Dr. Funkenstein. The Godfather of Funk. The cool ghoul with the funk transplant. Whatever name you know George Clinton by, when he and the massive collective that makes up Parliment Funkadelic come to town, especially to Washington, D.C., "One Nation Under a Groove" takes on a higher meaning. And on Tuesday, the 71-year-old Clinton and his ministers of funk took over the 930 Club stage to an audience ready to show him some major love. True, you wouldn't mistake the show for the Cap Center in the 1970s—the visually stunning Mothership(s) may have gone on to better (and worse) things, there was no flying bird, and the Godfather was sans dread locks and sporting a sharp suit. But it was still absolutely something to see. Chocolate City has long loved Clinton and P-Funk, and based on all of the dancing Tuesday night, this band will forever be good to the ear holes of Washington, D.C. Respect will always be paid.

Additional photos from the set can be seen here.

Wild Flag @ Black Cat

We covered a lot of music in pictures this year, but some truly stood out.

The show whose ticket needed to come with industrial-strength ear plugs...
Archers of Loaf at Black Cat (more photos here)

Dinosaur Jr. plays Bug at 930 Club (more photos here)

The coolest band reunion...
Dismemberment Plan at 930 Club (more photos here)

The show whose audience had the most members from other D.C. bands...
Office of Future Plans and Title Tracks at Fort Reno (more photos here)

John Davis at Luce Unplugged (more photos here)

Living legends who came to the area...
Bryan Ferry at Strathmore Music Center (more photos here)

Alejandro Escovedo at 930 Club (more photos here)

Show that resulted in the most bruises...
Marginal Man at Black Cat (more photos here)

2011 WCP Shows in Photos
Grant Hart In-Store @ Crooked Beat Records (Jan. 13)
Jason Isbell & 400 Unit @ 930 Club (Jan. 14)
Dismemberment Plan, Poor But Sexy, Batala @ 930 Club (Jan. 22)
Girl Talk @ 930 Club (Feb. 1)
Avett Brothers @ DAR Constitution Hall (Feb. 18)
Tommy Stinson, Mike Gent, Emily Roberts @ Iota (Feb. 17)
Jonathan Richman @ 930 Club (Feb. 26)
Middle Brother, Deer Tick, Dawes @ 930 Club (March 2)
SXSW 2011 @ Austin, TX (March 16-March 19)
Sebadoh @ Black Cat (March 2)
Mike Watt @ Black Cat Backstage (March 31)
The Black Angels @ 930 Club (April 3)
Wire, Weekend @ Black Cat (April 7)
Title Tracks CD Release Party @ Black Cat Backstage (April 20)
Alejandro Escovedo, Jesse Malin & St Marks Social @ 930 Club (May 1)
Tame Impala, Yuck @ Black Cat (May 6)
Surfer Blood @ Rock and Roll Hotel (May 10)
Ted Leo, Drew O'Doherty @ Black Cat Backstage (May 14)
Neko Case, Y La Bamba @ Black Cat (May 13)
Sondre Lerche @ 930 Club (June 7)
Chris Mills @ DC9 (June 16)
Allo Darlin @ Black Cat Backstage (June 16)
The Feelies @ 930 Club (June 18)
Dinosaur Jr Plays Bug@ 930 Club (June 24)
Deleted Scenes @ Black Cat Backstage (July 16)
Title Tracks, Office of Future Plans @ Fort Reno (July 25)
Bon Iver @ 930 Club (Aug. 2)
Archers of Loaf @ Black Cat (Aug. 5)
Marginal Man Reunion @ Black Cat (Aug. 20)
Virgin FreeFest 2011 @ Merriweather Post Pavilion (Sept. 11)
Cymbals Eat Guitars @ Black Cat (Sept. 24)
Wilco @ Merriweather Post Pavilion (Sept. 25)
Bryan Ferry @ Strathmore Music Center (Oct. 3)
Jens Lekman @ Sixth & I Synagogue (Oct. 5)
Wild Flag @ Black Cat (Oct. 20)
St Vincent @ 930 Club (Nov. 1)
Blind Pilot @ 930 Club (Nov. 6)
John Davis @ Luce Center, Smithsonian Museum (Dec. 18)

