Jackie Greene - Giving Up The Ghost flac album

You all know the music I like ...THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ALBUM ... it may well be the best material to come out in the last 25 years.Jackie’s been touring with Phil Lesh and Friends for the last year or so, and not to take anything away from Jackie, who is nothing short of brilliant in his own right, touring and playing with some of the greatest names in rock and roll can only rub off ... and here on ‘Giving Up The Ghost’ Jackie will lay you flat.The album opens with “Shaken,” one of the most mystical and moving songs I’ve heard in a long, long time ... proving that as good as some shoe gazing music can be, it doesn’t hold a candle to the real deal. Track two is a slow funky number, reminding me of Chuck Prophet. It’s not until the forth track, “Like A Ball & Chain,” that Jackie starts rolling, and I still haven’t exhaled ... this is a number the Rolling Stones can only wish that they’d written. Jackie Greene has always said that he could never understand writing an album just like the last one, each of his outings has been different, and this is no exception ... except in the fact that this is hands down the best and most consistent body of work the man has ever done.I wish that I could say that all of these songs were new to me, but having seen Jackie so many times, and having had the privilege of hearing his music before it was put to disc, all I can say is that the production for these final recordings has left nothing to be desired. Jackie’s flavored ‘Giving Up The Ghost’ with the traditional feel of an electric troubadour of the first ranking ... and back himself with the very best musicians playing today. His voice has a young tenor to it, bestowing righteous expectations. The album is thickly textured with instrumental harmonies, presented with a quiet shyness in some parts, while at the same time pealing the paint off of the ceiling. His lyrics are nearly beyond description, they are real, from a heart that has taken notes on life forever. I'm really struggling not to make any comparisons, so I'll just ask you, "Where were you when Greetings From Asbury Park N.J." was released.Please find your way to this release ... it’s honest as the day is long, and better than any rock n' roll that you've heard in a very long time.*** I've received so many messages regarding Jackie, that I thought you might dig reading this, it is all current as of Sunday, April 6, 2008 ...Jackie Greene is loving life these days. The 27-year-old rock musician moved to San Francisco from Sacramento a little more than a year ago. He spent most of his first year sleeping in an equipment storage room at the Mission Street recording studio he owns with Tim Bluhm of the Mother Hips, but now, thanks to his new job, he is renting a small apartment out by the zoo.He adores San Francisco and tools around town in a secondhand '94 Jetta. He doesn't have a girlfriend ("I have several," he says). He just released his fourth album, a very fine record called "Giving Up the Ghost," that may make him the star many have predicted he would be since he first showed up on the scene at age 21 with his debut album, "Gone Wanderin'." "I'm glad to finally have another record out," he says. "It's been a long time. It's been two years."He eats lunch at the Thai restaurant across the street from the studio. The waitress hasn't seen him much since he moved out of the neighborhood, but she still remembers what he likes to eat. Later, as his partner, Bluhm, is busy producing a solo album by ALO drummer Dave Brogan in their studio, Mission Bells, above a Mexican restaurant, Greene sits out on the sunny porch in back by his old digs and puffs on American Spirits. He is wearing a black leather jacket, a couple of silver bracelets and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, allowing a tattoo to peek out.Then there's the new job. Since July, he has been the lead singer in Phil and Friends, a jam band led by ex-Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh that has plopped young Greene in front of huge audiences, such as the 20,000 people who attended the Langerado Music Festival on the Seminole reservation in the Florida Everglades in March, where Phil and Friends headlined alongside R.E.M. and the Beastie Boys.A dream job for a Deadhead, but Greene was not a fan. He didn't know any of the Dead's songs. "I never heard them before," he says. "Maybe that's a good thing." Lesh heard Greene's 2006 album, "American Myth," on KFOG and caught Greene's set at Bonnaroo last year. He phoned Greene out of the blue and invited him to do some recording."Next thing I know," Green says, "he wants me to be in his band." Greene calls it "a super opportunity." "I'd be stupid not to recognize that when I see it," he says. "I jumped at it without thinking, 'What does this mean?' I love a lot of those songs now." He also performs a few of his own songs with the Lesh band, although in extended versions. On his own, Greene gravitates to more classic-rock forms than jam-band music. He is, in fact, something of a stylistic throwback, and he knows it. Every record label he has worked with tells him the same thing, he says."They say, 'How do we sell your records? It doesn't fit with modern things. It doesn't fit with what's selling,' " he says. "I've always said I don't know - it's not up to me, even though, in my mind, I've become a little more modern. I think of those older records like folk records now. I don't know where the