Love is in the air in Austin next week.
And The Waco Brothers will be there too
I'm headed down to Texas once again for the festivities surrounding South by Southwest. Please bookmark this blog and watch for my posts. Hopefully, if my grandsons allow it, I'll be posting ever day, starting Wednesday morning.
No, I didn't get a badge or wristband. But as any music fiend who has attended this Spring Break for the Music Industry knows, you don't need no stinking badge! There are plenty of unofficial, unsanctioned, unspeakable events to keep you thoroughly entertained.
The last time I was there, in 2014, there was a senseless, tragic crime in the streets of Austin that left four people dead (just a few blocks from where I was at the time.) A maniac named Rashad Owens plowed through Red River Street, which was full of pedestrians, leaving four people dead. this was near the Mohawk, where some musical acts I love, including X, The Black ANgels and Les Claypool were playing.
Last November a jury found Owens guilty of capital murder. Because the state didn't seek the death penalty, he received an automatic life sentence.
If anyone gives a rodent's posterior, you can find my posts from past years, going back to 2004 HERE. And you can find a whole lot of my SXSW snapshots HERE
Someone I won't be seeing next week is the late Davy Jones of The Hickoids. Davy died of cancer in November. But I bet his spirit will be there Tuesday night when Hickoids, Beaumonts, Churchwood, Stevie Tombstone and others play The White Horse.
Friday, March 11 , 2016 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 :
OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
String's Mountain Dew by Stringbean
Five Brothers by Marty Robbins
Cheatin'. Again by Whitey Morgan & The 78s
Rock my World by Jimmy & The Mustangs
Talk to Me Lonesome Heart by Miss Leslie & Her Juke Jointers
My Baby Don't Dance to Nothin' But Ernest Tubb by Junior Brown
Who Says God is Dead by Eilen Jewell
Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven by Loretta Lynn
Your Money and My Good Looks by Gene Watson & Rhonda Vincent
I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven by Eddie Dean & The Frontiersmen
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican March 11, 2016
You know from the first words Paul Burch sings on his new album, Meridian Rising, that this is going to have a lot more attitude than most records honoring any country-music immortals.
“Let me tell you all about the place I’m from/Where the police tip their hats while they’re swinging their clubs. … You best mind where you go and watch what you say/I’ll visit your ma, but I’m not going to stay.”
Yes, the sweet sunny South of romantic myth juxtaposed against the oppressive reality. I knew right then I was going to love this album.
That song “Meridian” is about Meridian, Mississippi, and the album is about that town’s most famous son, Jimmie Rodgers — America’s beloved “Singing Brakeman,” often called the “father of country music.”
But Burch, a honky-tonkin’ alt-country hero for more than 20 years, swings down the club on any notion that this is anything like any Rodgers tribute you’ve heard before. (And there have been some fine ones, such as Merle Haggard’s Same Train,A Different Time, Steve Forbert’s Any Old Time, and the Bob Dylan-instigated various-artist spectacular, The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers.) For one thing, there are no actual Jimmie songs here, though most the tunes are played in the Rodgers style that blends hillbilly, blues, and jazz.
Instead of merely covering his songs, Burch tells the story of Rodgers’ life — not as a literal biography, but with songs from Rodgers’ point of view in various situations. You find Rodgers on tour like a Depression-era rock star on “US Rte 49” — traveling, picking, drinking, womanizing. “They put me up in a house after the show/The mayor’s wife and daughter came in the back door. … Girls did alright by me but I had to leave ’em on Rte 49.”
But the stories Burch tells aren’t all fun and games. “Poor Don’t Vote” shows Rodgers’ working-class sympathy with those hit hardest by the Depression — and his anger at politicians who exploited and looked down on them. “You think you’re safe ’cause the poor don’t vote. … You’d better be kind to this rabble/’Cause if you got my vote or not may be the least of your troubles.”
Jimmie likes it
Rodgers’ death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five is foreshadowed in several tunes — even in the good-time “US Rte. 49,” there’s a quick road stop in a hospital.
On “Fast Fuse Blues,” the singer notes “Later’s coming earlier every day,” and makes a last request: “Take me to Coney Island, so the last thing in my eye/Is you way up on the Wonder Wheel waving me goodbye.” Indeed, Rodgers visited Coney Island the day before he died.
