GOODBYE PARAMOUNT

Somehow my story in this morning's New Mexican didn't make it on to the free Web site (Don't get me started here ...), so I'll post it here.

By the way, in the Fan Man e-mail I quote in the article Jamie Lenfesty asks club patrons to e-mail him favorite memories of the Paramount.

I have a few of my own. I have fond memories of playing there, opening for Jonathan Richman and Jimmy Carl Black's German blues group (The Farrell & Black Band) and for last year's Bonnie Hearne benefit with half the musicians I know in Santa Fe.

But probably my favorite show there was the Concrete Blonde show in 2002. Not only was I happy that Johnette and the boys were together again and playing as ferociously as ever, but that was my daughter's 21st birthday. It was the first time I took her to a club show without having to make arrangements with the management to get her in.

So e-mail Jamie your stories and read the story below:

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
May 18, 2005


After bringing popular music acts to downtown Santa Fe since late 1998, The Paramount Lounge and Nightclub will close at the end of next month.

In a mass e-mail to club patrons sent Tuesday, music promoter Jamie Lenfesty wrote, “After almost seven years I am very saddened to say that it does indeed appear that The Paramount, the best nightclub that Santa Fe has ever had, is going to close at the end of June.”

The e-mail says the closing is due to “a variety of factors,” including the health of owner Donalee Goodbrod. “Her guidance and energy kept the Paramount going and the loss of that energy was a blow from which the club was never able to recover,” Lenfesty wrote.

Goodbrod, who suffered a stroke last year, couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday.
Referring to the final two shows he has booked at the Paramount — Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra on May 24 and alternative country singer Kathleen Edwards on June 15 — Lenfesty wrote, “please come out and show your appreciation for the Paramount and enjoy what will be the last big club shows in Santa Fe at least for awawhile.”

Doug Roberts of Phase One Realty, which has listed the Paramount’s site at 331 Sandoval St., said Tuesday that his agency is trying to sell or lease the building, which is owned by a company called Dogleg LLC.

“There’s been a lot of interest,” he said, both local operators and folks from out of town.”

Roberts said one party has discussed making office space out of the building, but the others would like to operate a restaurant and/or a nightclub in the building.

According to Phase One’s Web site, the owners would sell the 9,100-square foot building for $2 million.

A Phase One brochure for the property says, “Originally built as architectural offices in 1988, the building was extensively renovated for a high-end restaurant. Since that time property has housed several successful restaurants, the most recent of which were the Paramount nightclub, (Bar B) and Paramount Pizza.”

Before it became The Paramount, the building housed a short-lived nightclub called Cowboy. Before that, the building was the Double A restaurant, which closed in February 1997. A story in this paper at that time described it as a “Los Angeles-style glitter dome.” The Double A operators spent $5 million to remodel the building for the restaurant that lasted less than two years.


In his e-mail Lenfesty recalled many of the nationally known acts that played the Paramount. Among those to play there were Lucinda Williams, Los Lobos, Warren Zevon, Ralph Stanley, Bo Diddley, R.L. Burnside, Rickie Lee Jones, Concrete Blonde, They Might Be Giants, Ozomatli , Toots & The Maytals, Gillian Welch, The Flatlanders, Alejandro Escovedo, Stan Ridgway, Terry Allen and Junior Brown.

There are few other Santa Fe venues for national popular music acts. The Lensic Performing Arts Center brings in several name acts, but it’s a theater and not set up for dancing. WilLee’s Blues Club on South Guadalupe St. has been booking national blues artists like Ian Moore and Mem Shannon (scheduled to play there May 28). But that club is much smaller than the Paramount.

The Paramount opened about a year after the closing of a downtown spot called Santa Fe Music Hall. At that time there was much discussion and hand-wringing in the popular music community about why Santa Fe has such a hard time keeping music clubs going.

Some said at the time it was because of a slump in the tourist industry. Some noted that people don’t drink as much alcohol as they did in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Some said Santa Fe has a scarcity of people in their early 20s and that baby boomers don’t go out at night as much as they used to.

