Blaze Foley is one of those eternally dropped names, usually by the hip or the famous (often both) musicians with tales to tell of the late and largely unheralded Texas troubadour and roustabout. Here is a veritable bushfire of fans, friends, acolytes and disciples, all keen to peddle his music to a wider public. If you have heard the name, now’s the opportunity to put his mouth into those of others, ahead, maybe, of risking the real thing.
Michael David Fuller, as he was born, in December, 1949, grew up in a musical family, singing gospel, as part of The Singing Fuller Family, with his mother, brother, and sisters. Childhood polio left him with a limp, and the sort of chip on his shoulder that predisposed toward the same sort of vices that beset his friend and co-conspirator, Townes Van Zandt. Although it was clear to see his songs were strong and sound, he was often his own worst enemy in his self-promotion thereof. A, let’s say, colorful career was demarcated more by setbacks and disappointment, with wider fame always one step ahead of him. His premature death, at 39, shot dead under never quite fully agreed circumstances, left him more as a memory than his meagre lifetime of recordings could ever provide. Sittin’ With Blaze isn’t the first tribute set to his dedication, but is certainly of higher profile.
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The Tom Waits fanbase is not entirely starved for news lately, but most of it is about Waits’s acting career. On the music side, the news is small change: something about singing on a new Pogues tribute, and similar tidbits.
Chrissie Hynde has been a rock star for more than fifty years. The Pretenders have not been together quite that long, but Hynde was already making her name as a girl about town and rock-star-in-waiting in London. She has lived the life full-time for all of that period. It is a surprise, then, that she does not fully appreciate the credit that has accrued with that history, and how people still want to hear what she has to say.
Possibly not the snappiest of album titles, but if you know, you know, and it is everything, much more, that it says on the tin. Which is a long winded way of saying party time. Sorry, PARTY TIME! And there won’t be a better party this year, that is for sure, with Valcour Records hoovering up about as stratospheric a line up you could ever imagine, in support this timely celebration of Chenier, the coolest man to ever tote an accordion in the name of rock and roll. And blues. And soul. For that is, loosely, what zydeco is, a defiantly idiosyncratic mixture of all those musical forms, cooked up in the swamps of Louisiana. Often sung in French. Lead instrument accordion.