Root Blog

David Blue with Jackson Browne (WBCN, 1972/73)

David Blue with Jackson Browne
Live on WBCN, Boston
1972/1973

WBCN Boston 27/8/72
1. Introduction and Tuning
2.The Times You’ve Come
3. Jamaica Say You Will
4. Troubadour Song
5. Yesterday’s Lady
6. Living for Jesus
7. I’ll Be True to You
8. Tonight Will Be Fine
9. For Everyman
10. Spontaneous Composition
& WBCN Boston June 1973
11. Introduction and Interview
12. I Can’t Find You Anymore
13. Save Something For Me Tonight

zip

  1. Maxime on June 19th, 2011

    Leonard Cohen’s elegy for David Blue:

    He died running, he fell beside the square, to the street where, many years before he had begun to sing, he fell in the fullest expression of vanity and discipline. Many of us, in our songs, had touched on the type of man that he became. Dylan raised up such a ragged hero many times before he turned to solace in the shadow of American Chistianity. Joni Mitchell had spoken simply of that constant ambiguous lover, spoken of him over and over, before she entered the beautiful technology of jazz and virtuosity. Kris Kristofferson had described that gambler playing his way from Nashville to Hollywood, where finally the dangers of the game were too coarse for poetry.

    David Blue was the peer of any singer in this country, and he knew it, and he coveted their audiences and their power, he claimed them as his rightful due. And when he could not have them, his disappointment became so dazzling, his greed assumed such purity, his appetite such honesty, and he stretched his arrm so wide, that we were all able to recognize ourselves, and we fell in love with him. And as we grew older, as something in the public realm corrupted itself into irrelevance, the integrity of his ambition, the integritv of his failure, became, for those who knew him,increasingly important and appealing, and he moved swiftly, with effortless intimacy into the private life of anyone who recognized him, and our private lives became for him the theaters that no one would book for him, and he sang for us in hotel rooms and kitchens, and he became that poet and that gambler, and he established a defiant style to revive those soiled archeypes. In the last few years, something happened to his voice and his guitar, something very deep and sweet entered, his timing became immaculate and vwe knew that we were listening to one of the finest, one of the few men singing in America and I was happy then and perhaps happier now to say that I told him that.

    He did not put away his cowboy boots. He did not take a part-time job, he was fully employed in his defiance and his originality and his faithfulness to a ground, a style, an image of which he himself was the last and best champion exponent, a style that many of us had wanted, courted, and had not won.And finally, toward the end of his short and graceful life, he had the grace to recognize the woman to whom he had always been singing, and he courted and married Nesya and because a woman of talent and beauty does not choose lightly, she made manifest for all to plainly see the qualities of love and generosity that he had forced out of his distress. The death of such a man unifies us, and recalls to us how precious we are to one another

    Leonard Cohen

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