TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Rolling the Thunder

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
July 19, 2019

Warning: This column is full of spoilers for the Netflix movie Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Life is full of spoilers. Welcome to the real world, kids.

A little historical perspective for those who weren’t around or those who were in a coma during the mid-’70s: the Rolling Thunder Revue was a ragtag tour featuring Dylan and lots of other musicians, including lots of his old folkie pals like Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Bobby Neuwirth; beat poet Allen Ginsberg; and Dylan rock contemporaries like Joni Mitchell and Roger McGuinn.

Backed by a group that included band leader T-Bone Burnett (who nobody had heard of at the time), David Bowie alum Mick Ronson on guitar, and mystery lady Scarlet Rivera on violin, the revue was the antithesis of the big-time mega-monster corporate stadium-rock tour that was rising in the ’70s. Rolling Thunder played small venues with little advance publicity.

And lots of great concert footage was captured by the incomparable Dutch filmmaker Stefan van Dorp, hired by Dylan to accompany the merry caravan.

Van Dorp, a Dutch master

One thing I liked about Rolling Thunder is that you can’t always tell what’s the “real world” and what ain’t. It’s part documentary and part mockumentary. At least one of the characters is completely made up, and several of the people being interviewed didn’t really do what they claimed to do during the daze of that tour.

Some critics have complained that the cruel and callous Dylan and his henchman Scorsese snared them into this web of deception. One overwrought review likened these deceptions to the “fake news” epidemic in the Trump era. Some calmer voices just dismissed the fake interviews as an unnecessary distraction.

When I found out about this — after reading up on the film right after watching it — I howled with laughter. I was duped! I shouted, loud enough to frighten my cat. It was a classic Dylan jest. No wonder Scorsese included Joni Mitchell singing “Coyote” in the doc. Like Joni’s protagonist, Dylan is the ultimate trickster.

But I was a little disappointed that a teenage Sharon Stone didn’t really join the tour because Dylan liked her KISS T-shirt. (She wasn’t there at all.)

And it would have been cooler had the stuffy, vainglorious van Dorp — who complains about everyone in Rolling Thunder nearly as much as people complain about him — had been real. Van Dorp (played by Bette Midler’s real-life husband, Martin von Haselberg), was a vehicle for Scorsese to poke fun at the self-important earnestness of talking heads in rock documentaries.

But whatever you think about these little twists, the music in the film is tremendous. Standouts include the live “Isis” (probably the best song on Dylan’s album Desire, released around the same time as the tour), as well as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” both of which he turns into rowdy rockers.

All these and others are a thrill to behold.

A real thrill.

Terrell’s Tune-up’s top 10 underrated Dylan songs:

* “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” — This song from Dylan’s Street Legal (1978) evokes troubling images of impending violence at some border town saloon. This would have fit in on Dylan’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack a few years earlier.

* “Billy 1” — Speaking of Pat ’n’ Billy, this song didn’t really shoot me in the back until about 20 years ago, when I walked into the Lincoln County Courthouse — from which Billy made a daring escape and killed two deputies in 1878 — and someone was playing this song. It made the whole visit magical.

* “Days of ’49” — Dylan didn’t write this tune, which appeared on his unjustly panned 1970 effort Self Portrait. The narrator is an aged ’49er recalling his friends and how they met their demise. “Of the comrades all that I’ve had, there’s none that’s left to boast/ And I’m left alone in my misery like some poor wandering ghost.” Those words go through my head every time a friend of mine dies, which is far too often these days.

* “Jokerman” — This oracle of a song, from his otherwise unremarkable 1983 album Infidels, proves that not everything Dylan did in the mid-’80s sucked. Just most of it.

* “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” — I didn’t begin to understand this gem from 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited (still Dylan’s greatest album) until years later, after I myself had gotten lost in the rain in Juárez a few times.

* “Everything Is Broken” — This swampy, bongo-boosted tune from Oh Mercy (1989) sounds like Slim Harpo’s “115th Nightmare.”

* “Watching the River Flow” — This was a 1971 single that didn’t appear on an album until the arrival of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2, released later that year. It features Leon Russell on piano and Jesse Ed Davis on guitar. It has one of my favorite Dylan couplets, “People disagreeing everywhere you look/Makes you wanna stop and read a book ...”

* “Dignity” — This was recorded in 1989 during Dylan’s Oh Mercy sessions but didn’t see commercial release, in a remixed version, for another five years.

* “Mississippi” — This laid-back gem first appeared on Love and Theft (2001), but the slower, looser version that kicks off The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs (2008) is the best. It’s like a hip update to the country classic “Gotta Travel On.”

* “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” — One of the best bloody tracks on Blood on the Tracks (1975). I came to truly appreciate this song during a break-up the next year.

Now with some videos!

Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?



Isis in all her glory



Here's Joni and "Coyote" as seen in the film



Here's Marty!

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: The Jackets, Nots and Walking with The Giants

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
June 21, 2018

Queen of the Pill (Voodoo Rhythm), the new album by The Jackets, is good, strong, punked-up variations of that wonderful 1960s sound of teenage Americans trying to imitate British bands imitating African-American blues and soul. It’s raw and rowdy and full of fuzz and fury.

Singer Jackie Brutsche’s voice ranges from Weimar Republic diva to riot grrrl screamer. It’s such an important ingredient of The Jackets’ sound that sometimes a listener will forget that it’s her guitar — mostly thunderous, but sometimes sweet and slinky — that’s also driving the songs.

Standouts here include the frantic “Loser’s Lullaby”; “Steam Queen,” featuring some nasty blues licks from Brutsche’s guitar just under the fuzz; and “What About You,” with lyrics by drummer Chris Rosales, who also does his most ferocious drumming on this one.

But best of all is the slow-burning, mysterioso “Floating Alice,” which sounds like it sprang from a mutant exotica record by Esquivel! on a mescal and mushroom binge, perhaps. The lyrics deal with a lady astronaut helplessly floating off into outer space away from her lover. “The stars shine so bright as I’m getting lost / Slowly fading away, at any cost …”

Also recommended:

* 3 by Nots (Goner Records). This is an all-woman punk, or maybe post-punk — or maybe, who cares about such distinctions? — band from Memphis that I discovered back in 2016 with their second album Cosmetic.

At the time, I described the record as the most urgent-sounding music I’d heard in a long time. Their new album is not such a big surprise to me as the previous one. But the sound is no less urgent.

There are some notable changes since their last album. For instance, there are no seven-minute rock odysseys here. No track even reaches four minutes, which probably is a good thing.

More significant is the loss of Nots’ keyboard player, Alexandra Eastburn, who provided Pere Ubu-like synth bloops and bleeps. Instead, singer Natalie Hoffmann fills in on keyboards on several songs, providing enough psychedelic embellishments to remain true to their sound.

As was the case with Cosmetic, it’s not easy to follow the lyrics. But you can tell Hoffmann is upset about something on basically every song. Her singing is more like desperate chanting. The song titles alone — “Woman Alone,” “Surveillance Veil,” and “Far-Reaching Shadows” — paint a bleak, maybe paranoid picture, which is reinforced by the music.

