The thread for discussing the amazing Life Is A Problem comp on MISSISSIPPI records

This is the best I could find. David Keenan says it better than I could anyway. Forgive the hyperbole, folks, but this album is really THAT good!

http://www.volcanictongue.com/?cat=1

Various Artists
Life Is A Problem
Mississippi Records
LP + 7″
OUT OF STOCK!

Totally *wailing* collection of raw, primitive electric guitar testifying from a bunch of obscure/seldom-compiled blues preachers including Utah Smith, Rev. Lonnie Farris, Sister O.M. Terrell, Straight Street Group, Rev. A. Johnson, Elder Charles Beck, Crumb Brothers, Bishop Perry Tills, Willanette Singers, Professor Johnson, Tom Dutson and Oakland?s Famous One Man Band with a bonus 7? single featuring George ?Bongo Joe? Coleman performing ?This Old World Is In A Terrible Condition.? Some of the electric guitar playing here is so ragged and iconoclastic that it ends up sounding somewhere between Sonny Sharrock and Fred ?Sonic? Smith and a track like Elder Charles Beck?s anti-rock rant ?Rock & Roll Sermon, Pt. 1 & Pt. 2? feels as Luciferian and high-energy as anything from the amps of the MC5. Besides all of the ripping and revelating there are a few slow-burning spirituals that lend the comp a particularly numinous depth, with Sister O.M. Terrell?s reading of the title track a hypnotic stand-out. But played back to back it?s the most punkinest comp of olde-time gospel shakedown to have made it to vinyl in years. Highly recommended.

Oops moderator plz fix title, sorry, thanks

Super blushing/ psyched people like this! I think it's sold out already, actually.

I did the liner notes and compiled about 80% of the thing along with Eric from Mississippi Records.

It gives me hope that my gospel blues book/ CD might 'Buked & Scorned' (which I'll hopefully finish this year/ get published late Fall) have an audience. We didn't make it explicit anywhere, but the "point" of this LP was to show that "sanctified blues" never went away it just was sort of hiding, even after the market for race records dried up. Also just to turn people on to this stuff.

Working on a sequel to this which will also likely be out this year -- and I can't recommend everything Eric's doing with Mississippi Records enough.

NOTE: The first person to correctly identify the two (intentionally) mislabeled artists will get a special prize from me.

Ha, I was going to say -- "This is totally Mike's bag, surely..."

Oh wow, didn't know this was yours Mike! The shop I work at has sold several dozen copies. Did you have anything to do with the other comps on Mississippi?

Which shop is that? Great to hear that it's like done so well, wow.

This is really Eric's bag, his label -- his partner Warren (guy who found the VU acetate) helped curate a few of the comp.s thus far, and Warren is going to be more involved in the future.

All I've done is maybe talk to Eric about like which Anglin Bros. song to use, or which Gospel Keys track -- nothing more than that and the LIAP comp. thus far.

However, I am overseeing a few reissue projects that I'm super psyched about -- too early to say anything about 'em here on the public internets, though.

Ah, you're the guy behind my spoken word reissues! I should have known.

hah -- i wish, ned!

seeing as the lp is already out of print (though plenty copies should be sitting ins tores, it just came out like 6 weeks ago), and mississippi records will never ever issue music digitally, you could download a rip of the album here if you were so inclined:

http://metaphysiques.blogspot.com/2007/12/various-artists-life-is-problembut.html

Ohhh -- and for the dude up top who's so into the charles beck anti-rock sermon, here's a column i wrote that's mostly about it alone:

http://www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/290_200707.html

and not long after i wrote that column his rare folkways album from the '50s was digitalized, and it's really worth hearing:
http://www.emusic.com/album/Elder-Charles-D-Beck-Urban-Holiness-Service-MP3-Download/11072759.html

Which shop is that? Great to hear that it's like done so well, wow.

Academy Records in Brooklyn, NY.
The other Mississippi stuff has sold very well too; in the future we've decided to order product direct through Eric rather than a distributor yet to be named.

