Not P:] Robyn Hitchcock Salutes Gillian Welch And David Rawlings

[Allan Balliett]

On Saturday, September 19, 2015, Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
>
> Robyn Hitchcock Salutes Gillian Welch And David Rawlings
>
>
> http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/09/18/441417024/robyn-hitchcock-sa
> lutes-gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings
> <http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/09/18/441417024/robyn-hitchcock-salutes-gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings>
>
> Robyn Hitchcock presented Gillian Welch and David Rawlings with the
> Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting at the Americana Music
> Association Honors and Awards Show on Sept. 16, 2015.
>
> Gala event tribute speeches are often so much fluff—in the right hands,
> however, they ascend to the level of the poetic. On Wednesday night in
> Nashville, Robyn Hitchcock's paean to his longtime friends and
> collaborators Gillian Welch and David Rawlings hit that high mark. Handing
> them a Lifetime Achievement prize at the Americana Honors and Awards,
> Hitchcock wove a tale that was also a dream history of American roots music
> itself. It was so good we decided to publish it. Do they give awards for
> awards show speeches? The man in the polka-dot shirt deserves one.
>
>
>
>     "We live, we die. Our earthly remains become compost from which
> eventually new bones may sprout; some demented gasoline for an as yet
> unsoiled future. We live and we die, but unless we drown in our own
> progress, or are pulverized by a whimsical asteroid, our culture goes on
> forever. Aside from expressing her or his response to the shock of
> existence, the artist gets to embed themselves in that culture: to become
> part of our own psychic compost.
>
>     "The artists we honor here tonight are a distillation of many before
> them, and of their contemporaries too. The deeper your roots, the broader
> your branches. Jimi Hendrix, the Louvin Brothers, the Pixies, Emmylou &
> Gram, the Stanleys and the Alpha Omega that is Bob Dylan are all present
> and roosting in their songs. Yet they sound like none of them.
>
>     "They've distilled so much of what America herself has distilled
> musically, time out of mind from the lake of mirrors that goes so deep you
> can't distinguish anything. Their alchemy has refined it into something so
> simple that nobody ever thought of it before, and now they're being openly
> copied by their many admirers.
>
>     "Like a jewel they have many facets. They may appear as an old time
> Appalachian pair, stood by a wooden wagon. Or as '90s indie rockers,
> finding the essence of a Radiohead song. Or they may strike you as a jam
> band. I've seen barefoot kids Dead-dancing to them in Golden Gate Park.
> She: the rhythm section, hair flowing like a Munch painting, slumped in
> spent ecstasy over her guitar. He: spinning out a cascade of notes from
> beneath his Freewheelin' Franklin hat, like an oddly sober Jerry Garcia.
>
>     "They are two beings in one entity. They are what John and Yoko might
> have been if they'd both played the guitar. They are whom I turn to for
> late night insomnia texting, for three-hour conversations about Dylan, for
> cover artwork and for high grade hoots in West L.A. Ladies and gentlemen,
> they are Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings."
> _______________________________________________
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150919/a1d22a7b/attachment.html>