Buck Meek's "What's In My Bag?" | Amoeba Music

0:00 Hi, I'm Buck Meek.

0:01 I'm at Amoeba and this is what's in my bag.

0:09 My in will it be me or will it be her?

0:25 First thing I found was Booker T and the MG's Christmas album.

0:29 In this Christmas spirit, Booker T and the MGs was the Staxs Records house

0:42 band and they're one of my favorite bands of all time.

0:45 They they backed up a lot of the the great, you know, singers like Otis Reading,

0:49 you know, like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,

0:50 of course, that's one of his big songs.

0:53 sitting on the darker bay watching a tire.

1:01 All of his like great records are the stacks house band with Steve

1:03 Craropper on guitar who's one of my favorite guitar players of all time.

1:06 Booker T of course Duck Dun on the bass.

1:08 This is um Otis Reading Sweet Loren.

1:16 places.

1:19 I never really noticed Steve Craropper's guitar playing until recently,

1:22 but if you listen to his licks, it's so beautiful the things he's doing.

1:25 I used to listen to Otis writing a lot with my grandmother in the kitchen.

1:27 She would like put on sitting on the dock of the bay

1:30 and those tracks and we would dance together as she cooked a lot growing up.

1:34 She kind of like taught me how to dance.

1:35 So those songs are like such a big part of my life.

1:38 But I was listening to it recently and I started noticing

1:40 the guitar and just got super obsessed with Steve Craropper and went

1:43 into all his recordings and the Booker T and MG's records

1:47 um are often like instrumental and his guitar playing really shines.

1:50 He plays a Telecaster just plugged right into a Fender

1:53 Tweed Harvard amp and his sound is so quintessential.

2:07 Next album is well I have a pair here.

2:09 A lot of my selections are pairs.

2:11 Terry Allen Warz is the vinyl I found.

2:15 Although the record I really know well is Terry Allen's love on everything.

2:18 It's one of my favorite albums of all time.

2:20 I ain't got no blood veins.

2:23 I just got them four lanes are hard and a real

2:32 Terry Allen is a songwriter from Leick,

2:34 Texas in North Texas where a lot of great songwriters came out of like

2:37 Buddy Holly and the Flatlanders with Butch

2:40 Hancock and Joe Elely and Jimmy D Gilmore.

2:42 I'm from Texas, from the Hill Country, really.

2:44 But Lik is kind of like known as a very open, boring place.

2:50 It's like the flattest place in Texas.

2:52 Terry Allen jokes that if you stand on a tuna can,

2:55 you look at the horizon, you can see the back of your head.

2:57 It's so flat up there.

2:58 But something about the I guess the that boredom bred.

3:01 Really good songwriters.

3:02 I guess there's just like a lot of open space to dream.

3:05 A lot of the songwriters there have this kind of mythic quality.

3:08 They're almost like these country mystics.

3:11 The Flatlanders, a lot of their songs are

3:12 like about the Bad Vita and like mysticism.

3:22 So later on we'll see ourselves and all be free.

3:27 This album is a I think it's his first album,

3:29 but it's a country like concept album essentially about these follows

3:32 these two couples who are kind of like outlaws crossing over the border

3:36 back and forth from Texas to Mexico and getting into trouble

3:39 and there's a lot of bloodshed and drama and love and yeah,

3:42 it's a really wild kind of concept album.

3:45 Yeah.

3:46 Leaving LA on a cloudy day pushing the crowd away.

3:51 you going to get away today.

3:57 As a pair to that, my favorite western film, Shane,

4:00 which I grew up watching with my grandmother and my grandfather,

4:03 they both were professors of literature in Texas and they and they

4:06 also taught film and this was one of their favorite westerns.

4:09 Again, one of the things I love about

4:10 country music or like great country songwriters and great

4:13 western films is that like I feel like

4:15 they often depict really subtle subtle aspects of love.

4:19 For instance, in Shane, this gunfighter comes to town and he's

4:22 a little ragged and kind of on the fringe.

4:33 You're a little touchy, aren't you?

4:35 And he stays with this couple and their son is obsessed with Shane.

4:38 and he idolizes Shane as this like, you know,

4:40 gunfighting hero and kind of neglects

4:42 his father and like kind of has resentment.

4:44 His father is just this super honorable farmer and really

4:46 his father is like the the good guy, you know,

4:48 like his father is just like doing his best and and eventually

4:51 you start to understand that Shane is a flawed character.

4:53 He's kind of an anti-hero in a way.