Mike - awesome, man! You've done a public service - it's my favorite record in a long, long while. Please keep up updated (especially about a sequel!) via this forum if you don't mind. Thanks!

PS any other Crumb Brothers stuff hanging around?

ian -- that's my favorite shop in nyc; when i was last there i was talking to this guy caleb who seems very rad and i guess i hooked them up? so, yay. i hope when i'm back in a month that i have some spending $$ for that shop.

and as to the person with the manitoba 12" for a name -- for more crumb brothers info. pls. email me a'ight.

also if you like the record i strongly suggest checking out the records we listed in the liner notes.

(intentionally) mislabeled

why you do this?

i shouldn't have said anything at all 'cause this is such a public forum, and everything. but it just was the only way we could include two of the songs.

anyone who'd dig just a little bit, like do an internet search with some of the info. provided and the song title, would easily access that information -- understand? that aspect of the thing wasn't my call, but it's not like i've never done anything that's not "boot leg ish" (i speak here solely for myself in that regard).

Any chance of a second pressing? raging I missed this.

there are still copies around, man -- sitting all over record shops. i saw a few tonight in portland at everyday music.

and yeah there will be a second printing, but not for awhile.

there better be, dude, cause that shit did not hit stores around here at all (or just flew right out the door the first day).

oh god that crumb brothers song is so satisfying

where is there?

i could be wrong, but it looks to me that copies are available here:

http://www.bompstore.com/servlet/Detail?no=8044

and here:

http://new.honestjons.com/shop.php?pid=32386

and here:

http://www.deecoo.de/product_info.php?info=p130803_various---life-is-a-problem--lp-7-----LP-UK.html

Mike:

Yes, Caleb is an ultimate bro. One of my tightest pals for real.
Anyway, good work to all involved. Maybe Caleb & I will play somethin' from the comp on our radio show this week.

And to speak to God Punch To Hawkwind, whose actual name I can't remember right now: It probably made it to the shops (you're in Philly?) but there were definite problems, at least for us, in keeping it in stock. We'd order ten copies, sell them in two days, then not be able to restock from F0rc3d Exp0sure until THEY re-stocked from Mississippi, I guess. Part of our decision to order direct.

Saw Eric today and we spoke of repressing it this year just with a different color scheme to the cover (and w/o the Bongo Joe 7" sorry).

We also talked about what the sequel's gonna be like. Basically, where the first one was hard and intense the second one will be spooky and strange -- the same kind of intensity but a really different vibe.

Best news I've heard all day

Mississippi can do no wrong! I'd like to see a repress of the early blues comp they put out which disappeared at precisely the same time that I discovered the label.

There are still copies at Honest Jon's (London). I ordered mine one week ago.

Kid from the Crumb Brothers has an incredible voice.

Professor Johnson's way of pronouncing "zone" is quite remarkable.

Zo-an

beautiful lps, folks. thanks. btw the lonnie farris stuff on a document cd is amazing, but document does a bad job keeping their stuff in print. i should post that to a blog some day -- it's not like anyone's getting royalties off of it anyway. the guy who wrote the liner notes isn't even sure when lonnie farris died.

if you like the stuff on the "life is a problem" comp id' recommend two cds on american odeon, both are reissues of long o.o.p. lps. the guy behind this label produced sony's defunct roots 'n' blues series (i forget his name); he founded a new label a few years back with lots of ambitious plans but i don't know that much has come of them.

anyway, the two cds are:

- a night with daddy grace
http://www.amazon.com/Night-Daddy-Grace/dp/B000AA4GI2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1200191022&sr=1-2

and

- harlem congregation
http://www.amazon.com/Harlem-Congregation-Live/dp/B000BKUX6A/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1200191017&sr=8-2

...two of the most-slept-on reissues of the past few years. get to it!

also see

http://50milesofelbowroom.com/new.html

AWESOME NEWS, Miss. Records fans -- Eric just met with Warren this past weekend and they're going to try to get all the back stuff in print again -- the Wash Phillips, Thai Orchestra, Love is Love, and then our Life is a Problem LP, everything -- all in the next few months! Eric also has some super great projects in the works. I'm not sure what I can say and what I can't at this point, but rest assured it's all going to be awesomeness.

