Buck Meek

 Buck Meek, the singer, songwriter & Big Thief guitarist, goes record shopping at Amoeba Hollywood in this "What's In My Bag?" episode. He talks about Steve Cropper's quintessential guitar sound, how Lucinda Williams uses repetition in her songwriting, and Milford Graves' study of the human heart impact on a drummer's rhythmic signature. Buck Meek's fourth solo album, The Mirror, is available now via 4AD.

Buck Meek's picks:
• Booker T. & The M.G.'s - In The Christmas Spirit (LP)
• Otis Redding - (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay b/w Sweet Lorene (7") 
• Terry Allen - Juarez (LP)
• Terry Allen - Lubbock (On Everything) (CD)
• George Stevens - Shane (BLU-RAY) 
• Lucinda Williams - Essence (CD)
• Lucinda Williams - World's Gone Wrong (CD)
• Victoria Williams - Loose (CD)
• Porches - Scrap And Love Songs Revisited (12")
• Milford Graves - Babi (LP)

Featured Artist: Buck Meek

Editor: Charlie McTavish Smith
Executive Producer: Rachael McGovern
Producer/Director: Craig Miller
Assistant Director: Derich Heath
Cameras: Derich Heath
Audio Recorded by: Patrick Emswiler
Assistant Editor: Patrick Emswiler

Watch Buck Meek's "What's In My Bag?" episode on Amoeba.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Buck Me. I'm at Amoeba, and this is What's in My Bag. First thing I found was Booker T and the MG's Christmas album in this Christmas spirit. Booker T and the MGs was the Stax Records house band, and they're one of my favorite bands of all time. They backed up a lot of the great singers like Otis Redding. You know, like Sittin on the Dock of the Bay, of course, that's one of his big songs.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, watching the tide rolling.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

All of his like great records are the Stax House Band with Steve Cropper on guitar, who's one of my favorite guitar players of all time. Booker T, of course, stuck done on the bass. This is um Otis Redding's Sweet Lorene. I never really noticed Steve Cropper's guitar playing until recently, but if you listen to his licks, it's so beautiful the things he's doing. I used to listen to Otis Redding a lot with my grandmother in the kitchen. She would like put on, sitting on the dock of the bay and those tracks, and we would dance together as she cooked a lot growing up. She kind of like taught me how to dance. So those songs are like such a big part of my life, but I was listening to it recently and I started noticing the guitar and just got super obsessed with Steve Cropper and went into all his recordings. The Booker T and the MG's records are often like instrumental and his guitar playing really shines. He plays a telecaster just plugged right into a fender tweed Harvard amp, and his sound is so quintessential. Next album is, well I have a pair here. A lot of my selections are pairs. Terry Allen, Warez. Is the vinyl I found, although the record I really know well is Terry Allen's Lubbock on Everything. One of my favorite albums of all time. Terry Allen is a songwriter from Lubbock, Texas, in North Texas, where a lot of great songwriters came out of, like Buddy Holly and the Flatlanders with Butch Hancock and Joe Ely and Jimmy Dale Gilmore. I'm from Texas, from the Hill Country, normally, but Lubbock is kind of like known as a very open, boring place. It's like the flattest place in Texas. Terry Allen jokes that if you stand on a tunican, you look at the horizon, you can see the back of your head, it's so flat up there. But something about the, I guess, the boredom bred really good songwriters. I guess there's just like a lot of open space to dream. A lot of the songwriters there have this kind of mythic quality. They're almost like these country mystics. The Flatlanders, a lot of their songs are like about the Bhagavad Vita and like mysticism.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

The earth turns low and battle upon degree. So later on we'll see ourselves and all be free.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

This album is a I think it's his first album, but it's a country like concept album essentially about these follows these two couples who are kind of like outlaws crossing over the border back and forth from Texas to Mexico and getting into trouble. And there's a lot of bloodshed and drama and love. And yeah, it's a really wild kind of concept album.

