Friday, June 5 , 2015 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
Long Hauls and Close Calls by Hank 3
Harm's Way by The Waco Brothers
Bad on Fords by Ray Wylie Hubbard
West Nashville Boogie by Steve Earle
Name Game by D.M. Bob & The Deficits
Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Blue by Whitey Morgan & The 78s
The Old Man From the Mountain by Bryan & The Haggards with Eugene Chadbourne
Closing Time by The Pleasure Barons
Coffee Grindin' Blues by Asylum Street Spankers
Don't Touch My Horse by Slackeye Slim
Here Lies a Good Old Boy by James Hand
Truck Driver's Queen by Louie Setzer
Honky Tonk Queen by Moe and Joe
Diggy Liggy Lo by Commander Cody & His Last Planet Airmen
I'm a Nut by Leroy Pullens
Hiram Hubbard by Jean Ritchie with Doc Watson
It's All Going to Pot by Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard with Jamey Johnson
Love and Mercy on Wilco
My Blood is Too Red by Ronny Elliott
The Devil, My Conscious and I by Billy Barton
Hell's Angels by Johnny Bond
Banjo Lovin' Hound Dog by Johnny Banjo
Rubber Doll by The Lone X
Shot Four Times and Dyin' by Bill Carter
Back Street Affair by Webb Pierce
Ragged But Right by George Jones
What Made Milwaukee Famous by Johnny Bush
I Can Talk to Crows by Chipper Thompson
Roll on Colorado by Fred Shumate
Whiskey and Cocaine by Stevie Tombstone
Sleep with Open Windows by Chip Taylor with Lucinda Williams
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican June 5, 2015 “A choke of grief heart hardened I/Beyond belief a broken man too tough to cry.”
Those lines, from Brian Wilson’s greatest song, “Surf’s Up,” sum up a good portion of the new biopic Love and Mercy. I don’t know whether Wilson’s lyricist Van Dyke Parks was consciously describing Wilson’s emotional state when he was collaborating with him on the songs for the album Smile in the mid-’60s, but the words fit.
And indeed, it’s a broken man at the center of Love and Mercy. Wilson, portrayed by Paul Dano (’60s Brian) and John Cusack (’80s Brian) is psychologically shattered despite his popularity, wealth, and accomplishments.
In the two main periods covered by this movie, Wilson is seen as the victim of loathsome bullies. First, there his father, Murray, who physically beat and psychologically abused him (“It’s not a love song, it’s a suicide note,” he growls when Brian plays him an early version of “God Only Knows.”).
And then there’s Wilson’s cousin and bandmate Mike Love, one of the most annoying jerks in the history of rock ’n’ roll, who fought, criticized, and humiliated Wilson at every turn during his most creative period, the Pet Sounds and Smile years. “It’s not Beach Boys fun!” he snaps at Wilson during the Pet Sounds sessions. “Even the happy songs are sad.”
But the most intense and fearsome bully in Wilson’s life is Dr. Eugene Landy (played magnificently by Paul Giamatti). He was hired as a psychotherapist to help Wilson overcome his addictions, but turned into a virtual captor who overmedicated him and ripped him off financially. “I have it under control,” he says to Wilson’s girlfriend Melinda. “I am the control.”
A fun family barbecue with Dr. Landy
With all these villains here, there has to be a hero, and that’s Melinda Ledbetter, played by Elizabeth Banks. A former model who meets Wilson when she’s working as a Cadillac saleswoman, Melinda is not a fraction as forceful as Landy. And as hard as she tries, she’s unable to make Wilson stand up for himself.
But her compassion and her determination eventually succeed. (In real life, she and Wilson married in 1995, several years after Landy was vanquished.)
Speaking of real life, I’m not sure how close the movie is to actual events. The film was made with the cooperation of Wilson. (He appears in the closing credits, singing the title song.) So it’s bound to be the version of events that he wants to tell – even though he doesn’t come out looking so gallant. I don’t think anyone would deny that Wilson was as helpless and befuddled as he appears in the film.
