sept. 5, more than five months after my marathon, I found myself chatting with a man who was hammering needles into me.

“Had any interesting assignments recently?” Dave asked. (Thwack!) “Really? What did you think of the situation there?” (Thwack!)

When he had finished his hammering, he sat down to continue the conversation, leaving me lying there bristling like a porcupine. I asked how many needles were in me. The answer was 26 – 10 in my stiff neck and shoulder and another 16 in my right hamstring and buttock.

I tried to be polite, but inside I wondered grimly if I had handed myself over to a practitioner of voodoo. Forever after, when I told my wife that I had another appointment with the voodoo doctor, she knew who I meant.

Dave turned out to be an extraordinarily sharp, well-informed and engaging guy. He broke his leg when he was 17, and then spent the next nine months in hospital because his case was mismanaged.

“It put me off trying to go to medical school,” he said. And the episode also spurred his interest in alternatives to traditional Western medicine.

He qualified as an osteopath in 1983 and began his career in a practice in London where acupuncture was also used. He started his study of the technique there. In all, he studied acupuncture for five and a half years, learning from Chinese, Vietnamese and Western teachers.

Now 47, he has treated competitors in various sports, including rugby, football, golf, motocross, Formula 1 – and, of course, running.

“People you’d know, as well,” he said.

He did not just begin by sticking needles into me. He had me stand in front of a mirror. One of my shoulders sloped downward more steeply than the other. He had me lie down on the bed. My left leg, he said, was shorter than my right.

This problem he attacked by performing an adjustment on my pelvis. He wrapped his arms around me, then twisted me with a sudden, powerful jerk. My hips cracked with a noise so loud that people two doors down must have jumped out of their chairs. I let out an involuntary yell, not from pain but from surprise.

He cracked my back, as well, and popped my neck once to each side, making a noise that sounded like sniper fire coming from over the hill.

Having corrected my structural problems, he worked to heal my hamstrings with acupuncture. He used needles .25 millimetres in diameter, threading them through guide chutes before thwacking them in with his finger. The ones in my backside he was driving in to a depth of an inch an a half.

That, though, depends on the patient. “On a very large person from Florida, we could be using four-inch needles,” he said.

It seems odd that sticking a bunch of needles into someone could cure injury. But, according to Dave, the process is not that complicated.

“In acu-puncture, directly needling affects the injured tissue, which triggers a healing response,” he said. The effect, he said, is “biomedically measurable.”

None of it hurt. Not the pelvic adjustment, not the neck cracking, not the needles. Actually, I felt loosened up a bit.

In the following days, very gingerly, I began training again. When I returned to Dave a week later, I thought maybe I felt a little better, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe the effect was just psychological.

Over the ensuing weeks, as I continued my appointments with Dave, I increased my training and even ran a couple of races. Little by little, it became evident that I was getting better. In time, I even returned to training with Julian, which involves hard effort and speedwork.

Finally, I realized that I could train at any level I wanted to. After six months of injury, I was elated. I felt like I’d won the lottery.

Dave said he occasionally sees people who have tried a raft of treatments first and come to him only as a last resort. But these days, as the benefits of acupuncture and osteopathy are more widely accepted, those cases are rare. Most people come sooner rather than later.

I’m just behind the times. And, the sceptic in me remembers, you can’t prove anything with a single case. Perhaps my hamstring was just ready to heal after a few months. And maybe my year-long stiff neck just decided to go away at the same time.

But I don’t think so. And you can bet that, the next time I’m hurt, I’m going to get my sceptical self into Dave’s office a lot quicker than five months.

CD Review - Craig King

Breakthrough
Bonedog

If you have any feelings for classic soul-blues, Craig King’s debut CD could be one of the better albums you’ve run across in years.

King’s impassioned vocals make him sound like Robert Cray before he lost his way, only grittier. King is backed by a fine horn section, with killer guitar, sizzling organ and a good chorus of back-up singers.

The thing here is the funky beat. There’s a bit of ‘Superstition’-era Stevie Wonder here, a bit of Stax there. There’s the obvious mix of faster songs and slower ballads.

