Sunny Friday morning, after 3 hours of emails on all sorts of biz matters (sigh!), Ray Charles came on, doing “Come Back Baby.” The day was lookin better!
Got me thinking about Ray and his recording of “Am I Blue,” live in Japan (in ’76 I think). Dialed it up on Grooveshark (here) and once again got chills (running from my ears down arms). A rare performance, with John Coles killing it on the trumpet, the crowd obviously tuned in.
The second time Ray sings “blue,” he makes it into a 6-note word. He starts bending all the held notes. At the very end, he makes “Am I gay…,” go “Am I gay-ay-ay…” Just a stunning vocal.
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
