“I don’t even like jam bands,” the engineer told me at Will Call. “I just come to these things to get high.”

I nodded at the child strapped to his back. “You folks are in good company, then. The Beautiful People are out in full force tonight.”

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NPR Music reports that Columbia is releasing Tell Tale Signs—Volume 8 of the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series—on October 7. (Click here for full streaming audio.) The new two-disc album chronicles a period of resurgence for the poet laureate of rock ‘n roll, involving several excellent bands, lots of lovely wordplay, and a tasteful minimum of proselytization.

Previous entries in the (thoroughly official and hardly bootleg) series include the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert (Judas, anyone?), Live 1975 (which documents the Rolling Thunder Tour), and the soundtrack from Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home.

So what’s new in this iteration? Much over which to rejoice, in fact. Besides offering a far crisper sound than any of the previous seven volumes, Tell Tale Signs features solid alt-takes from Oh, Mercy (”Most of the Time” and “Everything Is Broken,” especially), some fun David Bromberg and Ralph Stanley collaborations, two (two!) versions of “Mississippi” (a neat little unreleased tune left in the wake of Time Out of Mind), and a jivin’ live version of “Cocaine Blues.”

Listen below to “Dreamin’ of You,” the pre-release single also available for free download here.

Bob Dylan, “Dreamin’ of You”:

Photo courtesy of JL2003

The Music Builds Tour, a collaboration between LiveNation, Hollywood for Habitat for Humanity, and the bands (Jars of Clay, Robert Randolph & Co., Switchfoot and Third Day) came to Nissan Pavilion on Sunday, raising cash for local Habitat chapters and bringing some of that New-Time religion to Bristow.

Most went to see Switchfoot and Third Day; I went for Robert Randolph, with whom I’ve been relatively obsessed since Live at the Wetlands. To say that the gospel-steel messiah stuck out from the Christian rock acts that bookended him would be…something of an understatement. Picture Buddy Guy opening for the Monkees.

Randolph led the Family Band through a maddeningly short but immensely satisfying set that comprised key tracks from Undeclared and Wetlands and, surprisingly, none from Colorblind, the group’s latest LP. The highlight? “The March” (including a heavenly digression into “When the Saints Go Marching In”) and “I Don’t Know What You Come to Do,” which featured the band’s signature swapping of instruments. Randolph can play the bass and the six-string with a fever approaching his 13-string pedal steel pyrotechnics, but his drumming is lights-out.

When the Family Band tosses instruments back and forth, it’s no gimmicky display of virtuosity; it bespeaks a musical generosity rare among bands and doubly so among virtuosos. Their exuberance inheres in the collective, their faith not in lyrical heaviness but in the ascendent jam. And on Sunday, this approach rendered irrelevant all earthly gripes one had with the concert—the PA complications marring the bass intro to “I Need More Love,” the glaring discrepancy between Randolph and the other bands, the observation that, in typical TicketMaster style, the “benefit” tour raises only $1 per ticket for Habitat.

For Randolph, the music is the family; the family is the message. And in following their bliss, the band delivers yours as well. The sun is setting behind the pavilion; the man in the “Property of Jesus” shirt is dancing with his eyes closed; Jars of Clay are mercifully nowhere to be found; and the top of this hill is the center of the world.

We’re still waiting on a studio album that captures the sublimity of Randolph live, and we may never get it. (The clips below, I assure you, are far from a worthy substitute.) While we’re waiting, let’s hope for more collaborations like The Word, and give thanks that, for one Jersey guitarist, speed and noise are utterly compatible with grace.

“I Need More Love”:

“The March”:

“Ain’t Nothin Wrong with That”:

“Jesus Is Just Alright,” featuring Eric Clapton:

Sunday’s setlist:

• “Good Times (3 Stroke)”
• “I Need More Love”
• Jam with the sister
• “The March”
• “I Don’t Know What You Come to Do”

…and a vid of the band covering “Billie Jean”:

Photo courtesy of Nrbelex

Sad news for anyone awaiting a Pink Floyd reunion: Richard Wright, the band’s organist and one of its founding members, died today of cancer. He was 65.

