Commercially Inviable Records

Sad news reaches Commercially Inviable as we note the passing of Ben Keith.

Ben wasn’t the most famous musician to have ever walked the earth, and indeed it was hard to find news online as the story slowly broke along the grapevine earlier today, but his CV is just incredible. To put it simply, he played with them all.

Most notably Neil Young trusted him as his pedal steel sideman for almost 40 years. That’s Ben on Young’s classic “Harvest” LP…oh, and he also played on Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces”. It’s more than fair to say that this man had chops and will be missed.

Here he is onstage with Neil Young..

Campbell from Friends of the Stars has made a Spotify playlist of songs Ben Keith played on. For those of you without Spotify, here’s what you’re missing.

TRACKLISTING:

Anne Murray - “Danny’s Song”
Neil Young - “Walk On”
Emmylou Harris - Till I Gain Control Again
Crosby & Nash - “Fieldworker”
Neil Young - “Mellow My Mind”
Bob Neuwirth - “Cowboys & Indians”
Todd Rundgren - “Cold Morning Light”
Harris, Ronstadt & Parton - “The Blue Train”
Terry Reid - “Dean”
The Band - “The Promised Land”
Neil Young - “Harvest Moon”
Tim Hardin - “Bird On The Wire”
Warron Zevon - “Bed of Coals”
Neil Young - “It’s A Dream”
Patsy Cline - “I Fall To Pieces”

There may be some that Cam has missed, or you may have your own suggestions, but as Neil Young reportedly said on stage last night before dedicating a song to the man, “His spirit will live on”

Thanks for the music, Brother Ben

SPOTIFY LINK

Last weekend the vast majority of the Commercially Inviable stable of acts took a day-trip down to Somerset.  The reason for the trip was for each of them to record a session for the very lovely Songs from the Shed. World of Fox takes up the tale on his blog

“so, last saturday we all went down to north somerset where we ate sarnies, drank beer, snoozed in a hammock and played a few songs in a shed, captured on a camcorder by a lovely chap called jon. it’s quite a big shed, but even so it was quite a squeeze for gurdan thomas, given that there was five of them, and one was playing a tuba

the shed is an old billet hut and is stuffed full of fascinating detritus. one thing that caught my eye was an old magnetic theatre toy that i had when i was about four!

it was a thoroughly nice day out and some of us popped over to nearby clevedon for a glimpse of the seaside (well, the severn estuary, but close enough for a bunch of brummies). it has a nice pier:

i haven’t seen the finished videos, but i’ve a feeling they’ll be pretty good. jon will be posting them up on his website in the next few weeks, and obviously i’ll keep you posted when they’re up.”

Likewise, we can’t wait to see the results. A big thanks from us at the label to Jon from Songs from the Shed for accomodating 4 acts on the same day. Watch this space for links to the videos!

From Friends of the Stars

Andrew Dubber is currently recording a series of 5 minute interviews with interesting people he meets on his travels.  The 5th in the series is with Craig from Commercially Inviable - you can listen to it here

From Friends of the Stars…

The late, great Ronnie Lane would have been 64 today.

Happy Birthday, Ronnie.

We’ve been asked by the nice ladies of Stiches & Hos to help out at a 2-day ‘knit-in’ in April.

“Stitches and Hos are a motley crew of enthusiasts for all things knitted, crocheted and stitched who run a monthly knitting night based at Hare and Hounds pub, Kings Heath, Birmingham.”

They also hold knitting events in other places and on the weekend of 10th / 11th April will be hosting a sprawling two-day shinding at the newly minted Created in Birmingham store in the Bullring, where coincidentally you can also buy Commercially Inviable releases.

As well as offering knitting advice, encouragement, supplies and cake, Stitches and Hos have also enlisted the help of various Brum-based musical entities to provide the soundtrack, and we’ve been given the slot of 1pm-3pm on Saturday 10th April.  So, if you’ve ever wanted to learn the art of knitting in a huge shopping centre whilst two men play ELO records at the wrong speed, this is the event for you.

See you there!

From Campbell over on the Friends of the Stars site….

As taste makers have now conclusively identified, getting all mawkish and puffy and snivelsome online over the death of a celebrity is no longer okay, OK?

I myself have long railed (at whom is another question) against the vapid pointlessness of Tweeting my big sad face or “Liking” that one of your school colleagues that you no longer speak to wrote “RIP Lenny Bennett, I remember your name from on the telly from when I was young” (I’ll check whether Lenny Bennett has actually died in a minute and consider deleting this or leaving it in for some ineffable comic effect).

