Hi Friends!

Gretchen Horkins used her nifty new Flip Video Camcorder to shoot this video of our newest song, Shiner Bock and Vicodin. It took her a second to flip it, so the first few chords have been snipped, but the rest is in glorious technicolor.

If you have a video of the band that you’d like to share, please drop us a line at grantlangston@gmail.com.

Thanks,

G

Lowen and Navarro

We’re very happy to share that a cool show has fallen in our laps. The Mint called and because of an act cancellation we’re now on the January 30th bill with So Cal’s own Lowen and Navarro and the fine young men of Stonehoney.

I’ve linked off to their respective pages so you can get the low-down on these great acts. For complete show details click HERE.

In case, dear friends, you are unfamiliar with The Dwarves I recommend you take a moment to google the meanest, most inappropriate, nude, and offensive American punk band to ever plug in an amplifier. I’ll spare you the detailed history here, but the only thing they seem to like more than making loud fast music is taking the piss out of the record business and their fans.

You may be asking yourself why an Americana musician would ever want to go see a punk show.  Three reasons: 1) good music is good music is good music. be it Stravinsky or Prince or Frank Sinatra. Anyone who has a policy of disliking a genre of music is only cheating themselves. 2) Punk music is a great form of exercise, more on that later. 3) Fast Hillbilly Country music and Fast Punk music have a lot in common - just ask Hank Williams III.

Hewhocannotbenamed from The Dwarves

When you get one of those forwarded emails that contain a list of “worst album covers” The Dwarves’ Blood, Guts, and Pussy is always featured, because it is the most offensive album cover in the history of vinyl. It feature two naked women and a midget - covered in blood, and…wait for it…the midget appears to be sodimizing a rabbit. YES, friends this is truly out there. The kind of punk ethos that most punk bands can’t get near.

They once announced that the guitarist, Hewhocannotbenamed, was dead. You’ll recognize him because he performs in a wrestling mask and nothing else, save an occasional leather jock strap. And he likes to spit at the crowd. The Dwarves even released music in tribute to their “dead” guitarist. That little stunt got them kicked off SubPop Records.

The amazing part about The Dwarves is that their songs are MELODIC. sure they are fast as hell, and offensive as hell. But there are entire subgenres of punk that pride themselves on making insane noise. The Dwarves write songs and the singer, Blag Dahlia, is funny, musical, and sometimes leads the band like a conductor.

Sunday night in LA…the beauty of LA is that no matter the night something is going on, and it is probably less than $20 to do it. I saw that The Dwarves were playing at The Knitting Factory for $12. Grabbed my leather jacket, jumped on the bike and jammed down there. There were 4 other bands, and I got there just as the lights were going down for the headliner.

I’m a pretty big guy and I have been in a pit or two in my day. (A Motorhead show comes to mind when the guy who was with me fell down and everyone started stomping him for fun. I got him up with a broken arm, and when the other moshers saw he was really hurt they helped carry him out of the club. See, they don’t MEAN to hurt people.) These days I’m into grabbing a Stella and standing off to the side. Once you loose you pit chops it’s hard to get back in the game, so I prefer a more relaxing evening.

Grant gets clobbered at Dwarves show

The problem is you never know how big the vortex is going to be, and i had crowded in a little too close. Just as the band kicked in, i pulled out my iPhone to take a photo, (that move alone should’ve gotten me beaten at a true punk show.) and BOOM i’m in the pit. Pushing. Spinning. Screaming. I thought of my wife and loved ones - no one even knew where i was!

In the end, it was all okay. I just rolled around the circle a couple times pushing and rocking like it was 1993 until i spun right out of the danger zone. and the show was AWESOME!

I can remember having a job once where i was creating a audio program to promote new age music - the kind of music you listen to when you need to relax. I couldn’t help but notice that listening to that kind of music all day made you want to strangle a stranger and hide the body. When I would leave work I would be so tightly wound I was shaking.

And when we got around to doing the same kind of program for punk music I found that the opposite was true as well. Listening to punk music for hours on end drains you of energy, leaving your body calm and satisfied. So….the next time you’re feeling tense, sad, depressed, tight, or confused grab the paper and find your nearest punk show….I guarantee instance relief. Just stand along the outside of the room.

Salt Lake City (clean) from The Dwarves on Vimeo.

Spent the evening holed up in Red Hill Recording Studio with Rich McCulley banging out the guitar parts for Damn Good Day and The King of Sunset Hills. We have a nice time doing this work, but the chit chat is to a minimum when you’ve got knock out 7 guitar parts. Who said Americana music was simple?!