The beauty of these songs — the stories they tell and the emotions behind them — is that they stand on their own even if a listener knows nothing about Rodgers.
In the end, Meridian Rising makes me better appreciate both Rodgers and Paul Burch. Also recommended
* Got Myself Together (Ten Years Later) by Danny Barnes. Banjo maniac Barnes first got famous — well, maybe not actually famous, but he achieved a certain level of underground acclaim — with the pioneering Texas alt/punk/weirdo-bluegrass outfit called Bad Livers in the 1990s.
The Livers broke up around the turn of the century after their commercially disastrous final album, Blood and Mood, basically scared and/or angered much of the Americana crowd. In my review back then I wrote, “Had Beck been raised in Mayberry as the abused stepson of Gomer Pyle …”
In other words, I loved it.
After that, Barnes left Austin for Washington State and began a solo career, sometimes collaborating with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and even Dave Matthews — yes, that Dave Matthews — and others.
In 2005, Barnes released a record called Get Myself Together. “It was kinda my last acoustic type effort heretofore (I launched pretty heavily into my electronic period),” Barnes wrote on his website.
I’m not exactly sure why he decided to release a new version of that album, but somehow I missed the original when it came out, so I’m glad he did. (Unfortunately, he left off his bluegrass version of “Sympathy for the Devil,” which was on the 2005 album, though he does have a new version of Bad Livers’ “I’m Convicted” as a bonus track on the new one.)
Barnes does most of these tunes solo, mainly just voice and banjo. His wry lyrics and his vocal phrasing make him sound like a modern John Hartford. You can hear that in the song “Wasted Mind,” a disdainful look at some kid going nowhere fast.
“He ain’t the first boy standing round a beat-up Chevy/Want to sing like Eminem,” Barnes sings while his fingers fly around his banjo. “On a first name basis at the police station/Where you spend a lot of lonely nights/Standin’ in the line-up lights.”
Incarceration for stupidity is the theme of another highlight here, “Get Me Out of Jail.” It begins “Well, I got drunk this morning/And I went off to work/By nine or ten I cashed it in/And threw up on my shirt/Then I lost your house keys/So I broke in with a rock/I keep my OxyContin baby/Way down in my sock.”
And things get worse from there.
If you’re interested in Danny Barnes, check out this 2009 Bad Livers’ reunion show HERE.
Video Time:
Here's a live performance of "Meridian" by Paul Burch
Here's "Fast Fuse Blues"
Here's Jimmie Rodgers -- at least that's the name on the tail of his shirt. And yes, that's Louis Armstrong on the cornet and his wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano.
Here's Danny Barnes singing "Get Me Out of Jail" with Mimi Naja on mandolin and drummer Tyler Thompson live in Oregon last November.
And just for old time's snake, here's "Fist Magnet," my favorite song from The Bad Livers' crazed final album, Blood & Mood
Last Saturday, March 5, marked the 53rd anniversary of a plane crash that killed
three major country stars of the day: Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Patsy
Cline. It was country music's equivalent to the crash a few years before that
killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper
These days, everyone knows Patsy. But Copas and Hawkins are far less known.
Lloyd "Cowboy" Copas, an Ohio native first achieved stardom in the 1940s when he
replaced Eddie Arnold in Pee Wee King's band. (I just played one of his hits,
"Hangman's Boogie" on
my latest Big Enchilada podcast.) Copas began his solo recording career King Records in Cincinnati.
That influential label in 1948 also signed long tall Harold Franklin Hawkins,
better known as "Hawkshaw." Hawkins. whose wife was country singer Jean Shepard,
began singing professionally after World War II. (An Army vet, Hawkins fought in
the Battle of the Bulge.) Like Copas and Cline, he was a member of the Grand Old
Opry.
I probably don't need to tell you about Patsy. At the time of her death she was
one of the biggest stars of country music.
At the time of the crash, the three were returning from a benefit concert in
Kansas City -- a show to raise money for the family of a disc jockey who had
died a few months earlier. Also killed in the crash was the pilot, Randy Hughes,
who was Cline's manager and Copas' father-in-law.
