No, this is not a real review of The Mission of Burma show in Portland last night. I made the mistake of bookings flight back to New Mexico at the ungodly hour of 7:35 am the morning after a Mission of Burma show. But suffice it for now to say that they were tremendous. I'll have more details in Friday's Terrell's Tune-up column. And HEREis my review of their most recent album. Now back to my daze.
PORTLAND, OREGON _ And now for something completely different ... No, there wasn't a guitar in sight. But this was rock 'n' roll. Negativland, a sonic-collage, multi-media, socio-political art collective from San Francisco that's well into their fourth decade as an entertainment unit, headlined a show at Portland's Crystal Ballroom Friday night. Negativland is an unlikely crew of revolutionaries, all four members wearing gray plaid shirts that might have come off the rack at K-Mart. But don't be fooled. They are subversive. Employing sound and video from TV news, radio talk shows, government training movies, commercials, old educational films, all chopped up, manipulated and distorted on top of electronic noises and sound effects, this show the group has named "Content" was thought-provoking, hilarious, incomprehensible, annoying and almost mystical -- sometimes all at once. They take all these messages -- political, commercial, religious education -- that we're bombarded with constantly, throw it into an electronic blender and create new, frequently hilarious art. More than once an old Frank Zappa lyric popped into my overwhelmed mind: "American way, try to explain / Scab of a nation, driven insane." Here are a few notes I pecked out on my iPhone during the show. If any of this makes some se to you, please report to the Department of Homeland Security: "Leave the premises"
"Never forget the fact that we are all just content..."
(Footage of mashing potatoes with M.A.S.H. logo occasionally flashing. Chopping vegetables with an LP)
A bearded guy, could pass for a scientist in a 1950s B movie, talking about Congress considering a plan that involves melting the North Pole.
Report on a county fair. Guy starts talking about oil wells.
Gun toting granny on wheel chair. An angry woman, looks kind of like a Fox News blonde, angrily ranting that she spends all day on Facebook but NOBODY SHARES MY POSTS! At one point she yells, "Get the fuck off the Internet!"
"Guns and the bible carved this nation out of the wilderness."
"It's easy to imagine the end of the world but you cannot imagine the end of capitalism."
The word "Cadillac" is put on a loop, sped up. Becomes a bizarre chant.
A distorted ad for the Playboy Channel. Train going in and out of tunnel A Guy talks about some kind of. interference wrecking his orgasm on the Playboy Channel. "This statement is false. This statement is true ...." And now the voices of Negativland are stuck in my head.
PORTLAND, OREGON _ I think Rick Miller was wearing the same "Hillbilly Surf Club" T-shirt when I saw Southern Culture on the Skids 14 years ago at Santa Fe's Paramount club. Oh well. He wears it well.
Or maybe I was just having a flashback, one induced not by illegal and dangerous drugs, but by the fact that I think Southern Culture on the Skids were playing most of the same songs they played in Santa Fe all those years ago.
"Banana Puddin'," "Too Much Pork For Just One Fork," "House of Bamboo," "Liquored Up, Lacquered Down," "Nitty Gritty" ... All the hits, (speaking relatively, of course. Very few of the music acts around today that I like have actually had anything approaching a "hit.")
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I would have been bitterly disappointed if Mary Huff hadn't done "Daddy Was a Preacher, Mama was a Go-Go Girl" (my favorite SCOTS song of all time) or if Miller hadn't called out "Little Debbie, Little Debbie!" during "Camel Walk."
And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the fried chicken-tossing during the song "Eight Piece Box," which is a frequent ritual during a SCOTS show. Several enthusiastic audience members joined the band on stage for the fun during this. My biggest accomplishment of the evening was hitting Miller in the face with a piece of wing that had landed near my feet.
The band did perform a couple of tunes from their 2010 Kudzu Ranch album ("Bone Dry Dirt" and "Pig Pickin' "). But I wouldn't have minded if they'd done some of their more recent material like "Zombified" (maybe they save that one for Halloween) or their heartfelt cover of The Kinks' "Muswell Hillbilly" or some obscure older tunes like "The Man Who Wrestles the Bear" or "Carve That Possum."