But was Landy really as deplorable as Giamatti makes him? Was Ledbetter really as angelic?
Paul Dano as Brian Wilson in the studio
For a 50-plus-year Beach Boys fan like myself, the best scenes are the ones in which Wilson is in the studio recording tracks for Pet Sounds and the ill-fated original Smile with that tight-knit gaggle of studio cats nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. Dano portrays Wilson as wide-eyed and on fire with crazy ideas, much of which worked.
You see the infamous scene in which Wilson makes all the studio musicians wear firemen’s helmets while recording a track about fire. You see Wilson putting bobby pins on piano strings to get a crazy sound. And there are Wilson’s dogs in the studio barking for the final fade-out of “Caroline No.” (“Hey Chuck, do you think we could get a horse in here?” Wilson asks an engineer.)
One of my favorite elements of this movie are the lush, eerie sound collages representing the music, and sometimes the demons, in Brian’s head. Recognizable snippets of Wilson/Beach Boys music rise and fall back into the swirling vortex of sound. I had to check the credits to make sure it wasn’t Animal Collective on the soundtrack, a Wilson-influenced group if ever there was one.
It’s not. The man responsible is Atticus Ross, who has won awards including an Oscar and a Grammy for his soundtracks for The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, respectively. These strange sonic montages – sometimes sweet and heavenly, sometimes dark and tormenting – are essential to the story. The nonstop crazy symphony in Wilson’s head seems to be the source of his greatest works, though it often sounds like a direct and terrifying reflection of his inner turmoil.
I’m not sure how much Love and Mercy will appeal to those who don’t know or don’t care about Wilson’s music. (And believe it or not, there are people like that who walk the Earth.) But for those of us who have known and loved the Brian Wilson songbook, it’s a must-see.
The real Brian Wilson and
The real Dr. Landy
New Mexico side trip: They aren’t mentioned in Love and Mercy, but there are a couple of obscure New Mexico connections in the Wilson/Landy saga.
In August 1994, Beach Boy Al Jardine and two companies representing the band — Brother Records and Brother Tours, Inc. — filed a lawsuit in Santa Fe, accusing Wilson, Landy, and HarperCollins publishers of defaming the Beach Boys with the now discredited 1991 Wilson “autobiography” Wouldn’t It Be Nice.
That book painted an ugly portrait of the other band members and made Landy look as heroic as he appears villainous in Love and Mercy. (Wilson has since said he skimmed a draft of that book and did none of the writing.)
The plaintiffs also filed a virtually identical suit in New Hampshire. Wilson’s court-appointed conservator at the time, Jerome S. Billet, told me in 1994 that those were the only states that allowed suits to be filed three years after the alleged defamation.
But no Beach Boy ever had to appear in a Santa Fe courtroom. According to court records, a year later, Wilson was quietly dismissed as a defendant. The case was dismissed in early 1999.
After Landy lost his license to practice psychology in California, he still retained his license in two states: Hawaii and – you guessed it – New Mexico.
I don’t know how active he was here, but state records show he was licensed here between 1981 and his death in 2006. He’d had his license renewed in the state the year before. There are no violations or discipline reports on his record here.
Here is the official trailer:
Here is a frightening profile on ABC's Prime Time Live in 1991 when Wilson was still being "treated" by Landy.
And here is one of the most moving versions of the title song I've ever heard.
Jean Ritchie, an important figure in the New York folk revival -- and one of the sweetest voices ever captured on tape -- died Monday at the age of 92.
She one of 14 children in her family in Viper, Kentucky. Her dad let her play his dulcimer when she was seven years old. Now she's credited with reviving interest in that instrument.
Yes, Ritchie was a Kentucky farm girl. But she was no rustic bumpkin. She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1946 with a degree in social work. She moved to New York City in the late '40s to work at at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side.
There, according to her obituary in the New York Times, "she routinely calmed the urban street children in her care with songs from the Cumberlands, which, with their haunting modal melodies and tales of simple pastimes, were so alien as to stun her young charges."