Best not to concentrate on the words; they can detract from the fun. (In ‘It's On The Inside’, the message is that you should judge a person by what’s on the inside – duh.)

It’s hard to find much information about King. A web search yields the facts that he’s from Pittsburgh and he ‘fell in love with music at a young age.’

But King is not the real issue. In the notes, he thanks Mike Sweeney and Jeff Ingersoll for the call. Ingersoll, guess what, is the owner of Bonedog Records, and Sweeney often writes songs for Bonedog. He wrote 9 of the 12 songs on this CD.

They were looking for a singer and they rang up Craig. This is essentially a factory production.

So? Motown and Stax were factories, too. Some of the best in history have been in-house songwriters.

Bonedog’s web site says it “was created to help artists who were pioneers of 40's 50's, 60's and 70's and contemporary artists who embrace these roots.” Whatever. This is great stuff.

You might want to buy this CD and wait eagerly for King’s sophomore effort. But from the sound of it, go for more Bonedog CDs. They've got something going on at that shop. Check ’em out.

Music Interview - Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir

Canadian Band Combines Blues, Bluegrass for Raw, Honest Sound

By M.D. Spenser

Out of Canada, howling like wind through the chinks of a cabin, comes a sound so traditional it evokes something primal and yet so new you’ve never heard it before.

It is the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir, a four-piece band from Calgary that combines Blues, bluegrass, Appalachian folk and attitude into a rough, raw sound all its own. At its best, this music creates a hypnotic effect in which players and instruments and audience all become one, where nothing else matters but everything is included and you don’t wake up until the music stops.

The band was formed early in 2001 and played its first gig on only a week’s preparation – three rehearsals. Members had in mind playing small clubs in the area, nothing more.

“We accepted from the start that our music is, well, odd – by which I mean it’s not ever going to be popular, exactly,” said Judd Palmer, one of the founders.

But after that first impromptu gig, people kept asking them to play more. And more. So, three or four gigs down the road, the members started to talk seriously about what direction the band should take.

Nearly seven years later, AMGC’s music is still odd. It’s never going to outsell Britney Spears, nor even, for that matter, Keb’ Mo’. But the band has moved far beyond the local club scene. Based in part on its 2005 release, “Fighting And Onions,” and in part on the intensity of its live performances, AMGC has won an international following – not least in the U.K., which it toured in September.

“The U.K. folks seem to like us,” said Bob Keelaghan, another of the band’s founders. “We get a lot of interest. We haven’t had a stinker of a gig over there yet.”

The band’s origins lie in a near-hallucinatory experience Palmer had one day as he staggered around the mountains, perhaps in the grip of altitude dementia.

“I found myself bellowing oaths at the crags that there were Gods in the rocks, and that they deserved a gospel music of their own, a mountain gospel, in fact,” he said.

But this wouldn’t be the same as the traditional gospels, he told himself. This would be an agnostic gospel. As the dementia really took over, he imagined he could form an agnostic mountain choir, good people who would join in loud and raucous hallelujahs – not exaltation of religion but enthusiasm for mystical feelings, the kind that can grip us all, religious or not.

“I clambered down from the mountaintops,” he said, “with this big plan for a huge band of people who would stomp and holler and bang and clang and shout and therefore be overwhelmingly entertaining.”

In the end, only four people showed up for rehearsals. The huge choir remains more an aspiration than a reality.

But bang and clang they do. The first drummer, Jason Woolley, who plays on “Fighting And Onions,” had a drum kit that included pots, pans and, said Keelaghan, “a big piece of metal that looked like an Italian car’s muffler.” Woolley left, having felt the need for a more stable job. But his replacement, Pete Balkwill, is no more conventional. On one of his cymbal stands hangs a Belgian army helmet.

And the band stomps and hollers, too. Palmer and Keelaghan handle the lead vocals; neither will ever be mistaken for Sinatra. With voices that sound like five miles of gravel road, their singing can evoke wind howling at the mouth of a cave, or maybe someone in therapy giving a primal scream.

Keelaghan, a guitarist, never sang until he got into Delta Blues, songs that didn’t work without vocals.