The King of Sunset Hills

For this tune we decided to do what we never do and that is to duplicate an electric guitar part on the acoustic. My Taylor 510. Standard Tuning. Same voicings. It’s kind of a slow and boozy number and I wanted the electric rhythm to be a little sloppy, so this guitar will actually be the foundation - even if you barely end up hearing it in the final mix. It will be back there somewhere locking things down.

Then we plugged the Gretsch Chet Atkins Nashville Model into Rich’s Vox A60 amp. I wanted this part to be a little crunchy and muddy, so we turned it up and I played while looking around the room and taking sips off a beer. All in the interest of being sloppy and casual with it all. Couple takes later we had it ironed out.

I ordered a pizza on my phone and then ventured into the next tune.

Damn Good Day

This song is a fast country stomp. Lots of picking, and we’ve intentionally put the tempo so fast that hopefully I can barely sing it. It needs to be lighthearted and that should help. Not matter what ridiculous stuff happens it is almost always a Damn Good Day.

We cut the acoustic first, capo-ing it up around the 5th fret to give it a little mandolin kind of vibe. of course, the licks that naturally fall under your hand down on the first fret can prove to be almost unplayable somewhere else on the neck, so I had to think my way through this one…eventually it worked.

Electrically there is a kick-off lick and that re-occurs several times in the tune and then Larry and I will share a duel harmony lead. But, all this was written out when the song was to be played at a slower tempo. Every time I’ve said, “YES! I think it sounds better a little faster,” I’ve not been thinking about the licks that need to be played during the solo. Last night the chickens came home to roost.

I could ask Larry to play all the parts and he could do it easily, but the song will have so much more personality if we have two players with different tones doing the different lines. So, I hack, cursed, and said, “one more time” as Rich patiently looked on. We had swapped amps and we now using my Fender Vibroverb 1965 re-issue. It has one huge 15″ speaker, and it sounds great for the country slap-back rhythm parts. For the lead stuff I plugged in the old yellow Boss SuperDrive pedal.

3 Hours, 1 Pizza, some Beer, and it was in the can. Another step closer to the finish line.

Dear Friends,

Happy 2009! Lots of Cool News in the Wide Wide World of Music

1. Saturday Night Show in Hollywood
2. New Blog
3. New Website

Saturday Night Show in Hollywood

We’re playing with one of our favorite friends, Ro Chambeaux & The Circus Freaks. This guy is crazy and the music is like Stevie Wonder meets Chuck Barris meets George Clinton from Parliament Funkadelic. You will not be bored, we promise.

Grant Langston and The Supermodels
Saturday, January 17, 2009

Please go and visit the new site at http://www.grantlangston.com. Duff Ferguson whipped this thing up between writing songs and having a baby, and I love it. Photos, News, Shows, and MUSIC. yes, you can get some music as well. One of the things we’re going to start doing is taking photos of people at the shows….and putting it up on the site. If you sign up for the email list you’ll get an email with a link to the photos as a way of saying, “Thanks for Coming Down.”

Enjoy and Thanks for Supporting Independent Music!!

I get up on my high horse about the POWER OF VINYL. Click over to BLOG and check it out.

.

.

.

.

-

I’m an early adopter. I bought the first iPhone the day it came out - so silly to wait in line for a phone when i had a phone in my pocket that worked just fine, but I did it. Less than a year later, I went out and bought the slightly newer iPhone when it became available. This time I circled the Beverly Center on my scooter on a Sunday morning waiting for the stores to open so I could be first in line. My addiction to the new and unproven got an early start. As a youngest i bought the FIRST commercial CD Player - a Sony CDP-101. It was early 1983 and while there were practically no compact discs in the stores I listened endlessly to my Deep Purple, Perfect Strangers and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony - the two CD’s that came with the player.

I was a music freak growing up. Starting with my first Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass LP, I would sit in my room for hours listening to records. When I started playing the guitar at age 10, I would sit with my record player and guitar picking the tunes of the day. I would endlessly move the needle back and forth trying to learn that lick at the beginning of The Spirit of Radio. I would see if I could play through all the tunes on side one of Back in Black while standing and shaking my head back and forth. I was also a clean freak about my vinyl. I put each jacket in a loose plastic cover (shrink wrapping warps the disc, man!), I cleaned the needle. I used disc cleaner and a brush with every play. I even stored the normal paper inner sleeve and replaced it with a super clean, high quality plastic sleeve.