She became a regular on the Greenwich Village coffee house scene, did radio appearances with Oscar Brown and eventually was recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress.
Here's an appreciation by fellow Kentuckian Walter Tunis, a music writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader.
I've put together a Spotify playlist featuring about 35 minutes of her music.
But in the days before smoking bans, cigarettes -- made their smokey mark on various strands of American popular song.
Country singers poke fun at their addictive qualities. Sometimes their used as a metaphor of loneliness or a symptom of an empty, sinful life.
Listen to all of these tunes and you'll be coughing and hacking by the end of this blog post.
xxx
First let's start with the song that inspired this week's theme. A couple of weeks ago my old pal Mark asked me if I remembered a song that referred to a cigarette as something that had "fire on one end a fool on the other." I didn't recall this but went searching through cig songs to try to find it. Mark found it before I did, a novelty tune called "Cigareets & Whuskey and Wild, Wild Women." Mark found a good version by Ramblin; Jack Elliott. But I decided to use this goofy one by a group called Red Ingle & The Natural Seven. I never realized before that The Hombres lifted Ingle's introduction for the introduction to their own 1967 hit "Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out)."
I don't think hokum bluesman Bo Carter actually was singing about tobacco products in this 1936 love song, "Cigarette Blues."
One of the most famous country tunes about cigarettes was this talking song by Tex Williams, which he co-wrote with Merle Travis -- "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette."
Here's a sad and sultry one called "Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray" by Patsy Cline.
Tiny Tim (you've read about him recently) reached back to 1898 to find a song defending nicotine addiction with "Sly Cigarette," performed here with Brave Combo.
Speaking of sly, Robbie Fulks paid tribute to his boyhood home, the great state of North Carolina in his song, "Cigarette State."
I'm not sure where Ry Cooder found "Fool for a Cigarette," but it appeared on his album Paradise and Lunch as a medley with J.B. Lenoir's "Feelin' Good."
If "Cigarettes and Coffee" were what powered Otis Redding, then they should be mandatory.
Sunday, May, 2015 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
The Snake by Johnny Rivers
Shake Me by Motobunny
The Claw by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
Glow in the Dark by Lovestruck
Walkin' with the Beast by Gun Club
Parts Unknown by Kid Congo Powers with Lydia Lunch
Who'd You Like to Love You by Li'l Wally
Wine Wine Wine by Bobby Fuller Four
Bad Bad Woman by The Molting Vultures
Red Rose by Lisa Doll & Rock 'n' Roll Romance
Local Dive by Lawn Chair Kings
I Got Eyes For You by The Gories
Dirty Hands by Black Lips
Zombie Island by Jonny Manak & The Depressives
Elephant Stomp by Left Lane Cruiser
I'm Insane by T-Model Ford
The Lord is Coming Back by Reverend Beat-Man & The Un-Believers
GOSPEL SET
Don't Drive Your Children Away by Isaac Freeman & The Bluebloods
I Want Two Wings by Rev. Utah Smith
God's New Building by Little Midget & The Morning Stars
I Am Willing to Run All the Way by B.B. King
Feel Like Holdin' On by Valerie Mathis
Let Me Lean On You by Christian All Stars of Akron, Ohio
Help Me by Lula Collins
Something Within Me by Jubilee Hummingbirds featuring Rev. E.L. Whitaker
By and By by Katie Jackson with The Campbell Brothers
I'm a Soldier by The Original Blind Boys of Mississippi
What He's Done for Me by The Famous Davis Sisters
Sweeping Exit by Jody Porter
Drowning Man by Stan Ridgway
Fannin Street by Tom Waits
Innocent When You Dream by Kazik Strazewski
Surf's Up by Brian Wilson CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
The Omninous Anthropophageous Slackeye Slim by The Misery Jackals Slackeye Slim Live Set
Cowboy Song
Where the Wind Will Let Me Go
Vengeance Be Thy Name
Looks Like I Killed Again (from album)
Don't Touch My Horse
Introducing Drake Savage (from album)
Honky Tonk Maniac from Mars by Jason Ringenberg
Take Me to the Fires by The Waco Brothers
Nashville Casualty and Life by Kinky Friedman
The Love-in by Ben Colder
Me and The Whiskey by Whitey Morgan
I Can't Hold Myself in Line by Frontier Circus
North to Alaska by Johnny Horton
Marie Laveau by Bobby Bare
Weather Woman by The Gourds
Chick Singer, Badass Rocker by Ray Wylie Hubbard
Born to Boogie by Texas Marty & The House of Twang
Be My Ball and Chain by Brennen Leigh & Noel McKay
Cool Rockin' Loretta by Joe Ely
Two Dollar Bill by Paula Rhae McDonald
In My Arms Once Again by Slim Cessna's Auto Club
Some of Shelly's Blues by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Cheater's World by Amy Allison & The Maudlins
Feeling Mortal by Kris Kristofferson
Drinkin' Thing by Gary Stewart
I've Got a Tender Heart by Merle Haggard
The Selfishness in Man by George Jones CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets
Updated: Here's the first hour -- with the Slackeye Slim set -- via Mixcloud
The show starts at 10 p.m. Mr. Slim will go on 10 or 15 minutes after that.
