Opry Approved: Marty Robbins 100

Marty Robbins - El Paso City

I know this isn't the usual thing for here, but I pride myself on not having a usual thing. So we're doing it, and setting a record for the unprecedented third (!) centennial celebration of September.

I actually worked on this show extensively, building upon my recent discoveries about how AI stem separation, if used judiciously, can go a real long way towards restoring the parts of these concerts where the FM announcer inevitably talks over the music so he/she/they no longer do.

So for the first of two consecutive posts concerning someone with the initials MR, we're gonna pay tribute to the most Commie-hatin', heart-attack havin' Country star ever to drive NASCAR.

An early TV star, Marty Robbins began in the 1950s in Arizona, and after one of his guest friends got him a Columbia record deal, he began recording in his particular Cowboy Ballad vein.

His initial hits were among the first to cross over into the pop world, and he broke the mold and the bank with his 1959 smash El Paso, which remains a standard song to this day.

The legend has it that he also inadvertently popularized the intentional use of distortion in the studio, accidentally overloading his bass player in the console on one of his big songs and creating the "fuzz" tone that proceeded to colonize the entire 1960s.

One of the Nashville establishment figures the "outlaw" contingent (that's the law firm of Nelson, Jennings & Haggard, LLC) overthrew in the 1970s, he always had a couple of toes dipped in Rock and Roll anyway so I doubt he took it personally.

Anyway he died young, of cardiovascular disease soon after this performance at the Opry, and he'd have been the big hundred today, so I hope you're ready for the Country.

Marty Robbins

"Marty Party"

Opryland at The Grand Ole Opry

Nashville, Tennessee USA

6.10.1982

01 Silver Eagle introduction

02 Ribbon of Darkness

03 A White Sport Coat

04 Devil Woman

05 Don't Worry

06 That's All Right

07 Eighteen Yellow Roses

08 Tonight Carmen

09 Bell Telephone commercial (Tanya Tucker)

10 I Don't Know Why, I Just Do

11 Big Iron

12 Streets of Laredo

13 Some Memories Just Won't Die

14 band introductions/Louisiana interlude

15 Cool Water

16 Hormel commercial (Geezinslaw Bros.)

17 Release Me

18 Jambalaya

19 Restless Cattle

20 Chapel Bells Chime

21 El Paso City

22 Jenny

23 MR talk

24 A Good Hearted Woman

25 Bell Telephone commercial (Lena Horne)

26 MR talk

27 This Time You Gave Me a Mountain

28 Jumper Cable Man

29 El Paso

30 Silver Eagle outro

Total time: 1:15:51

Marty Robbins - keyboards, guitar & vocals

Conrad Hawes Noddin - piano, trumpet & vocals

Jim Hannaford - trumpet & vocals

Larry Hunt - bass

Billy Martinez - drums

Jack Pruitt - guitar

Wayne Hobbs - pedal steel guitar

Don Winters - vocals & guitar

Silver Eagle announcer is Larry Kenney

pre-broadcast vinyl from the Silver Eagle Radio Network

missing bits (Tracks 14, 17-20) are 320/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault, converted to 16/44 Audio

spectral analysis of missing bits is lossless to 20 kHz

assembled, edited, denoised & remastered for unity -- with DJ talkovers eliminated -- by EN, September 2025
453 MB FLAC/direct link

This was one of those pains in the butt where there's a preFM LP set and a Wolfgang's Vault stream, and if you combine them you get the complete performance, so that's what I did, emphasizing the more lossless source but for the bits missing from the Silver Eagle radio station LPs.

That may be it for this month from me, I'm not sure yet because I'm working on two different memorials to recently departed icons.

But I wasn't gonna let the sun set in the West without popping this one up and celebrating the centenary of one of the foundational pillars of the now-ubiquitous Americana genre, born this very day in 1925 and still twangin' his echoes through time!--J.

9.26.1925 - 12.8.1982

Lucille of Approval: B.B. King 100

B.B. King - It's My Own Fault

I hope everyone's ready to feel old, because we have a superstar centenary of someone it's hard to believe would have been 100 today.

