Actually playing Gimme Shelter with the maestro. Pretty cool…

Someone said to me recently, “In the old days all the news outlets had softball teams. Now it seems like they all have bands.” Five of those bands — from Vanity Fair, CNBC, Esquire, Fortune, and the New Yorker — played at the White House Correspondents Jam on Friday night, at the Mother Nature Network party hosted by Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell. Chuck sat in with each band for one song. I believe we were the only band that actually played a Stones song with him. It was a super fun night for all of us — a little nervous at first, but two songs in we settled down, and the crowd really got into it and didn’t want us to leave. There will be video at some point, but here are some odds and ends in the meantime.

Set List

Drive My Car
Green River
You Really Got a Hold on Me
Carol
Brand New Cadillac
Gimme Shelter
Dead Flowers
The Weight
Day Tripper
Encore: Sympathy for the Devil

Lena Dunham introduced us (long story) and took this great picture of DR and Lachrisha B. which she put on Instagram.

https://i.instagram.com/p/16EfCEi1Dq/

Here’s the pic

Heres our Logo. Tee shirts are available for $20!

16 cm sequoias-4

We play another gig Friday in NYC. More to come!

Thoughts on Brett Morgan’s documentary, “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.”

I attended a screening of the film at SXSW, and while I really wanted to like it, I felt that it raised more question about Kurt Cobain and his legacy than it answered. Foremost of which are — Why exactly did Kurt become such an icon, when he was so poorly suited for the position, and so plainly didn’t want to be anyone’s role model? Was our country’s self-esteem at such a low point in the late 80’s and early 90’s that it needed to make a self-hating drug addict a spokesman for the nation’s youth? Why, if he was so deeply alienated from almost everyone around him, did he hanker for the trappings of conventional family life? Did Courtney Love try to save him or did she provoke his suicide? How credible are we supposed to find her in the film? Where was Dave Grohl? Where was the grown up Francis Bean?

What the film is sorely lacking is narrative context. If not an actual narrator, then a narrative intelligence needed to be positioned between the footage and the interviews on screen, and the audience trying to make sense of them. Brett Morgan does great things with animation in the film, and Kurt’s notebooks are used in inventive ways (though the final entry, the suicide note, is strangely absent), but he sorely neglects interpretation. The music is magnificent, and the concert footage is superb, but the film leaves you with a queasy voyeuristic feeling (did I really want to see that much of Courtney naked?) that may or may not have been the filmmaker’s intention.