This story,
published Saturday in The Tennessean, tells the story of the crash
and their loved ones who survived them. (Check out the video interview of
Jean Shepard, who confesses to being resentful of the fact that Cline's death
overshadowed that of her husband's.)
But first enjoy some music from these three country greats. We're fortunate that
YouTube has live clips from all three. Here's Cowboy Copas.
Enjoy some Hawkshaw Hawkins:
Here's a fairly obscure -- but downright gorgeous -- Patsy Cline tune:
And finally, here's a rather maudlin tribute to Patsy, Hawkshaw and the
Cowboy: "Three Country Stars" by Dick Heil
America won the Space Race. We got to the moon before anyone else did.
So there.
U.S.A! U.S.A!
But back in 1961, that outcome didn't seem so clear. That was especially true on April 12 of that year when a Soviet cosmonaut became the first person to orbit the Earth.
His name was Yuri Gagarin. And today is his birthday. He would have been 82.
Gagarin joined the Soviet Air Force in 1955. Four years later he was training to become a cosmonaut.
On April 12, 1961 in spacecraft called Vostok 1 Gagarin circled the planet at a speed of 27,400 kilometers per hour. The flight lasted 108 minutes. Unlike the American space flights that followed, Gagarin didn't land back on Earth in his spacecraft. He ejected from Vostok and parachuted to the ground.
Godless communist or not, that was pretty bitchen!
Gagarin was killed in a plane crash on March 27, 1968 -- more than a year before the U.S. moon landing. Gagarin never got to take a second trip to space.
Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left medals on the moon honoring Gagarin and cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who also had been killed in a plane crash. A crater on the far side of the moon was named in honor of Gagarin.
Back when I was in college, some older friends of mine in El Paso honored Gagarin by inventing a drink named after him. I don't remember what was in it. Vodka I presume. A couple of bartenders down in Juarez would serve it when you asked.
In Russia, he was honored with this song. (Sung by Eduard Labkovskiy in 1975).
A website devoted to Soviet music provided the music. (Turned into English by Google Translate -- thus the Mad Libs / song poem quality of this rendition.)
We're leaving space to work, Stykuya ships in orbit, And all originates from the first flight, Gagarin first turn around the Earth. The commander of the ship, bright-eyed Russian guy, He smile his whole universe presented. No, not for nothing that went first in space Yuri Gagarin, It is a new road has opened for us.
Space miracle machines Explore Venus and the Moon, And if it is necessary, and we take off, guys, Climb into outer space any new ground. The commander, fighting a brave man, With the crew will go to Mercury and Mars. No, not for nothing that went first in space Yuri Gagarin, He opened a new road for us. Floats Land expanses of the universe, Around the Sun holds its usual path, And we live, humans, daring dream Across the Solar System to walk someday. The commander, son of Earth, a great guy, Astronauts, scientists will deliver at Pluto. No, not for nothing that went first in space Yuri Gagarin, For the future they committed feat.
I have no idea what "For the future they committed feat" means.
Sunday, March 6, 2016 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
OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Burn, Baby Burn by Stud Cole
Changing Colors by The BellRays
The Witch by Los Peyotes
I'm the One by BBQ
Anala by The King Khan & BBQ Show
Smoked All My Bud by King Mud
Startin' to Slip by Sons of Hercules
Cadillac Hips by Soledad Brothers
Must Be Desire by Mojo Juju
Springtime for Hitler / Don't Cry For Me Argentina by Billy Joe Winghead
Shortnin' Bread by The Cramps
Jenny Take a Ride by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels
Buzz Buzz Buzz by The Blasters
Red Hot by Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs
What's the Matter Now by The Oblivions with Mr. Quintron
Shoplifter by Quintron & Miss Pussycat
Golden Surf II by Pere Ubu
Almost Ready by Dinosaur Jr.