“Since it was the Blues that got me going, I wanted to get a throaty resonance,” he said. “Many stores don’t sell throaty resonance, so I had to find it on my own.”

But he found inspiration in the singing of Don Van Vliet, otherwise known as Captain Beefheart, and that of the renaissance Bluesman Alvin Youngblood Hart. And both of them, Keelaghan believes, were influenced in turn by the great Delta country Blues singer Charley Patton.

Keelaghan describes his own style as “Delta Blues yowling laced with high lonesome wailing.”

Patton was active in the 1920s and ‘30s. And, for all its volume, clatter, Italian mufflers and Belgian helmets, AMGC’s music has the feel of that era. Palmer plays banjo, harmonica and fiddle; Keelaghan contributes his Delta Blues guitar; Vladimir Sobolewski anchors the mix with his upright bass; and all of this is played, of course, over the clang and bang of the current drummer.

Four of the 18 cuts on “Fighting And Onions” are covers. One, “Look Up Look Down That Lonesome Road,” is traditional. The others were written by Son House, the Rev. Gary Davis, and Skip James – all Bluesmen whose careers date to the ‘30s.

But these covers are not musicologists’ cerebral revivals, faithful note-for-note to the originals. Far from it. These are old Blues songs warped through the unique sensibilities of this band.

For Keelaghan, the process of making someone else’s song his own starts with mistakes. He doesn’t sit with the CD and try to get every note perfect. Sometimes he learns the song from memory, as it has been filtered through his mind, then revises it later when he learns the lyrics. He’ll turn a major chord into a minor, or change the tuning, using a drop-D, for example, instead of an open tuning. But he does want to keep the feeling of the original intact.

The sound of these covers, traditional yet original, can best be described as Delta Blues meets old-time Appalachian folk.

“Those types of music have a lot of crossover,” Keelaghan said. “Both are intense forms of music. Many of the songs are modal, in that they mess with major and minor while hanging on one or two chords. Our theory is that, at some point in the evolution of those musics, they mingled and interbred, but for political and social reasons, America split them apart. I guess we’re reconciling that.”

The originals are in the same style. The album “Fighting And Onions” opens with a violin slowly sawing out of tune, as it might sound on the front porch of a tumble-down shack. The song, with no words until it is reprised to close the album, is “Stay Here For Awhile – fittingly, an invitation.

Some cuts are frenetic, bluegrassy, rough and noisy, like “Buried Them In Water.” The music to that song is original but the lyrics are from the late Howard Finster, a minister and acclaimed folk artist who lived in north Georgia, in the American South. Finster lived in the grip of life-long obsession – or inspiration, if you prefer – creating art like a madman and painting pictures, his own words and biblical verses over anything in his path – bicycles, automobiles, buildings and what have you.

Finster and AMGC make a good fit – inspired, artistic, crazy perhaps but eclectic and utterly unconcerned with fashion.

Other originals – “Oh Sorrow,” for example – are slower and more haunting, Bluesy but still twangy.

There’s no template here. Five of the cuts on “Fighting And Onions” are under a minute long; a sixth is only 1:04. The longest is 5:25. This band does whatever the hell it wants, whatever feels right – a lot like Finster. There’s freedom in knowing you’ll never outsell Britney.

The music is so rough and genuine that almost every note, intentionally or not, carries with it implied criticism of the glossiness and shallowness of contemporary culture.

“I’m not a fan of consumer culture,” Keelaghan said. “The masses get hung up on the product and not the ingredients. Sugar and fat are no good for you? No kidding! And it’s in nearly every damn pre-packaged food product! Do they realize that many celebrities are retards and what they do in their personal lives means not a stitch more than what regular folks do in theirs?”

And so it is with popular music, too, he said. People who listen to what’s on the charts give no thought to how the music is made, what the ingredients are. They don’t know that some bands don’t play their own music, that some singers have their voices altered with pitch correction, or that the musicians aren’t even in the same room at the same time.

But the ingredients affect the music. “To me, most of it sounds devoid of feeling,” Keelaghan said.

The album title “Fighting And Onions” comes from “Under Milkwood,” the radio play by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (from whom Bob Dylan took his adopted name). In the play, a sea captain is haunted by the spirits of drowned sailors. They come to him in the night and ask if life is still as they remember it, if their favourite things are still around.

