Saturday, November 04, 2006

YOUR TAX DOLLAR AT WORK

Here's an idea that's bound for glory: Having the government spend money promoting abstinence for people in their 20s!

From USA TODAY:

The federal government's “no sex without marriage” message isn't just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.
Can it get more surreal than this?

JUST AN AMERICAN DAD

My KSFR colleague Sean often turns me on to crazy, obscure music. (You can hear his wonderfully ecclectic musical vision on his show Undercurrents, or as I sometimes call it, "Undergarments," 10 p.m. to midnight on KSFR.)

This time, Sean introduced me to some crazy music with a sad story.

He had noticed a wire story The New Mexican published recently about "Azzam the American." Azzam's father, Sean explained, was a guy named Phil Pearlman, a hero of the "psychedelic underground."

I was intrigued. Sean loaned me some CDs.

Pearlman was in a band called The Beat of the Earth, who released a self-titled album in 1967. It has two untitled 20-minute-plus tracks, originally the sides of an LP. It's hypnotizing raw psychedelia jams. You hear traces of The Velvet Underground, The Incredible String Band, Sandy Bull. Pearlman's voice reminds me of The Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kanter.

I'm wondering whether Yo La Tengo isn't aware of this music.

Sean loaned me two other Pearlman projects, The Electonic Hole (from 1970, again, untitled tracks, though I recognize one as a cover of Frank Zappa's "Trouble Every Day") and Relatively Clean Rivers (1976), some of which has a slight country-rock flavor. Both are slightly more mainstream sounding (well, "mainstream" is hardly adequate. The tracks are shorter than 20 minutes) but still fascinating stuff.

But I hadn't seen the stoy about his kid. So while listening to The Beat of the Earth I Googled "Azzam the American," which I'd assumed to be some cheesy hip-hop moniker or band name.

Wrong.

My first clue was that most of the sites that showed up on Google were Fox News or right-wing blogs. Turns out Azzam, 28, last month was indicted on charges of treason, the first American citizen to face this charge since World War II.

According to a story on the CBS Web site, Pearlman's kid,
"appeared last month in a 48-minute video along with al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, calling on his countrymen to covert to Islam and for U.S. soldiers to switch sides in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

"It was the second time he appeared in the same video with al-Zawahri. In a July 7 video marking the one-year anniversary of the terror attack on London commuters, (Azzam) appeared briefly, saying no Muslim should "shed tears" for Westerners killed by al Qaeda attacks."
That's serious stuff. A lot more so than that American Boy John Walker Lyndh, who was younger and always seemed to me to have been confused and gotten involved in something over his head. I don't think Steve Earle will be writing a song for Azzam.

Azzam has been indicted, but not captured. According to one account, he hasn't been in the U.S. since his grandfather's funeral in 1998

Many of the stories and blog posts I read emphasized the fact that Azzam's grandfather -- Phil Pearlman's dad -- was Jewish, by all accounts a kindly doctor, who was on the board of the Anti-Defamation League.

Hearing Phil Pearlman's visionary music makes this story even sadder. I don't have much sympathy for the kid. He's old enough to know what he's doing. But I can't help but wonder what kind of hell his father is going through. Does he blame himself? Is some of that blame justified? Did he resign himself to the fact he lost his son years ago?

It's ironic looking at the verse on the back cover of Relatively Clean Rivers:

Hoping we can all get together, the Arabs and the Jews,
And melt down weapons into water sprinklers,
Tractors, shovels and hoes,
Irrigation pipes

Hippie-dippy utopian doggerel for certain.

But dammit ...

The best article I found on this sad story is on Pop Matters.

And here's a good interview, apparently done years ago before the world knew of Azzam the American, with a former member of The Beat of the Earth.

UPDATE: Sean just sent me a link to an eBay auction where an original Beat of the Earth LP sold for $711. (Plus $7.50 shipping.) But, hey bargain hunters, there's an eBay store selling the LP for a mere $599 (and only $4 shipping.)

