Okay music fans. If you're in Northern California/PNW, Reeves (MF) Gabrels is stepping up to join Stick Men on several while Tony Levin (all best wishes!) is recovering from undisclosed illness.

July 17 - Stockton,
July 18 - Fresno,
July 19 - Santa Cruz
July 20 - Petaluma
July 23 - Arcata,
July 25 - Eugene
July 26 - Corvallis
July 27 - Portland
July 29 - Vancouver, BC
July 30 - Seattle, WA (The Triple Door)

#StickMen #PatMastelotto #MarkusReuter #TonyLevin #Prog #ReevesGabrels #Improv

Delighted to discover that Reeves Gabrels has been a member of The Cure since 2012. And sitting here now listening to the excellent guitar on Songs Of A Lost World.

Calling out to the #BowieADay people who enjoyed his latter collaborations with Bowie, or who made the diversion into #TinMachine.

@ReevesGabrels

#ReevesGabrels #TheCure #SongsOfALostWorld #DavidBowie #music

I'd read so many good things about The Cure's last album, and seen it on many AOTY lists, that I finally bought a copy.

My, it's a dark and lovely thing. Lush, atmospheric, melodic, almost too intense in places. 🖤

Fittingly for an album so much about ageing and death, I bought it on CD, because I am... not that young. 😅

#TheCure #SongsOfALostWorld #GothicMusic #ReevesGabrels

An interesting choice from the Brain DJ this morning: a song that I haven't listened to for a while –

David Bowie, "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell" (1999)

Written by David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels, who also played lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and synthesiser on the track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=330xVUHu4Kc

#Music #GlamRock #DavidBowie #ReevesGabrels

In an alternate reality, #guitarist #ReevesGabrels was put in touch with #DavidBowie a year earlier. #Bowie scrapped further #guitar recording sessions with #PeterFrampton, stopped returning multi-instrumentalist #ErdalKızılçay’s calls, and wisely chose #LaurieAnderson’s spoken words over actor #MickeyRourke’s attempt at rap.

The result might have been this version of 1987’s #NeverLetMeDown album, posthumously re-recorded in our universe’s 2018: https://songsha.re/open/aa012c83ba3c4154ad080dea061c429117192859541483421

#music #80sMusic #1980s

Thursday, What A Concept! | David Bowie – The Leon Suites (1994, UK)

Next up in our series spotlighting rock operas or other concept albums from The List is number 423, submitted by yours truly.

With the first album in our “Thursday, What A Concept” series being Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral, David Bowie’s so-called “Leon Suites” is basically the logical next choice…if you’ve ever heard of it, that is. While not an official release, “Leon Suites” represents what is left of the “improvised opera” titled Leon, an absolutely batshit collaboration with Brian Eno – Bowie is always at his most interesting when he gives in to his experimental side, and you can’t get more experimental than this. Recorded in 1994, Leon was reworked to become Bowie’s 1995 concept album, 1. Outside; it was between these original 1994 recordings and the release of Outside when the NIN/Bowie co-headlining “Dissonance” tour started, which was part of the NIN touring cycle for Downward Spiral.

For those who are interested in all the details behind Leon/”Leon Suites”/1. Outside, I highly recommend reading Chris O’Leary’s work, either via his fantastic Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog (links to relevant entries at bottom of this post) or the collected/edited versions in his second Bowie volume, Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016. There are a few versions of the story floating out there; here I provide just a summary, based on O’Leary’s book.

The road to Leon began when Bowie and Eno reconnected at Bowie and Iman’s wedding in 1992. Setting out to make an album that wasn’t just an addendum to their Berlin trilogy, the pair wanted to create some sort of incomplete and interactive work where the listener ultimately had to figure out (or make up) the story. The writing/recording process began in March 1994 and was highly improvisational, relying heavily on role playing, Eno’s directions (including secret character sheets for all musicians and engineers), and Bowie’s vague sketch of a Twin Peaks-inspired narrative that involved a murder mystery, the art world, the Internet, and a handful of characters including Leon Blank, who was (either from the start or, in the process of Leon being reincarnated into Outside, became) an homage of sorts to both Tricky* and Jean-Michael Basquiat. The band jammed for weeks with the tape rolling, Eno ensuring the jam didn’t stray into the conventional or coherent. Bits of the resulting 25 to 35 hours of recordings were then further developed over the next few months, and everything was edited down to end up with a 3-hour long album called Leon…which no label wanted to distribute.