Wright was the linchpin of the Floyd sound. That lush organ, with its beastly Leslies and bent-pitch contortions, preserved and broadened the breathless psychedelia that Syd Barrett had championed before his doomstruck descent into the rabbit hole—and beginning with Meddle, Wright led the great backbeat (spare drums, bass in the pocket, organ washes countering funk with fizz) that anchored all extended Floyd jams until The Final Cut (the only album on which he doesn’t play a note). Plus, the guy could sing. That nice high harmony on “Echoes”? That’s him.

Wright’s songwriting never got the credit it deserved, either from the masses or from Roger Waters, who eventually edged him out. The AP’s obfuscation of Wright’s writing credits is indicative of the backseat history has allotted him:

The band released a series of commercially and critically successful albums including 1973’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” which has sold more than 40 million copies. Wright wrote “The Great Gig In The Sky” and “Us And Them” for that album, and later worked on the group’s epic compositions such as “Atom Heart Mother,” “Echoes” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”

As many of the 40 million folks who’ve purchased Dark Side (not to mention the red-eyed hordes who’ve downloaded it illegally) can tell you, Atom Heart Mother dropped in 1970, and Meddle (on which “Echoes” debuted) in 1971—both of ‘em well before Dark Side.

“Shine On” appeared on 1975’s Wish You Were Here.

Below, a clip of Richard recording piano lines to “Us and Them.” Wisecracks courtesy of Nick Mason.

Shockapella report, RNC edition: Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha made a ruckus on Minnesota’s capital lawn after the fuzz 86′d their planned appearance onstage. The shenanigans went down on Tuesday; videos thereof appeared yesterday on Above the Fold.

Watch below to see what happens when a couple of scalawags get their hands on a megaphone. Oh, the impertinence!

“I’m a certified senior citizen/Got Florida on my mind/I won’t even mess/With checkers or chess/Just take me to the place where they bump ‘n’ grind….”

Though not characterized by the bump ‘n’ grind, Sunday’s 10 p.m. show at Blues Alley drew a rapt and well-dressed crowd of LP nerds, precocious twenty-somethings, and couples in search of an atmospheric canoodle to see Mose Allison, a man whom Pete Townshend once dubbed “the Blues Sage.”

Mose knows, as the saying goes. And more to the point, he still puts on one hell of a show.

It is now 50 years since Allison’s first release—the groovy Back Country Suite, with which Richard Fariña fell in love—and 80 since his birth, but heck if he ain’t still the cat of cats. His elegant blues (or is it demotic jazz?) is as sharp as ever, his swagger intact, his delivery sly but unaffected (few bluesman can pull off a phrase like “your little psychic walkabout”). Joined by Tony Martucci on drums and Tommy Cecil on bass, Allison stuck almost exclusively to originals, and his few covers tended less toward Nat “King” Cole smoothness and more toward the down-home stuff of Lefty Frizzell (”If You’ve Got the Money…”) and Muddy Waters (a fantastic “Catfish Blues”).

Punctuating each quip with a sneaky piano lick, Mose kept the interstitial passages jumping with manic rhythm in the right hand over the left hand’s open fifth/stride patterns—funky enough to make middle-aged white cats in wraparound shades convulse with (or against) the music, but not so frenetic as to threaten the breeziness of lyrics like “If silence was golden/You couldn’t raise a dime.”

There’s something tremendously boyish about an 80-year-old singing this stuff. Allison has always been an insistent naïf (with a nod, of course, and a wink), but now he seems doubly so. Sure, he occasionally finds himself a bit short of breath, and his upper register may have shriveled somewhat; but the sheer delight he takes in his own contradictions seems more exuberant, more self-evident—unshriveled, one might say, by the miles and the years. A “certified senior citizen” by his own account, Allison has broadened the facetious strain in his blues to make old age seem pretty cool.

In other words, the fellow who taught “Young Man’s Blues” to the Who certainly seems to be enjoying the fruits of his own senility.

It’s not just the ever-present half-smile, not just his private scat (which through the years has morphed from a Neal Cassady-type exhortation to a vaguely apprehensive creaking sound), not just an evergreen predilection, in both composition and interpretation, for the zippy one-liner…it’s the reactive dissonance of the old man singing the songs of youth, the wise guy playing the innocent, the white boy stealing the blues.

Parchman Farm:

Young Man’s Blues:

Set list, and recommended discs, below.

