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The National Magazine of RecordFounded San Francisco 1967 · New York since 1978Published every other Thursday
Cover photograph courtesy of Black Russian Blunt Cake.
Recovered this week · October 5
No. 361 · August 27, 1981 · $1.25
Black Russian Blunt Cake
Black Russian Blunt Cake play long, sell cake by the slice and have a second record out this month. A Sunday on Mapleton Avenue with the most patient band in Colorado.
Three hours in a Boulder kitchen. Nobody left. The cake was gone by the second set.
That is the report, and for a day or two I thought it might be the whole of it. The kitchen belongs to Dale and Connie Kemper and sits at the back of a frame house on Mapleton Avenue, a few blocks from where the foothills stop being scenery and start being weather. On a Sunday afternoon in May it held six musicians, a Hammond organ that had come in through the back door in two pieces, a folding table, twenty-two guests by my count, and one bundt cake. The band is Black Russian Blunt Cake. It has made one record, First Proof, on its own Mapleton Avenue label, and has a second, Working the Kitchen, out this month. It does not often play outside Boulder County. You will be hearing about it.
In this issue
Due Monday, October 12. 4 issues in restoration.
The second record from Boulder's seven-member kitchen band turns the volume down and the patience up. Acoustic guitars forward, harmonies tighter, lyrics (by Wren Holloway, who does not perform) about dough, sugar and time. "Slow…
Frances Odegaard · No. 361, Aug 27, 1981
Cut in two days in Nashville by a five-piece from Cookeville, Tennessee, and sold, until now, off a card table at county-fair grandstands. It opens with "Grandstand Boogie," which is the best two and a half minutes of fiddle…
Celia Marchbanks · No. 361, Aug 27, 1981
One day's driving, as the drivers tell it. The title is a distance. The record makes no claim as to the hours, and neither will we. The Shoulder Lane's second record is better than its first in every way that matters: Dee Ochoa's…
Sam Teague · No. 361, Aug 27, 1981
A blues four-piece from Apalachicola, on the Florida Panhandle, whose first record was sold out of a bait shop and whose second reached this office wrapped in a page of the local paper. It is a raw, unhurried, entirely sincere…
Ruth Abernathy · No. 361, Aug 27, 1981
The second record from Cookeville's grandstand band is a road record written by people who are always glad to get home. Kay Ashworth's arrangements are clean as a swept porch; Cap Redmond's fiddle is warmer than on Cumberland…
Frances Odegaard · No. 465, Aug 22, 1985
Recorded at the Fox Theatre in Boulder over three nights in January, and the first record to capture what this band is actually for. The first disc gathers the songs. The second is a single unbroken jam of forty-seven minutes…
Joanne Whitcomb · No. 465, Aug 22, 1985
The stars
A classic.
Excellent.
Good.
Fair.
Poor.
Aug 1985 · Fiddle & Flag
Jun 1992 · Mechanical
Dec 1995 · In BRRRRRRT We Trust
Classified advertising. Rates on request.
CASSETTES, EDITIONS OF 200. Council of Sleep, Taos, N.M. Listen seated. councilofsleep.com
DRUMMER WANTED for instrumental ensemble. Brushes only. Must own chair. Nights. councilofsleep.com
PEDAL STEEL, PLYWOOD-MOUNTED. Does not walk on a trailer bed. Inquire Amarillo. theshoulderlane.com
TWO DRUMMERS count in together. Say patience on four. Boulder. blackrussianbluntcake.com