place is (for my music). Why can't it make its own place? "It doesn't occur to me that much. I don't think about it. Just call it American rock." With his Eurasian features and pasty-faced studio tan, Greene looks even younger than he is. His unruly black hair sits on top of his head like abird's nest. "My life is a like a country song," he says. "My daddy left when I was 13. I was the oldest of four kids. In the little town where I grew up, there was nothing to do but ride bikes or get in some kind of trouble." His musical path started for him the summer before high school in the small town of Placerville, when the family's TV set was broken. Out of boredom, he pulled out his parents' old LP collection and record player that had been stored away in the basement. He set up the stereo and took out the old Ray Charles album "The Genius of Ray Charles.""I'd never heard anything like it," Greene says, singing the opening horn riff of the Quincy Jones arrangement on the album's opening track, "Let the Good Times Roll." He went back to high school a self-described "record geek," digging brother Ray, Lightnin' Hopkins, Doc Watson, Merle Haggard and all the other artists in his parents' old folk, blues and '60s rock record collection, while his classmates at high school in El Dorado Hills were tuned to N'Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. It was a Tom Waits records he was turned on to by his girlfriend's brother one summer on Cape Cod that persuaded Greene to give songwriting a try.He was still a teenager when he met his manager, Marty DeAnda, who had gone to an open-mike night at a Sacramento nightclub to hear former Beau Brummels lead singer Sal Valentino, and Green was on the bill. DeAnda put out Greene's first two CDs on his own Dig Music label - and also recorded a CD's worth of Dylan tunes sung by both Greene and Valentino - but he signed Greene to Verve Records for his third album, "American Myth," recorded in Los Angeles with Elvis Costello's rhythm section and producer Steve Berlin of Los Lobos. Although the record initially played on radio, when the president of Verve was fired a month after its release, the album stalled and crashed. "I cried about it for a while," Greene said, "and then I started making another record."Greene sorted through around 30 songs to make "Giving Up the Ghost," all written since his previous album came out. A number of the songs were recorded at his studio, but he also cut tracks again with Costello's guys and producer Berlin in Los Angeles. He put out a five-song stop-gap EP last year, "Small Tempest," that he sells only at his shows. He and Bluhm recorded a duo album called "Strike Again!" under their pseudonym, Skinny Singers. Lesh joined the pair for a few songs in October at the Independent in San Francisco, and the fellows played "Sugaree" to close the show. Last year, Green's former label also released a collection, "The Dig Years: 2001-2005," that featured previously unreleased tracks. He seems to be an endless fountain of music at this point in his life.The boy wonder songwriter definitely has the rocking pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu. He drives everybody crazy backstage at Phil Lesh and Friends gigs, plucking away at his mandolin. He is an avid enthusiast of records and has recently been rooting around in early Elton John albums (especially the live LP "11-17-70"). He still plays vinyl phonograph records, even though he was born into the CD age ("I've never been in a record store," he says).The day after his Thai lunch interview, Greene left for Sacramento to refresh his backup band's recollection and rehearse for a few days before hitting the road. To promote the new release, Greene and company will tour with his own band throughout April (he plays Thursday at the Fillmore Auditorium). He has a full schedule of summer shows with Friends - including Bonnaroo, this time as vocalist for a headline act. If his record starts to break, he will be promoting it from the stage at Phil Lesh and Friends shows."We'll have to play more of those songs," he says, laughing. "Phil has been pretty sympathetic. He hasn't done that sort of business in a long time. If anything, it just means there are more songs in the catalog for Phil and Friends, and I already know these." (He compares the experience of trying to learn an old Dead song six hours before performing it to "trying out for the Raiders.") "I'm not used to playing to those numbers of people," he says. "They're used to it and I'm not. It's cool. I freaked out before the shows sometimes, but then I realized, it's just music - it's fun. That's why I wanted to do it in the first place. They call it 'playing' music, not 'working' music. I have to remind myself sometimes, because I take it so seriously. It's called a show." And Greene won't be tied down to some musical bandwagon, whether he's playing Grateful Dead songs in a jam band or leading his own band through some crunching classic rock that owes more to the Small Faces than Bill Monroe."I think of Marvin Gaye and George Jones in the same breath," he says. "I go from Citizen Fish to Merle Haggard in one step, and that's fine with me. I guess the world wasn't made like that. There are radio stationformats and genre bins. "I'm well aware of that, but it doesn't affect me," he says. "I don't give a shit. It goes somewhere. It goes in your CD player. And even if nobody ever hears this new record, I'm still going to make another one. You can't stop me."Review by Jenell Kesler