Kropp says there are plenty of recordings that get sucked into a black hole only to pop up at some point later, including some reel-to-reel promos for the station by The Beatles. In fact, he says he found a copy of that Elliott Smith session back in 2004. So, he did what any curious crate-digger would do: He ripped a copy of it. But Kropp "never thought to share it with any of my friends," and he didn't know that the recordings he found contained an unreleased song. He was just pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the session after hearing whispers about its existence.

The same goes for former WMUC live music director Chris Henry when he found a CD copy of the performance back in 2009. As live music director, Henry was responsible for running Third Rail Radio, the program Smith appeared on in 1996, but he discovered the CD before he ran that show. Henry wasn't even trying to find a recording of Smith's set when he decided to go digging through the archives, though he'd heard about it—he was actually hunting for a rumored WMUC performance by Will Oldham. But when he found it in a binder, he opted to do the same thing Kropp did some five years prior. "I had an engineer make a copy for me and I brought the copy back to my apartment and ripped it to my computer," Henry says.

Henry placed that CD back in its original file, where it probably still remains. ("It sort of surprised me that nobody touched the CD after that, which I think is kind of odd," he says.) He named the 10 tracks he ripped onto his computer as best he could, and gave the lead-off tune the title "Division Day, Take 1." That's because on the recording Smith began playing "Division Day" for about 20 seconds before stopping, mumbling, and eventually performing that impromptu version of "Misery Let Me Down." Like Kropp, Henry wasn't aware that the tune that followed his aborted take of "Division Day" was an unreleased gem. He learned that last Friday, long after he passed the digital files along to WMUC co-music director Vaman Muppala.

"It's always been a legend at the station," Muppala says of the Smith session. It landed in his lap in the form of a curious package from Weisholtz. As Malitz wrote, Muppala found a MiniDisc marked "Elliott Smith/Braid" in the package. But he couldn't do anything with it: Muppala hadn't seen anyone use a MiniDisc player at the station. Ripping the session from the disc got added to a future "to do" list, but nothing could be done then. That's where Henry came in.

When Muppala realized Henry had a digital version of the tracks—albeit a rip of a rip of the original MiniDisc—he asked him for a copy. Henry passed it along and uploaded the session to WMUC's digital music archive. In the wee hours of Oct. 17, Muppala sent an e-mail about the session's availability to the station's listserv with a subject that captured his rapt excitement: "Live at WMUC! on the music Archive and ELLIOTT EFFING SMITH." DJ Leila Mays played one of those songs almost two weeks later, and her public playlist helped lead to the realization that the session contained an unreleased tune.

Since the news of the session went viral, Muppala has been swift to try and set the record straight and give proper credit to Henry. That's because the session he uploaded to the digital archive didn't come directly from the MiniDisc Weisholtz sent him, but the copy of a CD copy Henry made in 2009. After Malitz's piece went live, Muppala wrote a humorous, scatterbrained post on WMUC's Tumblr explaining how the tracks got online and included a link to an edited version of the session. And the story keeps evolving: Muppala says that WMUC record librarian David Taylor is working on ripping the original session from the MiniDisc in order to obtain a higher quality version of the recording, and Muppala adds that Braid singer-guitarist Bob Nanna called the station to clarify that his band did not perform with Smith as Muppala's post indicates.

Discovery stories aside, Smith fans got their wish: a digital file of his WMUC show. Yet, it appears that new, slightly edited versions of that session dilute his set into listenable clips. (The above YouTube clip only contains the "Misery Let Me Down" cut, while the Click Track piece contains a slightly longer version with Smith introducing the tune saying "can I like warm up and play a song before we tape?") The reality of the performance is quite different.