And I can’t help but wonder if Nots’ “Floating Hand” belongs to The Jackets’ “Floating Alice.”

* Meetings with giants, now deceased

Roky Erickson in the Iron Works BBQ parking lot
1995

Three musicians whose music I’ve long loved have died in recent weeks: postmodern vaudeville crooner Leon Redbone; psychedelic wailer Roky Erickson; and New Orleans voodoo rocker Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John.

They were three very different musicians, but one thing they had in common was that I met them all, exactly once.

I interviewed Redbone in July 1981 when I was freelancing for the Santa Fe Reporter, and he was playing the late lamented Golden Inn.

Ever since his first album in the mid-’70s, Redbone was notorious for refusing to give his real age or place of birth. So naturally, that was one of the first things I asked him about. “Oh no, I’ve always answered questions,” he told me, politely adding that he was 41 years old and from Shreveport, Louisiana. This was very early in my journalism career, and I just took him at his word and included that in my story.

Decades later, I learned that Redbone, whose real name was Dickran Gobalian, was born in 1949 on the island of Cyprus. Oh well, a lot of people have lied to me in interviews since, but none of them could sing “Shine on Harvest Moon” or “Champagne Charlie” like Leon did.

Two years later, I got to interview Dr. John at Club West in Santa Fe, also for the Reporter. I lived close to downtown then, so I walked to work that night. Just down the street from Club West, I passed The Forge, where saxophone great Eddie Harris was playing. I stood in the doorway to listen to a couple of his songs thinking, Dang! This is a hopping little town!

In our interview, Dr. John talked a lot about his hometown hoodoo. Voodoo in New Orleans, he said, “is more like the Masons than religion. To me, it was more like a fraternal brotherhood thing. Also, it worked for me like therapy. I never got into it full swing. If I had stuck with it, I would have become a different type of person to deal with than I am now.”

Rollins and Roky

I never actually interviewed Erickson, but I met him in Austin in 1995, the first time I went to South by Southwest. He was supposed to do a book signing at a downtown BBQ joint, having just published a book for Henry Rollins’ publishing company. As I approached the restaurant, a bearded, disheveled guy who looked like a cross between a saint and a wino walked out the door. It was him!

I introduced myself.

“Hey Roky, my name is Steve ...”

“I know.”

“I’m from Santa Fe ...”

“I know,” he said, shaking my hand. “You have any cigarettes?”

I didn’t but he still was friendly and chatty — and started bumming cigarettes from passersby as we talked in the parking lot. I learned that he had bolted the book signing after he started feeling claustrophobic inside. A few minutes later, a frustrated Rollins emerged from Ironworks BBQ, trying to coax Roky back inside. “You want me to get your iced tea, Roky?” he asked.

Finally, he got Roky to agree to get into a car and sign books there. Including one that I bought.


Roky walked with the zombie. Dr. John walked on golden splinters. And Leon never walked without his walking stick. I’ve walked with some giants, if only briefly. Rest in peace, Leon, Mac, and Roky.

Some videos for you

First The Jackets



Here's Nots



Here's Roky from just a couple of years ago



A litttle gris-gris from the Doctor



Without my walking stick, I'd go insane

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Polkaholism and Other Serious Conditions

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
June 7, 2018

Here is a bunch of crazy rock ’n’ roll records that have been delighting me in recent weeks.

* Polka High by The Polkaholics (self-released). From the land of “Beer, Broads and Brats” (the title of one of their early songs) come this hopped-up, electric “Look Ma, no accordion” polka trio for their first full-length album in a whole decade. This group, led by guitarist, singer, and songwriter “Dandy” Don Hedecker, has a reputation as one of Chicago’s greatest party bands, describing their own sound as “oom pah pow.”

Severe polka purists — I don’t actually know any of these, but I suppose they’re out there — probably hate how The Polkaholics have mutated the genre. And I suppose some serious — or at least self-serious — rockers may dismiss the group (which, in early songs, declared themselves “Polka Enemy Number One” and “The Pimps of Polka” as a novelty act). But who gives a flying darn? Their music is outright infectious. If this be novelty, let us make the most of it.

There isn’t a track on Polka High that doesn’t leave me smiling. But some make me grin wider than others. The boozy, woozy waltz called “My Beer Was Talking to You” is one, as is “Space,” in which the group fantasizes about bringing polka to the final frontier. And the opening track, “Blue Haired Lady,” is a rousing ode to the dream girl of all aging polka lovers.

But best of all is “The Hippies Killed the Polka Stars,” which probably has roots in that old MTV-era song by The Buggles. It’s about how ’60s rock ’n’ roll destroyed polka (“with their long hair and loud guitars”). However, at least in this song, polka is back and those “dirty rotten hippies must pay.” At one point the song becomes a weird battle-of-the-bands of sorts with The Polkaholics alternating between playing some happy polka snippets with familiar old riffs from familiar old rock songs (“In-a-Gadda da Vida” being one of them!), which the “audience” boos.

Yes, most of these are pretty silly. But there’s a serious message here: Don’t discount fun music just because it’s based on something your grandparents thought was fun. Heed these words, my children — and learn to love the polka.

* Unwilling to Explain by Unknown Instructors (Org Music). This band basically is an ’80s indie-rock super group with bassist Mike Watt, formerly of Minutemen and Firehose (and drummer George Hurley of those two bands) along with Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis on guitar and poet Dan McGuire on spoken-word vocals.

It’s a coast-to-coast production with Watt and Hurley recording their parts in their hometown of San Pedro, California, and Mascis adding guitar from a studio in Amherst, Massachusetts, with McGuire doing his parts from Toledo, Ohio. According to a blog post from Watt, McGuire asked Watt to write nine tunes for Hurley and him “to accompany his spiels.” This, he said, is a big difference between the three previous albums, on which, Watt said, the songs were all improvised.

Nevertheless, the music here has a loose, improvisational feel, with McGuire sounding like a coffeehouse beatnik backed by crazy funk-fusion noise.

The Instructors sound most ominous in the slow, intense “Election Day in Satchidananda,” featuring McGuire growling about “piles of corpses” and “the rifle crack at midnight.” The title perhaps is an homage to Alice Coltrane’s classic 1971 avant jazz album with Pharoah Sanders, Journey in Satchidananda. No, it doesn’t sound much like Alice and Pharoah (no harp, sax, or tamboura to start with), but it’s every bit as otherworldly in its own peculiar way.



* Fudge Sandwich by Ty Segall (In the Red Records). This isn’t the first covers album the ever-prolific young Mr. Segall has released. He did one a few years ago called Ty Rex, which consisted of his versions of songs by Marc Bolan and T Rex. That one was dandy, but I like this new one (released late last year) even better. Here, Ty covers songs originally performed by a wide variety of artists from Funkadelic to Neil Young, from L.A. punk rockers The Dils to The Grateful Dead.

You know the album’s going to be wild when it starts off with a take on War’s “Low Rider.” It sounds a lot like some nightmarish song by The Residents, except that Segall’s vocals could almost be Tom Waits auditioning for some doom-metal band.

