NO DEPRESSION ARCHIVES & ME

Here's a big blast from the not-too-distant past.

From 1997 to 2004 I frequently freelanced for No Depression, a magazine that specialized in alternative country, (whatever that was), and other American roots music. The magazine stopped publishing last year -- a victim of the troubled economies of the music and publishing industries -- though it lives on the Internet.

During my years as a ND contributor (which started waning as the demands of being a political reporter in New Mexico increased -- I'd just like to thank the governor), I wrote features on various musicians, including a lengthy profile on Terry Allen and an interview with Cornell Hurd. Among those I spotlighted were several New Mexico musicians including Kell Robertson, Mose McCormack, Bill & Bonnie Hearne and The Bubbadinos.

I reviewed some concerts, including Junior Brown's reunion with The Last Mile Ramblers at the Fiesta de Los Cerrillos in 1998 and the Red Nations Celebration and Native Roots & Rhythm shows in 1997.

I wrote obituaries for Dave Van Ronk (who I credit/blame for my career in journalism) and Howie Epstein who died in Santa Fe in 2003. In that piece I quoted my old friend Alex Magocsi, who would die a few years later.

I reviewed lots of CDs -- The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks, Loudon Wainwright III, Judee Sill, Angry Johnny & The Killbillies, The Riptones, Dr. West's Medicine Show & Junk Band and Petty Booka -- among them.

Earlier this week, the good folks at No Depression launched the magazine's complete archives. You can read all the articles, reviews. columns, etc from issue #1 through #75.

And yes, that includes everything I wrote for them. (I haven't checked yet, but it looks like it's all there, even that weird hitchhiking memory that I originally wrote as a post on the old AOL No Depression music board.)

And you can even find Grant Alden's review of my CD, which was published in issue #8.

eMUSIC JULY

*Let's Lose It by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages. I actually was hoping to find Barrence's new one, Raw! Raw! Rough! on eMusic. It's not there, at least not yet, so this old one, from 1990, will have to do until I pick that one up.

And I hope the new one is anywhere close this fine. Boston-based Whitfield is simply one of the wildest R&B shouters in the business today.

Though nothing here is as wild as "Bloody Mary" or "Mama Get the Hammer," this album has its own crazed energy, as evidenced by the opening track "Method to My Madness." And "Calling All Beasts" is an electrifying jungle wail.



* Farm by Dinosaur Jr. These guys really shouldn't still be sounding this great.

But by golly, it looks like the reunion of J. Mascis and Lou Barlow a couple of years ago on Beyond was no fluke. (I should have known that was the case when I saw the reconstituted Dinosaur Jr, at The Pitchfork Festival last year. They were mighty and Mascis' gray hair notwithstanding, they blew most of the younger bands away.)

If anything, Farm is even better than Beyond. Not only are they sounding strong, Mascis and Barlow sound as if they are having a great time playing with each other.

Mascis remains the dominate frontman/songwriter, penning all but two of the tunes here. But the sound is clearly a group effort (and let's not forget drummer Murph whose enthusiastic bashing is an important element of Dinsoaur Jr.)

There's frantic joy in all the songs here. My favorites are the upbeat opening cut "Pieces" and the epic "Said the People," which starts out slow before building to a epic Dinosaur Jr. fury by the end of the near-eight-minute track.


* The Many Sounds of Steve Jordan. An old friend recently sent me a link to a very sad story on NPR about Jordan, the maestro of the Tex-Mex accordion.

I had no idea that he was so sick. Hell, I had no idea that he was 70 years old. But it's true.

After listening to that, I had to get some of his tunes on my computer. Luckily eMusic has a decent selection. I didn't know where to start, so I figured Arhoolie wouldn't disappoint.

I was right.

The best tunes here are the corridos such as "El Castgador" and -- my very favorite -- "El Corrido de Johnny Pachuco," an upbeat heroic tale of a bad ass.

Less successful are the two country songs at the end of the collection -- Buck Owens' "Together Again" and "There's More Pretty Girls Than One," a song done best by Doc Watson. Actually, Jordan's version of the latter, which he plays as a slow waltz, has its own peculiar charm.

* Rise Up by Dr. Lonnie Smith One my bad calls musicially this year was to not go see Dr. Smith when he played at Evangelos' in downtown Santa Fe.

Dr. Smith, not to be confused with Lonnie Liston Smith, is a jazz organist well versed in cool funk and even a little Dr. John-style Nightripper gris-gris. With a basic combo including guitarist Peter Bernstein, Donald Harrison on sax, and Herlin Riley on drums, Smith creates a unique, atmospheric sound.