Oh, and here’s a video of “Mind on Vacation”:

Sunday’s 10 p.m. setlist:

• “Just Like Livin’”
• “Fool’s Paradise”
• “Swingin’ Machine”
• “Days Like This”
• “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”
• “Trouble In Mind”
• “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me”
• “Certified Senior Citizen”
• “Ever Since I Stole the Blues”
• “How Does It Feel? (To Be Good-Looking)”
• “What Do You Do After You Ruin Your Life”
• “Middle-Class White Boy”
• “That’s The Stuff You Gotta Watch”
• “Hello There, Universe”
• “Your Mind is on Vacation”
• “Catfish Blues”
• “This Ain’t Me” (encore)

Recommended discography:

• Back Country Suite (1957)
• The Seventh Son (1972)
• Middle-Class White Boy (1982)

…and, of course, the totally fun Greatest Hits (Prestige), to which Christgau gives the most lukewarm A- in CG history. Though it does overlap prodigiously with The Seventh Son.

Seriously, it’s been on repeat in the office all morning and doesn’t appear to be losing steam. “Strange Overtones,” they call it, and it rocks—in the offbeat, bouncily bittersweet way that you’d probably expect. It’s tight but expansive, rhythmically impeccable and certainly not—whatever Byrne may sing in the chorus—”slightly out of fashion.”

Download it here (free and legal!), or watch the, er, video below.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is available for digital download on August 18.

Before the picks, a video courtesy of the wayback machine and, uh, John Mayer’s blog, featuring Ray Charles and a particularly swangin’ Billy Preston.

Ongoing:

• Summer Concerts at Farragut Square—with its weekly cross-section of local rock—continues tonight and the following Thursday.
• Friday Night Live! Summer Concert Series in Herndon, VA.
• Check out the Silver Spring Summer Concert Series.

Tonight: The Console War at the Red and the Black; Dean Fields at Iota; Luke Brindley Band at Jammin’ Java; Salif Keita at the GWU Lisner Auditorium;

Saturday: Columbia Pike Blues Festival in Arlington; Frog Holler & Sarah Borges at Iota; War at Carter Barron Amphitheatre; New Day Rising at Kilroy’s; The Method, The Bourbon Dynasty, Airport Boulevard, Buck Forty Nine at the Red and the Black.

Sunday: Emmylou Harris at Wolf Trap; Cloak/Dagger, Transistor Transistor, New Idea Society at the Black Cat.

And for the final video this week: Emmylou’s performance in The Last Waltz.

P.S. Curm: I left you a couple strategic openings. Have at it!

Before the picks, a special video in honor of the opening day at Bonnaroo. It’s a neat little track from the sexiest tribute band ever: Lez Zeppelin.

Ongoing:

• Step Afrika tonight through Sunday at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, with a special Father’s Day performance to cap it off.
• Summer Concerts at Farragut Square—with its weekly cross-section of local rock—continues tonight and the following two Thursdays.
• Check out the Silver Spring Summer Concert Series.

Tonight: Fink at Iota; Jamie Lidell with Jennifer O’Connor at the 9:30 Club

Friday: Alicia Keys at the Verizon Center; Robert Plant and Allison Kraus at the Merriweather Post Pavilion; Justin Jones and the Driving Rain at the Rock & Roll Hotel.

Saturday: BSO with Barry Douglas at Strathmore; Gordon Lightfoot at Wolf Trap; Monday Michiru at Bohemian Caverns; Wooly Mammoth at the Rock & Roll Hotel; Slick Rick at Love.

Sunday: Shearwater at Black Cat; Major Stars at the Velvet Lounge; Tullycraft at the Red and the Black.

And the closing video: Major Stars wailing (or is it shredding?) in a kitchen. Definitely an 11 on the face-melt-o-meter.

Before the picks, a moment of silence for Bo Diddley…and a very special video:

Tonight: The Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band with Poco at Wolf Trap; James McMurtry (son of Larry) at Birchmere Music Hall; Manhattan Transfer at the Kennedy Center; T.I. at Love; Yell County with Julie Ocean and the City Veins at Iota.

Saturday: moe and Rusted Root at Wolf Trap; Chuck Brown with Midnight Starat the Carter Barron Amphitheatre; Jakob Dylan with Luke Brindley at the 9:30 Club.

Sunday: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at Nissan Pavilion; The Wailers at the Belmont Country Club; The Cool Kids at the Black Cat.

And this week’s video: the Cool Kids on “Black Mags.”