But even with all that love, when CD’s came into my life I packed up the vinyl. I gave my turntable to my little brother. I was a DIGITAL man, and while those early cd’s sounded tinny, brittle, and thin, it was like magic. The last vinyl disc I purchased was in 1983 was Yes’ 90125. Oie.

Ah....The Plastic Disc

Fast forward 25 years. Like some sort of time capsule that I am compelled to drag around the earth, my record collection is still with me. Wrapped, taped, boxed, sealed I’ve moved these slabs of plastic exactly 16 times since I left Hartselle Alabama for college. Most recently the box became a toilet for the rats that decided to infest my garage in Los Angeles. When I went to clean it all out I had to wear rubber gloves and a surgical mask to work in the filth and stench. But once I cleaned it up and cracked open the box - there they were as neat and clean as the day i boxed them up. Waiting.

I jumped on Craigslist and bought an old Kenwood turntable. I found an online source for needles and turntable pre-amps. (You didn’t think that today’s stereo amplifiers would just work with a 1972 turntable did you?) Within a few days I was in business, and brothers and sisters let me tell you. It is GLORIOUS. It’s like music has been born again, or more likely risen from the dead. And after 25 years of digital music - CD’s, MP3’s, WAV’s, AIFF’s, Downloads, and iPods - it is clear to me that music is BETTER on vinyl. It’s WAY better on vinyl, and he’s why.

The Minor Reason #1 - It sounds better.

As a musician one of the first things you learn about recording music is that MOST of the time the process of recording imbues the music with something that it doesn’t have in person. As an obvious example a singer sounds better with a little reverb on his voice - reverb that may not be available in the room in which he is being recorded. Vinyl records imbue the music they carry with certain overtones and distortions that the ear finds pleasing. Now certainly digital recording and mastering has developed in such a way as to mimic these overtones, but very few digital recordings do this to the degree that a plastic record naturally does it. With some kinds of music that distortion is less helpful - a Mahler symphony for example, but with other kinds it is FUNDAMENTAL - The Faces, for example practically jump off the record, as does most kinds of rock and country music.

The Minor Reason #2 - Records need loving care

When I was a kid I had a stamp collection for about 10 minutes. One day I threw them out the window because you can’t DO ANYTHING WITH STAMPS. They just sit in a book. You look at them. With model cars…you paint and assemble the model. With records…you clean, file, organize, and replace into their sleeves endlessly. Digital music doesn’t give you anything to do. Yes, I’ve downloaded the “artwork” but it is usually just some boring photos that are a solid B- afterthought. With Digital music, I don’t even have anything to show for my purchase. I spend the money (which I don’t see either) and they tell me I have the music. I can see the file, but it feels like I bought air. Digital files never die. NEVER even degrade. Vinyl will become worthless without the constant attention and care that an avid music lover has to give.

The Major Reason #1 - You’re Forced to LISTEN to the Music

Apart from my band and the music I write, my typical music listening these days goes like this.Plug in my iPod as I drive around doing errands. Listen to iTunes as I write on my computer. Listen to the iPod while I travel and read. In each case, music is a) background to some activity b) a private experience. In some ways this is magnificent - I have more music running for more hours. I can get it easily, and even, gulp, share it easily. Hell I can have my entire music collection in my shirt pocket with my cigarettes.

But all this is costs something, and the tax is on my connection to the music. Vinyl records FORCE you to sit down and listen. Each side of the LP is 15-20 minutes. you could, I suppose, put on a record and do some housework, of course, you’ll be running back every 15 minutes to change the disc. But what it has forced me to do is to sit on my rear-end in a chair, with a drink and the LINER NOTES and listen to the music. I can’t take the music to my car, or my job, or my run, or my computer. It only lives in this little room in my house. I’ve put a nice leather chair in there. A cool old lamp so I can see who played B3 on track four and I LISTEN to the music. Astounding. The artwork and the detail it’s all part of the experience. You sit through the “album” tracks (Those are the cuts that aren’t designed to be radio hits.) because it makes no sense to get up and hop the needle around. The limitations of the medium actually contribute to the experience of the music.

