David Cantwell writes:

This past Saturday, December 6th, made it twenty speedy years since the death of Roy Orbison. I mark the occasion with my latest column at No Depression by taking a look at the recently released Orbison box set, The Soul of Rock and Roll, and I thought I’d do something similar here at Living in Stereo. Below is an essay I wrote a few years back, also for No Depression, when Orbison’s first trio of Monument albums were reissued along with a new best of set.

The Essential Roy Orbison
Sings Lonely and Blue
Crying
In Dreams
Monument/Legacy

When describing Roy Orbison and his music, people reach for adjectives like “weird” and “otherworldly,” “eerie” and “haunting.” These word choices mean to underscore the ways in which Orbison stood apart from his rock-and-pop contemporaries. But such descriptions have the effect of separating Orbison from the sounds and trends of his era, as if he were not, like each of us, a person completely of his time.

He sure looked different. Perhaps—considering that Orbison eventually cloaked his weak and weensy eyes behind dark and thick prescription sunglasses, and the way his raven black pompadour clashed with the ghostly pallor of his skin; and recalling all of those songs about dreams and, of course, his trembling, sky-scraping tenor—perhaps he wasn’t even quite real. As Colin Escott has cleverly observed, “even the name ‘Roy Orbison’ had a touch of unreality. Do you know anyone else called ‘Orbison’?”

The conventional wisdom is that Orbison was unlike any and all other singers, before or since. And the “weird” factor only intensified after director David Lynch sparked Orbison’s 1980s comeback by having the singer re-record one of his most indelible songs, “In Dreams,” for that genuinely haunting scene in Blue Velvet.

But the original “In Dreams”—the one with the buoyant strings but without a lip-synching sociopath—isn’t a creepy record and wasn’t heard that way when it was a top ten hit in 1963. Rather, like so much of Orbison’s work, the original “In Dreams” is…fanciful. And not in any delusional or menacing sense, either, but wistfully so, achingly, and—very important, this–playfully.

There’s no better example of what I mean here than the famous opening lines to “In Dreams” itself: “A candy-colored clown they called the Sandman tip-toes through my room every night.” Orbison’s plea for a dream of the lover who has abandoned him is closer to, say, “The Nutcracker” (television versions aired in 1958 and 1961) or to Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams” (a crossover country hit from that same year) than to Lynch’s nightmare.

More specifically, “In Dreams” alludes to the Chordettes’ 1954 pop smash, “Mr. Sandman [send me a dream].” Orbison mines a conceit here that, while not exactly a pop cliché, was hardly sui generis, either

What is it about Orbison’s records that feels so different? Many explanations have been posited over the years, none of them very satisfactory.

Is it Orbison’s and producer Fred Foster’s oft-noted use of rhythmic and counter-melodic nonsense syllables? Definitely not. Any doo-wop fan would have been right at home with the “Dum- dum-dum, dum-dee-do-wah” that launched Orbison’s first big hit, “Only the Lonely,” or the “Sha la la, dooby wah, bum bum bum, yip yip bum” that kicked off his follow-up hit, “Blue Angel.” And in the early sixties, remember, radio was smack in the middle of a doo-wop revival.

Did Orbison’s records sound so different thanks to their lush, swelling arrangements or, perhaps, because of their sometimes faintly Latin-inflected rhythms? Not in an era when Orbison’s chart rivals included Phil Specter and Motown, “This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” the West Side Story soundtrack and the albums of Perez Prado.

Is the Orbison “trick” there in the intense drama of his vocal attack itself, particularly the way he flew his voice to such unexpected heights? The word people choose here is “operatic,” but even that’s misleading. Orbison’s vocals were more influenced by the Mexican singing he heard growing up in west Texas than by any love of opera. More to my point, the vibrato and soaring crescendos, the gulping emotionalism, that mark Orbison’s style also just happen to have marked the style of many of his pop contemporaries and their immediate predecessors.

Such as, to cite only a few examples: Tony Bennett, Johnny Ray, Jackie Wilson, Tony Williams of the Platters, Roy Hamilton, the Conway Twitty of “It’s Only Make Believe,” and the pop recordings of Mario Lanza, as well as the music of Johnny Mathis, Gene Pitney, Perry Como, and, of course, Bobby “Blue Velvet” Vinton.