I know I'm sounding like a finnicky, know-it-all critic here, and that misses the point of a Southern Culture on the Skids show.
This North Carolina trio, which includes drummer Dave Hartman, celebrates all the gloriously trashy things that make America great -- not just the South -- great. Greasy food; hotrods; sex; loud, twangy guitars; tacky tiki bars; voodoo ...
Their name might invoke an image of a culture in decline -- and maybe it was suppose to back in the '80s when they started. But SCOTS' upbeat, swampy mix of hillbilly, surf, rockabilly, exotica and soul actually is an expression of a culture I'm proud to be part of.
PORTLAND, OREGON _ The Afghan Whigs left us on an artistic high note back at the end of the last century. Their album 1965 was full of the crazy, burning, obsessive passion that characterized their greatest work throughout the '90s.
The group didn't sound much like Roy Orbison -- they were more like an insane cross of Dinosaur Jr. and Isaac Hayes' band at Wattstax -- but singer Gregg Dulli's songs share some emotional traits with those of Orbison. Like the older singer, you can imagine Dulli becoming spiritually obsessed with a pretty woman walking down the street, and having his spirit cruelly demolished when the stranger keeps walking even after his best "Rrrrrrrrwwwwwllllll!" Of course, Dulli would take it further. It's easy to imagine him following the poor girl home and howling at her window until the dawn.
So The Afghan Whigs broke up. Dull carried on without the rest of the band. But despite some occasional intriguing flashes from The Twilight Singers or The Gutter Twins of his solo work, nothing reached the dizzying heights of the Whigs.
I was skeptical earlier this year when I found out that a new version of The Afghan Whigs had risen from the rock 'n' roll tarpits. I was so apprehensive of possible -- I thought probable -- disappointment, that I put off checking out their new album, Do the Beast for nearly four months. (Only two original members, Dulli and bassist John Curley are part of the album.)
But all my fears were for naught. The album is one of the best of the year so far. And their show at The Doug Fir, a cellar full of noise, as Petula Clark would say, in east Portland, showed them full of the power and rage that made us love them in the first place.
And yes, the new songs stand proudly with the old. They opened with a couple of the most intense songs from Do the Beast, "Parked Outside," which began with a weird violin solo by multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson (yes, that's his name) before launching into its frightening robo-blues beat. This seamlessly was followed by another Beast song, " Matamoros," which is more ferocious live than on the record. Another standout Wednesday from the the new album was "The Lottery," which starts out with drums straight out of the Shaft soundtrack. They didn't forget their '90s work. The Whigs cranked out amazing renditions of "John the Baptist," (my. Favorite song on 1965), an explosive "My Enemy" from Black Love, and the title song of Gentlemen.
They also did a handful of covers, including a slow, twisted Whigs-eye take on The Police's "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" (Dulli hops off the stage and walks among the crowd during this) and, in the encore, the first verse of the overture from Jesus Christ Superstar. (Longtime fans will recall that The Whigs covered "The Temple" from JCSS way back on their album Congregation. On Wednesday this served as the introduction to "Something Hot," another 1965 tune.
The best number of the evening though was the wild medley of a couple of Do the Beast songs, Royal Cream," which starts out, "I know you've been sleepin' with another demon..." and the spooky "I am Fire," on which Dulli emphasizes his lyrics by pounding on a floor tom. And somehow this mutates into a dark take on Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk."
"Don't say that you love me! Just tell me that you need me!"
Damn! After 16 years or however long it's been I almost forgot how much I needed The Afghan Whigs.
This post has been edited for an embarrassing number of typos.
Sunday, August 24, 2014 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(at)ksfr.org
Here's the playlist below
Friday, August 22, 2014 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
The album where I first heard "Cabbage Head" in the '80s
Here's the tale about a funny little song that has bounced across the ocean, across the centuries and across musical genres.
Back in the early 80s, when I first started getting into the iconic New Orleans piano man, Professor Longhair, I came across a song that sounded familiar. The name of the tune was "Cabbage Head." It was a funny story of a man who comes home "as tired as I can be" several nights in a row. And each night he sees something suspicious and out of place. Each time, his wife Sally has an explanation, but it doesn't quite add up.