Slackeye, known in the mundane world as Joe Frankland is responsible for at least three albums -- Texas Whore Pleaser, El Santo Grial: La Pistola Piadosa, and, his most recent effort, Giving My Bones to the Western Lands. (Follow the links to my reviews of the last two.)
Basically his albums are the musical equivalent to dark, troubling western movies, wild tales full of harsh landscape, desperate anti-heroes. Sometimes the songs are full of savage violence. Sometimes they're just soul-searching reflections by men with broken hearts (to sneak in a Hank Williams reference.) And many of his melodies are nothing short of gorgeous.
Slackeye's originally from Ohio, but like the troubled transients he sings about, Slackeye has knocked around the west these past few years, living in Montana, Colorado and now New Mexico.
So tune in tomorrow night and hear Slackeye Slim's songs and stories. You can listen live on KSFR's website, or, if you live in northern New Mexico and parts of Albuquerque, at 101.1 FM.
I have one listener down there who tells me he sometimes drives out to the West Mesa to listen to my show on his car radio.
Tonight would be a great night to do that.
You can listen -- and buy (what a radical idea!) Slackeye Slim's most recent works HERE.
And meanwhile, here's one of his real purdy songs:
Whatever you say about Herbert Boutros Khaury, better known as Tiny Tim, you have to admit that the man knew a lot about old popular songs, especially those from the the first three or four decades of the 20th Century.
Below are a bunch of Tiny's songs as done by the original -- or at least much earlier -- artists. All but one of the following were on Tiny's first album, God Bless Tiny Tim.
Tiny loved these tunes and so do I.
"Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight" was written by a couple of guys named Al (Sherman and Lewis) for the 1930 movie, The Big Pond, which starred Maurice Chevalier. Tiny Tim was exposed, so to speak, to whole new generation when his version was used in the very first episode of Spongebob Squarepants.
But Maurice did a good job too.
I once saw Ozzie Nelson sing a version of "Out on the Old Front Porch" on some late-night talk show. I think it was on Joey Bishop' show. Maybe Harriet was there too, I don't remember. But this one goes way back to at least 1913 when Billy Murray did it as a duet with Ada Jones.
Tiny of course didn't do a duet. He sang all the parts himself, including the angry father.
Tiny did a pretty warped cover of "On the Good Ship Lollipop" on his first appearance on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. He also recorded it for his 1969 children's album For All My Little Friends.
The original version, of course, was by America's little friend, Shirley Temple, who sang in in her 1934 movie Bright Eyes.
Tiny reached way far back for "Then I'd Be Satisfied with Life," 1903 to be exact. It was written by George M. Cohan, the same guy who wrote "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There." This version is by S.H. Dudley.
One major change Tiny made in his version. Dudley wants "an heiress" for his wife. But Tiny wants Tuesday Weld!
And Tiny also did a little number called "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." Here is the original, as performed by Nick Lucas, the Crooning Troubadour, in the movie Gold Diggers of Broadway.