My point is that even something so seemingly unprecedented as Orbison’s dramatic, soaring style of balladry was completely of a piece with his era, a style that was not just here and there but practically everywhere, common currency. One more example: You probably know that Orbsion’s “Only the Lonely” and such Orbisonesque kin as Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” and Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now Or Never” were all recorded with the same Nashville sessions pros. But did you know they were recorded the same week?

Roy Orbison’s three albums for Monument Records have now been reissued, just in time to commemorate what would have been the singer’s seventieth birthday. Each of them—Sings Lonely and Blue from 1960, Crying from 1962 and In Dreams from ’63—is a rock & roll classic, Nashville Sound division. Excellence aside, however, they are also entirely conventional records that include, alongside singles like “Crying” and “Running Scared,” covers of Don Gibson songs and recent hits by the Platters and Jim Reeves, as well as exquisite renderings of what were, even then, hoary chestnuts like Johnny Ray’s “Cry,” Johnny Mercer’s “Dream,” and Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.”

What to make of this? Well, for one thing, we can say that Roy Orbison was, to his immense credit, a member of the rock & roll generation who wanted to get real gone but who also wanted to come to terms with, embrace even, the Hit Parade as it had existed for decades—all the supposedly schlock that, we’re told, rock & roll sneered at and replaced.

You might miss all this, though, and much more, if all you have to go on is The Essential Roy Orbison, a two-disc collection that mistakes some interesting footnotes for key parts of the text. The most egregious example of this is that The Essential includes five tracks from Orbison’s comeback album Mystery Girl—fully half that Jeff Lynne-produced album—but a paltry four tracks from the entirety of Orbison’s MGM tenure, where the Big “O” spent nearly a decade and released 11 albums.

The Essential Roy Orbison also omits entirely the singer’s pre-Sun RCA recordings, and it includes not one track from the albums he released between his departure from MGM and his late ‘80s return to prominence. And a disc entitled The Essential Roy Orbison that doesn’t feature the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle with Care” can’t possibly live up to its billing. Orbison’s aching turn on the bridge of that 1988 hit single not only solidified his comeback but stands with the most thrilling moments of a career comprised of them.

The 1963 “In Dreams” is missing too, replaced by the inferior Blue Velvet version.  It’s in those original grooves that we can hear the essential Roy Orbison. The exemplary execution of its era’s crooning, vibrato-laden phrasing, bolero beat and pleading climaxes, and in its sweet evocation of swirling-stringed dreams, but also in the one obviously unique quality about Roy Orbison and his music…

That voice, all west-Texas pinched and nasal, a tenor with a tone—a texture, really—that feels lonely and elegant, sobbing yet stoic, and like no one else’s we’ve ever heard.

David Cantwell writes:

It’s that time of year again when people in my line of work are expected to compile a series of lists, honoring the best and worst whatevers of the preceding twelve months. And this annual necessity reminds me that one aspect of contemporary culture I am well past weary with is…The List.

Let me be precise here. I believe listmaking is a helpful, and sometimes even perhaps the best, way of foregrounding an argument. For example, Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made not only makes my short short list of essential pop music criticism; its list structure has inspired my own work. This is not because I appreciate so many of Marsh’s selections, though I do (He puts Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It through the Grapevine” at number one, a savvy choice), anymore than it is because I disagree with so many of his selections, though I do that as well (I’d go with the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” at number one) Listmaking’s enjoyments include the way lists alternately flatter our individual tastes and provide opprotunities to assert our distinctiveness.

Still, none of this accounts for the primary reasons I recommend to you, specifically, the listing in The Heart of Rock & Soul, nor does it explain why I have grown to loathe our listing culture, generally. THOR&S works, I think, because Marsh uses the list merely as a rhetorical tool to advance arguments about all sorts of bigger issues: about what qualities really are at the heart of rock & soul, for starters, and also about the importance to that heart of singles relative to albums, of reconcilliation revelevant to rebellion, of sound relevant to words, and so on.

(Typing this last sentence, I am struck, and not for the first time, that Marsh’s book might have been the first in what is termed today a poptimist approach to rock history. And, yes, I am well aware that observation directly contradicts Marsh’s reputation among many of those very same poptimists.)