unknown 3:54

Today.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

As a pair to that, my favorite Western film, Shane, which I grew up watching with my grandmother and my grandfather, they both were professors of literature in Texas, and they and they also taught film. And this was one of their favorite Westerns. Again, one of the things I love about country music, or like great country songwriters and great western films, is that like I feel like they often depict really subtle, subtle aspects of love. For instance, in Shane, this gunfighter comes to town and he's a little ragged and kind of on the fringe. And he stays with this couple, and their son is obsessed with Shane. He idolizes Shane as this like, you know, gunfighting hero and kind of neglects his father and like kind of has resentment to his father's just this super honorable farmer. And really, his father is like the the good guy. You know, like his father is just like doing his best. And eventually you start to understand that Shane is a flawed character. He's kind of an anti-hero in a way. So I don't know, there's all these layers to the story that I didn't even pick up on as a kid. I saw it recently at the New Beverly and like kind of realized how how layered it is, which is cool. Okay, the next one is Lucinda Williams. My one of my favorite records of hers is Essence, the song Lonely Girls. I love how she uses repetition in her writing. This song Lonely Girls, she just repeats this theme, Lonely Girls, over and over and over again and slowly introduces new ideas to this kind of like through line of the you know of the lyric Lonely Girls. And then I also found her new record, World's Gone Wrong, which I was honored and lucky to be a part of. I I wrote a song with her and in my band Big Thief for this record called Low Life.

SPEAKER_04 5:48

Well I guess this is the Lowlies. But it's we're wanna be.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

We went on tour with Lucinda a couple years ago and ended up just hanging out and jamming in the green room, playing like, I think we played Minneapolis with her in the green room and kind of went really well, and then she invited us to Nashville to write with her at the kitchen table and kind of showed us some of her raw ideas. So she had the first lines for this song Low Life, and we we wrote it, we wrote the rest of the song together. Yeah. Yeah, it was really fun. I love Lucinda Williams. This one is um Victoria Williams loose.

SPEAKER_06 6:44

I cannot decide who should die for Bill. I do my best to forgive.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

The song you are loved on here is Kick Ass and Crazy Mary. She collaborated a lot with like Lou Reed. There's a video of her playing Crazy Mary with Lou Reed on lead guitar.

SPEAKER_05 7:09

Take a bum.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

And also she worked a lot with Vic Chestnut, who's another one of my favorites. But yeah, this album, probably my favorite of hers. And then Porches, Scrap and Love Songs.

SPEAKER_05 7:54

Will I feel it stupid and scared that I love you when you burn into my stomach off my in the above you?

SPEAKER_00 8:04

When my band Big Thief was first starting, we were living in New York City and we were all obsessed with this band Porches. They had just put out their record Slow Dance in the Cosmos, I think, when we were we were there. Aaron Main is the songwriter. I really also appreciate Aaron Main's kind of creative arc. Like every Porches record is so different. Kind of went like super electronic for a minute and super poppy, and then now it's come back full circle to just this kind of gnarly rock and roll. This is like basically a, I think one of his first albums that he made in Pleasantville, New York, where he's from. These songs are so raw and emotional, and I really love his use of harmony. Like his chord progressions and his melodies are really subtly complex. There's a lot of like nines and thirteens and really pretty chords that you don't often find in rock and roll. And then finally, Milford Graves, Bobby. He's a a drummer from New York City, and he played with Sun Ra a lot and Sonny Sherrick, like on the Sonny Sherick record Black Woman, which is one of my favorites. Milford Graves is a really deep guy. He kind of pioneered this whole way of thinking about rhythm in regards to the human heart. He spent like his whole life doing research on the human heart with all of this medical equipment that he had collected in his basement in Harlem. He had brought in a lot of different drummers and musicians to study their heartbeat and like the overtonal rhythms of their heartbeat, like getting into like microscopic readings of people's heartbeats and how it was reflected in their playing, I guess. And how like people's you know rhythmic signature on their instrument was often reflective of their actual heartbeat. He's a really cool guy. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

That was really great.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Thanks for having me.