He mostly does original material. The opening song "A Matterapat" has a subtle Latin infuence, "As the World Weeps" is a blues-soaked lamet, and the mysterioso "Voodoo Doll" actually is worthy of its name. I think I hear echoes of Bitches Brew here.

But his covers of rock songs are amazing -- and shaped into new creatures barely recognizable. The Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams" is a smokey invocation. And The Beatles' "Come Together," featuring Smith's mumbled but menacing vocals, basically translating the lyrics into some Hoodoo Esperanta, is such a radical reworking I had to check online to make sure it was really the Lennon-McCartney song.


* Kicksville: Raw Rockabilly Acetates Vol. 2
Raw is right with this collection -- even rawer than usual for a Norton compilation.

The album is full of lo-fi recordings by very obscure rockabillies. The only name I even recogozed here was Hasil Adkins, who does a tune called "Can't Help It Blues" with a band whose name was lost to time.

The sound quality is so wretched that only the most rabid fans would appreciate this record. The recording equipment used for The Jokers' "I Found My Baby" couldn't have cost more than $10!

But there's lots of spirit here. For instance, "Red Headed" Woman by Morty Shann & The Morticians is a blast of energy.

That's the case also with Tears Of Happiness by Jimmy Sysum & The Rockin' Three. Lots of bands these days strive for the primitive thud that seems to come so natural to The Rockin' Three's rhythm section. And lots of contemporary surf bands would give their left testicle to sound half as bitchen as the sax-driven "Fender Rock" by The Dynatones.

Plus
* The tracks from Cool Cats. (that I didn't get last month.) I actually like this collection of rockabilly obscurities more than Kicksville. (For one thing, he audio quality is far superior) The collection was compiled by a disc jockey from Belgium called Dr. Boogie. He's responsibile for another cool compilation I downloaded from eMusic a few months back, Rarities From The Bob Hite Vaults. My favorite so far out of the batch I nabbed this month is the frantic "Big Dog, Little Dog" by Harvey Hunt. Like Kicksville Vol. 2, Cool Cats ends with a strong instrumental. Here, it's "Sledgehammer" (Not the Peter Gabriel song) by The Trashers.

* Five Tracks from How Big Can You Get?: The Music of Cab Calloway by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. I enjoyed Voodoo Daddy's set so much at the Hootenanny Festival I knew I'd like their versions of these songs. They should have done "Reefer Man" at Hootenanny, though perhaps tehy figured that was too obvious.

* "El Capitan" and "Washington Post March" by John Phillip Sousa. I nabbed these for background music on my latest Big Enchilada podcast, An American is a Very Lucky Man. These two tracks are from an album called The March King - John Philip Sousa Conducts His Own Marches And Other Favorites - An Historical Recording. That's right, it's the Stars and Stripes Forever man himself on the baton here.

TOM RUSSELL: CRIMINOLOGIST

I get so many music press releases in my e-mail these days it's ridiculous. And nearly all of them aren't worth the bytes used to create them.

But leave it to songwriter Tom Russell -- or at least his publicist -- to come up with the most interesting press release from a musician I've seen in a long time:

Rugged El Paso songwriter Tom Russell has finally revealed a long-held secret: he holds a Masters degree in Criminology. With "Criminology" and "East of Woodstock, West of Viet Nam," two of the highlights from Blood and Candle Smoke (Shout! Factory), Russell reveals his secret and also chronicles the times he's been faced with a gun pointed at him.

* First, in Ibadan, Nigeria in 1969, he was arrested for taking photos in a war zone on his first day, arriving in the middle of a vicious tribal war. In the months that followed, he read Graham Greene and drank palm wine in the bars.

* In Canada, 1971, while Russell was in Prince Rupert playing with a band, a clerk at a fleabag hotel stuck a gun in his face and slurred, "How you like it now, white boy? How's your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?" Russell realized later that it was an ee cummings quote.

"I was amused and interested in these little violent, character-building vignettes, because I had been educated as a Criminologist. Got my Masters degree, but never told anyone in the music biz. But in those honkytonks and skid row hotels I was
experiencing the real subject matter - up close and very personal," writes Russell on his blog at http://www.russelltom.blogspot.com

If the music biz gets too hard for Russell, I guess he could end up as a consultant for the El Paso Police Department.

I opened for Russell at a Los Alamos gig about 12 years ago. At the time, I was a crime reporter. Wish I knew then that he was a criminologist.

I haven't heard the album yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

I used a couple of Russell selections for my latest Big Enchilada podcast. "The Outcast," with vocals by the late Dave Van Ronk (from Tom's album The Man From God Knows Where) and a spoken segment that ends the podcast by Little Jack Horton, recorded for the Hotwalker album.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: BLUES FROM THE BOOMERS

I knew I was forgetting something. I should have posted this on Friday. What the heck, I'm on vacation!