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, November 3, 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
Rich Man's War by Hundred Year Flood
Rich Man's War by Steve Earle
Fortunate Son by Tony Furtado
Pot of Glue by Butch Hancock
Nothing at All by The Waco Brothers
Between the Cracks by Dave Alvin
Laura Ingraham by Jim Terr

Small Town Blues by Nancy Apple
Hold On to God's Unchanging Hand by Rob McNurlin
Lord Take My Pain by Wayne Hancock
Passing Through by Gary Heffern
Life's Railway to Heaven by Johnny Cash
Beloved Garden by Jon Dee Graham
Wings of a Dove by Lucinda Williams & Nanci Griffiths

Hot Dog by Buck Owens
Three Days by L7 with Waylon Jennings
One Sweet Hello by Merle Haggard
Food, Water, Etc. by The Sadies with Maude Hudson
Son of a Sauaro by The Hacienda Brothers
Going Back to Oklahoma by Emily Kaitz
I Miss My Loneliness by The Ray Mason Band
One Plate Guy by The Lonesome Brothers

Bring Out the Bible (We Ain't Got a Prayer) by The Texas Sapphires
Wayside/Back in Time by Gillian Welch
Leave it to a Loser by Robbie Fulks
Love in the Ruins by Jim Lauderdale
Magic Girl by Chip Taylor
Perfect Stranger by Eleni Mandell
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

Friday, November 03, 2006

POLITIICAL TIDBITS


High-roller gambling interests dominated the top-dollar contributors to Gov. Bill Richardson's latest campaign finance report. Read my story about it HERE

XXXXXXX

The state Green Party late last night sent out this terse press release concerning Carol Miller's endorsement of Heather Wilson:

New Mexico Green Party co-chairs Kathy Sanchez and Cliff Bain today issued a strongly worded statement reminding members of the press and the public that the Green Party has taken no position on the race between Heather Wilson and Patricia Madrid in New Mexico’s First Congressional District. A single Green party member, Carol Miller, has endorsed Wilson.

“The party wants to make it very clear that although Carol Miller is entitled to her own opinion as an individual, many other Greens are very active in their individual support for Madrid,” said party co-chair Kathy Sanchez. “Carol Miller holds no position with the New Mexico Green Party and speaks only for herself.”

“We would never endorse someone like Heather Wilson,” said co-chair Cliff Bain. “She has been a major player in the Bush administration that brought us Iraq and Afghanistan."

The Green Party does not have a candidate in the congressional race and is focusing its energies on electing David Bacon to the open District 4 seat on the Public Regulation Commission. Bacon is getting broad support across party lines in that two-way race, and has been endorsed by every newspaper and organization that has endorsed in that race.

Say what you want about the Greens, they've got the best election night party plans that I've head about in this state:

David Bacon invites the public to celebrate his campaign, Election Night after the polls close at the Plaza CafĂ© Southside, 3011 Cerrillos Road next to the Quality Inn. Performing will be Joe West and the Santa Fe All Stars, one of Santa Fe’s most entertaining bands.


And speaking of entertainment, be sure to watch The Line on KNME tonight, where I'm a guest panelist along with regulars Gene Grant of The Albuquerque Tribune, Republican blogger Whitney Cheshire, UNM Law School professor Margaret Montoya and former Crosswinds publisher Steve Lawrence (who I forgot to mention in my original post.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: BALLOT BALLADS

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
November 3, 2006


There’s been no shortage of protest songs in the past three or four years. With the Iraq war dragging on and the death count rising, not only do those golden-oldie protest classics of the ‘60s take on new relevance, but a whole new crop of antiwar anthems has sprung up from artists old and new.

But in recent months a couple of songs, inspired in large part by the war, deal specifically with next week’s midterm elections.

Some historical perspective:

Election songs are nothing new. In the past, campaigns frequently would come up with jingles to rally the faithful around a candidate. I still remember, as a kid growing up in Oklahoma, Sen. Fred Harris’ campaign song.
“The man from Oklahoma is a man that you can trust/A vote for Fred R. Harris is a vote of confidence.”
Presidents going back to the first George W used campaign songs. Folkie Oscar Brand recorded an album of 43 such songs (Presidential Campaign Songs: 1789-1996) with titles like “Jimmy Polk of Tennessee” (which might have inspired They Might Be Giants’ historical homage to Mr. Polk), “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge,” and “Hello Lyndon.”

And yes, even Tricky Dick had a campaign song, “Buckle Down With Nixon,” which Brand recorded. But who could forget 1968’s “Nixon’s the one, Nixon’s the one, Nixon’s the one for me ...”? No high concept here, no bothersome issues or answers. It was simple and memorable — but not nearly as cool as Neil Young and Graham Nash’s “War Song,” a rocker about Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern: “There’s a man who says he can put an end to war ...”

(Young, on his most recent album, Living With War, is already looking ahead to 2008 with the song “Looking For a Leader.” Did Sen. Barack Obama, who recently announced he’s thinking of running, hear this song?)