"It's kind of a sad thing to listen to," Kropp says. Some on-air sets can be rough around the edges, but Smith's stripped-down show is messy to the core. He stumbled through the rest of the session after playing "Misery Let Me Down": He made two more attempts of "Division Day," a couple takes of "Say Yes," and also performed "Thirteen," "2:45 AM," and "Alameda." Along the way, you can hear him break-off mid-song, pause to fix his headphones, mumble, profusely apologize, and anxiously pick at his guitar. On Click Track, Third Rail Radio creator Eric Speck relates his impression of Smith, saying "He was SHOCKINGLY shy and it became clear he had on air jitters. He pretty much locked himself in the promotion office—alone—to tune and practice. He was super nice, but very sullen and soft spoken."

"I think he was wasted on cough syrup, this is how the story is told," Kropp says. In fact, between his first try at "Division Day" and "Misery Let Me Down," Smith mutters, "I just need to wake up. I took some Nyquil." That could also partly explain his erratic behavior during the session, and why "Misery Let Me Down" abruptly ends seemingly mid-song. Looking back on it, it's hard not to re-contextualize the event in regards to the painful personal issues Smith grappled with and his early death in 2003.

Needless to say, it's an interesting document, and perhaps one of many waiting to be dug up at WMUC. Muppala says there are plenty of recordings from now-legendary bands like Q And Not U sitting in the station, and he's heard rumors of a Fugazi MiniDisc floating around. "There's definitely more shocking MiniDiscs to be found," he says. And finds like the Elliott Smith session remind old WMUC members the joys of their own musical treasure hunts. "It's fun to see that happen, because everyone gets to relive that discovery," Kropp says. For Kropp, it's stories like these that help build a special mythos around the station. "It's like Hogwarts with music," he says.

Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, played to a sold-out 9:30 Club last night, pairing her ethereal voice with off-kilter indie-pop melodies full of sometimes-frantic beats and a bass sound so big it would have made Chuck D jealous. From the start of "Surgeon" to the finale of "Your Lips are Red," she had the crowd in the palm of her delicate hand.

Additional photos from the set can be seen here.

"You know when you have the same dream for 740 nights in a row?" When Swedish singer/songwriter Jens Lekman asked this question to a sold-out crowd at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue last night, he phrased it so sincerely that you almost re-examined whether you actually had. Out supporting his EP An Argument With Myself, Lekman told beautiful musical stories that were quaint and odd, but still somehow managed to speak to the human condition. Jonathan Richman would be proud.

See additional photos from the set here.

Former Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas (not pictured) titled his Elvis Costello-offending memoir "The Big Wheel."

Even so, he changed things up impressively from when he brought his Spectacular Spinning Songbook to Wolf Trap’s Filene Center back in June, repeating only eight tunes from the three-dozen-song epic he performed then. (You’re welcome, trainspotters. Someone has to pay attention to this shit.) You need a deep catalog of strong material to get away with that. (I'd already heard Nick Lowe play "Alison" when he opened for Wilco Sunday night, so I didn't mind that Elvis, or perhaps his wheel, chose last night to give his most resilient crowd-pleaser a rest for once.)

The Spinning Songbook is a game-show-style wheel Elvis has been using this year to keep his setlists from becoming too predictable. He first toured this concept in 1986-7, when these songs would’ve been fresh; he hadn’t revived it since. There’s a carnivalesque atmosphere to these shows, with Elvis pulling double duty as event MC Napoleon Dynamite, abetted by two lovely assistants and a go-go cage audience members can dance in if they’re brought on stage to spin the wheel. (Guest hosts on the 1986 tour included Roberto Benigni and Tom Waits. That’s some inspired casting, there.)

Anywho, here’s the rundown on five of the wheel-selected songs performed last night that you won’t find on the many, many best-of (and rest-of) compilations Mr. Declan Patrick MacManus has given us over the many, many years.

(1) “The Other End of the Telescope.” Elvis shares credit on this farewell ballad with Aimee Mann, which first appeared on the third and final ‘Til Tuesday album, Everything’s Different Now, in 1988. Elvis’s own version opens his marvelous 1996 set All This Useless Beauty, an attempt to reclaim some of the songs he’d written for other artists.

