THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, June 3, 2005
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Now Webcasting
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
Cohost: Laurel Reynolds

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Countrier Than Thou by Robbie Fulks
Honky Tonk Shadows by The Waco Brothers
I'm a Ramblin' Man by Waylon Jennings
Johnny Armstrong by Michael Martin Murphey
What Am I Doing Hanging Round by The Monkees
Your Husband, My Wife by Bobby Bare with Skeeter Davis
Ghosts of Hallelujah by The Gourds
Funky Tonk by Moby Grape

Nixon in '96 by Doodoo Wah
Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues by David Bromberg
Runaway Mama by Merle Haggard
I Thought I'd Die by Karen Hudson
Bohemian Rhapsody by Grey DeLisle
Maybe the Devil by Eric Hisaw
Border Radio by Dave Alvin with Katy Moffat
The Mansion You Stole by Johnny Horton

JOHN PRINE SET
Crazy as a Loon
Illegal Smile
In Spite of Ourselves (with Iris DeMent)
Bear Creek Blues
Ain't Hurtin' Nobody
Grandpa Was a Carpenter (with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)

Mike the Can Man by Joe West
Dancing Days by The Bad Livers
Ripple by Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Broke Down Palace by The Grateful Dead
Horseflies by Butch Hancock
If I Needed You by Townes Van Zandt
Legend in My Time by Leon Russell with T. Graham Brown
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list

TERRELL'S TUNEUP:GOOD JOB, GOV!

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 3, 2005

Here’s one of those strange incidences where my main job as a political writer creeps into my “fun” job as music columnist.

The first time I heard the new John Prine album Fair & Square, a line from the first song leaped out of my car stereo and smacked me in the face.

“I got some friends in Albuquerque, where the governor calls me `Gov’ …”

Dang, I thought. This is better than six appearances on Larry King Live .
First chance I got, I asked Gov. Bill Richardson’s spokesman Billy Sparks whether his boss knows Prine and if so, does the governor call Prine “gov”? Sparks said he doesn’t think the two “govs” are friends. And for the record, unlike fellow musicians Quincy Jones, Herb Albert and Andy Williams, Prine isn’t listed among Richardson’s campaign contributors.

One pal of mine suggested that the governor Prine sings about might be former Gov. Gary Johnson. The key to this theory lies in Prine’s old song “Illegal Smile.” (I think my friend was smiling that way when he brought this up.)

But notwithstanding that political wild goose chase, I love this album. Backed by a small, mostly acoustic group (with a smattering of guest harmonies by Alison Krauss, Dan Tryminski and Mindy Smith), Prine shows there’s still gold in those classic three-or-four-chord melody structures he does so well.

Fair & Square is Prine’s first album of new material since 1999’s In Spite of Ourselves, a collection of duets with a bevy of female singing partners, and first album of primarily original new material since 1995’s Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings.
During this last decade, Prine has struggled with throat cancer. His voice has dropped an octave or so, but that always was a scratchy instrument. The important thing is that he didn’t lose his sense of humor nor his sense of poignancy.

There are some classic Prine tales here.

One of the best is “Crazy as a Loon,” about an ambitious young man with “a picture of another man's wife tattooed on my arm” who heads off to Hollywood “just to have my feelings hurt.” From “the wrong end of a broom” in Tinsel Town, the hapless protagonist ventures to Nashville and New York with the same result.

In “Other Side of Town,” a live cut, Prine sings of a henpecked husband whose mind wanders, during his wife’s nagging, to a fantasy bar on the astral plane.

On the slow but sturdy “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” Prine rails against unfeeling people.

“You open up their hearts/And here's what you'll find/A few frozen pizzas/Some ice cubes with hair/A broken Popsicle/You don't want to go there.”

But later in the song, gets political.

“… you're feeling your freedom, and the world's off your back, some cowboy from Texas, starts his own war in Iraq.”

It’s obvious that Prine still believes that a flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.

Prine’s songwriting is the main draw on Fair & Square. (He collaborates on some tunes with partners including Keith Sykes and “Funky” Donnie Fritts.) But he also includes a couple of excellent covers. “Clay Pigeons” is a sad song by the late Texas sultan of sad songs, Blaze Foley. And the most rocking track on the album is “Bear Creek,” a Carter Family song.

Concert alert: According to his Web site, Gov. Prine is coming to the Kiva auditorium in Albuquerque on July 29.