When Bill Friskics-Warren and I wrote our Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s Greatest Singles (It makes a great Christmas gift!), we tried to follow Marsh’s model, laying out our arguments and criteria up front, then elaborating and illustrating those arguments via the book’s 500 cases in point. In our introduction we take Marsh’s motto as our own: “It’s a book, not a list.” We could as well have written, “It’s not a list; it’s an argument.”

Most lists out there these days, from all those list shows on E! or VH1, to Q’s Top Singers Ever or Rolling Stone lists of greatest albums or songs and so on and on, ad infinitum, are not making arguments. Indeed, they dismiss argument all together in favor of…well, I don’t know what. They’re just lists, at best rough drafts for an argument no one is willing to make, at worst an exercise not even in trivia but in randomness and arbitrary subjectivity.

Rolling Stone’s Greatest Singers of All-Time is the lastest example. First thing we notice is that “All-Time” means merely “since 1954 or so.” Aretha Franklin tops the list, and who could argue? I mean, seriously, without a thesis, some criteria, something, who could argue?

*****

Speaking of essential pop music criticism, Carl Wilson resports at Zoilus that his contribution to the 33 1/3 series, Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (I explain why here) has been selected by Toronto’s Globe & Mail as one of the best books of the year and by London’s Telegraph as a swell Christmas gift for music loving readers. Congratulations!

*****

My colleague here, Charles Hughes, and Living in Stereo’s best friend, Roy Kasten, both inform me they will be returning with contributions here soon. Some year-end lists perhaps?

David Cantwell writes:

I have a review of the book pictured above, Dana Jennings’ Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music, up at No Depression. Though I have a few caveats with Jennings’ approach, and still scratch my head at illustrating a book titled after a Merle Haggard song with a painting of Johnny Cash (even if it is by Laura Levine), I liked the book and recommend it. 

Also my most recent ND column took a look at the twang-centric HBO vampire series, True Blood.

On other fronts…I’ve become quite a fan of literary critic James Wood these last few years. He recently offered a deconstruction (to use a word I suspect he’d loathe) of Barack Obama’s victory speech that was typically sharp and moving, Woodsian…The London Times essays gender difference and musical taste in “Why Does Music So Often Divide the Sexes?” If the lists identifying what men and women alternately like and hate are any indication (and I doubt they are), then I am either asexual or a hemaphrodite…Finally, I was excited to learn that one of my favorite popular critics, Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker, has written a book about the film Scarface (the 1983 Pacino/DePalma version mostly, rather than the the 1932 Muni/Hawks one. Oh well…) and its influence on hip hop and other popular culture. He sketches his ideas a bit at his blog, Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture. I trust the books talks at length about the pertinent Geto Boy.

Finally, for further depressing instances of the headline to my last post, see the Associated Press story “Election Spurs ‘Hundreds’ of Race Threats, Crimes.”

David Cantwell writes:

The morning after we elected a new president of the United States, Michelle Malkin posted a blog entry entitled So Much for AmeriKKKa, in which she asked, “If we live in such a racist country as the friends and fellow travelers of Barack Obama have argued throughout this campaign season, how did AmeriKKKa end up electing The One?”

I hesitate to grant Malkin any credence as a serious commentator; she makes Bill O’Reilly look like King Solomon. But her question–actually, it’s an assertion impersonating a question–is one, unfortunately, I think many people will be asking over the next couple of months (and even though the friends and fellow travelers of The One have most definately not been arguing anything like Malkin’s straw figure). The short answer is that Malkin makes the mistake here of envisioning a world without greys, one where there is either racism or there isn’t. As I’ve tried to explain before, the issue of race in America demands more nuance.

But it’s the polarized, one-or-the-other, with-us-or-against-us, love-it-or-leave-it way that Malkin and so many others approach not just race but…everything that I want to talk about. At Zoilus, Carl Wilson recently wrote about so-called fan democracy and how it is representative of, or leads us to, political polarization, an attitude that says my choice is best and yours is not only different but evil, un-American, traitorous. Carl points us to an article by Univerisity of California-Berkely professor Abigail De Kosnik, which finds similiarities in “political constituencies and fan cultures.” So, per Wilson and De Kosnik, Hillary Clinton supporters bitterly predicted they would vote for John McCain before they would ever vote for Obama in a way not unlike some Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans were actively angered that Buffy and Spike didn’t stay together.