He’s more faithful to the original version of The Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m a Man” (not to be confused with the Bo Diddley song of the same title) and to John Lennon’s “Isolation,” one of the most harrowing cuts on his album Plastic Ono Band.

His fuzzed-out guitar solo on the stripped-down rendition of Funkadelic’s “Hit It and Quit It” might confound George Clinton devotees. But I do believe that Eddie Haze, Funkadelic’s late original guitarist, would understand and appreciate.

While he’s best known for these guitar ragers, Segall displays his softer acoustical side on a couple of Fudge Sandwich songs, most notably an obscure punk song, The Dils’ “Class War” (which starts off quietly but builds up steam) and a tune called “Pretty Miss Titty,” by proto-prog-punk band Gong. (Segal’s version isn’t all that different from the original.)

At the moment, my favorite Fudge Sandwich song is “Archangel Thunderbird,” originally by Amon Düül II, who, according to AllMusic, was named for a “German art commune whose members began producing improvisational psychedelic rock music during the late ’60s.” I haven’t listened to them much before (I’m amazingly deficient in my knowledge of German art commune rock) but Segall’s tough minimalistic blast — with just a trace of “Louie Louie” — makes me want to learn more about them.

Videos!

Who killed the polka stars?



Hey Hey, we're the Unknown Instructors!



Ty of the Dead

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Mystery Lights, Imperial Wax & REQ'D

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
May 24, 2018

Here’s some recent hip, mod rock ’n’ roll the kids are going ape and blowing their tops over.

Or maybe not the kids. But I am.

* Too Much Tension! by The Mystery Lights. It’s been nearly three years since I discovered this band. For a while there I started to think the self-titled album of this wailing, psychedelia-touched, garage-fueled outfit — the first release on the influential independent soul label Daptone subsidiary, Wick Records — perhaps could be their swan song.

Fortunately, I was wrong. This new high-energy record is just as good, if not better, than the previous album. In other words, it’s a real humdinger (and I like ’em like that).

For those who haven’t seen the light of The Mystery Lights, singer Mike Brandon and guitarist Luis Alfonso Solano started playing together as teenagers in Salinas, California. These were kids who were hip enough to love the old Nuggets compilations — which consisted of first-wave garage-rock madness — as well as bands like The Velvet Underground and Suicide.

Somehow Brandon and Solano ended up in Brooklyn, where apparently they crossed paths with Daptone, which helped them win a wider — if not yet gigantic — audience.

There are many notable songs on Tension. After a 46-second spook-house intro by keyboardist Lily Rogers (titled “Synthtro”), the whole band comes in with “I’m So Tired (of Living in the City),” which seems to have sprung from the guitar riff of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges. “Wish That She’d Come Back” is informed by both Del Shannon and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. And I hear distant echoes of The Talking Heads in “Someone Else Is in Control.” Meanwhile, the slow, soulful minor-key track “Watching the News Gives Me the Blues” could be something the late Daptone star Charles Bradley might have taken a crack at.

I strongly advise: Go toward the Lights.

* Gastwerk Saboteurs by Imperial Wax (Saustex). After they buried the Lizard King, the surviving members of The Doors decided to go on as a trio without Jim Morrison. They released one pretty good album, Other Voices. While it was packed with fun (songs like “I’m Horny, I’m Stoned” and “Variety Is the Spice of Life”), it didn’t sound much like The Doors. (I’ll be nice and not mention the Morrison-less Doors’ subsequent, final and forgettable album, Full Circle.)

After Mark E. Smith — founder, frontman, and frothing prophet of The Fall — died last year, surviving members of his band also decided to go on. I should clarify that guitarist Pete Greenway, bassist Dave Spurr, and drummer Keiron Melling, while they backed Smith for The Fall’s final decade, are far from the only surviving members of that band, which first reared its ugly head in the late ’70s and reportedly has nearly 70 former members, including a couple of Smith’s ex-wives.

But unlike Morrison’s old band, these guys wisely decided not to keep the old band name. They named the group Imperial Wax, a nod to the first 2008 album on which they backed Smith, Imperial Wax Solvent. And they hired a new singer, Sam Curran, who can get manic like Smith, but otherwise doesn’t sound much like him.

I was prepared to be cynical about Gastwerk Saboteurs, the group’s first album, but I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if someone had played me these songs without mentioning anything about The Fall, I would have liked them anyway — and not even thought about Smith. It’s just good, aggressive, guitar-driven, punk-painted rock.

Standouts here include “Turncoat,” which sounds a little like Frank Zappa’s “Trouble Every Day,” except with nastier guitars; “Plant the Seed,” which has more than a little “Radar Love” in it; and “Rammy Taxi Illuminati,” which is nearly 10 minutes long but doesn’t get old.

I somehow don’t think Imperial Wax will ever become as influential and important as the band that spawned them. But they sound like they’re having a great time trying.

* Fall in Love on Hate Street by REQ’D (Wondertaker). This basically is a solo record by Sluggo Cawley, best known as the guitarist of the outrageous Bay Area punk band The Grannies. The two times I’ve seen that group, Sluggo was never singing. Both times his mouth was hidden by a gruesome-looking monster mask of some sort. (The Grannies are known for their colorful and hilarious costumes, wigs, granny gowns, etc.) But with his new band REQ’D (pronounced “wrecked”), we get to hear the monster behind the mask.

The music isn’t nearly as ferocious as The Grannies’. In fact, Sluggo even strums an acoustic guitar in some songs. Several tracks feature female background singers (Mrs. Sluggo — Laurian Rhodes — is one of them). And while Grannies songs are typically funny (and frequently obscene), Sluggo bares his soul on many of these tunes. “Cancer,” for instance, is about his young son who survived leukemia.

But don’t think the album doesn’t rock. His electric guitar on the opening song, “Blood,” should dispel any such notion, especially the feedback freakout at the end. Thomas Quinn’s wild sax on “Trash” reminds me of Steve Mackay’s work with The Stooges. And “Car” is funky in a swampy kind of way.

Sluggo wrote all the songs here except three covers: Nick Cave’s “The Ship Song”; “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool Ya,” written by Texas troubadour Guy Clark; and a surprisingly good — and unironic — version of Bonnie Tyler’s cheesy ’70s hit “It’s a Heartache,” on which Sluggo shares vocals with Hilary Reed.

Here's some videos:

First, a live radio set by The Mystery Lights



Now some Imperial Wax playing "Art of Projection"



Finally, here's Sluggo and REQ'D

Sluggo with The Grannies,
Triple Crown, San Marcos, Texas  2014

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: New Blues Releases

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
May 10, 2018

In the few short years it’s been around, Omnivore Recordings (founded in 2010) has become a major reissue/rarities label. Its catalogue includes old, out-of-print albums (and in some cases, new compilations) by some of the true greats in rock, jazz, and country. And don’t forget the blues. In recent months, Omnivore has released several worthy records by venerated bluesmen of yore. Here are some of them — and another one not from Omnivore but worth mentioning.