Obviously anyone culturally literate enough to read a street sign knows who B.B. King was, so I am not gonna bother telling all about Live At the Regal or whatever. If you don't know, well that's why Baby Jesus invented Google.

To put it simply, the roads he paved are all Sky Bluesways now, with trillions of travelers traversing their way to exit 1-4-5 as if it was always this way.

It wasn't. It took visionaries such as he to make it all so take-for-grantable for us entitled masses.

I mean, if you really wanna get into it, it says a lot that we can have the sort of mammoth expectations of excellence we have, when The Blues itself -- really the root of all American music -- is at its fundament just the expression, in sound and vibration, of the human misery and deprivation that's the baseline reality of the American experience for most citizens, once the faketooth veneer of phony, gold plated nothingness is peeled away.

Think about that: the basis of the music of the United States, that's taken hold in various forms all over the world, is essentially songs of terminal woe, all about My Baby Left Me Because I Spent The Half the Rent We Had On Bourbon and Poker.

Oh well, leave it me to spoil the birthday party with the overwrought cynicism of a dissatisfied native, who knows that the place in which he was born is likely gonna burn, and soon, with flames visible from other dimensions, or at the least other galaxies.

Meanwhile, back at this centennial fit for a King, let's have me shut the eff up and get us all living the Life of Riley.

This little 94 minute slab of Regal delicacy comes from way, way back in the day. Just two days, in fact, after the father  -- really he was the last MF who could have made sense of this heaping pile of illiterate, failed client state -- of the current stone-cold, brainwormed nutjob defunding the CDC for his billionaire masters was blasted into infinity by... wait for it... NO NOT A TRANSPERSON, you big dummeh. The CIA and the Mossad, just like always.

This also comes from the antediluvian epochs when Wolfgang's House Of Theft I'll Blame Bootleggers For Later On had lossless files for totally illegitimate, non-copyrighted sale, too.

Thankfully I was able to procure and fix up these bad boys without having to swear a loyalty oath, at least not yet. And we wonder why, every day, we have The Blues.

B.B. King

Winterland

San Francisco, California USA

6.8.1968

CD1: early show

01 Up, Up and Away

02 It's Gonna Work Out Fine

03 Every Day I Have the Blues

04 How Blue Can You Get?

05 Please Love Me

06 Confessin' the Blues

07 Woke Up This Morning (My Baby's Gone)

08 unidentified instrumental 

09 Sweet Sixteen

CD2: late show

01 Song for My Father

02 Ode to Billie Joe

03 Help the Poor

04 I Got a Mind to Give Up Living

05 A Whole Lot of Lovin'

06 Need Your Love So Bad

07 It's My Own Fault

08 Don't Answer the Door

09 Night Life

10 Paying the Cost to Be the Boss

Total time: 1:34:48 

B.B. King - guitar & vocals

James Toney - organ

Wilbur Freeman - bass

Sonny Freeman - drums

Pat Williams - trumpet

Lee Gatman - tenor saxophone

Albert King - guitar (CD1, Tracks 08 & 09)

original 24/44k files from the first, lossless iteration of Wolfgang's Vault

converted to 16/44 CD Audio -- with dropouts and between-track gaps repaired -- and slightly retracked by EN, September 2025
449 MB FLAC/direct link

It will come as little surprise that this pair of sets is a major 11 on the scale of Incendiary 1 to 10s. Fellow icon Albert King even gets up to jam at the close of the first half, to duel with the Birthday Boy like they're Jack Palance vs. Franco Nero in the bullring in 1968's Il Mercenario, only the Kings have pentatonia for pistols and the Winterland stage as the arena.

It isn't that distracting, but there's some tape damage audible in a couple of tunes in the first set, probably from B.B. burning the tape recorder, using only Lucille as a flamethrower. I left it be because ROIOs of folks like this, whose every note is a commodity to the people running the world now, are few and far between amid the reissues of every instance of them tapping their foot or frying a breakfast egg.

I shall return soon with yes, the third centennial celebration (!!!) of this month. But there was no way I was gonna let such a big birthday go by for one of the modern architects of The Blues, without chiming in with some party presentations to help outperform the puerile performances of the pitiful profit pundits.--J.

