Author: Vincent Abbate

WIB Listening Party #37: Let’s Buzz!

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featuring…

♫ The Paladins, Let’s Buzz!

🍺 La Quince Queens Kellerbier

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Dear reader, welcome to 2022. If you’re new to the Listening Party, this regular blog post is where I celebrate two of my biggest enthusiasms, a pair of wonderful inventions that were seemingly made for one another: beer and blues. I do that by spotlighting one standout album from my record collection while cracking open a single vessel of exceptional beer. The majority are sourced from a local craft beer retailer, my Listening Party partner Bierlager.

This dive into the big, sudsy world of barley broth is essentially a by-product of the ongoing pandemic: I’ve had a thing for beer ever since my dad let me sip from his bottle of Schmidt’s when I was a little boy (see Listening Party #11), but only recently did I begin taking the hobby a little more seriously. I now enjoy and appreciate it more than ever before – one of the millions swept up in the craft beer revolution.

A quote on the subject (it fills an entire page in Garrett & Evans’ Beer School) gives us a good jumping off point: “Some may take beer too seriously, but few who do are guilty of taking life too seriously.”

In that spirit, I’ll kick-start the new year with a 1990 album that crackles with positive vibes: Let’s Buzz! by San Diego roots stalwarts The Paladins. Liquid refreshment comes in the form of Queens Kellerbier, one Spanish brewer’s take on a traditional German recipe. We’ll indulge a bit later on.

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that you gotta make your own fun. Are you with me?

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WIB Listening Party #36: Spinning Christmas

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featuring…

♫ Various Artists on vintage 45 singles

🍺 Riedenburger Festbier

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Deep from within a swirling pool of childhood memories, I hear it bubbling up into consciousness: A small intermingling of children’s voices, singing Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer …

For most of us, the run-up to the holiday doesn’t feel much like A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s a hectic dash to finish off projects and order a few more Christmas presents, fearing our loved ones may have got us more than we got them.

With that in mind, I’ll not take up much of your time with this final Listening Party of 2021. The plan’s simple: I’ll spin a few of my favorite holiday-themed blues 45s on the official Who Is Blues cheapo phonograph, which you’ll see in the clips to follow. Quick hits on some great tunes you never hear on the radio.

And I’ll crack open a cheerfully designed bottle of seasonal Festbier from the Bavarian town of Riedenburg.

We’ve all heard holiday classics by Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, Eartha Kitt and Nat King Cole a million times. Let’s give these bluesmen their due.

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WIB Listening Party #35: Wizards From The Southside

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featuring…

♫ Various Artists, Wizards From The Southside

🍺 Saranac Adirondack Lager

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

I must say I’m bummed about the way 2021 is shutting down. Fourth wave, fifth wave, whatever the experts want to call it – where I live in Germany, stricter social distancing measures are back in place, requiring vaccinated individuals to present a negative COVID test to do fun things like attend concerts or enter restaurants. So people are staying home, shows are being cancelled, businesses of all kinds are suffering. Necessary? Probably. But I can’t help feeling we’re all the poorer for it.

So please allow me – in this, the penultimate Listening Party post of the year – to vent a little and return to a much happier time and place. I need only think back a couple of weeks.

I flew to New York for Thanksgiving and there it felt almost like business as usual.

Travelling upstate, I met a beer called Saranac Adirondack Lager.

And I caught up with an old friend: Wizards From The Southside, a Chess Records compilation featuring mid-50s recordings by the likes of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Little Walter.

Read on if you dare …

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WIB Listening Party #34: Giving Thanks

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featuring…

♫ Fishbone, In Your Face

🍺 Sierra Nevada Fantastic Haze Imperial IPA

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

It’s Thanksgiving week and I’m using that as an occasion to veer from the usual Listening Party format. At the risk of getting overly sentimental, I’ll use this space to give thanks for three things that have not only helped me survive the past year-plus of the corona pandemic, but several decades of life in general.

Those three “things” are friends, family and music.

Along the way, I’ll share a story of what was probably my most memorable Thanksgiving. It’s a while back and foggy in my memory, but I’ll do my best. The music in that story was supplied by Los Angeles, California’s Fishbone, so that’s the music you’ll hear this time around, taken from their 1986 album In Your Face.

If you’re unfamiliar with Fishbone or turning up your nose because it’s not blues – imagine the great band leader Louis Jordan had been a young man in the 1980s. I’d venture to say his music might have sounded like this.

And since no Listening Party is ever complete without a delicious beverage, we will be cracking open a Sierra Nevada Fantastic Haze Imperial IPA.

