TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, January 29, 2006
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell


OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
There's Nothing on the Radio by Graham Parker & The Figgs
Monsters in the Parasol by Queens of the Stone Age
Piss Bottle Man by Mike Watt
One Big Holiday by My Morning Jacket
On Broadway by Neil Young
I Can't Control Myself by The Ramones
Cigarettes by Greg Dulli

LIVE MUSIC ARCHIVES SET
The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave by Butthole Surfers
Loretta and The Insect World by Giant Sand
Eye of Fatima by Camper Van Beethoven
Millionaire by The Mekons
Memoirs From the Secret Spot by This Bike is a Pipe Bomb
That's Amore/Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

You Don't Love Me Yet by Roky Erikson
Maggie's Farm by Bob Dylan
Thumb by Dinosaur Jr.
Finish Line by Come
Who Knows One by Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars

The Bum I Loathe is Dead and Gone by Desdemona Finch
The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts by Sufjan Stevens
Roll Away My Stone by Mark Eitzel
I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got by Bettye LaVette
Tango by Bernadette Seacrest & Her Yes Men
World on Fire by Ken Valdez
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

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THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, January 27, 2006
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Declineometer by The Gourds
Throwin' Rocks at the Moon by The Backsliders
Interstate City by Dave Alvin
I Push Right Over by Robbie Fulks
Papa Dukie & The Mud People by The Subdudes
Juke Joint Jumpin' by Hank Williams III & Wayne Hancock
Miss Molly by Sid Hausman & Washtub Jerry
Rock Island Line by Leadbelly

You Can Pick 'em by Jessi Colter
No Good For Me by Waylon Jennings
Something's Gotta Happen by Martin Zeller
How Long (Have You Been Gone) by Rex Hobart & The Misery Boys
Chicken Man by Boris & The Saltlicks
11 Months and 29 Days by Johnny Paycheck
How Can I Be So Thirsty Today? by Petty Booka

LIVE MUSIC ARCHIVES SET
Cottonseed by Drive By Truckers
Sweet Kind of Love by The Pine Valley Cosmonauts
Face to Face by Danny Barnes
Sinkhole by Drive By Truckers
Drunkard's Blues by The Pine Valley Cosmonauts with Kelly Hogan

Jacob Green by Johnny Cash
He's Coming to Us Dead by Norman & Nancy Blake
Blue Eyed Ruth & My Sunday Suit by James Talley
I'll Sign My Heart Away by Merle Haggard
Crooked Frame by The Section Quartet
Rock of Ages by The Duhks
One of The Unsatisfied by Lacy J. Dalton
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: LIVE MUSIC ARCHIVE

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
January 27, 2005

The robber barons of the music industry are weeping again. In 2005 album sales hit the skids, declining about 7 percent from the previous year.


As usual, bigwigs of the major record companies are blaming illegal downloading for many of the industry’s problems. (And, as usual, guys like me will blame bad radio, overpricing, extravagant pampering of a handful of pop “royalty,” and most of all, crappy music.)

Personally, I like to see the Music Industrial Complex squirm. What better way to shake it up than a way to download free music that’s not illegal — or even immoral?

Get yourself acquainted with the Live Music Archive, a Web site that states a goal “to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy.”

Nearly 30,000 free concerts are available for downloading from more than 1,700 “trade-friendly” artists — that is, musicians who allow the taping of their shows and the noncommercial distribution of those recordings. (So actually it’s the commercial bootleggers who are hurt by this more than the music industry.) The vast majority of musicians represented in the Live Music Archive are pretty obscure. But there are a surprising number of well-known artists, either big in indiedom or cast aside by big labels.

The concept of the trade-friendly musician was pioneered by the good old Grateful Dead. Thus it’s not surprising that the Dead is the biggest presence on the Live Music Archive, with more than 3,000 shows ready to download. (This isn’t including spawn of the Dead like Phil Lesh & Friends, Ratdog, New Riders of the Purple Sage, etc.)