As to the liner note writer not knowing Rev. Lonnie Farris's exact DOD -- it can be really hard to find out the particulars of some people's lives, and I mean look at what Harry Smith wrote in the notes to the anthology (excuse me The Anthology) re: Blind Willie Johnson -- 50 years ago he wrote that there was nothing known about him. Then Sam charters tracked down one of his ex wives and got a lot of info. Then people realized that it was likely his other wife who sang on the tracks, and etc.

This stuff takes so much time and hard work -- and there's been so little research into this particular field for various (weird to me) reasons. And as we've seen with Corcoran's work on Wash Phillipps, the little bits of info. we all know may be totally wrong, to boot. This is something I'm highly concerned with in working on my book on sanctified blues/ gritty gospel -- in order to exactly fact check everything I'd need a huge trust fund and a shit-ton of time to go digging through records in muddy basements across the country. Since for so many artists this was never done in the first place, that's what would be ideal, but fuck it -- my list of Crucial Artists keeps growing weekly; it's up to 7 dozen or so now.

Anyway, I'll look into those other records -- I have one CD in that "series" 'cause Opal Nations did the notes and sent me a copy, never thought to look into it more for some reason. I love when people re-use old, early record label names that went away (ie Am Odeon, Perfect) -- it's about time for someone to resurrect Herwyn, no?

But I do stand by our little list that was included in the liner notes as being the records that I think most jibe with the raucous tone and post-ww2 content of the 'LIAP' comp.

In very much the same vein of course will be the next Case Quarter releases, the book/ CD about/ by Rev. Utah Smith -- that's gonna be AMAZING.

:-)

revenant was set to release a lot more stuff in this vein but it seems like dean blackwood slowed their release schedule to a crawl within a few years (around when fahey died), so i don't expect anything from them...

revenant's list of future projects was always great, yes -- among them was a rev. lonnie farris reissue that they were going to call "a night at the house of prayer" after the track of the same name. since they did everything so beautifully i'm def. bummed that never happened, in particular.

but the vinyl versions of their reissues that came out a few years ago were a swell treat -- reminds me i think i slept on a few of those -- they're probably out of print already?!

American Primitive is def. OOP on vinyl.
exciting news about these reissues, maybe I can go up to Portland and get a copy this time!

The only Revenant vinyl that's still around is the Stanley Bros. LP, I believe.

I thought I was pretty complete on my Mississippi discog, but I must have missed "Love is Love." What's that one all 'bout?

'Love is Love' is one of the African comp.s -- As the first one it relies the heaviest on Original Music material, but all the O.M. LPs are crazy hard to find these days and it really is an amazing comp. in and of itself.

This is amazing.

man, will need to pick up that repress. the only african one i got was lipa kodiya city council.

Forced Exposure has more copies of the Washington Phillips LP.

Still blowing minds in this home.

What exactly is the legality of these Mississippi records? Mike up there talked about having to change names of songs and I was wondering if all of these records are being done on the downlow because some of these recordings have been on other cds, like the Professor Johnson stuff on Document and the Washington Phillips cd Yazoo, which make no mentions. And specifically with the Phillips record, things like missing all the tracks (most of us would probably have spent the extra on a 2xlp) or the recent uncovering of new info about his life, etc. Great stuff, either way, just wondering how certain parties are getting compensated.

Listen to this and the I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore comp all the time all the time all the time. Haven't migrated to the stacks since I bought 'em. Missed Love is Love and Washington Phillips - need to get digging, I guess.

New Orch. Regional de Kayes is good - maybe less than mind-blowing.

x-post: My understanding with music from this era, from the 20s and 30s and often even later, it is incredibly difficult to track people down. If you wanted to pay for Washington Phillips royalties, I don't even know how you could. If you notice, Miss. LPs are very inexpensive, and they always attempt to license songs.