Hear for yourself on the video below. (UPDATE 2017: Unfortunately Fess' version has disappeared from YouTube. Closest thing I can find now is the Dr. John cover)
The thing is, I'd heard the song years before, albeit, with a different melody and slightly different lyrics. The British folk-rock band Steeleye Span had recorded it on one of their early albums, Ten Man Mop under the name "Four Nights Drunk."
Notice here that the cuckolded narrator is "so drunk I couldn't see" rather than "tired as a man can be."
Sung by Martin Carthy, backed by fiddler Peter Knight, "Four Nights Drunk" listed "Traditional" under the songwriter credits.
And traditional it is. According to several sources it was known in London in the 1760s under the name "The Merry Cuckold and the Kind Wife." It's one the 300-plus Child Ballads (traditional ballads from the British Isles collected by Francis James Child during the 1800s) under the rather boring title "Our Goodman." And reportedly, it was popular in other European countries
The versions collected by Child have lyrics are slightly different than Fess 'or Steeleye's or any of the modern verses I've come across. But despite the archaic dalect, you get the same basic idea. Here's the first verse of the first version:
Hame came our goodman, And hame came he, And then he saw a saddle-horse, Where nae horse should be. ‘What’s this now, goodwife? What’s this I see? How came this horse here, Without the leave o me?’ ‘A horse?’ quo she. ‘Ay, a horse,’ quo he. ‘Shame fa your cuckold face, Ill mat ye see! ’Tis naething but a broad sow, My minnie sent to me.’ ‘A broad sow?’ quo he. ‘Ay, a sow,’ quo shee. ‘Far hae I ridden, And farrer hae I gane, But a sadle on a sow’s back I never saw nane.’
And some of the lyrics were actually raunchy, as the drunken or "tired" narrator discovers other strange things in his bed. ("Who owns that thing in your thing where my old thing should be?") Most of those verses didn't make it to recordings, however -- though years ago I remember hearing a version by English folksinger Ewan MacColl that was downright nasty. Unfortunately, I can't find that online.
So how did this song get from the misty moisty British Isle to Roy Byrd's piano in New Orleans?
Apparently, like so many old British, Scottish and Irish folk songs, it came over with immigrants from those parts and found a home in the American South. Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music has a version titled "Drunkard's Special" by a singer named Coley Jones. J.E. Mainer did a dandy version called "Three Nights Drunk," that was recorded by Alan Lomax and included in the Southern Journey series. Riley Puckett, backed by Gid Tanner on fiddle did a similar version.
There's a more modern version from 1958 called "Mustache on the Cabbage Head" by Luke Gordon that skirts the borders of country and rockabilly:
Blues and R&B artists discovered the song also. Blind Lemon Jefferson did a version called "Laboring Man Away from Home" (which, sadly I've never heard and can't find online). Ruth Brown did a slow, jazzy "Cabbage Head." And Sonny Boy Williamson did a great version called "Wake Up Baby" in 1958, that has the same basic melody as Professor Longhair's. He also was "as tired as a man can be."
Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, the Irish folk band known as The Dubliners had a hit with their version called "Seven Drunken Nights." (Decades later the Chicago Celt-Punk band called The Tossers did a similar, if more rocked-out, version with the same title.)
And why am I not surprised that the song found its way to the late great Rudy Ray Moore, who recorded it not once, but twice. He called it "Old Cabbage Head" on his 1994 Return of Dolemite - "Superstar" album and, a truly filthy version on 21st Century Dolemite. The earlier one is a country spoof featuring "the world's first black country & western female singer, Jeannie Marie." The latter is harder-edged and funkier.
The song has appeared under titles such as "Three Nights in a Barroom," "The Blind Fool," "Five Nights' Experience," "Coming Home Late," "Shickered As He Could Be" and others.
And somehow, just about all these versions make me grin when I hear these poor drunk, or "tired" people tell of the saddles on the sows and the mustaches on the cabbages they find in their homes.
Here's a Spotify playlist of many of the versions mentioned here and a few that weren't. (Unfortunately, they don't have Professor Longhair.)
Welcome to the latest Big Enchilada podcast, Varmint Symphony. It's a hillbilly spectacular featuring raw animal country, rockabilly, bluesgrass, blues, country swing, cowpunk and other sounds to tickle your innards .Have fun, but don't let the possums get in your underwear drawer.