* Blues Piano and Guitar (Live) by Henry Townsend and Roosevelt Sykes. One of the biggest
compliments you can give to any live album is stating, upon listening to it, “I wish I could have been there.” Despite its lackluster title, that’s definitely the case with this 2-CD team-up of Townsend, who supplies the guitar, and Sykes, a renowned blues pianist as well as singer, known as the “Louisiana Honey Dripper.”

Recorded at a February 1973 show at Washington University’s Graham Chapel in Townsend’s adopted hometown of St. Louis (where Sykes lived for most of his early years), this was a reunion show for a couple of old friends — both well into their 60s at that point. They’d first met in the 1920s. Townsend sought out the older, more famous piano man in hopes of learning how to play the instrument. In that process, Townsend taught Sykes some basic guitar. They gigged together, and by the early ’30s, had recorded together.

Armed only with his guitar and voice, Townsend kicks off the show with a song called “Sloppy Drunk Again.” He goes on this way for several songs until he calls his wife, Vernell, onto the stage for a duet on a sweet bluesy “Why We Love Each Other So.” She returns later in the show to sing a tune called “Tears Come Rollin’ Down.”

After that, Sykes comes out for a long solo set, and from this point on he basically dominates the rest of the show. The bulk of his numbers here are nice and filthy, the funniest being “Dirty Mother for You (Don’t You Know).” Here the bawdy old bluesman suggests he’s about to use a dirty word but unexpectedly makes a sharp turn toward the wickedly innocuous.

Townsend and Sykes don’t actually perform any songs together except a couple at the beginning of the second disc. I would have loved to hear more cuts featuring both. Still, I wish I could have been there that night in 1973.

* Mule (Expanded Edition) by Henry Townsend. Originally released in 1980 by the Nighthawk
label, this recording shows Townsend still in fine form. Here he plays piano as well as guitar. This version has the entire original album plus eight previously unissued songs.

On several songs, he’s joined by the great country-blues picker who also started off in the 1920s, Tennessee-born mandolin player James “Yank” Rachell. There’s something about Yank’s mandolin that just makes a song seem spookier. This is especially apparent on “Things Have Changed.” Yank makes the song sound like it’s live from a haunted juke joint.

Vernell Townsend helps her husband sing on another favorite on this album, the ragged but righteous love song “Can’t You See.” She also does a studio version of “Tears Come Rollin’ Down” on Mule, which I like even better than the live version.

* The Blues Came Falling Down by Johnny Shines. Born in 1915, Shines was a contemporary of Robert Johnson, who he met in the 1930s. The two traveled and played together for a couple of years before Johnson died in 1938. Though long dead, Johnson’s ghost was well represented on this live album, which, like the Townsend/Sykes show, was recorded in 1973 at Graham Chapel. Four songs here are Johnson’s: “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man,” the ubiquitous “Sweet Home Chicago” (honestly, I wouldn’t shed too many tears if there were federal legislation enacted that prohibited future covers of this overdone song), and “They’re Red Hot (Hot Tamales),” which is my favorite of these covers, not only because it’s one of Johnson’s least-covered songs, but also because of Shines’ semi-comical 90-mph vocal delivery on it.

This album is almost entirely Shines accompanied by himself on guitar, though Nighthawk Records honcho Leroy Jodie Pierson plays guitar on three songs. The strongest tunes are a potential stoner anthem, “Stay High All Day Long,” and a Blind Willie Johnson spiritual, which Shines said was a favorite of his mother’s, “It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine.”

* The Angels in Heaven Done Signed My Name by Leo “Bud” Welch. No, this one didn’t come
from Omnivore. (It’s on a label called Easy Eye Sound.) And technically this isn’t a blues album, but a posthumous collection of gospel tunes from a Mississippi native known just as much, if not more, for his religious material as his blues. But who cares? This goes well with the albums reviewed above.

Welch didn’t release his first record until 2014, when he was in his 80s. His late-blossoming music career was cut short when he died in 2017 at 83. That was shortly after he recorded with Dan Auerbach, formerly of The Black Keys, now a hotshot Nashville producer. The Black Keys started out in the 1990s as a teenage duo that worshipped Fat Possum blues codgers like T-Model Ford.

As a producer, Auerbach mostly was respectful to Welch’s material, though he wasn’t afraid to juice it up to create a gospel-with-a-punch aura. It works best on rousing cuts like “I Come to Praise His Name” and “Don’t Let the Devil Ride.” However, Auerbach’s loud production basically overwhelms “Jesus on the Mainline,” making me long for Ry Cooder’s version of 40-some years ago.

Let there be videos:

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Dale, Jason & Martha

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
April 26, 2018

Let me riff on the old Wolf Brand Chili ad from decades ago: Neighbor, how long has it been since you read a big steaming Terrell’s Tune-up column entirely devoted to country music?

Well, that’s too long! So here is a look at three fine hillbilly albums I’ve been listening to lately.

* Call Me Lucky by Dale Watson. If there’s a better, more authentic, harder working and more
prolific purveyor of old fashioned honky-tonk music than Watson, I sure haven’t heard of him or her. He’s a little guy with a big white pompadour and a powerful baritone, similar to that of Waylon Jennings, though sometimes reminiscent of Johnny Cash.

He’s got humor and soul, an amazing (and amazingly consistent) band and a work ethic that would put most of us to shame. I’ve seen him play the Continental Club in Austin on both Christmas and Thanksgiving nights and once saw him at the Broken Spoke in the Texas capital play three hours without taking a break.

And the records keep coming. By my count, this is his sixth album since 2015. Among his recent discography there’s a duet with Ray Benson, a covers album, a live album and one featuring of re-recordings of his old songs.

In the past year or so, Watson bought a second home, so he now splits his residency between Austin and Memphis. And yes, you can hear echoes of both Sun rockabilly and Stax soul in Lucky (though not as much as his 2011 offering The Sun Sessions, which was recorded at the studio where Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny Cash and Cash made their magic.)

A few songs, including “Tupelo, Mississippi & a ’57 Fairlane,” “Inside View” and “Who Needs This Band” feature a horn section. Willie Nelson’s harmonica man Mickey Rafael, sort-of a one-man horn section himself,  graces some songs here, including “Johnny and June,” on which Watson trades lines of love with his real-life girlfriend Celine Lee.

In two songs here, Watson jokingly questions his own intelligence. “I know that I’m not smarter than nearly anyone / I’m just lucky,” he sings in the title track. And backed by a classic Johnny Cash chunka-chunka beat in “The Dumb Song” Watson pokes fun at his own dumb habits like drinking, smoking and eating “that Southern fried chicken.”

But don’t be fooled. Dale is far from dumb. And if you’re smart you’ll give this album a listen.

* Stand Tall by Jason Ringenberg. With Jason & The Scorchers, the band that made him famous (well, kinda famous) Ringenberg is the guy who brought cow-punk to Nashville. No question he’s a rocker, but he’s got country in his heart. That was obvious even back in the days when he was sporting a Mohawk along with a red sparkly C&W jacket. And it’s even more obvious on this, his latest solo album.

