TVD's Idelic Hour with Jon Sidel

Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

I’m back from New York City and have fallen safely into the arms of the canyon. This week has been warm to say the least. These last few hot breezy days reminded me it has been a long while since I created a show with a lover’s muse.

I started digging through “my crates" thinking about the notion of keeping my love ones close. That Vanilla Fudge cover of “Keep Me Hanging On” came to mind and I started to explore the concept of “holding on.” I quickly discarded “the fudge” and replace it with the more obscure “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart” from Terry Reid.





In the end, rock songs were not what I want to hold onto for this week’s Idelic Hour. Instead my focus was on the sexy sounds of South America mixed with a few new releases and of course a classic or two.

Former Elefant singer, Diego Garcia’s sexy love ballad “Stay” seemed to balance Bowie’s Station to Station, “Wild as the Wind.” I dropped new songs from Deerhunter and Blonde Redhead into the mix with old favs like Nicolai Dunger and Fiona Apple.

Hold me close baby!


The Idelic Hit of the Week:
Deerhunter - Desire Lines (Mp3)



xosidealer
idelicsounds.com | @sidelic

TVD Takeover | The Posies

It's our last day with The Posies and both Jon and Ken have a few parting shots. Jon's up first...


Follow the Hatful of Hollow
Growing up in the small town of Bellingham, Washington during our teens in certainly had its merits – decent schools, relatively safe streets, and at least one avenue downtown all the ‘restless youth’ like ourselves could populate/troll after school everyday. Downside? Regardless of whatever potential cultural influx we might have received as a result of our proximity to Seattle and Vancouver B. C. (smack dab between the two essentially), Bellingham was still….a small town. If memory serves, even basic TV cable was threadbare and MTV wasn’t an option unless you had a satellite hookup of some kind. For me I was forced to rely on late night television on weekends for my fix of rock videos and exposure to new sounds/images. I loved staying up late and became kind of addicted to a show called “Night Flight”, a three or four hour program starting at midnight, and I wouldn’t miss it if I could.

Of the many memories I have of seeing/hearing something for the first time, few are as strong as the moment a video featuring washed-out images of smokestacks and industrial waste being released into the air appeared on the family cathode box late one Saturday night. I was completely hypnotized by the images and the music was both otherworldly and propulsive. A deep voice sang the words “I am the son….and the heir…. of a shyness that is criminally vulgar” and I was hooked. This was my introduction to “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths.


I can’t remember if I told Ken about seeing this video or if he'd seen it as well and we were both excited by it, but I do remember that I got to Cellophane Square (our favorite used record store) first and managed to get a copy of The Smiths’ Hatful of Hollow before he did and the only copy the store had as well. Luck of the draw…

I loved the record and was thrilled to at least feel like I was somewhat ahead of the curve in possessing it, maybe even took a little pleasure in my buddy Ken’s jealousy –haha– but was also afflicted with an almost OCD-like need to keep selling and exchanging my record collection. Don’t ask me why – I still haven’t figured that one out myself. Regardless, a scant two weeks after my proud purchase, with Ken along for the afternoon I believe, I found myself back at Cellophane Square exchanging The Smith record for something else - maybe even a Scritti Politti record. Go figure.

Little did I know my loss would be Ken’s gain…

TVD Fresh Track | New from Neil Young

Le Noise Film is a 38-minute black and white film of eight live-in-studio performances of every song on Neil Young’s brand-new album Le Noise.





In addition to the performances, there is also a personal introduction by Young himself, along with behind-the-scenes clips from album producer, Daniel Lanois, and more. The performances, shot by filmmaker Adam CK Vollick, feature Young on acoustic and electric guitars at Lanois’ home studio in Silverlake, CA, where Young and Lanois recorded Le Noise.

TVD's The Ardent Sessions

For close to a year now we've been privileged to present the fruits of the labor of Ardent Studios—specifically The Ardent Sessions—in this spot each Friday morning. These efforts however aren't self-supporting and assistance is needed to keep these sounds alive—which is why we're rerunning this post from last Friday. Ardent Studios founder, John Fry fills us in:

Rachel Hurley and I decided to kick off The Ardent Sessions on BreakThruRadio.com 3 years ago this December. The idea was to give up-and-coming bands some internet radio exposure, and to give them an introduction to the Memphis music tradition and current scene by performing in front of a small live audience in one of our studios.

When possible, I enjoy combining that experience with a personal tour of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, as Stax is such a huge part of Ardent's early history. It's always fun for me to meet these young artists, and I am always amazed at how much they know about what all of us were doing in Memphis almost 50 years ago, not to mention how much they seem to enjoy some of that music.

Ardent Sessions, and its companion show, Ardent Presents (singer/songwriter acoustic) is now available on Ardentsessions.com in addition to BreakThruRadio.com.



Although this may seem like a new idea, it really goes back to the early 70s at Ardent. That's when we had a pair of 15kHz equalized telephone lines to WMC-FM100, and we would originate live broadcasts from our Studio A with artists like Lynard Skynard, Pure Prairie League, Martin Mull, Big Star, Cargoe, The Groundhogs, Stories, Hookfoot, Elton John’s recording band on Tumbleweed Connection, Ry Cooder with JLD, Wishbone Ash, Nazareth, and Charlie Daniels.

Yes, I do mean live - no delay, no opportunity to bleep or re-mix - no need to, really.

We started The Ardent Sessions because we thought it would be helpful to young musicians, and we have managed to keep it totally free of cost to the artists.

However, in the current economic conditions, this is becoming harder to do. At the moment we have no offsetting advertising income from the shows, so we thought we might ask fans to help us keep this a free service by donating to our Kickstarter Campaign. Let us know what you think.

—John Fry, 9/22/2010