The two songs that were changed are the only instance of this happening, and I do not think is something that will happen again.

All the LPs will soon enough be in print. Or if they go out of print they'll be back if you're just a little patient.

The sequel to 'Life iss a Problem' is just starting production now, FYI -- I didn't compile nearly as much of this one but then again I have a 3 CD set to get together for Tompkins Square next fall, as well as the CD that will accompany my gospel book, so I am not bummed about that.

People in NYC who do not have LIAP: It's on sale for only $10 at Kims right now -- they have a chart and it's listed as their #2 best seller for the week? Or it was when I dropped by there the otehr day. That totally made my week.

ps: to th ebest of my knowledge, a number of mississippi records have been either officially "cleared" of the need for royalties -- as w/ the latest african disc, that one was fully public domain, or have a very high percentage of royalties going to the artists, as with the philip cohran album.

yaow! there's an article here that namedrops an imminent reissue of michael hurley's armchair boogie on mississippi. i actually sat around yesterday wondering why people haven't reissued this.

i think the tjo to trace a raveling ep/s is as good as anything on mississippi.

unfortunately I have heard, off the record from an employee, that lawyers are preventing that reissue. which sucks.

f'kin jerks. I hate those guys.

aw. i saw michael hurley a couple of weeks ago and was asking the merch guy if you could get any of his stuff on lp, which seemed as if it was so dumb a question as to be funny, they're long gone. gnomonsong? have just put out his last record, so that's something.

a skip james record?, and represses of love is love & thai orchestra are happening/have happened, apparently, but i've no idea where one would ascertain such things outside of forced exposure or honest jon's, and there's nothing there yet.

"it's about time for someone to resurrect Herwyn, no?"

didn't Matt Valentine & Erika Elder do a take-off on this, Heroin, for one of their CDR imprints?

as i emailed Mike this, J. Spaceman rrecently did a two-page spread in Vice about MS Records, with Life is a Problem getting a half-page gush on it.

and along the same lines, Spring Fed Records recently put out the John Work Tapes, Recording Black Culture, which includes the crucial recordings of Frazier and Patterson. no one seems to be talking about this disc, but it was originally slated to come out on Revenant. or at least when i interviewed Dean Blackwood back in the late '90's, he put it on a short list alongside The Anthology Vol. 4 and their pre-war gospel second volume comp.

i have a couple of boring mississippi recs qs:

on love is love, the second song's by s.e. rogie, who also pops up on city council. he's written down as s.e. rogers, which i think he's also credited as on the comp the track's from, africa dances. is there anything behind this?

and, also, there's another blues comp, apart from life is a problem and not i don't feel at home ..., called something like everything is o k. has anyone got it/can you get it, etc? what's it like?

by "off the grid" do you mean "placing bootlegs of LPs by african musicians in every significant indie record store in the USA?" b/c that's what happened (i think it was the orchestre regional de kayes LP). they apparently corrected that error eventually (or so i recall reading), but i just wanted to point that out.

yeah, but that's the point at which the rubber hit the road, right? in their early days, they'd been operating out of their portland shop exclusively, making records for in-store customers and a fairly small network of friends. then they spread out to a clutch of west coast indie shops, and after that to the rest of america and the world.

i forgive them for failing to adjust their practices ahead of their growth curve because they've been responsive to criticism, they don't seem ever to have done anything for profit, and they were never printing particularly large quantities. they still produce some of the cheapest LPs out there, and it's not like the quality is poor. i pay twelve to fifteen bucks for a mississippi record, and the chances are good its gonna come with a bunch of inserts, a bonus 7", a handmade cover, special printing, maybe even a gatefold or some such. that speaks to me of a fundamentally ethical, "in it for the music" mindset. were i buying a cutthroat, money grubbing boot, i'd be paying $25-30 for the same.