Lenfesty, in an interview Tuesday, said that whoever runs the next big music club here should explore doing more “all-ages shows” with an enclosed area for those who are too young to drink but come to hear the music.

“They have it in Albuquerque, I don’t see why we couldn’t have it hear,” he said. “It’s young people and college kids who really support live music.”

Lenfesty said the Paramount was able to work for so many years because it didn’t cater to one particular crowd. “There was live music, there were DJs,” he said. “You’ve got to be everything to everybody. You had hard rock shows, country, blues, reggae ... Bar B was more loungy. The DJs attracted gays and straights. You can’t just cater to one group and make it in Santa Fe.

“The Paramount worked for a long time and it would still work except for the loss of Donalee’s guidance,” he said. “When she got sick, that was the end.”



THE CHARRED REMAINS at THE PARAMOUNT
1999

BAD JOHN AND ME

Joe Monahan today writes about Gov. Bill Richardson's recent blasts at the bloggers.

He's talking about recent Richardson speeches that have criticized some unspecified blogs for inaccuracies.

It should be noted that the governor gave these speeches before a new local blog launched. I'm sure that whatever irked the gov about the blogs he'd read was mild compared with Fat Bill and Me.

Fat Bill, which debuted Monday, is the creation of John Coventry, a longtime (20 years? 25 years?) City Hall agitator and frequent, if no longer perennial, City Council candidate. (He told me the other day he's considering a run for mayor next year.)

Richardson is the main target of the blog, which seems to be a natural extension of Coventry's ire-inspiring comments on The New Mexican's Web site in recent months.

It's outrageous. It's obscene. It's probably libelous.

But it's pure Coventry, which means it's kind of fun in a twisted way -- unless you're the target of one of his rants.

Which I have been in the past. About 20 years ago he threatened to punch me in the nose because I called him a "gadfly" in print. I told him I could have chosen another annoying insect.

Then back during the whole Clinton sex scandal, Coventry had a gig with former Municipal Judge Tom Fiorina's old radio show on KTRC (or was it KVSF?) as a roving "reporter." One day during the show, Coventry was at The New Mexican fielding live ambush "interviews" with reporters and editors. He stuck a cell phone in my face and barked, "Steve Terrell, how much perverted sex do you have?"

I could only answer honestly. "Not nearly enough," I told Coventry and his radio audience.

For the record, I'm not the "journeyman reporter" quoted in Fat Bill who warned Coventry about the governor's state police detail. I know most those officers and while they are very serious about their duty, I wouldn't describe any of them as humorless.

My advice to Richardson and anyone else who gets the treatment on Coventry's little corner of cyber space: If working on his blog makes him miss just one City Council meeting, it's all worth it.

PALAST IN SANTA FE

As published in the Santa Fe New Mexican
May 17, 2005

Gov. Bill Richardson usually is treated with chummy deference when he makes one of his frequent appearances on national news shows. In fact some say the national media tends to fawn over Richardson, even conservative commentators.

So it must have been a shock for the governor two years ago when making the rounds on the talking-head circuit after the New York blackout, a fellow guest on The O’Reilly Factor accused Richardson, a former energy secretary of being a party to “the snake oil of deregulation” and described the governor’s observations as “wonderful blather.”

That other guest was Greg Palast, an American investigative reporter whose work is featured on the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Observer and The Guardian, Harper’s magazine, and who authored the 2002 book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.Don’t bet on Richardson showing up Saturday when Palast speaks at Cloudcliff Cafe and Art Space about his work.

In a telephone interview last week, Palast said he’s coming to New Mexico to investigate what he and several progressive activists in the state say are problems with the presidential election here last November. President Bush beat Democrat John Kerry by less than one percent here according to official results.

“I’m coming here more to investigate than talk,” Palast said.

It won’t be his first time here. In the 1980s, Palast said, he assisted then state Attorney General Paul Bardacke in an investigation of Public Service Company of New Mexico and the now defunct Southern Union Gas Company.