9.16.1925 - 5.14.2015

Airproof It All Night: Leo Kottke 80

Leo Kottke - Airproofing

The second post for September brings a milestone birthday of a first fret legend of guitar wizardry.

I know Autotune and influencer culture (now there's an oxymoron) make it hard to remember, but there was a time when this thing called "playing an instrument" was the yardstick by which musical talent was largely assessed, measured and, if you were good enough, valued.

To do this antiquated practice of epochs gone by, you had to do things that aren't a whole lotta popular these days.

Among these things were Long Game activities such as listening to all your pals have a great time playing outside whilst you sat in your bedroom for 12 hours at a time, practicing your axe until the callouses on your fingers spurted blood like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for strings.

Nowadays it's very easy to make the machines do the heavy lifting so we can slink away to count the YouTube views. There's a couple, but overall there's very few virtuosi around, wielding (for instance) acoustic guitars and with blazing chops that make jaws drop at twenty paces as the minds attached to those mouths process how much effort must have went into learning to play that darn well.

These days the mouths are flapping but the practice is lacking, and you're getting a lotta music people that are effectively in the Here Today, Gone Later Today category of fame for fame's sake and no other there there, to paraphrase the great Gertrude Stein.

Leo here is from the old times, before side chicks and mouse clicks counted more than guitar picks.

As skillful and expressive a guitar player as any that has existed in our lifetimes, he must have spent his whole childhood practicing until his fingers about fell off, and none of the strain was from clicking either.

I dunno about you, but I liked the old times -- and the one-off, irreproducibly individuated talents they produced -- quite a bit better.

Let's have our latest octogenarian explain, using only a couple of old acoustic guitars and the occasional sound of his voice, in beautiful Sonoma County a little over 40 years ago.

Leo Kottke

Cotati Cabaret

Cotati, California USA

5.1.1985

01 Little Beaver (2nd segment)

02 Airproofing 

03 Last Steam Engine Train/Stealing

04 talk: A Corn Tyrant

05 Sleepers Awake

06 Everybody Lies

07 From the Cradle to the Grave

08 talk: My own protoplasm

09 Pamela Brown 

10 Mary

11 Bean Time 

12 Jack Fig

13 Saginaw, Michigan

14 Up Tempo

15 Standing In My Shoes

16 Three Quarter North/Four Four North 

17 talk: Self Defense/Theme from "Doodles"

18 Airproofing (2nd segment)

19 Little Beaver 

20 Bean Time

21 Ojo

22 Pamela Brown 

23 talk: Glued to the guitar

24 Three Quarter North/Four Four North 

25 A Trout Toward Noon

26 Eight Miles High

27 talk: A guitar I got from John Lundberg

28 Saginaw, Michigan/June Bug

29 The Train and the Gate/Vaseline Machine Gun

30 Little Martha

31 Echoing Gilewitz

32 Cripple Creek

33 Louise

34 Rings

35 Julie's House

36 Little Beaver/Embryonic Journey

Total time: 2:24:39

disc break goes after Track 17, at set break

Leo Kottke - guitars & vocals

Easy Ed's beautifully captured master soundboard cassette of, essentially, the complete performance

slightly retracked, edited and repaired -- with track-to-track volume fluctuations smoothed -- by EN, September 2025

Tracks 34-36 are bonus tracks from grner1's transfer of a soundboard/audience matrix capture of The Catalyst, Santa Cruz CA 5.9.1985

reoriented to natural stereo and slightly remastered by EN, September 2025
861 MB FLAC/direct link

So yes, the acoustic geetar shaman we call Leo Kottke is 80 today, and he still can play an instrument, without even the need for amplification or electronic assistance, better than just about anyone any of us will ever personally know.

I will be back in a few days with a centennial guaranteed to give you The Blues, even though this blood-besotten, autogenocidal anti-culture probably made sure you got them long before I ever learned to work the Sound Forge 11 Graphic Dynamics tool.

Until then, let's all Airproof ourselves with 2 1/2 full hours of sumptuous solo flight from the birthday boy Leo the Virgo, shall we? He has more imagination in his aged, calloused little fingers than most of today's gold medal contingent, here in the Olympics of Unwarranted Attention, has in their whole endorsement deal.--J.J.