“How’s it above?” one asks.

“Is there rum and lavabread?” asks another.

“Bosoms and robins?” asks a third.

Yet another, thinking of what he misses most, asks, “Fighting and onions?”

These are symbols of life. This is a music that is pungent, flavourful, full of life and full of fight.

But what is AMGC’s music, sometimes cacophonous, always off the beaten track, about? It’s not dance music; it’s not meant to soothe the savage breast; these are not love songs or serenades.

What, to these players, is the purpose of music?

It’s a hard question to answer directly. Keelaghan and Palmer have talked about boogie hypnosis, the trance that rhythmic, one-chord songs bring on. And the music is about communication, too – union, a form of oneness.

As Keelaghan studied pre-World War II Blues, he was struck that no one sang or played half-heartedly. AMGC wants to communicate that same intensity – whether the emotion is sorrow, fear or joy – without relying too much on amplification. When audience members sing along, or stamp their feet, or roar with approval, then that has been achieved.

“For the last few years, I’ve been big on the idea of transcendence through music,” Keelaghan said. “Those are the moments when we play, or I play, that are so good nothing else is noticeable until the song ends. The fingers and the strings are one. You don’t make mistakes. You take musical chances in the moment and they succeed. Everyone is on the same page and you know it. The audience knows it, too. That’s pure communication through music. It doesn’t happen very often, but I’ve had that more with this band than any other.”

Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir will record over the winter and hopes to release a new CD next spring or summer. They hope, also, to visit the U.K. in 2008, this time for a longer tour.

The band’s success has surprised its members, given that their ambition was just to play local clubs. But they know they’ve got something going.

“We’re in it for the long haul,” Palmer said. “I think there’s plenty more to explore about the forms of music that inspire this band.”

CD Review - Bessie Smith

Blues Queen: The Definitive Collection
Definitive

Tutored by Ma Rainey and an inspiration to Janis Joplin, Bessie Smith was vital to the development of the Blues. This superb overview of her recording career, which began in the early 1920s and lasted a decade, gives voice to all the emotions that make up the Blues – sadness, defiance and joy.

“I swear I won’t call no copper/When I’m beat up by my papa/Tain’t nobody’s business if I do,” she sings, years before Billie Holliday. It’s an assertion of power. Sometimes the only defiance available to the oppressed is handling misfortune the way they alone decide.

Smith, who lost both parents by age 9, became the highest-paid black performer of the ’20s. She’s backed on these 24 tracks by a who’s who of the era’s musicians, from Louis Armstrong to Benny Goodman.

But her singing’s the attraction. She had a voice so true the hiss of records made 80 years ago falls away, unnoticeable. As the excellent liner notes say, Smith, the Empress of the Blues, had “a strong personality which she imposed on every tune she chose to sing.”

The tunes she chose stand the test of time. Wonder where Clapton got “Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out”? Smith recorded it in 1929 as she was about to enter her own lean years.

The Blues gave way to jazz. Smith sank into alcoholism. She died in a car accident in 1937, aged 43. Her grave remained unmarked until 1970, when Joplin, herself months from death, bought her a headstone.

This collection illuminates the arc of Smith’s career, from the Dixieland joy of “Cakewalkin’ Babies (From Home)” to the sorrow of “St. Louis Blues.” One can imagine the tears that flowed from seeing her in person.

But this is what’s left to us, and it’s well worth owning.

CD Review - porterdavis

Live At Eddie’s Attic
Independent Release

There’s a rare magic in music when exceptional players mesh perfectly.

Porterdavis’ music is deeply traditional yet totally new. It is of no genre yet of them all – Blues, folk, jazz, bebop. Before every show, band members pour a drink on the floor in homage to their heroes: Ray Charles, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elvin Jones, Miles Davis, Townes Van Zandt, Muddy Waters and Little Walter.

This CD captures the trio – a guitarist and drummer, both Americans, and a British harmonica player – live at a club near Atlanta.