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
July 3, 2009

On his new album Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs, Otis Taylor, the blues bard of Boulder, does what he does best — blues-based musical meditations that often tell grim stories. But at the same time, he's taking his music to strange new levels.

Like most of his recent work, the new album is almost all acoustic, though guitarist Gary Moore goes electric on a few tunes. Cornet player Ron Miles is back, and there are African drums on some songs, giving several numbers a spooky jazz feel.

Taylor uses the phrase "trance blues," but I don't really like that label. True, Taylor's music sometimes gets spacey and repetitive. But trance blues doesn't even begin to describe some of Taylor's bolder sonic experiments here.

Take the song "Talking About It Blues." There are some moments toward the end of the song that have distinct echoes of Miles Davis' On the Corner. And that's even more true with the eight-minute epic "Walk on Water." To his credit, Taylor lets his sidemen stretch out.

As he's done on previous albums, Otis steps back on several songs and lets his daughter Cassie Taylor sing lead. Cassie, who also plays bass on some tracks, is really starting to come into her own. That's apparent on the sad, yearning "Sunday Morning."

There's a new version here of "Mama's Got a Friend" — the story of a kid coping with the fact that his mom has taken a lesbian lover — which first appeared on his Below the Fold album. (Mama's always up to something in the Otis Taylor universe. On another album, Double V, there was the song "Mama's Selling Heroin.") Called "Mama's Best Friend" on the new CD, the song is sung by Cassie.

At first it seems that Cassie's voice and the arrangement are so ethereal that the song loses a little bit of its original punch. But this track has its own weird charms. With Jason Moran's piano, Miles' cornet and percussion by Nasheet Waits on trap set and Fara Tolno on djembe drums, the song evolves into a jazzy voodoo workout.

And it's a great lead-in for the next song, "Maybe Yeah," also sung by Cassie. Here, Waits drums like he's in a marching band.

Taylor's previous album, Recapturing the Banjo, centered around that instrument. There's less of it on Pentatonic Wars, but the song "Country Girl Boy" is a banjo-driven stomper.

The bloooooziest song here is "Young Girl Down the Street." Over a slow funky blues-thud beat, some nasty organ licks by Brian Juan, and stinging electric guitar by Jonn Richardson, Taylor taunts a former lover by bragging about his latest conquest.

As on previous Taylor outings, the singer deals with issues of race. In the past, he has sung about slave ships and lynchings. But here, in the song "I'm Not Mysterious," the racism is far more subtle. It's about an 8-year-old black kid deeply in love with a white girl his age. His mom tells him that he's too young to be in love, but he suspects that might not be the real reason she's trying to discourage the relationship. It's heartbreaking when he sings, "I've got a little red wagon. You can use it anytime."

Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs is Taylor's 10th album in about 12 years. "I'm 60. I don't have a long time," Taylor said in a recent interview with his hometown paper, the Colorado Daily. Referring to his first career, as a rock 'n' roller in the '60s and '70s, he explained, "I stopped music for a lot of years, so I have to do a lot of records in a short period of time."

The sound of his catching up has been rewarding.

Also recommended:

Sweetheart Like You by Guy Davis. Davis is another baby-boomer bluesman. The frog-voiced guitar picker's latest album has covers of songs by Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Son House, Big Joe Williams, and Bob Dylan, plus a couple of tunes based on Leadbelly songs.

He does justice to most of these. I especially like his slow-grooving take on Williams' "Baby, Please Don't Go" (well, slow compared to the rocked-out versions I love by Them and by The Amboy Dukes) and his banjo-and-bass version of Muddy's "Can't Be Satisfied."

But far better than the covers' original songs. There's the wistful "Sweet Hannah," which is about an affair with a married woman, while "Steamboat Captain" sounds like a long-lost song from some movie about the deep South.

"Bring Back Storyville" is a funny little romp about a guy nostalgic for New Orleans' fabled whorehouse district. "I had me a woman used to hold my jug/Kept it in a trap door under the rug/I'd come there, lay back and drink my fill/Bring back, bring back Storyville."

Davis claims he wrote "Going Back to Silver Spring" — which has a Blind Willie McTell feel to it —about a girl who promised to send him naked photos of herself if he wrote her a song. "Hey! Where are those pictures at?" he writes in the liner notes.

Speaking of funny liner notes, Davis credits the idea of "Slow Motion Daddy" to a story about a celebrated hobo named Slow Motion Shorty as told by Utah Phillips and a naughty story involving Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and Sammy Davis Jr.