And this idea has gotten me thinking about other missteps in the name of “progress.” For a while in the 70’s INSTANT coffee was the rage. “Taster’s Choice. It has to be better because it is so darn convenient.” Really? Instant coffee was convenient and modern and terrible. Now, we’ve gone 10 steps back the other way. People take more time and energy making coffee now than they did in 1950. Why? Because it is a better experience! There are many food examples - wonder bread and TV dinners spring to mind.

but let’s not forget the artwork. Big slabs of photographic and artistic statement. Propping up the music. Chrissie Hynde may not be the most attractive woman in the world, but staring into her eyes for hours while listening to Precious makes you her love slave. When music went digital it lost the art that helped define it.

The Major Reason #2 - You can SHARE

I mentioned earlier that music is now, for me, a personal and private experience. I listen in my car or in my ear buds. No one knows what I listen to. I don’t know what others like apart from the random, “You heard that new Lucinda record? It’s cool.” But vinyl is different. Vinyl is BEGGING for a house party. It’s begging for a “Hey man, come over let’s listen to the new Killers record.” My friend Dean Chamberlain has taken to throwing vinyl house parties where he plays DJ and kicks out the jams with old R&B records. It’s a hoot. You’re not taking this music into your iPod, man. This is PARTY music, for groups only. Loners need not apply.

So, do yourself a favor. Grab a turntable. They’re pretty cheap these days. Go down to your local indie record store (If you can find one.) I went to Amoeba here in LA and got 20 records for $30. Pull up a chair, and let there be ROCK!

So 2009 is here. What a strange sensation it is getting older and watching time pick up speed.  We started recording this new music in, what, April. It’s almost been a year.

The great news is…we’re almost done. Here’s the song list as it currently sits:

Burt Reynolds Movie Brawl

Pretend you Love Me Tonight

Not Another Song About California

Stand Up Man

Call Your Bluff

Damn Good Day

The King of Sunset Hills

Shiner Bock and Vicoden

30 Days

The Only Me

We’re hoping to do some unique things with the packaging and the promotion of this music…stay tuned.

A Genuine live album full of sweat and hard-edge country

Even without a shred of evidence, having never heard a Grant Langston studio album, it’s hard to believe that they can come close to catching the untamed energy of this live album. There are bands that flourish in the studio and then there are those, which surely include Grant Langston and The Supermodels, who feed off the audience almost as a parasite hoes its host. Songs like Baby, It’s Raining were born to be played live, it’s not note on note or technically perfect - which is another way of saying it hasn’t had the life produced out of it - instead it fizzes and crackles with the promise of a night to remember.

This is also a true live recording, one night, one go, it’s not the “best” culled from a series of gigs, which seems to defeat the object of recreating, as near as possible, the gig experience, warts and all. And there lies the essence of Live in Bakersfield, hard living country music, with the sweat stains visible, played to an audience who have come to be entertained. There is a bright twinkle in the eye of Grant Langston and his Supermodels; Him or ME for one follows the grand tradition of country-rock songs, substituting hearts and flowers for something altogether eartheir and meatier.

It would also be an injustice to neglect the Supermodels. A most uncountry-like name hides a tight, aggressive collection of musicians. Langston hasn’t gathered together a rag tag band of sidemen, happy to stand in the shadows, drummer Troy Harkins, bass player Josh Fleeger, and guitarist Larry Marciano is a summit of equals. the challenge for all is to not be left behind.

The staple diet of Live in Bakersfield is unyielding, uncompromising country-rock, epitomised perfectly by Divorce Number One but as Koreatwon and Broken Clocks demonstrate, it’s also got as much heart as passion. Langston doesn’t appear to be a natural balladeer but what he lacks in silky smoothness, he more than compensates for with soul and intergrity.  He’s a singer it’s easy to believe in and one it’s even easier to live with. But this is an album built on crowd pleases like Burt Reynolds Movie Brawl  - one of three new songs and one which is pretty much what the title suggests it should be - Working Man Blues, the decidely un-PC Ugly Women and Walk of Shame, this is not an album you’re going to waste your time analysing.

what LIB does have is a real timeless quality but not the tired reheat variety, this is a band that loves playing country music and riding it as hard as it can. Songs like Prove Them Wrong are deep-rooted in tradition but when placed in the not so tender care of musicians like these, they find new vitality. There may be nothing new about the sawdust and spitoon country-rock of Grant Langston and the Supermodels but when it’s as much fun as LIB, who wants new?

Hola,

ah music. It isn’t just music anymore…it’s photos, videos, blogs and WEBSITES!

Here’s the brand new site. It’s meant to be practical, informative - and not slick and shiny.  I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have.

More to come.