4:55 So, I don't know, there's all these layers to the story

4:56 that I didn't even pick up on as a kid.

4:58 I saw it recently at the new Beverly and like

5:00 kind of realized how how layered it is, which is cool.

5:03 Okay, the next one is Lucinda Williams.

5:06 My one of my favorite records of hers is Essence song Lonely Girls.

5:14 Lonely girls.

5:17 Lonely girls.

5:20 I love how she uses repetition in her writing.

5:23 This song, Lonely Girls.

5:25 She just repeats this this theme, Lonely Girls, over and over and over again.

5:29 Slowly introduces new ideas to this kind of like throughine of the, you know,

5:34 of the lyric lonely girls.

5:36 And then I also found her new record, World's Go Gone Wrong,

5:39 which I was honored and lucky to be a part of.

5:43 I I wrote a song with her and in my band,

5:46 Big Thief, for this record called Low Life.

5:48 Well, I guess this is the low life, but it's where I want to be.

6:01 We went on tour with Lucinda a couple years ago

6:04 and ended up just hanging out and jamming in the green

6:07 room playing like I think we played Minneapolis

6:10 with her in the green room and kind of went really well.

6:12 And then she invited us to Nashville to write with her at the kitchen

6:15 table and kind of showed us some of her raw ideas.

6:18 So she had the the first lines for this song Low Life

6:20 and we we wrote it we wrote the rest of the song together.

6:23 Yeah.

6:25 Yeah.

6:25 It was really fun.

6:26 I love Lucinda Williams.

6:41 This one is Victoria Williams.

6:43 Loose.

6:44 I cannot decide who should die or live.

6:50 I do my best to forgive the song You Are Loved on here.

6:58 It's kickass and Crazy Mary.

7:01 She collaborated a lot with like Lou Reed.

7:02 There's a video of her playing Crazy Mary with Lou Reed on lead guitar.

7:05 pass it around it around.

7:09 Take a bottle and drink it down it around.

7:16 And also she worked a lot with Vic Chestnut who's another one of my favorites.

7:19 I look at a intensile thing up and rising.

7:35 But yeah, this album probably my favorite of hers.

7:38 How blind man who cannot see that God will ease his blindness

7:51 and then porches scrap and love songs.

7:54 And I'm feeling stupid and scared that I love you.

7:59 And the birds in my stomach are flying above you.

8:05 When when my van Big Thief was first starting,

8:07 we were living in New York City and we were all obsessed with this band Porches.

8:11 They had just put out their record Slow Dance in the Cosmos,

8:13 I think, when we were we were there.

8:15 Aaron Mine is the songwriter.

8:16 I really also appreciate Aaron Mine's kind of creative arc.

8:20 Like every Porch's record is so different.

8:22 kind of went like super electronic for a minute and super poppy and then

8:25 now it's come back full circle to just this kind of gnarly rock and roll gas.

8:40 This is like basically I think one

8:42 of his first albums that he made in Pleasantville, New York where he's from.

8:45 These songs are so raw and emotional and I really love his use of harmony.

8:50 Like his chord progressions and his melodies are really subtly uh complex.

8:56 There's a lot of like nines and 13s and really

8:59 pretty chords that you don't often find in rock and roll.

9:02 Porch kid leaps up, spits out his cake.

9:10 It's no one's mistake.

9:15 And then finally, Milford Graves, Bobby.

9:28 He's a a drummer from New York City and he played with Sun Raw a lot

9:34 and Sunny Sherik like on the Sunny Sherik

9:37 record Black Woman which is one of my favorites.

9:48 Milfred Graves is a really deep guy.

9:49 He kind of pioneered this whole way of thinking

9:52 around about rhythm in regards to the human heart.

9:55 He spent like his whole life doing research on the human heart with all

9:59 this like medical equipment that he had collected in his basement in Harlem.

10:03 He had brought in a lot of different

10:04 drummers and musicians to study their heartbeat

10:06 and like the overton tonal rhythms

10:08 of their heartbeat like getting into like microscopic readings

10:12 of people's heartbeats and how it was reflected in their playing I guess and how

10:17 like people's you know rhythmic signature on their instrument

10:20 was often reflective of their actual heartbeat.

10:23 He's a really cool guy.

10:35 Thank you so much for coming in.

10:37 You taught us a lot today.

10:38 You taught me a lot today.

10:39 Cheers.

10:39 Thanks you so much.

10:41 It was really great.

10:41 Thanks for having me.

10:43 Go on fire and People are