Although Brand goes all the way up to 1996 in his collection, campaign songs are seen these days as cornball. In recent elections we’ve seen candidates choose theme songs from the realm of tacky pop music — Bill Clinton’s use of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” or John Edwards’ appropriation of “Small Town” by John Cougar Mellencamp.

(That’s why I never could run for office. How would voters respond to The Cramps’ “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns”?)

But most music we associate with elections these days is the sinister, synthesized, minor-chord rumbling played on negative ads when the candidate’s opponent is being discussed — and the tinkly New Age piano music played in the background when people talk about the candidate paying for the ad.

Back to the midterms:
Most election songs are about specific candidates. Candidates, whether U.S. Senate contenders or City Council hopefuls, always try to hype the election as a critical crossroads. Midterm elections — when there is no president being chosen — rarely capture the imagination of the general public, much less that of creative spirits. But both Rickie Lee Jones and Texas troubadour Butch Hancock are portraying Nov. 7 as an epic day of reckoning in new songs.

Both are decidedly anti-Bush and anti-Republican. (Sorry, GOP, but I couldn’t find any equivalent on your side. If you can point out any Republican-oriented midterm election songs by artists of Jones’ and Hancock’s stature, let me know and I’ll post it here on my blog.)

In a song circulating around lefty Internet circles as a free MP3 download, Jones teamed up with Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher, formerly of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, on a tune called “Have You Had Enough?” The melody and arrangement will sound hauntingly familiar to Zippers fans. It’s lifted directly from their quasi-hit “Put a Lid on It,” a hot, jazzy tune with muted trumpet. It’s the kind of song that would have been popular during the “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge” era.

The lyrics go like this: “Have you had enough of the rubber stamps?/Have you had enough of the wire taps?/If you’ve had enough, then it’s time to throw the rascals out.” Jones even has a nice League-of-Women-Voters “get out and vote” message: “You cast your vote, it don’t cost a dime/Sittin’ it out will be a crime.”

Hancock’s new album War and Peace could be considered his Living With War. From start to finish, it’s political. And like Hugo Chavez, when Butch smells Bush, he smells sulfur: “He smiles like the devil when he’s talkin’ to the press,” he sings in a Buddy Holly-like rocker called “The Devil in Us All.”

But Hancock doesn’t sound as much like Neil Young as he does Woody Guthrie. The spirit of the original Dust Brother (sorry, I stole that line from Billy Bragg) is evident throughout War and Peace, as if he heard the call years ago when Steve Earle sang, “Come back, Woody Guthrie” in his song “Christmas in Washington.”

(Strange Woody detour: At one of President Bush’s Albuquerque appearances during the 2004 campaign, a recorded marching-band version of “This Land Is Your Land” played after Bush’s speech. “They’re playing a song by a real communist,” I told a Republican friend there. He thought I was crazy. Maybe so, but I was right.)

For those unfamiliar with Hancock, he’s probably the least-known of the three original Flatlanders. But while he’s not as recognizable as Joe Ely or Jimmie Dale Gilmore, he’s easily the best and most consistent songwriter of the three.

Hancock alludes to the upcoming election in the last verse of “Cast the Devils Out.” But the final song, a nearly eight-minute saga called “That Great Election Day,” casts the election not as a choice between candidates but as a choice between “who’s gonna be the master and who’s gonna be the slave?”

Butch puts in a plug for paper ballots with the lyrics “Don’t let ‘em count the votes with some man-made machine/... Mark your ballots on a piece of paper and count ‘em all by hand.” But the meat of the song is when he sings, “I ain’t a gonna vote for man nor beast who’s full of lies and fear, on that day on that great election day.”

So vote. It don’t cost a dime.

War and Peace is available through Waterloo Records, , or Miles of Music.

What the heck: It's been a long time since I've had the excuse to post my Butch Hancock rafting photo. This is a 1995 trip on the Rio Grande. The photo is taken on the "Race Course" near Pilar. Butch is holding one of the oars. I'm the drenched walrus in the front.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP: CHILD'S PLAY

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
November 2, 2006


Last week state Land Commissioner Pat Lyons caught some criticism for filming a campaign commercial at a local elementary school. The parent of a little girl was upset because his daughter showed up in the Lyons ad without his permission.

Lyons’ staff quickly had the ad pulled and a new version substituted for airplay — though the girl’s dad David Pittis earlier this week pointed out that you can still see his daughter on Lyons’ Web site. Earlier this week the state Democrats asked the secretary of state to investigate for possible violations of the Government Conduct Act.