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WIB Listening Party #33 1/3: The Specialty Story Vol. 1

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featuring…

♫ Various Artists, The Specialty Story Vol. 1

🍺 Bevog Rudeen Black IPA

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Entry #33 in the Listening Party series. That number – inevitably calling to mind the rotational speed of a long-playing record – sent me back to the shelves that hold my modest collection of vinyl LPs. (At least the ones I’ve acquired in Germany; the 500+ albums of my youth reside in a walk-in closet in upstate New York.) There, I settled upon The Specialty Story Vol. 1 – a flea market find from the mid-1990s. I recall putting a few standout cuts from this record on a mixtape back when spending hours punching buttons on a tape deck was something I took pleasure in. Also, I had the time for it. Where have those days gone?

Some 25 years later my favorite songs off the album haven’t changed and I’ll be featuring them here today.

Over on the beer side of things, we’ve got something deep, dark and Austrian to dive into – Rudeen Black IPA from Bevog, the inventive brewer we first came across in Listening Party #14.

I’m not feeling especially deep or philosophical today, so this one will be a straightforward mix of historical facts and upbeat tunes infused with the rock’n’roll spirit.

Blues had a baby, remember?

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WIB Listening Party #32: Break The Chain

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featuring…

♫ Doug MacLeod, Break The Chain

🍺 Lowlander Cool Earth Lager

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Riffing on the environment, drinking the environmentally-friendly Cool Earth Lager, revisiting Doug MacLeod’s 2018 gem Break The Chain. Welcome to Listening Party #32.

This morning I was watching CNN’s ongoing coverage of COP26. If you’re reading this in the year 2050, it means this particular summit meeting – “The United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties” is the official title – wasn’t all for naught and that Planet Earth is still inhabitable. Hooray for that!

But I’m doubtful. Even as they put on a good show and say all the right things, I question our leaders’ willingness to put the long-term good of the natural environment ahead of economics and their own addiction to power and personal gain. 

Today’s news included promises to reduce methane emissions and a deal by 100 heads of state to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Well, OK.

Then CNN brought in a representative of an anti-poverty organisation who put a damper on things. He pointed out how Britain was actually doubling down on fossil fuels while doing the climate change dance at the COP26 conference. Greta Thunberg also chimed in, calling out politicians for their hypocrisy and shouting about how we cannot entrust the fate of the planet to corporations and governments. In true revolutionary spirit, she said climate change would have to come from “the people.”

Next came an almost too-painful-to-watch report from Afghanistan showing impoverished parents in the act of selling their daughters in order to survive. Selling their daughters.

My main takeaway: humanity sucks. The systems we’ve created are unjust. Given that situations like this exist – circumstances so desperate that mothers and fathers would make the soul-killing decision to sell their children – is there really any hope that we can pull together as a race and reverse the seemingly irreversible downward climatic spiral?

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WIB Listening Party #31: The Sea Saint Sessions

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featuring…

♫ Tab Benoit, The Sea Saint Sessions

🍺🍺 BrewDog Silk Road Hazy IPA &

Double Hazy New England IPA

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

I spent quite a while skimming through my CD collection, trying on various records, before I settled upon the right music for this week’s beer-and-blues jamboree. In the process, I came to a realization: I have a lot of CDs. A lot. Somewhere between 1000 and 2000, I’d estimate.

Mind you, many of them were sent to me as promos – a fringe benefit that makes up for the miserable pay that comes with being a music writer. Even if labels and magazines have long since stopped sending out physical promos and I’ve sold off some of the excess in my collection, I’ve still got shelves, storage boxes and countless nooks and crannies filled with all the silver discs I’ve bought or been given, housed in jewel cases, digipaks, paper sleeves or nothing at all.

And let’s face it. They’re more or less obsolete. Most people listen on streaming services these days. It’s practical. Hoity toity audiophiles and collectors, on the other hand, tend to go for vinyl. CDs are still hanging around, but except in rare cases – like if they’ve been autographed – no one feels particularly sentimental about them. Do you?

But CDs are good for skimming. And today’s somewhat dusty skimming activities eventually led me to an excellent album released on Telarc in 2003: Tab Benoit’s The Sea Saint Sessions. Three choice cuts will give you an idea of the record’s stripped-down, bluesy southern energy and the prodigious talent of an artist who’s been criminally underrated.

As I mentioned last week though, my focus is more on beer this time around. I’ll be sampling not one but two different hazy IPAs from BrewDog: the Double Hazy New England IPA and Silk Road Hazy IPA flavored with lychee and mango.

Here they are, all lined up and ready to go …

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WIB Listening Party #30: Reconsider Baby

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featuring…

♫ Elvis Presley, Reconsider Baby

🍺 BrewDog Elvis Juice

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Loyal readers … for Listening Party #30, I’ve chosen to return to the flourishing Scottish-founded brewer I introduced in Listening Party #2: BrewDog. This entry will serve merely as a preamble to a kind of “BrewDog special” I have in mind for next week on the heels of a satisfying interaction with the company’s customer service department. I’ll expound on that when the time comes.