Silver Monkey by Copper Gamins
Busted by The Black Keys
Betti Moretti by King Salami & The Cumberland 3
Green Sin Bags by Alex Maiorano & The Black Tales
Broken Bones & Pocket Change by St. Paul & The Broken Bones
Red Cadillac by Johnny Rawls
Wild Wild Lover by The A-Bones
Feeling Great Now She's Gone by Lynx Lynx
No Control by The Manxx
Albuquerque Freakout by Holy Wave
Searchin' for You by Javier Escovedo
The Hole by The Soul of John Black
My Life by Harlan T. Bobo
Bang Bang by The Gaunga Dyns
As Time Goes By by Jimmy Durante
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
Friday, March 4, 2016 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 : OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
Back in the Saddle Again by Charlie Daniels
Mud by Legendary Shack Shakers
My Frijoles Ain't Free Anymore by Augie Meyers
Man of the Road by Wayne Hancock
The Race is On by George Jones
There Ought to Be a Law Against Sunny California by Terry Allen
Boomtown Boogie by Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, Jo Carol Pierce & Joe Ely
Fools Fall in Love by Butch Hancock with Marce LaCouture
Heaven is the Other Way by Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
Whispering Sea by Loretta Lynn
Poor Don't Vote by Paul Burch
Pretty Girl by Miss Leslie
DIYBYOB by The Waco Brothers
Rats in My Amp by Salty Pajamas
America is a Hard Religion by Robbie Fulks
The Cold Hard Facts of Life by T. Tex Edwards & Out on Parole
Monkey Rag by Asylum Street Spankers
Beautiful Blue Eyes by Red Allen & The Kentuckians
Pick Me Up on Your Way Down by Jimmie Dale Gilmore
God Don't Never Change by Lucinda Williams
7 Devils by Goddamn Gallows
Let's Bounce by Supersuckers
Hillbilly Highway by Reagan Boggs
Need Somebody Bad by Rhonda Vincent
Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy by Red Foley
Velvet ine Matador by Freakwater
Touch of Evil by Tom Russell with Eliza Gilkyson
Blue is My Heart by Holly Williams
When I Was a Cowboy by Odetta
A Beautiful Thing by The Handsome Family
Tiny Island by Leo Kottke CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets Like the Santa Fe Opry Facebook page Subscribe to The Big Enchilada Podcast! CLICK HERE Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list
Artist, musician and Santa Fe resident Terry Allen was honored this week when NPR featured one of his tunes on the Songs We Love segment.
The song is "Cortez Sails" from Terry's 1975 debut album Juarez. Jewly Hight of NPR writes:
The album's longest track and gravitational center, "Cortez Sail" is a rickety waltz which pivots between whimsical road ballad and ominous war song, between Jabo's keenness to get back across the border into Mexico (homesick and ducking a double murder he'd committed in Cortez, Colorado) and 16th century conquistador Hernan Cortes's drive to brutally colonize the Aztecs. It's a dialogue between the freedom to move, to flee, to choose one's destination, and the power to dominate — or the powerlessness of being dominated.
I never can get the dadgum NPR embeds to work on this blog, so I'll just post a Youtube of the song:
No denying the majesty of "Cortez Sail." But if I were choosing the song that I love most from Juarez, it would have been this one:
Juarez is being re-released again in May, this time on a label called Paradise of Bachelors. You can pre-order HERE. The label also plans to re-release Terry's second album, Lubbock (On Everything).
Long before cable television, back in the early to mid '60s, dozens of pop and rock stars were filming hundreds of music clips for what amounted to a proto-MTV.
It was centered around a contraption, manufactured in France, called the Scopitone 450, which basically was a jukebox hooked up to a 26-inch TV set that played 16mm film clips.
The technology had been around since at least the 1940s when "Soundies" -- black and white clips played on coin-operated machines -- were briefly the next big thing in show biz.
The Scopitone machine was a huge improvement over the old Soundies model, For one thing, a customer could chose among a wide array of film clips. The clips were in color.
And best of all, as the art form evolved, most the Scopitone clips were filled with scantily-clad go-go girls whose shimmying put Sister Kate to shame!
... the message in these videos is clear: T&A! The in-your-face sexiness of the images is a stark contrast to the rather unsexy, often downright lame songs. To see more explicit non-static imagery, one would have had to go to the trouble of attending a peep show or tracking down a stag film. The Scopitones' absurdly enthusiastic buxom women were chosen to attract the male gaze on a small screen across a smoky bar, with the promise of a peek at more skin...in the next video.