{Hear a whole lotta John Prine Friday night on the Santa Fe Opry, KSFR Santa Fe Public Radio. Show starts at 10 p.m., the Prine segment will start about 11 p.m. }

(Check out www.ohboy.com)

Also recommended:

Georgia Hard by Robbie Fulks. Back on his second album South Mouth, Fulks had a hilarious little ditty called “Fuck This Town,” a vitriolic tirade against the Nashville music establishment. “I thought they'd struck bottom back in the days of Ronnie Milsap,” he barked in the song.

Since that time, Fulks and Milsap appeared, though not together on an album, (a Disney various-artists tribute called O Mickey, Where Art Thou?)

It’s not hard to imagine Mac Davis or even Milsap himself crooning Fulks tunes like “You Don’t Want What I Have,” “I Never Did Like Planes,” “It’s Always Raining Somewhere” or the title song.

Fulks flirts with country schlock here. Maybe he even steals a kiss. But with a strong band, including Merle Haggard vet Redd Volkaert on guitar and Lloyd Green on steel and Sam Bush on mandolin, the performances are all solid.

And with Fulks writing the lyrics, there’s enough twistedness to give the songs strange edges. “Doin’ Right (For All the Wrong Reasons)” might sound like a Jimmy Buffet song on the surface, but the story is about a guy who avoids infidelity only because his wife is rich.

There’s some good hard-core honky stompers here, such as “each Night I Try” and “All You Can Cheat.” And there’s a couple of madcap Fulks novelty tunes like the ones that made fans love him in the first place.

“I’m Gonna Take You Home (And Make You Like Me),” a song about a sloppy-drunk pick-up attempt is a fun-filled duet with his wife Donna Fulks.

“Countrier Than Thou” starts out as a wicked slap at practitioners of C&W purism. But then it turns political.

“He’s got a ranch, with a Stetson / He's a hip-shooting ex-oil king/ He even talks like Buddy Epson/ But he’s sittin’ in the West Wing … won’t somebody please explain/ How you get a county sheriff walkin’ with a frat boy’s brain.”

Along with Prine’s song listed above, this one definitely won’t be found on the president’s iPod.

{For for Fulks’ apology to Ronnie Milsap, CLICK HERE }

ROUNDHOUSE BLUES: CLOSING THE WATERGATES

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 2, 2005

It was the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. I was working on a story about some problems in the state Corrections Department. One of my sources knew someone who had access to some documents that would nail the story for me. But that person didn’t want to actually meet with me for fear of being seen. For fear of being labeled a “rat.” And he didn’t want to be seen anywhere near The New Mexican office.

So I made arrangements through my source to be in a certain parking lot at a certain time that afternoon. I described my car to my source. Sure enough, I drove to the parking lot, found an empty space, waited just a few minutes until a vehicle pulled up behind me. A man with an envelope — someone I’d never seen before — got out and approached me. I don’t actually remember if we even spoke. He might have said something like, “You Steve?”

I took the envelope. He rushed back to his car and drove away. The documents were as promised. I had my story.

To my knowledge, I’ve never seen the guy with the envelope again. I wouldn’t be able to give you his name even if you tortured me.

The weird thing is, I honestly don’t even remember what the story was about. It obviously wasn’t as consequential as, say Watergate.

But this story, with this little dash of cloak and dagger, is the closest I’ve come in my newspaper career to the moving-flower-pots, underground-parking-garage-rendevous world of Deep Throat journalism.

This week’s revelation of the identity of the mysterious “Deep Throat” — former FBI number two man Mark Felt — comes at a time when using anonymous sources is coming under more and more scrutiny.

It’s something you try to avoid as a reporter. But sometimes it’s neccessary to uncover what’s really going on. Workers for instance are almost always hesitant to see their name in print criticizing their bosses. And I would never have gotten honest opinions from Democratic delegates about Gov. Bill Richardson’s convention speech in Boston last year had I insisted on using their names.

But the days of secret super-sources like Deep Throat do seem to be over.

Appearing on MSNBC’s The Abrams Report Tuesday, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said, “if a ‘Deep Throat’ had emerged now, you would be talking about it every night. Chris Matthews would be talking about it. Bill O‘Reilly would be talking about it. It would start with the news cycle in the morning. Rush Limbaugh would be on the air demanding to know who it is. And you wouldn‘t have the opportunity to have the kind of reporting that was going on then because there would be so many distractions. It would become kind of a sideshow.”

To which Limbaugh responded Wednesday, “So people questioning the motives and work of the media is a sideshow. We would have been a distraction because they wouldn't have been able to do the great work that they did, and they're unable to do it now. They are distracted by people like me. We are nothing but a sideshow. ... that's why they're going back and reliving Watergate, because that's when there was nobody to stand in their way.”

Reliving Watergate: The flood of Watergate retrospectives that broke following the Deep Throat story dredged up a lot of Nixon-era memories for those of us old enough to remember that strange time.