Working for The Observer, he also investigated the Geo Group, then known as Wackenhut, the private prison company that operates facilities in Santa Rosa and Hobbs. The story focused on the 1999 killing of Ralph Garcia, a Wackenhut guard killed during an inmate uprising.

Palast said he plans to talk Saturday about some of his recent investigations, including a Harper’s story about Pentagon documents he uncovered indicating the Bush administration — long before the Iraq invasion — was considering two very different plans for Iraq’s oil fields. One plan called for privatizing Iraq’s oil, a move that would have damaged the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries. But, Palast said, American oil producers balked at this plan. So instead, the administration went with a plan in which the Iraqi government owns a single oil company. Under this plan, OPEC and American oil companies continue to prosper.

He also intends to talk about “the smoking gun memo,” a top-secret British government document written by a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair describing a July 2002 meeting between Blair and the head of British intelligence.

“Military action was now seen as inevitable,” the memo said. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

But it’s Palast’s views on the election that local organizers are stressing.

After all, one of Palast’s best-known investigations concerned the 2000 presidential election — specifically Florida state officials’ purging voting rolls of alleged felons, a move some critics say tipped the election to George W. Bush.

Then last year, Palast created a noisy Internet buzz in a widely circulated article published only days after the election. There Palast wrote, “... it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.”

The culprit, Palast argued was “spoilage” — ballots from old punch card machines that were unreadable and provisional ballots that were cast but never counted.

“Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter,” Palast wrote Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush ‘plurality.’”

Palast’s numbers were challenged in Salon.com by writer Farhad Manjoo in a “debate” published in that online magazine.

Palast said last week he wants to look at why there was such a high “undervote” — ballots that were cast but showed no choice for president — in this state and why so many of those tended to be in high Hispanic or American Indian areas.

The statewide undervote rate was 2.45 percent. According to a study for a national organization advocating a recount, Indian precincts in New Mexico had an undervote rate of 6.7 percent , while Hispanic precincts had a 3.5 percent undervote rate.

According to a report by Scripps-Howard News Service New Mexico was one of only four states with an undervote of more than 2 percent in 2004.

Election errors are often just due to “a goofball factor,” Palast said. “I don’t look at it as Dick Cheney in his bunker calling up Diebold.”

But he said that voting machines seem to break down and have problems mainly in poor and minority districts. “If it happened in Republican country club districts, it would be fixed,” he said.

Palast is scheduled to speak 5 p.m. Saturday at Cloudcliff Cafe and Art Space, 1805 Second Street in Santa Fe. Tickets are $15. For more details CLICK HERE

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, May 15, 2005
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Now Webcasting
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Haunt by Roky Erikson
Murder in the Graveyard by Screaming Lord Sutch
I Ain't Nothin' But a Gorehound by The Cramps
The Ballad of Dwight Frye by Alice Cooper
TV Eye by Iggy Pop
Do You Swing? by The Fleshtones
The Hump by Heavy Trash
Needles and Pins by The Ramones

The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists
The Black Freighter by Steeleye Span
The Deserter by Fairport Convention
Room 229 by Ian Moore
Killer Inside Me by MC 900-Foot Jesus

BLUES FOR UZBEKISTAN
Recordings by Jack Clift in Uzbekistan, 2004
(19-minute improvisation) by Jadoo
The Hankerchief is Gone by Baxhi Sashok
You Are My Ray of Light Sevarra

Gim Git (Silence) by MC Mario with Jadoo featuring Greg Leisz
Laka Baluk by Jadoo
Uzbeksky Capitan by Baxhi Sashok
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

BLUES FOR UZBEKISTAN

This isn't much time to publicize it, but the situation in Uzbekistan prompted me to devote the last hour of tonight's Terrell's Sound World to the music of that troubled land.

My brother Jack has been to that former Soviet republic two or three times in recent years and has recorded loads of jams with Uzebeki musicians. Jack will be on the show with me tonight on the second hour of my show to play some of his recordings.

Those of you in Santa Fe can hear the show 10 p.m. to midnight on KSFR, 90.7 FM. Everyone else can hear it streaming from KSFR's Web site. The Uzbek portion will start at 11 p.m. Mountain time.