Starting off with the spaghetti-western style instrumental title song, this album is populated with hard-edged honky-tonkers like “Many Happy Hangovers to You,” an emotional cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” a sweet acoustic, fiddle-colored ode to nature, “Here in the Sequoias” and a country-waltz version of Bob Dylan’s “Farewell Angelina.”

There are songs praising The Ramones – based on the time The Scorchers backed them on a 1982 Texas tour – environmentalist pioneer John Muir and John the Baptist, (who Ringenberg says “was a real humdinger.”)

This is not nearly as political his last proper solo record, 2004’s Empire Builders, (I’m not counting his children’s records he’s released under the name of “Farmer Jason) there’s a fife-and-drums Civil War ballad, “I’m Walking Home,” which is anti-war as well as anti-slavery and pretty radical all around.  “Well I hated slavery and all that support it / But I hate the Union for what it’s become,” the Confederate deserter sings.

* Dancing Shadows by Martha Fields. For the past several years, the West Virginia-born Fields has
made the very best country music coming out of France. Maybe even the whole European Union. And I believe this album, released late last year, is the expatriate hillbilly’s best –at least so far. Her band may be French, but they sound like true Americans to me.

Some of the songs here deal with being a foreigner, such as the lonesome “Paris to Austin” (that contains the line “I’ll pretend the Eifel Tower is a big oil well”) and the bluesy “Exile,” in which Fields sings, “I’m a stranger in my homeland / So afraid for my homeland / And I hurt for what I’ve left behind …”

There are a couple of nostalgic tunes for her past homes, the bluegrass-touched “West Virginia in My Bones,” and the slow aching, acoustic “Oklahoma on My Mind.” However I like up-tempo, country-rockers like “Last Train to Sanesville” (I missed that train years ago!), the dobro-driven “Demona,” and the bluegrass stomp “Maxine.”

But the one I keep going back to is the truthfully titled romp called “Hillbilly Bop.” My favorite verse is where she sings, “Well brother’s got the moonshine, Daddy’s got molasses / Get off your hillbilly asses / You gotta hillbilly bop …”

Here are some videos

First a live version of the title song of Dale's latest.



Jason scorches The Ramones



Martha shows how the Hillbilly Bop is done



And yes, tracks from all three of these albums, plus a lot more, can be heard on a recent episode of The Big Enchilada. In fact, I named the episode after a certain Martha Fields song. Listen and/or download HERE or just listen below:

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Romping with The Yawpers and The Flesh Eaters

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
April 12, 2018

One of my surprise favorite albums of the past few years was Boy in the Well by a trio of Colorado roots rockers called The Yawpers. I’d heard this group’s music several times, even saw them do a live set at the annual Bloodshot Records party at the Yard Dog Gallery in Austin a year or two before the album came out. I’d considered their music OK — tolerable, interesting in spots, but nothing that really knocked my socks off.

But then sometime in the late summer of 2017, I heard a couple of cuts from Boy in the Well, and something clicked. I went back and listened to the whole album, a collection of songs that told a strange story of the bastard son of an American soldier and French farm girl in World War I.

As I wrote in this column back then, I found traces of the Legendary Shack Shakers, the Gun Club, and ZZ Top. (I could list more possible audible ingredients: Mudhoney? Wilco? The James Gang?) In any case, I never did find those socks I’d been wearing that day.

So when the new Yawpers album, Human Question, sprang forth, I was looking forward to it, and just a little afraid I would be disappointed. That fear was unjustified. If anything, I like the new one even more than Boy in the Well.

Unlike their previous album, this is no concept album with a storyline to stick to, though at least a couple of cuts seem to be dealing with singer and chief Yawpers songwriter Nate Cook’s divorce. It’s just good, raw, blues-infused music. It grabbed me and refused to let go in the opening seconds of the locomotive onslaught of “Child of Mercy,” which deals with the putrid pangs of romantic collapse. “… a child of mercy, all the shades are drawn/Flies on the wall and all the furniture’s gone,” Cook sings.

This is followed by an even more brutal romp, “Dancing on My Knees,” which sounds like it came from the border of proto-metal and garage rock. Cook spits, “In the struggle since the altar/the world has taken shape/I’ve found the words I’m looking for but they came a little late .../I’m on to greener pastures/but my neck is in the weeds/I’ve taken all the medicine, but I’ve still got your disease.”

Things get weird in the playful, psychedelic-leaning “Earn Your Heaven.” Here, at the end of a crazed, funky wah-wah guitar solo, Cook shouts — for reasons that escape me — “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the crucifixion Harry Connick Jr.!” I’m not sure whether poor Harry is the one being crucified or if he’s just providing a musical backdrop for the spectacle.

While I mostly like the Yawper’s rowdier tunes, there are a handful of slower ones that are hard-hitting. One is the soul-soaked “Carry Me,” the type of song you could imagine being covered by Solomon Burke. It starts off quietly and builds to thunder. Somewhere toward the end of that road, there’s a heartbreaking sax solo as Cook screams in the background.

This song is followed by one of the craziest rockers on the record, “Forgiveness Through Pain,” featuring Cook’s rapid-fire vocals, distorted guitar noise from lead guitarist Jesse Parmet, and Alex Koshak’s bloodthirsty drums.

Between Human Question, the Flesh Eaters’ reunion (keep reading), and the latest Mekons record (yes, I’m still slobbering over Deserted), I’d have to say rock ’n’ roll is off to a great start this year.

Now I think I’d better go buy some new socks.

Also recommended:

* I Used to Be Pretty by The Flesh Eaters. Here’s a band that rose up during the pioneer days of the great LA punk rock explosion of the early 1980s, a supergroup, really, that in some incarnations would include a who’s who of Southern California punk and roots rock.

The Flesh Eaters had a revolving door of a lineup through the years, but now frontman Chris Desjardins (known as “Chris D,” no relation to Chuck) is back with the same basic band that recorded the critically acclaimed, but still relatively obscure A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die, the group’s second album, released in the year of our Lord, 1981. Players include members of X (the band, not the brand) John Doe (bass) and D.J. Bonebrake (playing marimbas here); Dave Alvin (guitar) and Bill Bateman (drums) of The Blasters, and Steve Berlin of both Los Lobos and The Blasters (sax). Desjardins’ ex-wife and longtime Flesh Eater Julie Christensen also lends some vocals here.

So, yes, it’s a supergroup. And fittingly, the album is downright super. Desjardins — whose voice sounds as if he’s just woken up from a nightmare — and his cronies capture the spirit of the unique bluesy, noirish sounds they were making back at the dawn of the Reagan years. It’s a little more polished than A Minute to Pray, but still powerful and a little bit frightening.

There are some cover songs, including tunes we’ve previously heard by the likes of the Gun Club (another LA band frequently compared to The Flesh Eaters), The Sonics, and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac. And there are re-recordings of a few old Flesh Eaters songs, including “Miss Muerte” and “Pony Dress.”

The best songs here are the ones where Desjardins and band get spooky and slinky like they do on “House Amid the Thickets,” where the combination of Alvin’s hard-knuckle blues guitar and Bonebrake’s marimba brings back memories of Frank Zappa’s Ruth Underwood period, and “The Youngest Profession,” on which Desjardins commands “Go crazy!” and both Alvin and Berlin do just that.