I’m no audiophile, but in general the sound quality on these shows is inferior to regular commercial CDs. In fact, some are pretty bad. I recently downloaded the Oct. 12, 1989, Camper Van Beethoven show in St. Louis, which was recorded, broadcast over the radio a couple of months later, and captured on some boombox before it made it onto the Internet.

Luckily, much of the spirit of the show remains — including covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Virginia” and Jerry Garcia’s “Loser” — more than making up for some loss of sound fidelity. In fact my biggest complaint is that Camper didn’t perform “Jack Ruby” from their then-current album Key Lime Pie.

Truth is, ever since I got DSL for my home computer, I’ve been like a kid in the proverbial candy store. While checking the band roster a couple of minutes ago, I just noticed that the Drive By Truckers were on it. I downloaded and am enjoying a live May 2005 version of “Where the Devil Don’t Stay” as I write, and it’s rocking!

Here are some of my other discoveries on the Live Music Archive:

*Mekons Live at the Echo Lounge, March 16, 2004: They don’t have as many shows here as the Grateful Dead, but the Mekons indeed are trader-friendly. They have 28 shows listed, going all the way back to 1980. You can also find a bunch of shows by Mekons offshoot the Waco Brothers and “solo” outings by Mekons singer Jon Langford. (Here's the 1999 Pine Valley Cosmonauts star-studded Bob Wills tribute show at South by Southwest. If you listen closely you can hear me applauding from the audience.)


Much of the repertoire from this show is from the Mekons album Punk Rock, which consisted of remakes of some of their earliest songs. There’s also a righteous cover of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and a high-charged version of “Millionaire,” one of my favorite Sally Timms tunes, which unlike the studio version has no synths. Unfortunately, Sally’s voice sometimes gets overwhelmed in this mix.

One of my favorite nonmusical parts of this show is when Sally wonders aloud why the overwhelming majority of the Mekons’ audience these days is male: “I want to know what happened to all the women who used to come to our shows.”

*Robyn Hitchcock Live at Maxwell’s, March 26, 2005: This is an acoustic solo show Hitchcock recorded at a Hoboken, N.J., nightclub last year. Starting out with Dylan’s “The Gates of Eden” (and later covering “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”), Hitchcock also plays a couple of Syd Barrett tunes (“Dominoes” and “It Is Obvious”). But it’s his own strange tunes, which meander between whimsical and mysterious, that are the main attractions here. Too bad he muffs the ending of “Madonna of the Wasps.”

*Butthole Surfers Live at Emo’s, July 20, 2002: Gibby Haynes and the boys are on their home turf here in this Austin, Texas, show. The song list features tunes spanning their long career, from the near-folk rock of “Dessert” to the crazy chaos of “Lady Sniff.” (For reasons not explained, there are two takes on this song, one right after the other.)

* Warren Zevon Live at Parker’s Casino, Feb. 11, 1992: The late Zevon delivers faithful versions of crowd-pleasing rockers such as “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” as well as killer takes on “Boom Boom Mancini” and “Detox Mansion.” But my favorite part of this Seattle show is after his synthy ballad “Searching for a Heart,” when he gets defensive about the song, which was included in the soundtrack of the forgotten ’90s film Grand Canyon.

“Is this the new, subdued, adult-contemporary kind of response I’m to expect from now on?” Zevon chided the crowd after the song. “Listen, you realize if this song was to actually be successful, it’ll, you know, enable me to be financially secure enough to actually go back and write those songs about sex, terrorism, and voodoo. ... Think of it as sort of like Dr. Hunter S. Thompson writing a few episodes of Knots Landing ...”

*Danny Barnes Live at the Tractor Tavern, Dec. 22, 2005: Here’s the most recent show I’ve come across, recorded right before Christmas. Barnes, former singer with the pioneering punk bluegrass outfit the Bad Livers, plays with a good, rocking band. It’s basically country rock, though he does a creditable take on the R&B classic “The Haunted House.” There’s some solo banjo here, as well as a medley from the Livers’ final album Blood & Mood — avant twang that Barnes describes as “music that killed my career.”