While nobody’s saying that the poor girl has been scarred for life, you can’t really blame Pittis for being upset. As a parent I’d want to know if my offspring are being filmed by strangers. (And as an uncle, I was proud of my niece, who graduated from high school this year, for refusing to be part of a politician’s ad because she didn’t like said politician.)

There obviously was some miscommunication between the school and the Lyons campaign. The Lyons camp swears they told the principal at Turquoise Trail Elementary what they were doing, but the principal says she didn’t realize that Lyons was doing a campaign ad, She apparently thought The Land Office would be shooting a public service announcement at the school, like they had done once before.

But here’s the deal:

Any time an elected official gets a film crew together the real purpose is political — whether it’s for a “public service” announcement or an actual campaign commercial. Lets not kid ourselves.

And both sides are guilty. Republicans get all bent out of shape over PSAs featuring the image of Patsy Madrid or Rebecca Vigil-Giron, just like Dems do over Lyons’ PSAs. Both sides are right. It’s unofficial political advertising courtesy of taxpayers.

Leave those kids alone: Political rhetoric these days is filled with appeals for “the children.” Politicians of every stripe are always asking, “How does this affect the children?” and “What kind of message does this send to the children?” And politicians of ever stripe love to use children as political props.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re electing someone to be a public servant or to be Mr. Rogers.

On the same day that Pittis was talking to reporters about Lyons using his daughter for political ends, Gov. Bill Richardson was at a Rio Rancho school announcing some new bold initiative or another. I don’t believe this was for a campaign ad or PSA. But television cameras certainly were welcome. Look at the campaign commercials on Richardson’s Web site. If he’s not on a horse, chances are he’s in a classroom surrounded by lovable kiddies.

I suppose, for potential voters less jaded than me, seeing politicians with children strikes some primal chord, creating an irresistible sentimental appeal and creating warm feelings for the politico in question.

Vote for me. I’ll fight for the children. Vote for me. I’ll protect your kids from predators. Vote for me. I’ll give your kid’s school surplus computers. Vote for me. I’ll hire more teachers for your kid. Vote for me.

I’m guessing this is a relatively new phenomenon. Somehow I made it all the way through grade school in the 1960s without some camera-saavy politician showing up to my classroom to entertain us like a clown at a birthday party.

You can probably tell that while many wring their hands over “negative” ads, it’s some of the “positive” ads that give me the willies.

I know this appeal probably is useless, but I wish the politicians would leave the kids out of it. Surely there’s some brave candidates out there who would pledge to refrain from using youngsters as political props.

Do it for the children.

Liberally speaking: Incumbent Congresswoman Heather Wilson got an endorsement Wednesday from an unexpected source — longtime Green Party leader Carol Miller. Cynical Dems, recalling Miller’s own race for Congress 10 years ago, say this wouldn’t be the first time Miller helped elect a Republican to Congress.

Meanwhile, an e-mail from the Wilson campaign discussing the Miller endorsement brags that the non-partisan National Journal “gave Wilson a 50.5 liberal and 49.5 conservative rating” and points out that Wilson has fought “Republican sponsored cuts in Medicaid and other important welfare programs.”

Is this the same Heather Wilson who has run so many adds blasting “Liberal Patricia Madrid”?

On our way to the top: The governor had an interesting answer this week when a reporter at a news conference asked him about the recent “Most Dangerous State” list compiled by Morgan Quitno Press, an independent research and publishing company based in Lawrence, Kansas.

According to Morgan Quitno, New Mexico is now the third most dangerous state in the union. Last year we were ranked 6th.

The ratings are based on per capita statistics of various crimes: Murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft. New Mexico ranks second and third in all categories except robbery and vehicle theft.

Richardson’s comment: “We’re making progress, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”

I guess rising from 6th place to third is “progress.”

But he’s right. We do have a long way to go. So come on robbers and car thieves, get with it. Do your share so we’ll whip Nevada and Louisiana and we’ll be number one next year.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

I WALK THE LINE

I'm going to be the guest this week on The Line, "KNME-TV's smart and provocative weekly series" in which folks of various political persuasions discuss the news.

The program airs 7 p.m. Friday and repeats 6:30 a.m. (yeah, right, don't miss that one!) Sunday. I'll be joining regulars Gene Grant of The Albuquerque Tribune, Republican blogger Whitney Cheshire and UNM Law School professor Margaret Montoya.

Something tells me we might be discussing the election ...

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

  Sunday, March 24, 2024 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM, 101.1 FM  Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell E...