Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar

When I think of TV funnyman Arnold Stang I think good country music.

Actually this movie, Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar features the likes of Homer & Jethro, Little Jimmy Dickens, Minnie Pearl, Faron Young, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Lefty Frizzell and Bill Monroe.

I just put it on my Netflix Queue.



(Thanks to Robert Nott for alerting me to this.)

AMIE STREET WILL BE CLOSED TO TRAFFIC

News flash: Big fish swallows a little one.

Amazon.com has purchased, for an undisclosed price, Amie Street, a music download service I've been known to use. As of Sept. 22 the Street will be blockaded and pages will be redirected to Amazon.

It's not clear whether Amazon will keep Amie's price structure -- in which tracks start out way cheap then go up to $1 depending on their popularity. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Here's some good news and bad news from Yahoo News:

Users that have an Amie Street account should download all their purchased music by September 22 and spend their remaining balance by that date, as it will not be transferred to Amazon.

Furthermore, Amie Street is giving its users a $5 promotional code that they can spend at Amazon's MP3 store.

This reminds me of iTunes' recent purchase of LaLa. What are the big fish going to eat when the small ones all are gone? (Answer: their customers!)

I first started using Amie Street a little more than a year ago when I was looking to alternatives to eMusic, which had just raised its prices. I found some good stuff over there -- I basically looted their Voodoo Rhythm catalogue -- but over time, Amie's catalog -- at least of the stuff I like and didn't already have -- failed to keep up. My purchases there became more and more infrequent.

Still, I hate to see it go. It was always nice to know that another good alternative for cheap and legal downloads was out there.

(Thanks to my friend Chuck for tipping me to this and sending me the email Amie Street sent him. For some reason Amie didn't email me. They must be talking to some of the New Mexico politicians who have decided to leave me off their lists.)

Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat Dan Singa Live

Here's some music for your Labor Day, courtesy WFMU's Free Music Archive.

This is the current band of Arrington de Dionyso, formerly of Old Time Relijun, who I talked about in my latest monthly eMusic report. These songs are from his 2009 album, Malaikat Dan Singa and it features lyrics by William Blake (there's that guy again!) translated into Indonesian. The show was recorded in May.

And here's some good news for us here in New Mexico: de Dionyso and his band are coming to Albuquerque on October 12, venue to be announced.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, Sept. 5, 2010
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
Webcasting!
101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Surf Narcs by The Barbarellatones
You Can Have Her/Mean Woman Blues by Jerry Lee Lewis
Keep a Knockin' by Little Richard
A Poison Tree by Movie Star Junkies
Dog is Life/Jerusalem by The Fall
Tyger by Arrington de Dionyso and the Old Time Relijun

Hey Gyp by Eric Burdon & The Animals
A Luz Sobre Mim by Horror Deluxe
Lost Planet by The Thunderbolts
Shakin' All Over by The Gibson Bros. & Workdogs
Naked, Naked Naked by The Raunch Hands
Let Me Holler by King Khan & The Shrines
Ride Danny Ride by The Nekromantix
Girl of Matches by Thee Headcoats
Woodie on a Safari by The Silly Surfers

Wooden Heart by Brave Combo
Strip Joint is Closed by The Red Elvises
Rebellious Love by Gogol Bordello
Who Stole the Kiska by Frankie Yankovic
I Want Beer #2 by Kazik
The Happy Wanderer by The Polkaholics

Strange by Screamin' Jay Hawkins
King Kong/Whistle Bait by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
Dizzy Miss Lizzy by Larry Williams
Jailbait by Andre Williams & Green Hornet
Pieces of the Past by Jon Langford with Andre Williams
Panic Holiday by The Country Teasers
Like a Wanderin' Star by Stan Ridgway
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

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eMusic September

Besides my usual 50 credits, this month includes 15 additional ones eMusic gave me as "loyal member." eMusic caught a lot of flack last year when it changed their its pricing structure, but to their credit they've given us loyal members similar bonuses two or three times. So, thanks.

* Varieties of Religious Experience: 1993-2003 by Arrington de Dionyso and the Old Time Relijun. While writing my recent review of The Movie Star Junkies' A Poison Tree, I started Googling around looking for rock bands that had covered William Blake poems. There I discovered "Tyger" by this band. I'll stand by my description that it sounds like Roy Orbison on angel dust.

That was interesting enough for me to download the whole album. This is a fun little distillation of lots of classic avant, primitive rock. I hear Beefheart. I hear Ubu. I hear some Thinking Fellers. And there's a definite No-Wave influence here. Whoever's playing that sax owes James Chance some royalties.

Old Time Relijun is a creature of K Records up in Olympia, Washington. So I'm probably hearing a little Twin Peaks mushroom madness in there too.