One of that album's strongest tracks is “Complicated Shadows,” a don't-take-your-guns-to-town sort of thing he wrote for Johnny Cash. Cash never recorded it, though he did cut a different song Elvis wrote for him called “Hidden Shame", and he also used a cover of Elvis’s “The Big Light” to open his Johnny Cash is Coming to Town album in 1987. Of the sole song Cash and Costello ever recorded together—a cover of George Jones’s “We Oughtta Be Ashamed” cut at then-Cash-son-in-law Nick Lowe’s home studio the day after Christmas, 1979—Costello once quipped, “the title proved to be prophetic.”

Elvis has a history of singing Johnny Cash songs. When the spinning songbook landed on “CASH” last night, the result was back-to-back covers of “Cry, Cry, Cry” and a haunting, solo acoustic (2) “I Still Miss Someone.” It wasn’t as great as the many occasions on which he has performed this song with Emmylou Harris, but it was pretty goddamn good.

Another of last night’s jackpot selections was “TIME”, prompting performances of Elvis’s “Strict Time,” “Man Out of Time,” and “Next Time ‘Round,” followed by — and this was a delightful surprise—(3) The Rolling Stones’s “Out of Time,” from the mid-60s, when they could do no wrong. Elvis wandered the Warner’s aisles as he dug into the kiss-off's refrain, finally inciting the largely trousers-and-Blackberries crowd to stand and sing.

Other surprises? Well, Elvis got the crowd to sit still for four tracks from his most recent release, National Ransom, a generally well-regarded effort that even I haven't spent much time with. He performed three of them in a single solo acoustic sequence, after the Imposters had taken their first bow following a smoldering “I Want You.” Near the end of the fizzy (4) “A Slow Drag of Josephine,” he broke out one of his better tricks, stepping away from the microphone to fill the hall with his unamplified voice. You know who takes this as an invitation to clap along? The kind of jackass who needs to have his hands amputated, that's who.

The Imposters returned to the stage to join him on “Sleep of the Just,” a ballad from 1986’s King of America that felt of-a-piece with National Ransom’s caravan of weary hustlers, deserters, and entertainers.

Imperial Bedroom, the 1982 album that brought a previously-unsuspected lushness and gloss to the Attractions's sound, got a lot of play last night. A pair of its selections, “Beyond Belief” and “Man Out of Time” appear on the long-supplanted single-disc compilation The Very Best of Elvis Costello & The Attractions (my personal gateway drug to this music) and thus can’t really be counted as rarities. But two IB album cuts made the gig, too, "Town Cryer" and "You Little Fool." Please enjoy these official music videos for (5) "You Little Fool" and (6) “New Lace Sleeves,” which showed up as another audience-pick late in the show. They differ radically in their approach, hiding their singer and putting him front and center, respectively, but they wear their early-Thatcher-era incept dates with equal pride.

Man, this cat has written a lot of good songs, holy cow.

Oh, here's the complete setlist:

01 Lipstick Vogue
02 Watching the Detectives
03 So Like Candy / Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (The Animals)
04 The Other End of the Telescope
05 All-Time Doll
06 Strict Time
07 Man Out of Time
08 Next Time ‘Round
09 Out of Time (The Rolling Stones)
10 Cry, Cry, Cry (Johnny Cash)
11 I Still Miss Someone (Johnny Cash)
12 Town Cryer
13 You Little Fool
14 Pump It Up
15 Heart of the City (Nick Lowe)
16 (I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea
17 I Want You

ENCORE

18 All These Strangers (solo acoustic)
19 A Slow Drag with Josephine (solo acoustic)
20 Bullets for the Newborn King (solo acoustic)
21 Sleep of the Just

ENCORE 2

22 Welcome to the Working Week
23 No Action
24 Uncomplicated
25 Beyond Belief
26 New Lace Sleeves
27 National Ransom
28 (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?