And speaking of spooky, the 13-minute “Ghost Cave Lament” is a grand finale and an instant epic. You will believe that flesh has been eaten in that cave.

Here are some videos:

First, The Yawpers



And now some Flesh Eaters ...

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Mekons Unleashed!

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
March 29, 2018

There aren’t many bands that I’d fly across the ocean to see. The Mekons is one of them.

And if the group’s various performances at the 2017 Mekonville Festival in Pettaugh, Suffolk County, England — a glorious three-day celebration of the band’s 40-year history — weren’t enough to prove that my love for The Mekons wasn’t misplaced, their new album, Deserted, is.

It’s their best album in more than a decade. Of course, a couple of years ago, I told anyone willing to listen the same thing about their previous album, Existentialism. But Deserted is even better. It’s probably their best in a couple of decades. It’s wild, somewhat cryptic, beautiful in spots — and it rocks like folks their age (or my age) aren’t supposed to rock.

Now begins the obligatory part of the column I’ll call “Mekons 101,” which is sadly necessary because so many people don’t know The Mekons from Alexander’s Ragtime Band. The Mekons, a brash, loose-knit art-school band in Leeds, U.K., sprang out of the world of punk in the late 1970s. But by the mid-’80s, they’d gone on to incorporate elements of folk and country music — and, at times, reggae, other world music, and flirtations with electronica and other sounds.

Though sometimes referred to as a collective, this band has had an amazingly consistent membership for decades. Singers/guitarists Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh have been there since the beginning. Singer Sally Timms, fiddler Susie Honeyman, accordion man Rico Bell, oud/saz player Lu Edmonds, and drummer Steve Goulding all were in place by the mid-’80s.

The only current member who hasn’t been around since the ’80s or before is “new guy” Dave Trumfio, the bass player, who joined just a few years ago after serving as a sound engineer for the group. He started that job more than 20 years ago.

Deserted was recorded at a studio near Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. I’d like to think the studio is the lonesome little trailer shown on the album cover and in the video of “Lawrence of California.” I don’t know if that’s so, but whatever the case, like Edward Abbey, The Mekons found incredible inspiration in the American desert. It permeates the lyrics as well as the music.

And if you listen close, you can hear the ghost of Gram Parsons, which haunts Joshua Tree, wailing in the background. (I’m making that up, but years and years ago, The Mekons did record Parsons’ “Sleepless Nights” as well as “$1,000 Wedding.”)

I knew I was going to love this album just a few seconds into the thunderous first song. “Lawrence of California” sounds like a lunatic’s call to arms — but one that’s tempting to follow because it’s so joyful and powerful. The band sings like an angry mob seemingly driven by Honeyman’s demonic fiddle. The song’s refrain, “I will be the king,” sounds like a last-gasp proclamation by the leader of a ragtag army about to be mowed down. (For most of their 42 years together, all original songs are simply credited to “The Mekons,” not individual members.)

“Harar 1883” deals with a military deserter (the title refers to a famous photograph of poet Arthur Rimbaud in Ethiopia), and is somewhat slower but no less mighty. And the most intense song here is “Mirage,” which sounds like a meditation on post-apocalyptic gloom.

By far the strangest song on Deserted is “Weimar Vending Machine,” which starts off with an ominous slow-burning tempo and lyrics about Iggy Pop trying to buy a sandwich from a vending machine in Berlin. It includes a lyrical shout-out to playwright Bertholt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar.” Then the music makes a sudden shift to the boogie, with Bell pounding on piano like Leon Russell backed by falsetto voices that remind me of Frank Zappa’s Flo & Eddie era. The oft-repeated refrain in the last couple of minutes is, “The priest is gone, the priest is gone ...”

One of the real highlights here is sweet, melodic, and pretty. That’s “How Many Stars?” which has deep folk roots. “Captain, Captain, tell me true/Does my sweet William ride with you?” (Sweet William — wasn’t that the fallen lover of “Pretty Peggy-O”?). The captain tells the woman, “He’s lost out in the dark, my dear.” Then the song takes a classic “Butcher Boy” turn, with the heroine taking a pen to paper for what turns out to be a suicide note. “Father, father dig my grave ... show them all I died for love.” The story is ancient, but the melody could haunt you forever.

Also recommended:


* It Is Twice Blessed by Mekons 77: One of the highlights of Mekonville in 2017 was the set by the original Mekons lineup, which featured Langford (on drums!) and Greenhalgh, as well as singers Andy Corrigan and Mark “Chalkie” White, guitarist Kevin Lycett, and bassist Ros Allen. It was too good to be a one-off, so late last year this group released this album of new recordings.

Though most of these Mekons emeriti had long forsaken the music biz, this record is amazingly tight. And there are a number of standout tracks.

I’m not sure what “Bug Out Time” is about, but it’s a wild stomper with audio traces of dub reggae. Some songs are political in content, such as “Borders,” “You Lied to Us,” and “Still Waiting” (which could be an answer to the early Mekons showstopper, “Where Were You?” The big hint is “the girl with the yellow hair,” who appears in both tunes).

Though there are other songs here fueled by political rage — like that other team of Mekons — there is also plenty of wry humor, so the album doesn’t come off as just another angry screed.

Video Mekons

Here's "Lawrence of California."



This is the Mekonville version of "How Many Stars," featuring Tom Greenhalgh's kids on background vocals. (I was standing pretty close to the stage on Susie and Lu's side.)



And here is some Mekons 77

 

 

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Neverland Aftershocks

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
March 15, 2018

I almost feel bad for fans of Michael Jackson following the revelations of Leaving Neverland, the recent HBO documentary detailing the agonizing allegations of sexual abuse, by Jackson, of two of his former kiddie pals, now grown men.

Almost.

Like most living Americans my age, I became aware of Michael Jackson back in my late high school days, when The Jackson 5 began dominating pop charts.

I didn’t like them.

To me they were bubblegum soul, a black version of the Osmonds, who I also couldn’t stand. Both the Osmonds and the Jacksons were out there back then, each doing their best to damage AM radio beyond repair. (Now there’s a good thesis for a Ph.D. in pop culture: How Michael and Donny paved the way for Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.)

Michael Jackson rarely crossed my mind for years after the demise of The Jackson 5. But around 1979, I started hearing songs from Jackson’s album Off the Wall on the radio — and I thought they didn’t stink too bad for disco-laden pop, going well beyond the pipsqueak pop of his early career.

And soon came Thriller, and with that, Michael Jackson basically became the ’80s in the eyes of his rapidly expanding fan base. As for me, after the initial thrill of Thriller was gone, Jackson once again just seemed cheesy to this old cynic.

At first, it was just that the glitz and excess of both his sound and his image seemed to epitomize everything about the ’80s that I hated.

But it ultimately wasn’t a question of musical taste that bothered me about Jackson and his worldwide legions of true believers. Whispers of pedophilia about Jackson and his seemingly endless parade of boy companions abounded for years.