Most of the album is basic acoustic blues. But Davis subtly incorporates a little technology in "Words to My Mama's Song," which features "vocal percussion" (you've heard this on recent Tom Waits works) and a mid-song rap by his son Martial, who is in his late teens or early 20s.

The one misstep on this album is Dylan's "Sweetheart Like You." Not that's it's a bad version, and I'm not saying it doesn't belong on the album. It's just that it's so slow that it's a questionable way to kick off the album. "Storyville" or "Slow Motion Daddy" would have worked better in the lead spot.

WHAT A HOOT!

UPDATE: For more of my photos of the Hootenanny Festival, CLICK HERE



IRVINE, CA. -- It was a true patriotic moment: Hearing The Blasters sing "American Music" on the Fourth of July! Of course I was in a Porta-potty when they started. But I wasn't there for long.

It was the 15th annual Hootenanny Festival outside of Irvine. I don't know why they call it that. When I first heard of "The Hootenanny Festival" my first image was a bunch of folkies in a coffee shop singing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone."

But that's not what this festival is all about. This is a hootenanny for rockabilly, pyschobilly, roots rock, a little neo-swing and a touch of hillbilly music. Plus there's a car show.

Here's some of the people I saw.

* Los Lobos: Following The Rev. Horton Heat -- not to mention all the other high-octane bands on the bill -- it only made sense that Los Lobos would emphasize their raw R&B side, rather than their artsier tendencies. Which is great, because that's the side that first made me love Los Lobos back in the early 80s. So sure enough, they led off with an explosive "Don't Worry Baby" and never once let the energy wane.

Toward the end of the set they called Phil Alvin of The Blasters and Rev. Heat to the stage to top off the festival with some R&B and blues standards (my favorite was "Buzz, Buzz, Buzz," originally a hit for The Hollywood Flames)

When Alvin began singing the Blasters' classic "Marie, Marie," it reminded me that one of the last times I'd seen Los Lobos, at a South by Southwest in Austin a few years ago, Phil's brother Dave Alvin joined the band on stage and sang that same song. Earlier in the Lobos' set, Cesar Rosas recalled how The Blasters had given his band their first break. The early 80s indeed was a great time for roots music in Southern California with bands like Los Lobos and The Blasters mixing it up with X and future country star Dwight Yokam. It was good to get a little taste of that on Saturday.

* The Rev. Horton Heat: The Rev. is a Hootenanny veteran and a crowd favorite. And it was easy to see why. He ripped it to shreds during his set. From the very beginning, the crowd was screaming for the song "Psychobilly Freakout." He delivered it with zeal.

One thing that strikes me about Heat's performance is that even though his music is frantic and crazy, his demeanor is calm. No jumping around, very few rock-star poses. It's as if he just allows a wild energy to pass through him and he just lets it flow with a bemused expression.


* Big Bad Voodoo Daddy: With its five-man horn section, Big Bad Voodoo added some good variety to the bill. They followed the cacophony of Nekromantix, a loud blaring psychobilly trio that sounds much better on record than they did at the festival.

For the record, I'm one of the few critics in Criticdom who wasn't completely down on the neo-swing fad of the late '90s. While I wasn't real impressed with the zoot-suit costume-party aspect of the movement, I actually enjoyed the sounds of several bands including The Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. "Neo Swing" was a misnomer anyway. These bands basically revived the jump blues sound.

Voodoo Daddy's most recent album, How Big Can You Get, is a tribute to Cab Calloway. (They covered "Minnie the Moocher on one of their early albums.) They did "Minnie" and "Calloway Boogie" on Saturday. Cab's originals are still the best, but BBVD does them justice.

* Lee Rocker: He's the bass player of The Stray Cats, who were early MTV stars and the most successful of the early '80s rockabilly revivalists.

Lee was cool. He might look like your high-school science teacher, but, as the song says, "He's got cat class and he's got cat style."



* The Blasters: Dave Alvin, an original Blaster, has gone on to more critical acclaim as a solo artist (and he's coming to Santa Fe Brewing Company next month), but Brother Phil remains the voice of The Blasters.

And what a voice. The guy just exudes soul. As the music pours out he grins as he must have done the first time he heard rock 'n' roll as a kid.

The most memorable songs were early Blasters faves ("American Music," of course, ""Long White Cadillac," "No Other Girl," "Dark Night," and "Marie Marie," which Phil now sings in Spanish.)

They also did some dynamite covers by the likes of Johnny Paycheck and James Brown.

My only complaint was that the set was only 30 minutes (which was the case with everyone except Los Lobos and Rev. Horton Heath.) I could have listened to The Blasters for another hour.