Though there is a new found sense of good feeling in the air this week, we’re also seeing a great deal of rage over Obama’s election. He hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but there are already a few Impeach Obama groups on Facebook, and you can purchase a t-shirt expressing the same sentiment at Cafe Press. What’s more, people continue to harp on Obama’s connections to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers (P. J. O’Rourke at the Weekly Standard won’t let it go, neither will E. Thomas McClanahan at the Star here in Kansas City, and so many others). His associations, we’re told, don’t just make Obama a poor choice but an illegitimate one.

I’ve been wondering lately if there isn’t something built into American politics, something fundamental, that at the very least encourages this sort of hostile, scorched earth, zero-sum approach to political life. When you have only two not-so-different-as-we-like-to-think political parties to choose from, and when even the electoral college system is all or nothing (except in Nebraska and Maine), perhaps the wonder is how we aren’t even more polarized than we are. This state of affairs, where everything gets reduced to one or the other, is actually quite consistent with a disdain for nuance, and it rewards the bullying personal styles of commentators, politicians and just plain cititizens alike. Could it be that more political choices, not to mention proportional representation, would by definition push us to coalitions and to practical compromise?

Obama plays the game differently, sometimes, and that is one of the reasons I’ve been attracted to his style (if not always to his politics). To pick just one example…After the first debate, McCain was commended for prefacing his remarks with “Senator Obama is wrong” or “He just doesn’t get it.” This purely adversarial approach was seen as a sign of McCain’s strength. Obama, on the other hand, was mocked after that encounter for frequently beginning his comments with some version or other of “He’s correct.” Never mind that each “He’s correct” inevitably led to a “But…” I still appreciated that Obama’s instinct appeared to be to identify the common ground.

*****

I’m optimistic about an Obama administration, though I think people are also getting a bit carried away in their praise for just what this election portends. Each time I hear that parents can now, finally, honestly, tell their children, see, anyone can make it here, I want to remind the speaker that Barack Obama may be our first obviously half-white president (a mutt, as he called himself this week), but he is not, say, our first jewish, atheist lesbian president.

On the other hand, am I the only one who found each revelation of Obama’s “sinister” associations to be just one more reason for optimism? I’ve written here before that Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, however limited it actually was, is an example of the sort of concrete pragmatism that Americans, particularly conservative Americans, once valued. Ditto his alleged willingness to sit down with any leader, even without pre-conditions, if it might lead to a safer planet.

I’ll take it a step further. I don’t think Obama’s a socialist, but his history suggests to me that he might actually understand the term (unlike, say, Jonah Goldberg, Sean Hannity or Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Malkin, Sarah Palin, or Joe the Plumber). He might even have studied some Marx along the way. Therefore, he might understand just a tad bit better the built-in cruelties–”immoralities” would be a better word–of capitalism in a way that free-market fundamentalists never can. Similarly, I don’t think Obama is a radical on issues of race. But it seems fair to assume that anyone who spent twenty years listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright would be conversant with, and at least partially sympathetic to, a critique of white supremacy, which at any rate, as I’ve written before, is hardly as radical or shocking as is usually claimed. To my mind, that’s all potentially to the good. How good? We’ll see…

David Cantwell writes:

A small thing but appropriate…I awoke Wednesday and set about my morning ritual of reading the paper, drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword, and in the edition of the puzzle in that day’s Kansas City Star I found the clue: “poem with the line, ‘They send me to eat in the kitchen’.” The answer, of course, is “I, Too,” the 1932 poem by Langston Hughes. The poem was, in part, a response to Walt Whitman’s famous “I Hear America Singing,” which catalogs American types but neglects to include any black Americans. ”I, Too” predicts a day when “I’ll sit at the table/When company comes/Nobody’ll dare/Say to me/’Eat in the kitchen’/Then.”

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am.

And be ashamed–

I, too, am America.