The sun shone bright Saturday at this year's Virgin FreeFest at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and while the grounds were a bit muddier than last year, at least the Dance Forest wasn't as dusty. It was the first nice afternoon in weeks—as well as the day before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and the start of Ethiopian New Year, as we learned from Patti Smith—so this year's lineup, heavier on the synth and electronica acts than years past, provided an upbeat soundtrack to a beautiful day.

Grace Potter & the Nocturnals

Cut Copy

!!!

Patti Smith

Cee Lo

TV on the Radio

The Black Keys

Deadmau5

Additional photos from Virgin FreeFest sets and people can be found here.

Marginal Man, one of the early bands on Dischord Records, played a one-off reunion show to a packed Black Cat on Saturday night. "When [Government Issue] did their reunion show back in December, [Marginal Man drummer] Mike Manos and I sat in on a couple of Marginal Man songs with Set to Explode, who opened for GI that night," said Marginal Man guitarist Kenny Inouye recently. "It was a fun time, and it got even more folks hitting us up to do a reunion show."

There may have been a general age difference of 20 or 30 years between the crowd in the mosh pit for Marginal Man and the crowd for the opener Strike Anywhere, but the ferocity and power was intense across the board. Signs reading "No crowd surfing or stage diving allowed" were nothing more than decorations.

All proceeds from T-shirt sales went to the Shirts for a Cure, an arm of the Baltimore-based Syrentha J. Savio Endowment, which provides financial assistance to underprivileged woman who cannot afford the expense of fighting breast cancer. SSE's Mark Beemer said the Marginal Man shirts from Saturday will be available for mail order shortly; look for an announcement on the Marginal Man website and Facebook pages.

All photos from the Marginal Man show can be seen here.

This is what an angklung looks like.

Right now, a hall in the Indonesian Embassy is filled with boxes containing a total of 5,000 angklungs—an ancient Indonesian instrument that, when played en masse, might remind you of your elementary school bell choir. On Saturday at 4 p.m., Indonesian Embassy officials will hand them out on the National Mall just north of the Washington Monument and attempt to set the world record for the largest gathering of angklung players.

What song will the ensemble play? "We Are the World"—that treacly Michael Jackson/Lionel Richie fundraising classic.

"That song reflects … the theme of Indonesian Festival, which is celebrating multiculturalism," says embassy spokesperson Heru Soebolo. "We are different people with different nationalities and different kinds of languages and cultures, but we are one world."

We also have different musical languages—with traditional angklung tuned to a five-note Indonesian scale that sounds rather foreign to Western ears. Saturday's angklung choir, however, has been tuned to the eight-note Western scale. That's because our scale, for better or worse, has become music's lingua franca. "It's the international standard," says Soebolo.

Though only about 1,600 people have signed up so far, smart money is on the record being set Saturday—as it's never been attempted before. To participate, just show up in a red or white shirt, or sign up by emailing indofest2011@embassyofindonesia.org. You'll receive a batik scarf or bandana, and you'll get to take home your angklung.

The world record attempt is part of the Indonesian Festival, which includes cultural demonstrations and, for some reason, a performance by the '80s soft rock duo Air Supply.

Image via Flickr user asfarian, creative commons generic 2.0

Alejandro Escovedo is one of those artists who has lived three or four lives in the space of one. He's seen what most have only read about in books, and thankfully, puts these experiences into his songs for us to hear. Escovedo brought his genre-spanning catalog to the 9:30 Club stage on Sunday with his usual self-possessed elegance. On songs like his anguished cover of The Band's "It Makes No Difference" and his searing "Chelsea Hotel '78," Escovedo proved Rolling Stone writer David Fricke right once again: "Musically, Alejandro Escovedo is in his own genre."

Jesse Malin & St. Mark's Social were the perfect choice as opener. While Malin's set was tremendous by itself, the two bands joining together for Escovedo's encore of Whiskeytown's "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight," The Rolling Stones' "Miss You," and Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" was pure joy.

Alejandro Escovedo

Alejandro Escovedo encore with Jesse Malin & St. Mark's Social

Jesse Malin & St. Mark's Social

(More photos from all sets can be seen here.)