yeah i'm not hating over it i just wanted to point out that they managed to get a bootleg (or two or three) into stores before public shame caused them to alter their business practices.

that speaks to me of a fundamentally ethical, "in it for the music" mindset. were i buying a cutthroat, money grubbing boot, i'd be paying $25-30 for the same.

yeah, this is true. those LPs on the monk label, which seems to have jumped on the bandwagon once mississippi became a big thing, are more what you're describing insofar as they are really tackily packaged comps of old blues stuff that's been reissued (on every conceivable format) a million times, and they charge real import prices--$18 minimum, often i see them for $30.

and they are mastered, like most of mississippi's comps, from other LPs or CDs (or even MP3s) rather than from original elements or even selectively-sourced 78s.

i should say most of mississippi's comps not curated by salsburg, nagoski, etc.

yeah, those monk albums are crazy overpriced and boring besides. no sensibility of their own, just a record mill.

i mean, i recently bought an LP reissue of ali farka toure's ni foli, a cassette originally issued in 1984. it's on "social music", a portland-based record-club label specializing in tiny print runs that's clearly modeled on mississippi records. the music is wonderful, but the album is minimally (and rather crudely) packaged, with no explanatory information. just a record in a sleeve, basically. i can't imagine that the estate of AFT was paid what they might have asked for a legit reprint, given his international celebrity, but i'm happy to have it as it's not easily available elsewhere and came quite cheap. and because i'm a nerdy vinyl geek. if there's harm being done here to anyone but hoarders of the original cassette, i can't see it.

htttps://rapid-----.com/files/3655039306/AFT.rar

delete extra t and s

cool, thanks, i hadn't gotten around to digitizing it :)

and yeah, it's everywhere now that the LP's out

and maybe before, but i'm a fan, and i'd never come across it

more killer stuff comin:
https://sites.google.com/site/mississippicsr/

super old hurley lp accompanied by an all-new home recording blue hills-y one

Land Of Lo-Fi was an old (90's?) Hurley tape release. This could be different though. So psyched for the Folkways sessions one.

oh huh, no kidding. i didn't know there were tapes, actually; was just listening to him enthusing about eight tracks on this, tangentially; he plays the slurf song about ten minutes through & then o my stars just before the end. o my stars makes me ache.

written up as new, anyhow: Michael Hurley - Land Of Lo-Fi (New home recordings)

hey woah! http://www.landoflofi.com/

woah! will buy!

there are some great tapes from the 80's and 90's that he reissued on hand-burned CDR... Growlin' Bobo, Woodbill Bros., a double called Land Of Lo-Fi/Redbirds were all CDR. Excrusiasion '86 is tape-only and I still don't have it.

i admit i like that this stuff is coming out in a kind of steady trickle rather than in some massive box set or whatever. gives you time to appreciate each drop.

the hurley stuff i mean. that movie looks great and what a fantastic website!

yeah i love that you can read the bios for both protein monster AND jolie holland. can't quite work out the relevance of the performances that are listed, & which you can sponsor, but i hope there's some good live hurls in the film.

my guess is those performances will be in the film and/or bonus features on DVD?

I know it is old news, but I was lucky enough to finally get the True Story of Abner Jay today, wow made my whole week

oh man... so much of that record is so amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kajvEslcEPM

ugh, just gonna bump this thread whenever something new's forthcoming - even though it's been a while since i picked up a mississippi record!, i'm outta the loop - but:

V/A - Hasabe (Ethiopian R&B compilation)
& tsegue maryam gebrou, alemayehu eshete & mahmoud ahmed reissues. the gebrou piano stuff is just the bomb.

i have only spun hasabe once but it sounds great, btw. i am enjoying this, too; a mix of ethiopian 45s, starting with this super-sweet astatke-arranged slow take on tezeta. the guitar playing's consistently so beautiful, the music has its own pace.