Besides arriving on the very morning when Hughes’ prediction had come true in a new and, until very recently, unexpected way, this was an apt start to my day because in one of the classes I’m teaching this semester we had just that Monday completed an all too brief look at the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. My freshman students were particularly impressed with the work of Claude McKay, who, in poems such as “America” and “If We Must Die” (a 1919 response, in part, to the lynchings and riots of the so-called Red Summer), and called his country on its brutal racism. We decided our favorite of McKay’s poems, though, and in no small measure because of what we expected would happen this week, was the following sonnet from 1932.

The White House

Your door is shut against my tightened face,

And I am sharp as steel with discontent;

But I possess the courage and the grace

To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,

And passion rends my vitals as I pass,

A chafing savage, down in the decent street,

Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.

Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,

Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,

And find in it the superhuman power

To hold me to the letter of your law! 

Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate

Against the poison of your deadly hate.

David Cantwell writes:

I have a piece today at No Depression on the late, great Levi Stubbs (he’s on the far left, above) and, especially, on what I think is the Four Tops greatest record, “Bernadette.” It would be enough if all Stubbs had ever done was to voice that number, let alone ”Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” and the rest of the Tops’ best-known hits. But, as my headline suggests, I want to talk here about a different side of Stubbs’ art.

In The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, in his entry for “Reach Out I’ll Be There” that holds that book’s number four position, Dave Marsh notes that “Even Stubbs fans understand why his style can be too declamatory.” As a Stubbs’ fan myself, I second Marsh’s emotion. When you want subtle and dynamic phrasing in your Motown vocalists, you’d be better off listening to the hits of David Ruffin, Marvin Gaye or Gladys Knight.

Stubbs wasn’t always declamatory, though. He could, when a song demanded it, sing with nuance in a relaxed, quiet, conversational style. This Stubbs-ian approach is most obvious on the many pop covers the group did, especially after Holland-Dozier-Holland left the label and took their songwriting and production genius with them. On the Tops’ versions of “Honey,” “Sunny,” “Light My Fire,” and “If I Were a Carpenter,” for examples, a subdued Levi Stubbs reins in his soul shout and speaks in another common language of his era, the crooned pop-rock cover. His voice in these instances is no longer loud but it is no less clear. Likewise, the Tops’ take on the Glen Campbell hit, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” is much more of a conventional cover than Isaac Hayes’ epic rendering of the same song but it is no less affecting.

Stubbs’ pop abilities are no surprise. As a precocious pre-teen, Stubbs sometimes wowed the crowds at Detroit’s Paradise Club, where Duke Ellington and Lucky Millinder played when they visited the Motor City. That is, pop was in Stubbs’ blood, so to speak, at a very young age, and he continued in that vein for years before he and his fellow Tops became famous.

Motown was already playing in the big leagues—the Temptations, Miracles, and Supremes, as well as Martha Reeves and Marvin Gaye, were already national stars—by the time the Tops ever scored a hit. So Stubbs and company must have seemed an overnight success when in 1964, with their debut Motown release, they climbed high with “Baby, I Need Your Loving” on both the R&B and pop charts. Actually, though, the quartet had been banging around since the early 1950s, singing show tunes and assorted pop fare for supper club crowds in the Motor City area.

They sang, too, for a short time, on tour behind their eventual Motown label mate Billy Eckstine, and every once in a while someone gave them a chance to make a record that no one bought: “Pennies from Heaven,” for instance, which they cut for Riverside in 1962. Even after signing to Motown, the Tops spent a year recording pop standards for Motown’s jazz imprint, Workshop (sides that went unreleased, as it turned out, until 1998).

Levi Stubbs sang lead on several of my favorite records ever, and there are several fine versions of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Stubbs’ version of that standard sits close to the top of both of those lists.

The Four Tops “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” from Yesterday’s Dreams (Motown, 1968)

David Cantwell writes:

Some friends and I (apparently, about 75,000 of them) attended the Barack Obama rally yesterday here in Kansas City. It was not as inspiring an experience as I had held out hope it might be. Stump speeches are stump speeches, after all, especially these days when you can hear and see them, and likely have heard and seen them, repeatedly, from the comfort of your couch or computer desk already. Too, there is something about standing crowded elbow to elbow with thousands of people for three hours that tends to sap enthusiasm.