But let's start with one of the milder ones. Debbie Reynolds' production company was responsible for many of the Scopitones. But the bump and grinding is kept to a minimum here -- though wholesome Debbie sure could work her pretty pink petticoats in this Golden Throat take on "If I Had a Hammer."
But wait, it gets wilder. Check out the bikinis and beehives in this " Pussycat a Go-Go medley by Stacy Adams & The Rockabilly Boys (no, they ain't rockabilly)
Jody Miller was best know for "Queen of the House," and answer song to Roger Miller's "King og the Road." Here she sings a George Jones song. But I don't think Possum done it this way ...
Joi Lansing, one of the queens of the Scopitones, sings one of my favorite songs from a Matt Helm movie.
And here's one in which i actually like the music. It's a song I first heard by The Searchers done by a group called George & Teddy & The Condors. And oh, yeah, there are go-go girls ...
Something was always cooking at Scopitone
(Hat tip to my friend Deborah and our mutual friend Tim for sending me down the Scopitone path.)
'60s nostalgia has been an annoying cultural phenomenon for way too many years.
In fact I'm pretty sure it's been plaguing the national imagination since
sometime in the early 1970s.
But back in the late '60s, some major (and minor) rock and pop musicians were
busy perpetrating a nostalgia for music from even earlier eras.
Think of songs like "Winchester Cathedral" by one-hit wonders The New Vaudeville
band, or "When I'm 64" and "Honey Pie" by The Beatles.
The Rolling Stones did their part in 1967 on the last track of
Between the Buttons. Most folks think the lyrics of "Something Happened
to Me Yesterday" are about an LSD trip, though the additional of of the woozy
sax and trombone (played by Brian Jones) give the tune a whimsical British
Music Hall feel.
By the last 30 seconds of the song, the whole thing has morphed into a faux
dance band radio broadcast with Mick Jagger serving as the smarmy announcer,:
"So from all of us to all of you, not forgetting the boys in the band and our
producer Reg Thorpe, we'd like to say God bless. So if you're out tonight, don't
forget, if you're on your bike, wear white ..."
Jagger has been quoted saying, "The ending is something I remember hearing on
the BBC as the bombs dropped." Take a listen:
Speaking of late '60s songs framed as live radio broadcast, a singer named Guy
Marks had a minor hit in 1968 with this little treasure called "Loving You Has
Made Me Bananas" that sounded like a Bizarro World version of a depression-era
big band dance program. An announcer (Marks himself?) starts it off:
From the Hotel Sheets in downtown Plunketville, the Publican Broadcasting
Company presents the Music of Pete DeAngelis and his Loyal
Plunketvillevanians. Here in the beautiful gold, yella, copper, steel, iron
ballroom of the Hotel Sheets in downtown Plunketville, overlooking the
uptown section of downtown Pottstown!
Then it gets downright silly.
I'm not sure whether this song came before or after a similar recording by San
Francisco psychedelic heros Moby Grape. Their album WOW, released in
April 1968 had a strange song called "Just Like Gene Aurty, a Foxtrot." This was
a Skip Spence composition that featured a guest musician named Arthur Godfrey
(!) I'll let Graham Reid of the
Elsewhere
blog tell the story:
So just before "Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot" on the 33 rpm album, a
voice came on and invited listeners to get up and change the speed of their
player to 78 (most players at the time had speeds of 33, 45 and 78, some --
like the one in my house -- even had 16rpm). And what you got was an orchestra lead by Wow
producer Lou Waxman and introduced by famous CBS radio and television
announcer Arthur Godfrey who also played banjo and ukulele on it. "Skippy bumped into Arthur at Columbia [Records]," said band member Jerry
Miller later. "The two of them were like Mutt and Jeff, cruising around
arm-in-arm. The funny thing was that Arthur Godfrey thought that Gene Autry
was the kind of music we did all the time."
Godfrey kicked off the proceedings: And now, emanating from the Secaucus Lounge of the fabulous Fandango Hotel
in Weehawken, New Jersey, we proudly present the celestial melodies of Lou
Waxman and his Orchestra, who ask the age old musical question...
And, with Spence crooning like Guy Lombardo on Thorazine, here's what
emanated:
So in conclusion, I'll let Frank Zappa have the final word:
