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[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 66: Country Special

This months episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio was a country special, a sequel to the previous one which you can find here. It’s largely my favorite kind of Golden Age country: mostly from the 50s and 60s, lots of reverb, warbly with ghostly backing choirs and hazy heatwavey pedal steel guitar. It also features “Wichita Lineman,” an all-time favorite which I sometimes think is the most beautiful song ever written. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Marvin Rainwater – Gonna Find Me A Bluebird
2. Brenda Lee – The Grass Is Greener
3. Loretta Lynn – Fist City
4. Jerry Lee Lewis – You Win Again
5. Hank Williams – Lovesick Blues
6. Jeannie Seely – Don’t Touch Me
7. Eddy Arnold – Cattle Call
8. Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton – Last Thing On My Mind
9. Bobby Helms – My Special Angel
10. Webb Pierce – In The Jailhouse Now
11. Davis Sisters – I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know
12. Marty Robbins – Singing The Blues
13. Glen Campbell – Wichita Lineman
14. Lucille Starr – Heartaches By The Number
15. Don Gibson – I Can’t Stop Loving You
16. George Jones – The Race Is On
17. Wanda Jackson – Right Or Wrong
18. Little Jimmy Dickens – May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose
19. Roy Clark – The Tips Of My Fingers
18. Louvin Brothers – I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby
19. Jim Reeves – Welcome To My World
20. Connie Frances – Your Cheatin’ Heart
21. Dave Dudley – Six Days On the Road

Peter Walker – Rainy Day Raga, 1966

I hope that if it’s still torrential downpouring where you are, this gets to you in time to be a helpful addition! Peter Walker is a Boston-born steel string guitar legend who left home at 14 to begin his lifelong project of musical study and research. He traveled, toured, and hitchhiked through America, Mexico, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco, and Spain, but it was seeing Ravi Shankar perform in San Francisco in the early 60s that sparked his fascination with Indian classical–he went on to study under both Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. In the mid-60’s he embedded himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, becoming close with Sandy Bull, Karen Dalton, Joan Baez, and eventually Timothy Leary, for whom he served as a “musical director.”

This was the first of two full lengths he recorded before a 40 year hiatus, until he was later coaxed out of retirement by Joshua Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records in 2007, at which point he went on to release a slew of new material and tour extensively. Though his interplay with Appalachian (and more generally American) folk, Indian raga, and flamenco was still taking shape upon the release of Rainy Day Raga (his follow-up “Second Poem To Karmela” leans into Indian traditions much more explicitly), I love it for its raucous joy, tumbling lines of masterful fingerpicking building into extended crescendoes before a long cooldown. A very appropriate indoor rainy day soundtrack. For fans of Robbie Băsho, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.

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Ryuichi Sakamoto – Esperanto, 1985

Guest post by Andy Beta (Twitter / IG)

Last year was brutal in almost every aspect, from the social to the international to the personal. Amid such rubble, there was a bit of a silver lining, in that I achieved a noteworthy professional achievement: interviewing Ryuichi Sakamoto for the Gray Lady. We sat one afternoon and sipped tea at a café near his West Village home and discussed his stunning new album, async, and also drifted onto some other topics. He talked about his recent interest in La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #5 as well as the works of Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki. “One of his early pieces was a big concrete cube in a gallery and he pushed it so it made a sound of friction on the floor,” Sakamoto enthused. “It’s beauuuutiful music.”

We even briefly touched on one of my favorite solo albums of his, 1985’s Esperanto. Originally commissioned for a dance performance from New York-based choreographer Molissa Fenley, it’s one of Sakamoto’s earliest forays into sample-based music and it’s as bewildering, playful, formidable and forward-looking as anything in his catalog. He told me that the computer he used to make the album was massive, holding his hands out wider than his body to show the size of the actual discs that stored mere seconds of sound. The album also features tasteful percussion work from Yas-Kaz and some guitar slashes courtesy of Arto Lindsay.

There’s news that Light in the Attic will be reissuing an incredible amount of Japanese music over the next few years and while I’m sure that Sakamoto’s work will receive some long overdue reassessment in the west (almost none of his groundbreaking 80’s work is available for streaming, which is just ridiculous), I wonder if an album as far-out as Esperanto will be high on the priority list. That said, recently graphic designer and album illustrator Robert Beatty enthused about Sakamoto’s work and this album in particular, which prompted a reply from Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran:

esperanto fun fact: all the tracks are actually 15 minutes long. they recorded it before was finished and didn’t know how long each dance section needed to be edited to so they intentionally overshot the length of each piece. the tapes still exist!

Here’s hoping that full 15-minute immersions into pieces like “A Rain Song” and “A Carved Stone” might re-emerge one day. Until then, enjoy for a limited time this visionary work from the master.

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