(Background Music: Fiesta Alegre by Flaco Jimenez y Max Baca)
The Weasel, Bean, Frog and Dog by Splitlip Rayfield
21 Days in Jail by Magic Sam
Truckin' Little Woman by Dave & Phil Alvin
Big Bad Wolf by Clinton O'Neal & The Country Drifters
Set Up Another Drink by Carl Phillips
Coffee Grinder Blues by Asylum Street Spankers
Sunday, August 17, 2014 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(at)ksfr.org
Here's the playlist below;
OPENING THEME: Let it Out, Let it All Hang Out by The Hombres
God is a Bullet by Concrete Blonde
Go-Go Girls by Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs
Just a Little Bit of You by The A-Bones
On My Way to Houston by Powell St. John & The Aliens
Living in Squalor by Chump
Stukas Over Disneyland by The Dickies
Devil Drag Strip by The Fumes
Staring Down by New Mystery Girl
Skinny Mama by Floyd Jones
Stuff They Call Money by Dave & Phil Alvin
Buzz Buzz Buzz by The Blasters
21 Days in Jail by Magic Sam
Black Cadillac by Figures of Light
Sharknado by The Barbaraellatones
Linda's Gone by The Black Angels
Epopeya by Doctor Simio
Cockroach Crawl by the Del-Gators
Everybody Got a Little Devil in Their Soul by Bobby Patterson
Big Bad John by Big John Hamilton
Escape by Night by King Shark
Stop Breakin' Down Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears
One More Try by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
Ain't No Sunshine by Freddie King
Maybe Your Baby by The Dirtbombs
Your Love Belongs Under a Rock by Bobby Patterson
All Tomorrow's Parties by Frontier Circus
Black Girls by Violent Femmes
I Dig Black Girls by Charlie Whitehead
Saved by The Mighty Clouds of Joy
That's Life by Big Maybelle
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
Friday, August 15, 2014 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
Here's my playlist below: OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
Sick Rick by Misery Jackals
Monroe by Howlin' Brothers
Highway Cafe by Kinky Friedman
Lug Nut Larry by Dale Watson
The King's Shilling by Del McCoury
Jezebelle by Steve Train & His Bad Habits
Side by Side Doublewides by The Hickoids
The Spasm by Daddy Stovepipe & Mississippi Sarah
Just Let Go/ It Ain't All Flowers by Sturgill Simpson
Yankee Taste by Jayke Orvis
Highway 41 by Husky Burnette
Gotta Get to Heaven by Scott H. Biram
Baby Let Me Follow You Down by Bob Dylan & The Band
Can You Blame the Colored Man by South Memphis String Band
The Cockfight by Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs
I Wear the Scars by James Hand
Dave & Phil Alvin set
How You Want it Done by Dave & Phil
Never No More Blues by The Blasters
Collins Cave by Phil Alvin
So Long Baby by Jo-el Sonnier
Goodbye Again by Dave Alvin with Rosie Flores
Just a Dream by Dave & Phil
House aren't Stomp/Crawdad Hole by Big Bill Broonzy
Long White Cadillac by Janis Martin
Big Bill Blues by Dave & Phil
A Girl Named Johnny Cash by Harry Hayward
Checkers and Chess by Billy Joe Shaver
Down to Seeds and Stems Again by Commander Cody & The Lost Planet Airmen
One Last Look by Angry Johnny & The Killbillies Epitaph (Black and Blue) by Kris Kristofferson
PORTLAND, OREGON _ And now for something completely different ...
PORTLAND, OREGON _ I think Rick Miller was wearing the same "Hillbilly Surf Club" T-shirt when I saw Southern Culture on the Skids 14 years ago at Santa Fe's Paramount club. Oh well. He wears it well.
PORTLAND, OREGON _ The Afghan Whigs left us on an artistic high note back at the end of the last century. Their album 1965 was full of the crazy, burning, obsessive passion that characterized their greatest work throughout the '90s.
They didn't forget their '90s work. The Whigs cranked out amazing renditions of "John the Baptist," (my. Favorite song on 1965), an explosive "My Enemy" from Black Love, and the title song of Gentlemen.