The “Leon Suites”, then, is the result of someone getting a hold of that 3-hour piece and editing it down further, to 3 tracks that are each over 20 minutes. Though both Eno and Reeves Gabrels (guitarist on the recordings) wanted Bowie to ignore the disinterest in Leon and still release it in some form – even if as a quasi-bootleg release without his name on it – Bowie stopped shopping Leon around at some point in 1994/5. It’s possible that the bootlegged “Suites” made Bowie lose interest in pushing Leon in its original form; however, since the bootlegs didn’t leak until 2003, perhaps they had no bearing on Bowie’s decision to rework Leon (Bowie was known, after all, to start huge brilliant projects, only to completely abandon them and move on). Whatever the case may have been, at the end of 1994, Bowie’s assignment to keep a diary for 10 days for the 100th issue of Q magazine kickstarted the rewriting/fleshing out of the Leon storyline and then reincarnation of the work into the more commercial 1. Outside (this diary then became the liner notes of Outside). In fact, Bowie expanded the storyline to the point that Outside was meant to be the first in a series of 5 albums totalling 8 hours of material that would (or, maybe, would not) complete the story he had roughly sketched out for Leon. As the other 4 albums never happened, and as only snippets of the “Suites” exist in Outside, one can’t help but wonder whether more/the rest of the “Suites” would’ve popped up in those albums, or if they would’ve largely been new post-“Suites”/Leon material. At any rate, without Leon we wouldn’t have Outside, and, without Outside, who knows what other gems we would never have been gifted – there probably wouldn’t have been the NIN Dissonance tour, and then probably no Earthling, probably no Mike Garson on NIN’s The Fragile…who knows.

So, my recommendation? Set aside time to listen to both the “Leon Suites” and Outside, ensuring you can listen to each one in a single sitting, both in one go if you have the capacity. While you can read about what parts from “Suites” did or didn’t make it into Outside, it’s a lot more fun to do a close listen of both and figure that out for yourself. The key is to consider the “Leon Suites” and Outside as companion albums, not thinking of the “Suites” as Outside demos or outtakes (as they’re sometimes labelled) or Outside as a polished version of the “Suites”. Listening to “Suites” is more like finding only 3 issues of an out-of-print highly conceptual comic book series that later inspired a brilliant TV series (…that was then inexplicably cancelled after the first season); so, if you’re the type of nerd who loves finding all the connections and easter eggs, a double bill is best. At the very least, if you have a spare hour and want to listen to Bowie yell out a whole bunch of random words and phrases in a bunch of ridiculous accents (and/or at least want to hear him predict in 1994 that “someday, the internet may become an information super-highway”) over top of Garson’s absolutely brilliant piano playing, give “Leon Suites” a try.

The “Leon Suites” – what a concept!

• Youtube: David Bowie – The Leon Suites: I Am With Name
• Youtube: David Bowie – The Leon Suites: Leon Takes Us Outside
• Youtube: David Bowie – The Leon Suites: The Enemy Is Fragile
• Discogs: David Bowie – The Leon Suites
• Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog posts by Chris O’Leary on Leon/”Leon Suites” (note some details in the blog posts were then updated/corrected for the book version):
  • OK Riot/I’d Rather Be Chrome
  • Nothing To Be Desired
  • I Am With Name/Segue: Ramona A. Stone
  • Leon Takes Us Outside
  • The Enemy is Fragile
  • Category: Leon 1994

* Some fun extra Bowie/Tricky stuff: In 1995, Q magazine asked Bowie to interview Tricky for an issue. The two hadn’t yet met, and Bowie instead wrote a piece of fiction that essentially featured himself as the Leon/Outside character Nathan Adler and Tricky as Leon. Bowie then wrote Tricky a letter after him and Iman saw a Maxinquaye show in August 1995 (a month prior to the release of Outside), letting him know about the Q piece that was to be published in their October 1995 issue. See also the “Leon Takes Us Outside” blog post from O’Leary.

#1001OtherAlbums #1990s #BrianEno #conceptAlbum #DavidBowie #experimental #MikeGarson #ReevesGabrels #ThursdayWhatAConcept #Tricky

#TheMetalDogArticleList
#MetalInjection
14 Remarkably Cool Bassists Who Deserve More Love
Meet some of the greatest men in music!

https://metalinjection.net/lists/14-remarkably-cool-bassists-who-deserve-more-love

#Metal
#Bassists
#RigRundowns
#InnovativePlayers
#InspirationalBassists
#RockHistory
#JackBruce
#GeezerButler
#BobbyGlover
#TimCommerford
#KimDeal
#EvansBlue
#StevenBlaze
#StuHammond
#ReevesGabrels

Opening for #TheCure in South America is a #shoegaze band called Just Mustard. I confess not to know music business dynamics & mine fields, but for being a global liberal band European chauvinism is relatively obvious. They're making buckets of millions in the #USA (Maryland tonight, before GA & FL). Just Mustard are Irish. Twilight Sad are Scottish, as Robert's friends Chvrches.

But who are the best?

#ReevesGabrels wear your #CaptainAmerica shirt every night...