ROUNDHOUSE ROUND-UP: FUNDING THE FACT FINDERS

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
January 26, 2006

Trips to see the World Series. Tickets to Denver Broncos games. Fact-finding jaunts to Europe.

Every year, Barry Massey of The Associated Press dutifully documents some of the goodies that lobbyists bestow upon legislators and other state officials.

Every year, Massey’s stories explain how there’s no limit on the amount of gifts, meals, travel and campaign contributions lobbyists can give. (HERE's a story from last May)

And every year, nobody does anything about it.

This week, Massey wrote about Louisiana Energy Services — a company that wants to build a uranium-enrichment plant in southeastern New Mexico — paying nearly $20,000 to send a couple of groups of legislators to the Netherlands to tour a similar uranium facility.

In light of the state treasurer scandal in New Mexico and the Jack Abramoff scandal in Washington, D.C., it might seem that unrestricted freebies from lobbyists would prompt more attention.

I asked Gov. Bill Richardson about it Wednesday morning at the annual Legislative Breakfast of the New Mexico Press Association.

“I want to work with the Legislature in the next session to see if we can have comprehensive reforms that deal with a number of these issues,” Richardson replied.

But the reforms the governor has in mind apparently don’t include legal limits on the amount of airline tickets and hotel rooms lobbyists can give.

“As long as it’s disclosed, promptly divulged,” he said, “I think it’s fine.”

Referring to the LES trips, Richardson said: “Sometimes legislators, many times congressmen, need fact finding. ... I felt this trip was legit. They took a critic from my administration, and she came back even more negatively disposed.”

He was referring to Gay Dillingham, who chairs New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board. She went to Holland on an LES-sponsored trip with a group of lawmakers and other state officials in 2004. Dillingham indeed remained critical of LES’ New Mexico plan.

But she’s an exception. Every legislative “fact finder” quoted in the AP story found facts that were favorable to the company’s proposal.

State Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Albuquerque, disagrees with Richardson about the quality of such “fact finding” missions.

“If something is important enough to study, it should be studied in a neutral way,” he said. “When you go on a junket paid for by a lobbyist, you’re only getting one side.”

McSorley said he would support legislation to prohibit lobbyists from paying for trips and to set a limit on the value of gifts allowed. “I don’t think you should be allowed to accept anything more than a meal,” he said.

Sen. Dede Feldman, D-Albuquerque, said she thinks gifts from lobbyists should be banned.

Trips, such as the LES Netherlands jaunts “don’t look good,” Feldman said.

However, she said, sometimes “think tanks” pay for lawmakers to go to out-of-state conferences concerning various issues such as health care. Feldman has accepted such trips, she said, which proved to be worthwhile.

Salaries for legislators: One might think that European junkets and World Series tickets would be pretty good incentives for recruiting new legislators.

But Senate Republican Whip Lee Rawson says the increasing workload and time it takes to serve in the Legislature is making it harder to attract anyone other than retirees, government employees and people who are financially secure or able to work nontraditional hours.

“It’s getting difficult to recruit people who could do an exceptional job, but can’t afford to run,” Rawson said in an interview this week.

“We no longer have a Legislature that is representative of our population at large,” he said.

Therefore, he said, the state should consider another path — providing an actual salary for lawmakers.

Rawson’s Senate Joint Resolution 2 would amend the state Constitution to give lawmakers a salary on top of the per diem and mileage they already receive.

The measure calls for legislators’ salaries to be set to 15 percent of a U.S. Congress member’s salary. That figure currently is $162,100, which would work out to an extra $24,315 for our state legislators.

“This isn’t about more money for me or the current legislators,” said Rawson, adding that everyone currently serving knew going in that nobody would be paid for all the time they spend.

The legislation would go to state voters in November if it passes both chambers.


Rawson said he’s aware that the next step after a salary could be a move for a full-time Legislature.

“If they do that, I’m out of here,” said Rawson, who has served in the Senate and, previously, the House for a total of almost 20 years. Such a move would completely take away the concept of “citizen Legislature,” he said.

The resolution is awaiting a hearing by the Senate rules committee.