Life Imitates Art: Art Pepper 100

 

Art Pepper Quartet - Begin the Beguine


September arrives with a blast of sax, on and for the occasion of the centennial of one of the most beloved Jazz cats that will ever bend a reed. I know I covered him a year ago but he bears repeating, especially on his Hundred Year anniversary.

He began in the band of Benny Carter in the early 1940s, and by the time a decade had gone by he was polling in Down Beat as second on alto only to Charlie Parker, which is a little like if he'd have had a baseball bat and been compared favorably to Babe Ruth.

Back and forth trips to prison for hard drugs then began to derail his ascent.

Come on, if you saw this guy coming you might cross the street. Please don't hit me with your saxophone, mister!

There, that's better. Much more innocent looking, right?

Every time he'd get let out of jail, he'd come back stronger and ascend to the pinnacle of the polls once again. His life could and should be a movie.

His wife, who has championed his music for the almost 45 years since his death, has been threatening for years to make one.

You can hear her tipsily hassling him between tunes on this tape I worked on for the last 72 hours.

Ah yes, this tape. Did I do a good job on it? I really don't know. Maybe the Art Pepper heads will set me ablaze for crimes against standards.

But Art Pepper ROIOs are hard to come by. Most are from 1981 and the aforementioned Laurie Pepper has ably reissued a lot of them as legit things, with her unbelievably awesome Unreleased Art series.
So when I found this complete concert, as yet unreleased, on Soulseek that purported to be a matrix of soundboard and audience flavors, I said Let's Go For It. Even though it sounded like the instruments other than the drums were recorded from a single microphone stationed in the men's restroom of the club, and not even in the stall closest to the stage.

Some of the tunes, the drums just flat out eclipsed the rest of the band to such an extent I almost needed those special, side-sealed sunglasses they have for that stuff.

Anyway I split it and hit it, using the AI stemsplitter Audacity magic plugin to break the drums apart from it all, whereupon I set about attempting to rebalance the thing and get more than mere bathroom stall tone from the sax/piano/bass triumvirate struggling to emerge.

There was also this buzz coming and going in it, which I tried to ameliorate as best as possible, but which couldn't be removed from the music without taking the high end with it. In addition, it's got a lotta audience chattering in it, owing to that it might be a desk feed on the drums and stage mics for the rest of the dudes, I dunno for sure.

At the end of the day it makes not much difference, because this is an all-star band just wailing their asses off for two full hours of performance peak. When you hear Art go off like he does, you understand why he's the galactic level of musical deity people remember him for, as he immolates the room with effortless shifts from gut-shredding Blues to the sob-inducingly lyrical to speed-blinding Bop like he's James Bond working the stick on a vintage Aston Martin.

Art Pepper
Blues Alley
Washington, D.C. USA
4.22.1981

01 Landscape
02 Art talk & band introductions
03 Good Bait
04 Yardbird Suite
05 Patricia
06 Scrapple from the Apple
07 unidentified title
08 unidentified title
09 Begin the Beguine
10 Darn That Dream
11 Now's the Time

Total time: 2:01:40
disc break goes after Track 06

Art Pepper - alto saxophone & clarinet
Gene Perla - bass
Barry Altschul - drums
Milcho Leviev - piano

soundboard/audience matrix of indeterminate origin
remuxed, rebalanced, edited, denoised, repaired & remastered by EN, August 2025
801 MB FLAC/direct link

Like I was saying, this show is not just about Art and some anonymous guys up there with him. Every dude is an all-star and there are wild moments from everybody. But Art just takes it beyond the ionosphere and into realms of ecstasy, with audients calling out for Christ -- and generally carrying on as if He has returned with an alto saxophone to entertain the masses -- in the middle of solos and so forth.

Hopefully I didn't mess it up too bad! It was hard labor, born of love and these vape pens. I'll be back with more milestone birthdays and even more iconic centennials soon, but don't let any milquetoast mayonnaise that might be on the menu distract the palate. It's the 100th birthday of a legendary Maestro, so go ahead and spice up your Labor Day BBQ with some pure and powerful Pepper.--J.

9.1.1925 - 6.5.1982