Key to their sound is Simon Wallace, who won the U.K. National Blues Harmonica Title at age 17. His harp takes the lead on more songs than not. Sometimes his harmonica and Daniel Barrett’s guitar track each other exactly, an octave apart.

On other songs, Barrett provides rhythm or slide-played bass. The sound is complemented by Mike Meadows’ creative, intelligent percussion. This is a tight, tight band.

Lamentably, there are no credits on the promotional CD, but the album seems to mix covers and originals.

Muddy Waters’ ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ is transposed into a minor key, barely recognizable but deeper, blusier, more cutting than the original.

Robert Johnson’s ‘Come On In my Kitchen’ is eerie and true – brilliantly reworked, completely new.

‘Long Legs’, apparently an original, is aching folk, pure poetry: “I could see that freckled, bonesy girl would one day be my world. Would you be my world? … I dare not dream so dangerously. You could be the death of me.”

And ‘Diamond Eyed One’ is a delightful finger-poppin’ ode to desire: “I want to cook your favourite dish. I want to kiss your favourite kiss.”

With heartfelt singing by men who follow their own muse, this album is a revelation. Porterdavis is a band worthy of your attention.

CD Review - Toby Walker

Just Rolled In
Toby Walker

This is a fabulously fun CD, featuring acoustic blues guitar the way everyone should play it – with precision, gusto, and sass. You won’t hear better picking than this.

Walker, a Long Islander, was raised far from the Mississippi Delta. But his passion for blues and rag prompted him to head south. He tracked down musicians from an earlier era, learning from the likes of Eugene Powell, James "Son" Thomas, Etta Baker and R.L. Burnside.

His repertoire, a mix of covers and originals, is, he says, “99.9 percent songs of thieving, lying, stealing, cheating, murder and mayhem” – leavened, thankfully, with a large helping of humour.

Walker’s vocals rarely rise above serviceable, though they grow on you. The thing here is the guitar. Whether it’s blues or ragtime, the syncopation and rhythm make it hard to sit still when he plays.

With his funny between-song patter, Walker is a born storyteller; his guitar is an extension of that. His playing is not frantic and overfull, but still technically astonishing. He senses when the spaces say more than notes, and when a single bent note can move the story along.

‘Blame It On The Bass Player’ – an instrumental paean to those underappreciated musicians – is humour without words. Walker’s thumb gleefully picks out classic bass lines while his fingers tell another story up top.

And when Walker sings, the interplay between his vocal storytelling and that of his guitar is guaranteed to raise a smile.

Most of the album is light-hearted, but it ends with two barnburners – notably the defiant ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, on which Walker’s voice, playing and blues come into their own.

This CD is 98 percent happy and 100 percent blues. If you think that’s a contradiction, just listen a while – and smile.

CD Review - J. Dorsey Blues Band

Worried Blues EP
Independent Release

By M.D. Spenser

Let’s be upfront about it: If you want to buy this CD, it’ll be tough. You won’t find it at HMV, nor on amazon, and the band’s web site – on myspace – had, as of late December, not a speck of information.

But that’s OK, because there’s no reason to buy it anyway, unless what you need to fill out your collection is a complete lack of originality.

This CD is not horrible, but it’s not good, either. The five tracks are a melange of styles that don't really mix.

The title track is a droning one-chord version of a song listed as ‘Worried Blues’ and called “traditional”. In fact, the title of the song is ‘Someday Baby’ and it was written in 1935 by Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon. It’s played with some slide guitar and a whole lot of racket.

Track 2 is the only original, a one-chord number so slow it sounds like an LP played at the wrong speed. It is topped by Jimi Hendrix-like vocals and descends into distortion. Clocking in at 8:22, it’s about eight minutes too long.

From Hendrix territory we jump improbably to Nina Simone: the cover of her ‘Do I Move You’, slinky and sexual, is the EP’s one high point.

Then we hop to a dreary Chuck Berry cover. Chuck Berry with the fun taken out? What’s the point?

The CD closes with a Fred McDowell number, which is fun in a Fat Possum, Mississippi hill country sort of way. The song has a driving rhythm, but there is still a tendency to confuse cacophony with musicality.

The verdict? Twenty-three minutes of mishmash.