So, imagine the problem when one of your deeply-held heroes dies. It’s an even greater problem when that hero is a guy you mostly loved for being awkward, diffident, unsure or, more likely, unwilling to accept his stellar talent and, in short, someone who probably wouldn’t have liked seeing mawkish tributes to himself. If this wasn’t being written about the untimely death of Alex Chilton from a heart attack at just 59 but about Alex Chilton being justifiably but implausibly honoured at the Grammys, I visualise him standing there bristling a little from disdain and embarrassment, a little awkward twitch, not making eye contact, like George Milton from Of Mice and Men in a tight, starched collar.

Alex Chilton’s application to the higher echelons of rock artistry, as opposed to fame and success of course, is quite an untidy scrapbook of achievements really, when you look at it.

The Box Tops were great, certainly the original and best Blue-Eyed Soul group going, but that was mostly about the songwriting of Dan Penn and Wayne Carson Thompson. Young Alex’s voice was powerful and thrilling of course.

Then came Big Star and, well, Big Star weren’t as good as you think they were. This isn’t clever revisionism. It’s fact. Chilton used to say it in interviews and everyone thought he was being difficult or weird. But he meant it and he’s probably right. It’s not a great mystery that no-one bought Big Star back then, they were a ramshackle and dysfunctional, not great live, version of power pop that The Raspberries and others were selling more of. Plus no-one wanted adult pop songs, adults wanted rock gods, kids wanted cutie-pie pop.

BUT when Big Star were good, mostly Chilton’s songs, they were amazing. The Ballad of El Goodo, Thirteen, Daisy Glaize, Feel and of course September Gurls. All copper-bottomed classics.

The third album “Sister/Lovers” is a favourite of some; it’s wigged out on downers and booze and it’s pretty depressed and depressing. There’s a song called Holocaust on it. People dig it because it wasn’t released until later (no wonder) when Big Star’s cult was percolating in those bedrooms changed forever by punk, then indie. The album is a curate’s egg and has some kind of twisted genius bravery to it, but it IS the sound of an unfinished album played by down-on-their-luck Memphis session guys (Steve Cropper’s on it for fucksake) in the mid 1970s totally bummed on sour mash and Quaaludes. It sounds like a progenitor for the early Palace records in places. It sounds like a lot of odd things to be honest.

Then his later, patchy and intermittent solo stuff went through odd twists and turns, veering this way or that both attracted and energised by the East Coast new wave but also, at the same time, totally rejecting it. Listen to Like Flies On Sherbert. It’s a ride. But he also did wonderful things like his cover of Can’t Seem to Make You Mine, Bangkok, Lost My Job. Patchy, random, brilliant and a bit unsettling. Plenty of spikes and splinters in there.

Even when he came back to playing gigs as Big Star and the Box Tops, he looked pretty pissed off by it all. A wiry-thin, awkwardly morose guy, hardly moving, trotting out September Gurls for college audiences who weren’t even born when he first recorded it and no one cared. But yet he kept on doing it, attracted and repulsed at the same time by his whole career.

Makes me sad to think but, from reading comments from his Memphis friends after his death was announced, apparently he was living a pretty settled life with a wife and son. Maybe that’s why he kept gigging as Big Star, maybe he was just cool with it now. Fair enough and I’m sorry it didn’t last for him.

You might read this and wonder why the hell I would give a shit about Alex Chilton’s death, ‘he doesn’t sound like much of a fan’. Well, every word in here is WHY I’m a fan and why I tweeted my big RIP whilst simultaneously not liking people who do such pointless things. Alex Chilton was fucking great.

From over the way at the Friends of the Stars site:

Made by the clever folks at GGRP, this cardboard record player would probably destroy your vinyl collection, but it’s rather sweet and, obviously, I want one really bad.

Commercially Inviable artists Richard Burke, World of Fox and Friends of the Stars will be sharing the bill in Bristol on Friday 5th Febuary at the Grain Barge.

Friends of the Stars are late additions to the bill at the 2010 Meadowlands Festival in Lewes (which we believe is in Sussex), and takes place over the May Bank Holiday weekend of 29th and 30th. We’re not sure at the moment whether the band will play on Saturday or Sunday, or indeed where on the bill, but we’ll post more details as and when we have them. In the meantime, here’s the festival poster.