Saved by Grace ...

I love great music ... and a new generation of musicians is saving us from the rock and roll dark ages of the 80's and 90's. I discovered one of these saviours last night on the Sun Record Studios blog. Her name is Grace Potter, and she and her band, The Nocturnals, are reminding us what rock and roll really sounds like. Smokey, smouldering vocals, wild B3 chops, Rhodes rhythms, soul-searing song-writing ... and that's just Grace. Her band is equally amazing.

Check out Grace Potter and The Nocturnals on YouTube:

• Big White Gate, performed at the 8x10 Club in Baltimore.


• Nothing but the Water, performed at the Boston Music Awards.


• Here's another rockin' version of Nothing but the Water, performed at Wakarusa.

For their first two years, Grace and her band teamed up with friends to run their “Ragged Company” label from her dad’s old sign shop. In 2005, they joined forces with Justin Goldberg after reading his Ultimate Survival Guide for the New Music Industry: A Handbook for Hell. Following Goldberg's advice, Grace and her band turned down small-time record deals and instead toured incessantly to build their fan base. In 2007, they reached critical mass on the touring circuit and the major-label deals started coming in.

Their latest album, This Is Somewhere, is their long-awaited major label debut. It's worth the wait. But their previously-recorded material released on indie911.com is also groovin'.



Grace Potter and The Nocturnals have been opening for the Black Crowes on their Warpaint tour. The Black Crowes are here in Winnipeg on July 15. Grace isn't on the bill ... yet. But she's got an opening on that date.

Winnipeg needs Grace.

Nothing on the TV ...

... but I'm not bored. I've gathered up some DVD's for the summer. Here's what's on my list so far:

Jerry Lee Lewis, Live from Austin
Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story
Lightning in a Bottle: A One Night History of the Blues
Atlantic Records: The House that Ahmet Built
Blues Brothers I and II (2000)
Hustle and Flow
Great Balls of Fire
Jerry Lee Lewis, Last Man Standing
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Crossroads (yeah, the Ralph Macchio movie)
Ray
Walk the Line
Elizabethtown
Almost Famous

... and of course, This Is Spinal Tap (got it for $4.99)

I've seen 80% of these discs before, but I'd like to pay them another visit. Plus, I've got a ton of guitar "instructional" videos to wade through, including Arlen Roth's Masters of the Telecaster and a couple Redd Volkaert videos.

Any recommendations?

For your listening pleasure, I'm really pleased with Mothership, which I downloaded from iTunes. It's a great Led Zeppelin anthology.

Also ... last week, I collected about three dozen Stax sides. I'd love to compare favorites.

If the shoe fits ...

Suspicious vehicle pulled over and surrounded by the police, service revolvers drawn, perp dragged out of the vehicle and cuffed. For once, police got the upper hand on one of Winnipeg's legions of psychopathic car thieves.

But this time their perp wasn't a car thief (or a psychopath). He wasn't even a perp. He was Fresh I.E., a Christian minister and Grammy-nominated rapper. How did the police screw up so badly? They claim they ran the plates on Fresh's pearl-white Chrysler 300C and it came up stolen. Later, police claimed a dispatcher had miskeyed Fresh's plate number and it was the miskeyed plate number that came up stolen. Hmmm.

Fresh claims it was racial profiling. He claims he was pulled over by the police because he was a black man driving a fancy car. I don't think so. I see a lot of 30-something black guys driving mid-size sedans and they don't get pulled over ... ever.

In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words. Fresh loves the gangsta look. He even posed gangsta for the papers after his incident with the police. That's his prerogative, but gangsta culture revels in its demented and destructive hatred for law and order. If Fresh wants to roll gangsta, then guilt by association is going to be a way of life for him. Wear it with pride, brother. And stop whining and complaining about racial profiling. It has nothing to do with race. Not every black man shares your sense of gangsta style. And this was about style, not skin color.

For me, the most disappointing aspect of Fresh's fifteen minutes of fame was his failure to embrace the creative tension presented by his double roles as rapper and minister of Christ. That's an incredibly unique and powerful combination of roles, which should evoke an incredibly unique and powerful response to his situation. Instead, Fresh used his bivocational identity to thumb his nose at the police: "Fooled ya, suckas. I might dress like a homey from the hood, but I'm really a Christian minister. And now you goin' down."

What a waste. As a gangsta-style rapper and Christian minister, Fresh was custom-fitted for last week's showdown on the streets. He was the right person at the right time to show us the right way to rise above our cultural malaise. Last Tuesday, Fresh was admonishing pastors at a city-wide prayer meeting to support our police in prayer. On Friday, he was calling for their heads, claiming he was a victim of racial profiling.

Late last week, the police issued an unequivocal apology for their actions. Fresh stuck to his story and re-iterated his suspicions of racial profiling. This past Sunday, we gave Fresh an opportunity to share his story -- and perhaps some sober second thoughts -- on the GodTalk Radio Show on CJOB. What better place for a rapper/Christian minister to set the record straight than a live talk radio show about God? We were delighted when Fresh's manager confirmed his appearance on the show. We were disappointed when Fresh opted out.

I'd hate to think that getting all up in 5-0's face is the best Fresh can do. Show us the way forward, bro. You might be just the person we need for our moment in time. There aren't too many other rapper cum Christian ministers out there! No one else can fill your shoes.

Give the chief of police a call. Make a joint statement for the media.