North Mississippi Allstars: Not classic or dud, really, but Luther Dickinson sure can play

nah, Memphis. I was in Oxford in '95-'96 and visited often (though considerably less these days) after I left.

biggest dipshit I ever interviewed, maybe I just caught him on a bad day or something - fortunately I wasn't really impressed with their music (studio at least, never seen 'em live) anyway (obv. I didn't convey that in the interview tho, at least I hope not).

i saw them open for the blues explosion in chicago and they were incredible. also saw them in oxford with their dad playing keyboards to about 10 people at some street festival. also, mind bogglingly great. their albums do blow, though. i've got a few early tapes (93-94?) of various covers which i must digitzie sometime. great stuff.

Ah, the Double Decker Arts Festival. I was living in CA the year Richard Thompson played that. More regret!

fwiw, here's a ysi of my favorite track from the new one. It's credited to Odetta, but I'm guessing it predates her. Either way, it has a melody that they don't get in the way of, and a nice long Luther solo in the middle.

Just to add to the chorus. Back in the early nineties I went to see Jim Dickinson play at SXSW in Austin. I was with some guitar player friends who had met or worked with him at one point and they were running him down as a self-important blowhard. I don't even know why they were there- it was either because they were there to see another act, or because they had heard he was playing with Chuck Prophet and they wanted to see him. In one of the corners of the place, which had had several names, I think it was called Chances at the time, was a weird guy I had seen before, doing what I had seen him do before, sitting in a corner and singing and playing guitar and blowing on a harmonica at kind of a low volume with nobody paying attention to him. He looked kind of raggedy and run down, like a street person doing a one-man band thing for tips. When the Jim Dickinson part of the show starts, it turns out this guy IS Jim Dickinson. And his band is this bunch of kids that sound great, especially the lead guitarist who's playing this far out stuff, like he's absorbed the lesson of Lou Reed's solo on "I Heard Her Call Me Name" and can now do that all night long. Eventually we find out that these are his kids, DDT had already played the day before, and that they are teenagers. And, this sounds like something out of a bad movie but I saw it with my own eyes, one of my buddies, who was a local guitar hero, pushing thirty, was practically crying, saying "Man, this is the kind of thing that makes me want to just go home and sell my guitar."

"I Heard Her Call MY Name"- it was Lou Reed, not Steve Jones.

The fact that my friend really said that doesn't detract from it coming across like an artificial note ruining my story- if I ever get occasion to tell this story again, maybe I'll have to change it up a little bit.

their jam-band shit is, to me, one of the biggest wastes of talent ever. lame. I used to run into Jim Dickinson in Memphis, the last time was the day before I moved to Colorado. He was in a record store and in line in back of me, and I said, "what you buying?"

It was a copy of Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours." "Because I like the drum sound they got..."

I don't know the guy personally, but I always liked Jim D's comments in Sweet Soul Music.

Jimbo Mathus is hit or miss, too. I've seen him with his Knockdown Society and it bored me to tears. Then I saw him play with Luther & Cody in the early days and he/ they were amazing. The best though was when he jumped on stage with Jack Oblivian's Tennessee Tearjerkers (apparently the two played together in a high school punk band called Jonny Vomit and the Dry-Heaves). Absolute mayhem.

I've always heard good things about Songs For Rosetta. I'll have to put that on the mile-long to buy list.

i just saw these guys at borders during lunch. luther is just a monster. cody was on an accoustic, too. he was very focused on playing, whereas luther can just rattle that shit off in in his sleep, but he could hold his own next to his brother. great stuff.

holy shit, in Chicago? State and Randolph? how did I not know about this? damn.