I think it pops just like the real book they got over at WAL-MART.
Alan also decided that he wants a web site. A real web site. One with streaming audio and video, and pages with photos and all that sort of thing, and who am I to say no to that? I discovered a whole treasure chest of 1989 DAT recordings and some of them are brilliant. The rest are pretty cool too, but mostly for the inimitable vibe and atmosphere they contain. After all, anyone who ever spent any time - even just an evening - at Alan's funhouse in Gray knows, this stuff was the omnipresent soundtrack of that world. For some of us, it was the soundtrack of an era.
So this page is now going to be a redirect for anyone who wants to get to the new site (once it gets up, of course) and are either too lazy hunt it down via Google or simply happen upon this portal and are too curiouse over what the hell this is all about to pass up clicking forward.
Here's the link.
Alan's wild run was all about the blues, and his blues were just as wild and unscripted as everything else that flared, freaked and flamed out around him. Meanwhile, the guy passed like a spirit through the entire conflagration and made us all wonder how it could be so easy to live between so many crossfires. In the cuts I've heard recently, the assortment of players (Jimmy Coupe, Al Brin, Chester, Iggy, Peter Daniels, and even I'm on one - I think), muddle along with moments of vague transcendence here and there as Al runs through it all like a yard dog let into the kitchen just before dinner, as free and unfettered as we each wish we could be for even a moment in our own lives.
Okay, it's not Miles Davis, but then Miles Davis might've liked this stuff a lot if he'd ever had a chance to sit with it and allow it to draw him in. I could imagine him with a set of phones and some time alone, with these Gray recordings making him smile. Miles appreciated freedom of expression, and this is raw freedom dancing with its pants off as the class soldiers on beneath it. I think Miles would've liked that aspect of what I discovered in the music that Al's W. Albany St. Blues became in the final months before the feds shut down the project and sent him out on the road.
On http://walbanystblues.com/ you'll have everything - the music, the photos, the bios, the footage, and yes, the book itself - at your fingertips, and some other cool innovations that may allow you to hang out for real with those renegades as it happened back in those dissident days as the go-go 80s got set to go away forever.