Bob Johnson, executive director of New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, was in New York working as managing editor for the Associated Press during Nixon’s final days.

“I had to oversee most of the reporting that was coming out of Washington,” he said Wednesday. “Woodward and Bernstein got ahead of everyone on the Watergate story. They jumped on it and never let up. It took the rest of us a lot to catch up.

One of his hardest tasks was overseeing the story about the White House tapes released by the House Judiciary Committee. Basically he had to condense a 30,000-word summary into 10,000 words — being careful not to leave out anything important in the cases for and against Nixon.

Before Nixon resigned in 1974, Johnson said, “I didn’t get to go home for a month. I was living on coffee and sandwiches, sleeping at a hotel and putting myself to sleep each night with a couple of stingers.”

Billy Sparks, deputy chief of staff for Gov. Richardson, had been an intern as a teenager for North Carolina Sen. Sam Ervin, the grandfatherly constitutional scholar who chaired the Senate Committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

Sparks didn’t work for Ervin during those years, but he stayed in touch. He recalled talking to Ervin after Nixon’s autobiography was released. “He was very disturbed,” Sparks said. “I remember he said ‘Nixon still doesn’t admit that he was guilty. He wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it fell on his head in the middle of the Rose Bowl parade.’ ”

Camelot: New York Attorney General Eliott Spitzer was in town Wednesday for a a $500-a-ticket fundraiser at the home of his friend, art gallery owner Gerald Peters. He was up in the office of his other local friend, Gov. Richardson in the afternoon for a quick session with a couple of Capitol reporters.

Spitzer apparently was impressed by the huge round marble table in the governor’s cabinet room. The moment he walked into the room he said, “Wow! Look at this table. Where does King Arthur sit?”

DEEP THROAT THOUGHTS

Tuesday's Deep Throat revelations brought back lots of Watergate memories.

Sitting in Okie's every afternoon during a period of unemployment in the summer of '73, watching the Senate Watergate Committee hearings on TV. ... Learning the phrase "twisting slowly slowly in the wind" ... Listening to my grandmother defending Sen. Joe Montoya, whose questions at the hearings became something of a national joke. "They're not dumb questions," Nana would say. "He just has to go last, so most the good questions have already been asked." ...

Watching Nixon resign on a black 'n' white TV in the projection booth of the Master Adult Theater in the summer of '74. Hey, it was a job. At least I wasn't hanging out at Okie's every day. Plus I read a lot of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in that room that summer, and back then country radio was really good. When Nixon made his announcement, I figured that this was a goddamn historic moment and the guys in the auditorium had a right to know, even if they were just a bunch of pathetic old porn scum. So I shut down the projector, walked into the theater and told them Nixon had resigned -- only to get answered with a bunch of "boos," "fuck yous" and "turn the movie back on, dammit!!!!" ...

Interviewing John Ehrlichman for The Santa Fe Reporter at Fenn Gallery in the early '80s, and how he later sent my editor a note calling my effort "sleazy," which I took as a badge of honor. ... Interviewing Egil "Bud" Krough, another Nixon man who did time in prison for Watergate, when Ehrlichman died in 1999 ...

Visiting Nixon's grave with my son in the 1990s and feeling vaguely sad. The last time I'd been that close to Nixon was a '72 campaign stop in Albuquerque, and I, along with a few hundred protesters, was screaming my lungs out. A nice old Republican lady came up to me and said, "You shouldn't do that. We don't come boo your candidate." She was so sincere, I was kind of embarrassed. "Sorry ma'am," I muttered. "I just have to." Say what you want about Tricky Dick, in those days candidates actually went out and came face to face with protesters.

My favorite read on Deep Throat so far is by Hank Stuever of The Washington Post (and formerly of The Albuquerque Tribune). Read it Here

My favorite passage from Hank's essay is this:

Had he lived in this era, Deep Throat might not have lasted long. He'd be blogged to bits. He'd be Drudged, smudged, Romenesko'd. People would disprove him with their own Deep Throats. His identity would be discovered within a news cycle or two, spun around, and he'd be left holding a book contract.

HOOSIER DADDY?

I just heard back from the Indiana Steve Terrell, whose Hoosier Lawyer blog I stumbled upon a couple of days ago.

In addition to his serious legal-issues blog, he also runs a fun blog called "Hoosier Daddy?"

I haven't been through the whole thing yet, but I laughed out loud at the story of the 3-year-old kid who got stuck inside a "Win a Stuffed Animal" machine at Wal-Mart.

(If I had a quarter for every time I denied my son money for those damned machines, I could buy 100 stuffed animals!)