As for now, we’ll be sampling one of BrewDog’s most hip sounding offerings, a grapefruit-infused IPA they call Elvis Juice. Frankly I’d have thought an Elvis Presley-inspired beer would be flavored with peanut butter and banana. Whatevs. If you google “Elvis Juice,” as I just did, you’ll find that legal battles have been waged between BrewDog and Elvis Presley Enterprises over BrewDog’s attempts to trademark the beer. At this writing, though, Elvis Juice is the name on the can.

Our accompanying musical selection is Reconsider Baby, which has Presley singing the blues in a variety of settings – from a previously unreleased master of the Lonnie Johnson hit “Tomorrow Night” from 1954 (or 1955) to a recording of “Merry Christmas Baby,” a song made famous by Charles Brown, from May of 1971. The compilation originally appeared in the mid-1980s as part of the Elvis 50th Anniversary series – including the blue vinyl edition I was lucky to get my hands on through a roommate who worked for RCA at the time.

So it’s Elvis times two. Are you ready for this?

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WIB Listening Party #29: Blues From The Delta

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featuring…

♫ Skip James, Blues From The Delta

🍺 Chinook Red Indian Ale

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Are you ready to get way down low?

I just dug out my CD copy of the Skip James album Blues From The Delta, thinking it might be a worthy Listening Party candidate. It’s been a while since this one found its way into the CD player tray. The purple and violet-tinged Vanguard Records release combines nine tracks from 1966’s Today! with an additional nine cuts from 1968’s Devil Got My Woman. Two previously unreleased recordings bring the total to 20. As my favorite baseball broadcaster might say when noting a player’s stats: That’s just bookkeeping.

Then I skim listened, starting with James’s most enduring title “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” Goose bumps. “Special Rider Blues.” Goose bumps. James’s sorrowful moan set my hair on end the first time I heard it and it still does today.

If you’re unfamiliar with the originator of the so-called “Bentonia School” of blues (James was raised on a plantation near Bentonia, Mississippi), this 1998 Vanguard compilation is the place to start, as opposed to the hissy, scratchy relics he recorded for Paramount in 1931 – undeniably great but considerably less accessible.

Over on the beer side of things, we’ll be unscientifically enjoying a bottle of Kraftbierwerkstatt’s Chinook Red Indian Ale. Let’s be clear: I did not choose this beer on the strength of its name. I suppose I could have not chosen it on that basis. Were it brewed and bottled in the US instead of the southern German city of Böblingen, the marketing people at Kraftbierwerkstatt surely would have thought twice about the Red Indian moniker. Just ask the owners of the baseball franchise now called the Cleveland Guardians or the NFL’s Washington Football Club, who are still looking for a new name.

Issues of racial insensitivity aside: The album and beer look great together.

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WIB Listening Party #28: Believe What I Say

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featuring…

♫ James Hunter, Believe What I Say

🍺 Crew Republic Drunken Sailor IPA

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Before sitting down to write this Listening Party entry, I went on one of those online “quotes” sites and entered: “looking back.” I was hoping to find something I could use here, some profound words about the importance of reflection. Something to help reign in the urge I, like most of us, have to constantly move forward. But I came up empty. The quotes listed were all about goal setting and achievement and leaving the past behind.

What I’m finding as I write this series, however, is that revisiting the past can be a valuable exercise in slowing down. As music lovers, we’re consumers. If we allow ourselves to be dragged along by media’s omnipresent tether – through Facebook, Instagram, or more traditional sources like magazines and radio – then music becomes disposable. There, it’s all about the latest releases and who’s currently in the charts and when a certain artist will be going on tour again.

But what about the 500 LPs we have resting on our shelves at home? The 1,500 CDs? All the music stored on our hard drives and mobile devices? If an album resides somewhere in our collection, it suggests it once meant something to us. Perhaps it became a favorite for a time. Maybe it is connected to a past relationship, an apartment once lived in, a trip, a car, a concert.

Isn’t that what makes us what we are – the sum of our experiences?

This week’s album is Believe What I Say, the 1996 Ace Records release that signalled Englishman James Hunter’s initial breakout to a broader international audience. It was my introduction to the man who’s been called the UK’s greatest soul singer and recalls our first encounter in a jazz club in Cologne, Germany.

While letting faint memories bubble up and take on sharper contours, I’ll sample the award-winning Drunken Sailor India Pale Ale from Crew Republic, an independent brewery launched by two young men from Munich in 2011.

The music and the beer are set up. Let’s do this.

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