I myself made a snarky innuendo in this very column back on Jan. 5, 1990. Reviewing a record by Terence Trent D’Arby (Neither Fish Nor Flesh, an album I still love), I wrote, “He can sound as angelic as Michael Jackson crooning lullabies to Webster or as wild as James Brown in a high-speed chase along a southern highway.” (Webster was a 1980s TV sitcom starring child actor Emmanuel Lewis, who was a frequent Jackson boy pal and houseguest in the ’80s.)

In 1993, the parents of one of his constant kiddie companions filed a civil lawsuit against Jackson, alleging he’d molested his son. Jackson settled the case, reportedly for more than $20 million. Jackson loyalists knew that it was just a case of money-grubbing parents trying to besmirch the honor of a wholesome entertainer who just happened to love children.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Then in 2003, British journalist Martin Bashir made a documentary called Living with Michael Jackson, in which the singer talked openly about sleeping with the little boys who were guests at his Neverland Ranch.

“It’s not sexual. We’re going to sleep. I tuck them in,” he said. “It’s very charming, it’s very sweet.”

And millions of his fans were charmed. Not so much the district attorney of Santa Barbara. Jackson would be charged with molesting another boy. This case went to trial, but the King of Pop beat the rap — with the help of testimony by Wade Robson, an Australian kid whose family had moved from their home country to California so he could be closer to Jackson, who he’d idolized.

Robson is one of the alleged victims at the center of Leaving Neverland, who in the documentary describes in excruciating detail his story of being raped by Jackson as a young boy.

Some of his fans still — and will always — defend Jackson. But not all. On social media, I’ve seen many Jackson fans who, after seeing the documentary, no longer care to defend him, despite growing up on his music and loving him for most of their lives. While it’s tempting to feel morally superior for never having been a Michael Jackson fan and for pegging him as a child molester years and years ago, I know how it is to have musicians you like transform into monsters.

For instance, I’ve always liked Western-swing pioneer Spade Cooley, even though he murdered his wife. I’ve even made sardonic jokes about that fact when playing Cooley on the radio.

But my perception of Donnell Clyde Cooley changed a couple of years ago when I heard an episode about him on the Cocaine & Rhinestones podcast. Host Tyler Mahan Coe described in brutal detail how Cooley not only killed but tortured Ella Mae Cooley and forced their fourteen-year-old daughter to watch.

“This was not a domestic argument that got out of hand,” Coe said in the podcast. “Not an accident with a dangerous weapon. Not a so-called crime of passion. This wasn’t even an isolated incident. It was a savage and deliberate execution which many people had to have seen coming.”

And while I haven’t thought much of or about the music of Ryan Adams in recent years, during the great alt-country scare in the mid-to-late ’90s, I was a huge fan of his old band Whiskeytown. For years I’ve thought of Adams, who’s always been known for his “bad boy” antics, as a guy who’s just too full of himself.

But a recent article in the New York Times contained serious accusations about his treatment of women, including one allegation that’s caught the interest of the FBI: that he engaged in “graphic texting” and phone sex on Skype with a female musician who was fifteen and sixteen at the time.

How do you separate a horrible man from his art that you love? No easy answer here. Last week comedian Bill Maher said he’ll still go on listening to Thriller — though he might have problems with one of the songs, the one subtitled “Pretty Young Thing.”

So before you start idolizing musicians — or other entertainers or politicians — realize they are not gods but humans. And some humans are just plain evil.

No Michael Jackson videos on this blog.

But here's some TTD:

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: 3 Rock 'n' Roll Holy Men

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
March 8, 2018

I’m not sure how religious you gentle readers are, but I’m going to spotlight the latest albums by three righteous rock ’n’ roll reverends — the Reverend Horton Heat, Reverend Peyton, and Reverend Beat-Man. (Sorry, Reverend Gary Davis, but you’re, uh, dead.) All of these hell-raising holy men preach wild gospels that, to those with ears to hear, can lead to sweet salvation.

Let’s start with Rev. Heat, aka Jim Heath, the longest running member of this trinity, and his new record, Whole New Life. The Dallas native’s debut album, Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em, was released by Sub Pop Records around the height of that influential label’s heyday, back in 1992.

Heath didn’t invent the term “psychobilly,” which was sometimes used to describe The Cramps in the late ’70s and early ’80s and was picked up by a bunch of British bands like The Meteors and Demented Are Go later in the ’80s.

But the term has been applied to Heath and his band, and they helped popularize it via an instrumental on their first album called “Psychobilly Freakout” — which, judging by the couple of times I’ve seen him perform, remains perhaps his most requested number.

Nobody would call Reverend Horton Heat “psychobilly” anymore. Like most of us who were around in the early ’90s, he’s mellowed and his songs aren’t quite as frenzied as they used to be. But he’s still got a rockabilly heart and the new album has plenty of high-powered rump-shakers. “Perfect” is a perfect example, as is “Got It in My Pocket.” (No, it’s not a rocket, like that old 1958 rockabilly classic by Jimmy Lloyd goes. It’s a diamond ring for a woman to whom he’s going to propose.)

Other standout tracks on Whole New Life include the bluesy “Hog Tyin’ Woman”; the jaunty Professor Longhair/Fats Domino-style New Orleans romp called “Tchoupitoulas Street,” which shows off the talents of the band’s new piano player Matt Jordan; and an uptempo slice of craziness called “Wonky.” (I’m still trying to wrap my mind around a rockabilly song titled “Wonky.”)

Late last year, the prolific Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band (as fans know, a trio from rural Indiana headed by singer/slide guitarist Josh Peyton), released its latest album, Poor Until Payday.

The Big Damn Band — which includes the reverend’s wife, Breezy Peyton, on washboard and background vocals, and drummer Maxwell Senteney — doesn’t break a lot of new musical ground. Basically, if you liked any of their blues-infused, touched-by-gospel albums in the past 15 years or so, or if you’ve enjoyed any of their live shows (they’ve played in Santa Fe and Albuquerque several times in recent years), chances are you’ll like this record.

While Peyton has yet to top his greatest song (“Your Cousin’s on Cops,” from 2008’s The Whole Fam Damnily), there are some fine new tunes in this latest batch. The rousing title song is a soulful rocker about a guy promising to show his woman a good time once his next check comes.

“Get the Family Together” is a rowdy but sweet little tune with some good advice: “Don’t wait for a funeral to get the family together.” And, speaking of funerals, “Church Clothes” is an acoustic song about a guy who needs decent threads because “you know we got the worst kind of call/and I can’t go to town in these dirty overalls.”

And just like Reverend Heat’s latest, Reverend Peyton’s new one has a song about a street in New Orleans. Unlike “Tchoupitoulas Street,” “Frenchmen Street” doesn’t have a lot of Professor Longhair in it. (No piano, for one thing.) And there isn’t a hint of brass either, but every time I hear it, in my mind’s eye I see and hear the impromptu brass band I saw forming one night on Frenchmen Street a few years ago.