hey anyway so here is a super vague question. there is a gospel jam in my head that i can't place - i felt like it was on one of the 3cd tompkins square post-war gospel comps, neither of which i have to hand, & then wondered if it was maybe on a mississippi comp. it's sung like a duet, over a very minimal electric guitar backing, with a woman singing falsetto and a guy singing a lower part, but still kinda high, & i feel like it ends with the main line being something like "do you nee-ed pow-err", kinda straining, repeated, very slow, the voices in and out of sync. i'm skimming tracklists & can't find anything: does anyone know what i'm talking about? post your phone number & i'll call you & sing the gospel to demonstrate.

is hasabe available anywhere except vinyl?

it's all sourced from the ethiopiques series but the comp's just vinyl

Did they get permission from the Ethiopiques folks and will the artists ever see any money

i would be mega surprised if they didn't, bc i think that's their MO, now, but really if you wanna know i guess write eric, or bump the other thread & let's avalanche into five hundred posts of reflexive suspicion

btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayA4Qb23eQk

Life is a problem/I'm gonna whine it/All night long

All the new Ethiopian releases of Eric's Mississippi are licensed through Ethiopiques, and will finally reach some the artists he's releasing. I was really upset though to see that the last comp Hasabe was spelt Halale in Amharic, and the frontcover with a photo of Mulluqen Mellese has absolutely nothing to do with record as he has no songs on it. Afraid that he's way too much in a rush creating these albums..

Thanks for the update.

So Mississippi finally got a website going:

https://sites.google.com/site/mississippicsr/

Didn't know if I should post here or the Tompkins Square / Takoma thread, but I've really been enjoying the new Marisa Anderson. Not sure I dig it as much as The Golden Hour quite yet - it seems this time the brevity of the tunes doesn't always work in her favor, which I guess means I wish all of these songs were twelve minutes long. Anyway, shes terrific. What do you guys think? Anyone seen her live? She was here a while back but I was out of town, unfortunately.

oh i'm gonna pick that one up. i didn't buy the golden hour but dipped into this one on bandcamp & really liked it. i'm glad mississippi have her, & that killer tjo release, it's a nice angle in their catalogue.

dying to pick up a ton of new MR releases in general. did anyone hear the michael hurley 7"?

I have it sitting in front of me, gimme an hour or so

beautiful cover on the Hurley single... do we really need another version of "Wildgeeses"? I guess so, this one is good. B-side has a nice guitar sound, gonna come back to that one again.

i went to this tonight - http://qujunktions.com/artists/i-dont-feel-at-home-in-this-world-anymore-film-stories-images-from-the-mississippi-records-and-alan-lomax-archive

it was a fantastically entertaining 90 minutes and highly recommended if it comes your way. my already big respect for eric isaacson has sky rocketed.

yeah seconded (saw it a few weeks ago). much of the archive footage is :O and I like how he is candid abt Lomax being kind of a dick in many ways

Here's the Crumb Brothers recording. Just incredible. 10 years old, really?
However, one of the YouTube comments says this is actually by The Hightower Brothers. And sure enough, the song is listed on one of their compilations at AMG. Can anyone shed any light on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZGduzdOi1Q

been listening to the life is a problem comp a lot lately

what an incredible song! thank you

Just got the DeZurik Sisters LP on Mississippi and it's crazy fun if you like old 78s of sisters who sing like birds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNYDyXn6qso

*PLEASE KEEP AN EYE OUT!* Eric Isaacson from Mississippi Records had a break in at his home today and had about 100 really rare blues and folk records stolen. A-M of his collection. Stuff like Cat Irons, rare Skip James, Fred McDowell, One String Jones, cannons jug stompers, etc. If you have any info, please call him at 503-954-2686. Thank you!

maybe it's the underprivileged reappropriating their culture?

where'd you see that, sleeve?

Hey that's a good way to get people calling you with rare records they find.

https://katu.com/news/local/community-rallies-to-clean-up-portland-oregon-beloved-mississippi-records-music-store-after-suspected-arson

https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/16wcpb6/mississippi_records_arson_fire/

bizarre