Tag Archives: Dap-Kings

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Lollapalooza 2008: Don't Be Old, Be Fun

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Lollapalooza 2008I had a bad attitude about Lollapalooza this year. I was not looking forward to it at all. I’ve covered Lollapalooza for Glorious Noise each year since the festival was resurrected in Chicago in 2005. Between Lolla and Forkfest, I was thinking I might just be festivaled out.

My wife’s advice as I left on Friday: “Don’t be old—be fun.”

Which sounds a lot harder than it actually turned out to be. Once I let go of some of my uptightness and decided to just roll with it, I ended up having a great weekend. Free your mind, and your ass will follow, right? Surprisingly, I think the lack of bands that I needed to see helped me relax and just enjoy myself.

Not to say that there weren’t a ton of great bands playing this year. There were, but I’ve seen most of them recently. At Lollapalooza two years ago. Or at Pitchfork last year. Or both.

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Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings Live in Chicago

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Sharon Jones - Photo by Megan PhillipsPark West Theater, November 15, 2007

My fascination with modern bands reproducing vintage sounds started in the early 90s when a couple Kalamazoo bands from the Leppotone label started donning sharp suits and banging out sounds that could have emanated from any Seattle-area garage in 1966. It was to my great surprise to learn months later that there was a whole subculture of garage rockers out there who were still living in the Johnson years and searching out wingtip shoes to accompany their sharkskin suits. This was before Swingers, mind you, and it was cool as all get out.

More than just quirky recording projects, these bands lived a sort of performance art. It wasn’t enough just to sound like the Sonics or the Living End, you had to believe it and immerse yourself in the sights and sounds of the period or else the entire fantasy fell apart like Christopher Reeve when he found that penny in his pocket and was whisked away from the turn on the century on Mackinac Island and back to the shitty early 80s. The movie is called Somewhere in Time. Rent it. And then wash off the honkeyness with a sweet taste of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings.

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Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings – 100 Days, 100 Nights

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Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings - 100 Days, 100 NightsSharon Jones & The Dap Kings – 100 Days, 100 Nights (Daptone)

I am sometimes accused of being Old Timey. It has nothing to do with my habit of walking very fast around in clipped cadence or the fact that I appear in a faded, sepia-toned black and white regardless of the time of year or level of light in a given room. It doesn’t even have that much to do with my drive to bring back terms like “You’re all wet!” or “23-Skidoo!” No, I like old timey music. I especially like it when new artists play old timey music and do it RIGHT!

My introduction to Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings was right here on GLONO. In response to my admittedly hyperbolic declaration that Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album was “the best soul record in decades” a reader simply known as “matt” directed me to check out Jones and her band of Brooklyn soul brothers. I picked up Naturally and listened incessantly for two weeks. Given the volume of music I consume in a month, that’s a LOT of time on my playlist. And I still return to that album when I’m hungover or moody, which is more often than I should admit in public.

Now we have the follow-up, 100 Days, 100 Nights, and yes, I am smitten once again. From the beautifully vintage cover of Jones replete in gold lamay dress and Motown-inspired typeography to the hard-panned mix of the Dap King’s painfully cool instrumentation, this record is LEGIT.

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