* Fuck Me Stupid by The Raunch Hands. Yes, Eric Davidson's We Never Learn still is inspiring me to catch up on some of superstars of Gunk Punk that I somehow overlooked in their glory days.

The Raunch Hands were a rootsy little outfit, playing hard-charging whacked out punk blues back in the '80s before many people were doing that.

This 1995 release was the Raunch Hand's last album for Crypt Records. They were getting close to breaking up, but the group sounds like they were having the time of their lives recording it.

My favorites here are "Baby Don't You Tear My Clothes," a hilarious rewrite of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down." "What's the Matter Now" is a soul workout with touches of crazed gospel energy. This might be what the Almighty Defenders were aiming at on their Punk gospel" album.

*The Ding-Dongs. (My comments on this and the next album might look hauntingly familiar to loyal readers. I wrote about these a few weeks ago in my Terrell's Tuneup column.)

Mark Sultan, aka BBQ, meets Bloodshot Bill for a rollicking half-hour of Canadian trash rockabilly. This is unabashed bashing fun. The sound is closer to what you’d hear on a Bloodshot Bill album than to King Khan & BBQ. It’s less scatological and more traditional rockabilly sounding.

My one complaint is that Sultan’s amazing voice isn’t at full force here. He does channel Buddy Holly on the tune “Worried Man.” and does a respectable job on the countryish “Until I Die.” But nowhere does his voice really soar.


* $ by Mark Sultan So if you want more Sultan, check out $, his latest solo album, which was released earlier this year. Not only will you hear more Sultan, you’ll get a greater diversity of sound.

Compared with his previous solo album, The Sutanic Verses, $ is far more experimental. For instance the kick-off cut, “Icicles” is a 6-plus minute opus with a lengthy instrumental section marked by layers of fuzz guitars and faux Mideastern sounds . Is BBQ going prog rock? Naw, the album retains an admirable home-made, blues-slop appeal.

Plus

* 10 Tracks from Red Hot Rockabilly (the ones I didn't already have) I was listening to an old episode of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour the other day -- and came across a rockabilly song I hadn't noticed before: "Okie's in the Pokie" by Jimmy Patton. I had to have it! Doing a quick search on eMusic I found it on this collection of (mostly) obscurities. Also included here are Buck Owens' original version of "Hot Dog" (under the name "Corky Jones") and a bluesy shuffle called "Grits" by a wildcat named Harmonica Ray.


* The 64 remaining tracks from Hillbilly Classics. This collection has to be my eMusic find of the year. It's a 73-song collection of mostly obscure country tunes from the '40s and '50s and it costs only 12 credits. I picked up nine songs last month, so these 64 tracks only cost me three credits.

Several tunes on my latest podcast Hillbilly Pig Out -- "Give it To Me Daddy" by Hartman's Heartbreakers, "Nothin; Clickin' Chicken" by The Down Homers and "Who Puts the Cat Out When Papa's Out of Town" by Sam Nichols came from this collection. And I've been playing lots of it on The Santa Fe Opry in the past few weeks.

There are a few well-known artists here. There's pre-Nashville Sound Chet Atkins (doing "Boogie Man Boogie"), The Carter Family, Spade Cooley and Tennessee Ernie Ford. But for every Delmore Brothers or Grandpa Jones, there's five or six like Roy Hogsed or Smoky Wood & The Woodchips. This almost is a secret history of country music. Truly, this is the music Nashville would like you to forget.

* "Navajo" and "Wild Texas" by Los Peyotes. These are the two tracks I didn't already have on the Psychotic Reaction EP by South America's Los Peyotes. "Navajo" is an instrumental "surf" rocker in the tradition of "Apache," except it's got a flamenco (!) finale. "Wild Texas" is a cool fuzz 'n' Farfisa rocker Los Peyotes do so well. The band has a new album called Garaje o Muerte coming out at the end of the month.

* "Ducken" by Hasil Adkins from 1950s Rock 'n' Roll and Rockabilly Rare Masters. Here's another cool bargain collection from eMusic -- 56 tracks for 12 credit. I had only one credit left, so I made a "down payment." I hope the rest of it's as fun as this Hasil track. He does a pretty good impersonation of a police siren here.