Before you start watching the videos of the bad television themes below, indulge me in a couple of creative musical exercises:
1) Think of the melody to "House of the Rising Sun." Now think of someone singing the Gilligan's Island theme to that melody. (Hey, it works better than "Stairway to Heaven.")
2) Now imagine The Pogues singing the theme, Shane MacGowan slurring all the lyrics, to The Brady Bunch.
I apologize if you can't get those out of your head all day.
The point is, I'm a fan of TV themes, even, in a weird way, the bad ones. I think about them way too much.
The Too Many Cooks video that swept the Internet late last year was a wonderful satire of cheesy boob-tube theme songs, especially from the late '70s and '80s. (If you're one of the last six Americans who hasn't seen or heard this CLICK HERE.)
But here a bunch of theme songs -- from shows that mostly were flops -- that still haunt my nightmares.
First, I give you My Mother the Car, a Jerry Van Dyke vehicle (pun intended) that ran on NBC from late 1965 through the spring of 1966.
Many years ago, George R.R. Martin (sorry for the gratuitous name-dropping) made me laugh out loud when he said that that the funniest thing about My Mother the Carwas that serious men with briefcases and expensive suits at NBC had to have had several intense meetings to develop this show.
The entire premise of this clunker is explained in the theme song.
Phyllis(1975-77) has the distinction of being the worst of the Mary Tyler Moore Show spin-offs. (Hey, I liked Lou Grant!) The opening theme actually was kind of clever. But still ... Phyllis.
The mid '60s hit series Batman had one of the coolest theme songs in TV history. Written by Neal Hefti, this instrumental was covered by The Ventures and even Iggy Pop, who did a live version. But that makes the theme song of Batman's far-less successful spin- off Batgirl even more deplorable. For one thing, they gave it lyrics -- lyrics like "Are you a chick who fell in from outer space? Or are you real with a tender warm embrace?" Holy crap on a cracker, Batman!
Besides Batgirl, Batman's success, inspired other superhero shows on network TV. NBC's answer was a bad comedy called Captain Nice. At least Batgirl was easier to look at than this mercifully short-lived series. And the theme song was nearly as terrible.
F Troop's stereotypical treatment of Native Americans would never fly today. Just ask Adam Sandler. Of course the only people dumber than the Hekawi tribe, for the most part, are the white soldiers at Fort Courage.
I have to admit, I kind of liked this show when I was a kid. It was better than My Mother the Car anyway. Still, the mock-heroic theme song from the first season is pretty clunky.
B.J. and The Bear was an NBC comedy about a truck driver and his chimpanzee. It debuted in 1979, a year after Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way But Loose, a comedy about a truck driver and his orangutan. (It was not a rip-off. Chimps and orangutans are completely different animals.)
And yes, the theme song sucked. "New dreams and better scenes/ And best of all I don't pay property tax," the show's leading man, Greg Evigan sang.
I don't know, but I think even Grover Norquist would rather pay property tax than to be stuck in the cab of a truck with a damned chimpanzee day in and day out.
The song loses even more points when you compare it with the theme of an earlier NBC truck-drivin' comedy Movin' On, -- which was written and sung by Merle Haggard.
All parents make mistakes, but I can proudly say that I never inflicted Lamb Chop's Play-Along (PBS, 1992-97) on either of my children. But I must admit, the theme song is a showcase for one of the pioneers of Caucasian hip-hop: Shari Lewis.
And I agree with this next one. Eight IS enough of these horrible tunes.
But may you spend your Wacky Wednesday like a bright and shiny new dime!
(Background Music: Dog Breath in the Year of The Plague by The Mothers of Invention)
Deputy Dog by The Great Gaylord & The Frigss
Motor Pyscho by Rattface
Bomb Squad by Gas Huffer
Saint Dee by The Bloodhounds
You Bring Me Down by Jonny Manak & The Depressives
Hound Dog by '68 Comeback
(Background Music: Taylor's Rock by Hound Dog Taylor)