And then there’s Reverend Beat-Man, aka Beat Zeller, a Bern, Switzerland, wild man who is more than just a “reverend” when it comes to primitive, trashy rock. He’s the high priest — naw, he’s the dang pope — of “Blues Trash Folk Noir,” the name he gives to the music on Baile Bruja Muerto, his latest album, which is co-credited to Izobel Garcia, a honey-voiced singer (who also plays drums and keyboards) from Los Angeles. Garcia collaborated with Beat-Man on last year’s dandy album, Blues Trash.

Dedicated Beat-Man fans will recognize that the first two songs on this record are ones he’s recorded before. “Pero Te Amo” (But I Love You), sung in Spanish by Garcia, who also performed it on Blues Trash. The Baile Bruja Muerto version is more hard-edged, but Garcia’s voice is equally stunning.

Meanwhile, “Come Back Lord” is a Beat-Man rewrite of an obscure old ’60s garage-rock tune (“Come Back Bird” by an Abilene, Texas, band called Chevelle V), with lyrics about God, sex, and the devil.

At the moment, my favorite tracks are the fuzzed-out rocker “I Never Told You,” sung by Garcia; a cover of a Venom song, “Black Metal,” which has lyrics that seem personally tailored for Beat-Man (“Lay down your soul to the gods of rock ’n’ roll ...”); and Garcia’s take on the Costa Rica-born Chavela Vargas’ “Macorina,” another song she sings in Spanish.

The album ends with a trademark Beat-Man seven-minute spoken-word, sometimes obscene psychosexual religious rant/sermon called "My Name Reverend Beat-Man." Nobody does it like the Rev.

Let's do some videos!

Here's Rev. Heath



Rev. Peyton



And Rev. Beat-Man with Izobel Garcia

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Alien Space Kitchen, Full Speed Veronica and King Shark

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
Feb. 15, 2018

Nothing like some loud and local apocalyptic garage-punk space-pop to get your blood circulating on such a winter’s day. Who’s serving that purpose for me lately? It’s The Golden Age of Climate Change by an Albuquerque band called Alien Space Kitchen.

This seven-song, 26-minute EP is a refreshing blast of raunchy riffs, rump-shaking beats, simple but addictive melodies, and irreverent lyrics about planetary suicide.

Alien Space Kitchen has been around for nearly a decade. They started out as a duo featuring singer Dru Vaughter and drummer/vocalist Noelle Graney. (Originally they called themselves “Dr. Rox” and “Chiffon,” respectively, but those monikers didn’t last.) Their first album, Just ASK, was released in 2012. Sometime before 2016’s Some of This Is True, they picked up a permanent bass player, Terry “Mess” Messal, who helped solidify the Space Kitchen’s sound.

At the moment, my favorite track on this record is “In the Mud,” in which Vaughter sings matter-of-factly, “Back in swamp, deep in the water/Weather’s getting warmer, world is getting hotter.” Though other tunes here have similar messages — how to cope when the world is headed for a boiling point — Vaughter never seems preachy. It’s like he’s conjuring troubling images with a smile on his face, while his guitar screams in rage.

Another worthy one is “Who Controls the Weather,” which unabashedly veers down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Of course, they’re being tongue-in-cheek here … I think … (Remember, this is the same band that did a song called “How to Fake a Lunar Landing” on Some of This Is True.) The song ends with Vaughter and Graney singing, repeatedly, “The world is run on gasoline/I’m gonna destroy your weather machine ...”

Also impressive is “Down in Flames,” a crunching — and rather paranoid — rocker with the grim refrain, “It’s all going down in flames/It’s never going to be the same/God damn, ain’t that a shame?” Though the lyrics are dire, there’s a strong glimmer of hope just in the way Vaughter and Graney sing it. Maybe I’m nuts, but I think I detect a knowing wink in the delivery.

Like most good EPs, The Golden Age of Climate Change leaves a listener wanting just a little more. The good news is that more might be just around the corner. This record has a subtitle: The ASK EP Project – Volume 1. “This series of themed EPs will cover a broad range of topics and styles,” the website says. “ASK’s current mission is to release a new volume with a new theme and new songs approximately every 3 months.”

Here’s hoping the Space Kitchen crew follow through on that.

Some other recent New Mexico records:

* June 31 by Full Speed Veronica. It’s another rocking little trio that hails from this Enchanted Land. Guitarist Malcolm June and drummer Matt Worley started the band as a quartet with bassist Nathan Hey and someone named Brandon back in 2008. Hey left the group in 2016 and was replaced by Sarah Meadows. Like June, she’s an alumna of early 21st-century New Mexico rockers The Hollis Wake (and a former arts editor of the Santa Fe Reporter).

Though definitely guitar-centric, Full Speed Veronica is less punky than, say, Alien Space Kitchen. Their melodic sound actually is closer to folk-rock, though they don’t sound much like The Byrds. Fortunately, they also don’t sound much like Three Dog Night or Billy Joel, both of whom are included in Veronica’s lengthy list of influences on their Facebook page. (But I would kind of like to hear them do a version of “Mama Told Me Not to Come.”)

Among the standouts on June 31 are the opening song, “Barnburner,” which has hints of Byrdsy jangle and Dinosaur Jr. roar; the slow, minor-key “A Month of Sundays,” which starts out with June on acoustic guitar; and the soulful “The Great Escape,” which features Meadows on vocals.

Check out Full Speed Veronica's Bandcamp page. You’ll find June 31 there as well as their previous two albums — Always Play the Part and Been Known to Lie, which are available for “name your own price.”

* Walk in the Light and Dub to the Ite’s by King Shark. Alphanso Henclewood, the man behind the Shark, has lived in these parts for most of the last couple of decades, but he was born in Jamaica, the Greenwich Farm district of Kingston, to be exact. And it’s there where Henclewood returns every so often to record himself and his friends playing old-school reggae.

According to a story in the Jamaica Observer last March, King Shark was there for “his most ambitious recording sessions to date” for which he “assembled a crack team of musicians to cut tracks for an album he hopes to release this year.”

The story mentioned two songs — “Walk in the Light” and “Love Revolution,” which he recorded at the famous Tuff Gong studio. That “crack team” included guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith, who has played with too many major reggae musicians to list here, and who is a boyhood friend of Shark’s.

Walk in the Light consists of several versions and mixes of the two songs mentioned in the Observer. So a listener gets to know both songs inside out. My favorite tracks are the “Straight Mix” of the title song and the stripped-down Kete Drums mix of “Love Revolution.”

The other new album under the King Shark banner, Dub to the Ite’s, features ten instrumentals with Smith and other stalwarts of the Shark’s impressive stable.

But wait, there’s more.

Shark also has a new various-artist compilation, Kingston 13,  which he produced, including singers like Pretty Rebel, U Mike, Peter Rankin, and Candyman. My favorite tunes here, though — “Got Feelings 4u” and “I Like to Know” — are love songs performed by a sweet-voiced female duo, Amanda & Queen Lydia Garcia.

King Shark’s albums can be found at CD Baby, The Kingston 13 compilation also is CD Baby.

Here are some videos

Unfortunately I couldn't find any of Alien Space Kitchen's new songs. But here is one called "Alien Agenda" from their previous album:



Here's Full Speed Veronica doing "Barnburner" on the Santa Fe Plaza last May


All hail King Shark!