At the same time, the Liberty Memorial site is always dramatic, though not nearly as dramatic as being in the most racially (and otherwise) integrated crowd of which I’ve ever been a member. That mass of people included one woman next to us who, as Obama was leaving the stage, danced joyously to what she told us what her deceased parents’ favorite song, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed and Delivered.” At one point, she shouted to the sky, “Mama and Papa, I’m dancing to your favorite song and a black man is gonna be president!” 

On a related note…Earlier in the week, my wife and I had recieved one of those robocalls from the McCain campaign. It said:

“You need to know that Barrack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers whose organization bombed the US Capital, the Pentagon, a judge’s home, and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barrack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin, 2008 and the Republican National Committee…”

I have grown so weary of this obsession with Bill Ayers. Infuriated too, particularly with the way the GOP uses the “issue” as a way of changing the subject. (Another example of this McCain strategy was his mock indignation that Representative John Lewis had accused him not of the potential crime of unwittingly inciting violence but of, for Christ sake, supporting segregation! Diane McWhorter has penned an excellent piece on this foolishness for Slate.) According to McCain-Palin, Obama should have had this response upon being first introduced to Ayers in 1995 and then being asked to work with him: “Wait a minute…are you the Bill Ayers from the Weather Underground?” I dare say virtually no one, including John McCain and Sarah Palin, would have been able to identify immediately and to reject instantly the Univeristy of Illinois professor and Annenberg Foundation grant winner at that time, even if they had wanted to. I know I wouldn’t have recognized the name and therefore wouldn’t have seen the invitation as an issue one way or the other.

Of course, I’m sure that at some point, perhaps even earlier than Ayers’ commendation as Chicago’s 1997 Citizen of the Year, Obama learned of Ayers’ past. I wish Obama would own that knowledge more strenuously than he has. I also wish he’d own his decision to go ahead and work with Ayers anyway by reason of that most American of virtues, pragmatism.  That is, it is far better to work with Ayers, despite his history, in order to advance Chicago education reform than it would be to walk away from that concrete effort in defense of some abstract sense of political purity.

McCain-Palin like to say this Ayers’ association was a test of Obama’s judgement, and I think they are exactly right. It’s also a test he appears to have passed with flying colors.

David Cantwell writes:

Turns out the rumors (news accounts, actually) of the demise of No Depression were, if not exaggerated than at least premature. The one time print magazine will live on in at least two new formats. First, the magazine, which during its original run hardly had any web presence at all, has now launched on on-line version of itself that includes album, book and concert reviews, occasional features, and a host of regular columnists, including old ND hands Don McLeese, Allison Stewart, our good friend Barry Mazor, Lloyd Sachs, Kurt B. Reighley, Paul Cantin, editors Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden, and yours truly. (I have a piece there this morning, for instance, on the import of Darius Rucker becoming the first black man in a quarter century to top the country singles chart). 

Second, ND will exist in print again, twice a year, in a form they’re calling the Bookazine, a paperback book-bound publication chock full of the magazine’s signature style–long form features–but without the advertising. The first of these is pictured above. From the web site:

No Depression and University of Texas Press have joined forces to produce a new “bookazine” – a book/magazine hybrid, edited by No Depression cofounders Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock, which will be issued twice annually. The first edition, due out in October 2008, is identified as No Depression #76, acknowledging the tradition of its 75 predecessors from the publication’s 13-year history as a magazine.

This debut issue centers on the regeneration of the roots music community and extends the theme of the magazine’s March-April 2008 cover story, a collective overview of the changes swirling around an impressive community of young string bands. Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet are featured on the cover.

In addition to more than a dozen feature articles (ranging in length from four to 14 pages), ND #76 inclues a photo essay featuring the works of many of the magazine’s most frequently-featured photographers over from the past decade. The bookazine concludes with a 14-page appendix featuring extended reviews of 11 high-profile albums released during the past few months. 

Those features include a piece I’ve done and am quite proud of on…Hanson!. Also Roy Kasten, Living in Stereo’s Best Friend, on the Duhks, and Edd Hurt on the Homemade Jamz Blues Band. You can order a copy at NoDepression.com and at Amazon, or pick one up at your local bookseller. Stop by the new site and let us know what you think.