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, September 3, 2010
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Handcuffed to Love by Johnny Paycheck
Hey Sheriff by Josie Kreutzer
Okie's In The Pokie by Jimmy Patton
Hell's Comin' by The Cedar Squeezers
Bald Headed Baby by Buddy Sharpe & The Shakers
Rebel Within by Hank III
Hot Dog by Corky Jones (Buck Owens)
Action Packed by Ronnie Dee
Sweet Virginia by The Rolling Stones

Sweet Virginia by Jerry Lee Lewis with Keith Richards
You Shake Me Up by Andy Anderson
Oh You Pretty Woman by Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel
Oh Honey Baby Doll by Bloodshot Bill
Word to the Wise by Bill Kirchen with Dan Hicks
Who Walks In When I Walk Out by Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys
Don't Make Me Walk Away by The Stanfields
Sharon by David Bromberg

What Am I Doing Hanging Around by Michael Martin Murphey
Freight Train Boogie by Doc and Merle Watson
Keep on the Firing Line by Ralph Stanley
Corn Liquor Made A Fool Out Of Me by Bad Livers
Steamboat Whistle Blues by John Hartford
Don't You Hear Jerusalem Moan by Miss Tammy Faye Starlite
Cash on the Barrelhead by Dolly Parton

You're the Reason by Nancy Apple
A Man Like Me by Roger Miller
In Spite of Ourselves by John Prine with Iris DeMent
A Girl Don't Have To Drink To Have Fun by Wanda Jackson
Third Rate Romance by The Amazing Rhythm Aces
Lead Me On by Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty
You're Lookin' at Country by Eilen Jewell
Haunted by Jon Langford
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: MOVIE STAR JUNKIES & BAD BAD BILLY BLAKE

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
September 3, 2010

Elusive rock ’n’ roll poet William Blake might be considered something of a one-hit wonder.

True, folks like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith owe Blake an obvious debt, and Van Morrison actually name-checked Blake and his band The Eternals in “You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push the River” on Veedon Fleece. Folkie Greg Brown did a whole album of Blake tunes in the 1980s called Songs of Innocence and Experience, and an Olympia, Washington, band called Arrington de Dionyso and the Old Time Relijun did a version of Blake’s “Tyger” that sounds like Roy Orbison on angel dust.

But Blake’s only work to get much mileage in the rock universe is his poem “Jerusalem,” best known for its treatment by 1970s prog-rock commissars Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who recorded it on their album Brain Salad Surgery. The Mekons recorded it too, though I prefer the trash-rock version by The Fall from the late ’80s.

However, a new version of an old Blake poem (written in 1794) recently emerged. A Poison Tree, the new album by Movie Star Junkies, features a Blake poem as the title cut. “I was angry with my friend:/I told my wrath, my wrath did end./I was angry with my foe:/I told it not, my wrath did grow.” Spoiler alert: The “wrath” grows into a tree, and by the end of the poem, “In the morning glad I see/My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”

That Blake is a heck of a writer. Too bad he’s never made any albums of his own. But I bet if he did, he’d sound a lot like The Movie Star Junkies. They’re a well-read bunch. Their previous (and first) album was a whale of a record called Melville, which featured songs about shipwrecks and crazy obsessions.

The Blake tune is pretty indicative of the rest of this album. Images of murder, torture, and betrayal color the lyrics. “How many nights I got to wait before you put me on a stake?” is the first line of “Leyenda Negra.” Then there’s “Almost a God,” which ends with a religious observation: I admire the devil/For finishes everything.”

And there’s another song about a tree, “The Walnut Tree,” a minor-key romp that sounds like Gogol Bordello paying tribute to Johnny Cash’s chunka-chunka beat. It’s a song of doomed love. My favorite foreboding line: “We danced in a field with ravens and crows.”

The basic MSJ sound is dark but melodic — spaghetti-Western guitars over (a real) Farfisa organ and drums that evoke a marching band. The band proudly cites The Birthday Party as an influence, and you can hear echoes of early Nick Cave in there. The last song, a seven-minute epic called “All Winter Long,” ends in a dense instrumental with fuzzy guitar licks that bring back memories of The Electric Prunes.

The album is barely more than 30 minutes long. But it’s intense enough by the time it’s over that a listener feels like he’s been through a journey.

Also recommended:

*Two-Headed Demon by Urban Junior. Voodoo Rhythm is fond of the one-man-band concept. They’ve red albums by John Schooley and Bob Logg III (both Americans), French wonder King Automatic, and label head Rev. Beat-Man’s masked alter ego Lightning Beat-Man.

And now comes Urban Junior, who, even by Voodoo Rhythm standards, will amaze you with how much noise one man can produce.

But unlike most of those others listed, Urban Junior doesn’t seem to be following in the footsteps of the late West Virginia madman Hasil Adkins, who created a distinctive one-man country/blues bash sound. Instead,

UJ describes his sound as “Swiss-spankin-electro-trash-garage-boogie-disco-blues-punk” and lists The Beastie Boys as an influence. He fears not the synthesizer. But don’t get the notion that his sound is slick or glitzy. He uses his synth as an assault weapon.

The title cut sounds like invading Huns in a disco massacre. “With the Idiots” is a little more rootsy, at least in the opening moments before the decibels rise. It has what sounds like a theremin solo.

UJ shows his true perversity in the last song, “We Love Urban Junior,” in which a couple of little girls — well, at least they sound like little girls — literally sing his praises, complimenting both his music and his manly physique.