TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, July 2, 2006
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
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
4th of July by X
Flags of Freedom by Neil Young
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) by Bruce Springsteen
200 Years Old by Frank Zappa, Capt. Beefheart & The Mothers of Invention
Volunteers by The Jefferson Airplane
We're An American Band by Grand Funk Railroad
Fortunate Son by Uncle Tupelo
An American is a Very Lucky Man by Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians

No Agreement by Fela Kuti
Maggot Brain by Funkadelic

ASIA ROCK SEGMENT
The Shiny Radio in the Blind Man's Wallet (from Radio Phnom Penh)
Samisen Boogiewoogie by Umekichi
For a Few Dollars More by Man Chau Po Orchestra
Sleepwalking Through the Mekong by Dengue Fever
Taxi Driver by The Rodeo Carburettor
Goodbye by Pietro Atilla & The Warlocks
A Beautiful World by The Amppez
Haisai Ojisan (Hey Man!) by Shoukichi Kina
Commie Funk? (from Radio Pyongyang)


Curse of Milhaven by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
My Cat's Name is Maceo by Jane's Addiction
Earlier Baghdad (The Bounce) by T-Bone Burnett
Gamblin' by Hundred Year Flood
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

JOE ELY, HYF, JONO

(For more photos of this show CLICK HERE)

The Joe Ely/Hundred Year Flood/Jono Manson show at the Santa Fe Brewing Company was loads of fun. It actually seemed like two shows. Ely and Jono played acoustic sets on the outdoor patio stage, while Flood played later indoors. I like both settings.

I've seen Ely backed with a full band, with The Flatlanders, duet gigs backed by the late Jesse Taylor and Dutch flamenco dude Teye. And there was the great SXSW session where he played with Doug Sahm, Ruben Ramos, Rosie Flores, Rick Trevino and others -- a gig that launched "Los Super 7."

But until last night, I'd never seen him play solo acoustic. He pulled it off flawlessly. Well, not exactly flawlessly -- he did blow the lyrics in one verse of Tom Russell's "Gallo de Cielo,." But it was still a powerful version, and it's still the coolest song ever written about cockfighting.

Ely mainly stuck to his better known songs -- "Me and Billy the Kid," "Lord of the Highway," a lot from Letter to Laredo, and of course tunes from the Butch Hancock songbook like "If You Were a Bluebird," "She Never Spoke Spanish to Me," and, as a special treat, the lesser-known sequel "She Finally Spoke Spanish To Me."

The set included a cool little novelty I don't think I've ever heard him do live -- "If I Could Teach My Chihuahua To Sing."
When I saw Terry Allen before Ely went on I asked if he was going to join Joe on stage. "I hope not," he said. He told me there's just one song they both do and they've both forgotten the lyrics.

But sure enough, Ely called him on stage for a duet on that song, Terry's "Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy." And sure enough, they both did have a little trouble with the words. But it was obvious that the two of them were having a good time and their spirit was contageous. Like I've said before about The Flatlanders, those old Lubbock friends really seem to enjoy each others' company and playing music together.

Hundred Year Flood's set was electrifying. What can I say, I love them more every time I see them.

A lot of the Ely fans left after Joe's set. Their loss. (I joked that the Flood lost the 60-year-old Texans, though they kept this 52-year-old Okie.)

But even though the Brewing Company wasn't as packed as it was last time I saw them (a couple of months back at their CD release party), the band seemed to be even more on fire.


Toward the end of the night the Flood played a Mexican-tinged Tommy Hancock song, "Marfa Lights." During this song Felecia, whose distinctive voice is a wonder anyway, seemed to be channeling Lydia Mendoza. It was amazing. By the end of the tune, I think I was seeing the Marfa Lights!

Jono Manson opened the show. Unfortunately I got there a little late, so I didn't see his entire set. But it was good seeing him. It's been a few years. (Was the last time when we both played at Gregg Turner's wedding?) Jono's been spending a lot of time in Italy in recent years. Last night he did one of my favorite Jono songs -- "Jackie's Dive."

He told me he's got a new CD coming out pretty soon. Watch this blog!

A word for the venue: The Santa Fe Reporter's Joanna Widner this week proclaimed "The Brewing Company is the new Paramount." She's right in that the Brewing Company has become the most likely spot to catch good local and national talent.

But I'll go her one better and give it some historical perspective. The Santa Fe Brewing Company is the best music bar in the Santa Fe area since The Line Camp. Support this place, people!

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, June 30, 2006
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Madonna Trilogy by The Meat Purveyors
This Gun Don't Care Who it Shoots by Cornell Hurd
Bad Cowboy by Lynn Anderson
Redneck Friend by Dave Alvin
Amarillo Highway by Robert Earl Keen
Baby's in Black by John Doe with Virgil Shaw
BBQ & Foam by Joe Ely

Champion Dog by Hundred Year Flood
Big Mamou by Doc Gonzales
You Can Buy My Heart With a Waltz by The Desperados
Where I'm From by The Bottle Rockets
Gather the Family 'Round by Ed Pettersen
Green Wish by Boris & The Saltlicks
Violin Bums by James Luther Dickinson
Tee Makhuea Pok (Your Cheatin' Heart) by Pairote

Snake Farm by Ray Wylie Hubbard
Cowboys to Girls by The Hacienda Brothers
Your Great Journey by The Handsome Family
I Tremble for You by Waylon Jennings
No Earthly Good by Johnny Cash
Ben Dewberry's Final Run by Steve Forbert
The Matchbook Song by Graham Lindsey
Mary of the Wild Moor by Porter Wagoner

Enchildada by Earl Gleason
Land of the Shalakho by Sid Hausman
Out in the Parking Lot by Guy Clark
The Real El Rey by Frank Black
Take These Chains From My Heart by Merle Haggard
THinkin' About Her by Fred Eaglesmith
Here Today and Gone Tomorrow by Hazel Dickens
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

CAMPAIGN WATCH: FIRST ATTACK AD OF THE GOVERNOR'S RACE

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 30, 2006

Democrats have called Republican gubernatorial candidate John Dendahl a “bomb thrower” and “attack dog.” However, Gov. Bill Richardson’s re-election campaign threw the first advertising bomb at Dendahl in a radio commercial this week.

Richardson campaign chairman Dave Contarino said Thursday that the incumbent Democrat’s radio spot is a factual representation of Dendahl’s record and the events that put the Santa Fe Republican on his party’s ticket in place of primary-election winner J.R. Damron.

A “fact sheet” posted on Richardson’s campaign Web site quotes newspaper articles to back up the advertisement, Contarino said.

Dendahl said Thursday that he was amused that just a few days before the ad started running, Richardson had told the Albuquerque Tribune, “I don’t talk about Dendahl. I don’t worry about Dendahl.”

“They say my name seven times in a 30-second commercial,” Dendahl said. “I think he’s worried about John Dendahl.”

While this is the first gubernatorial attack ad of this political season, Dendahl, a past GOP state chairman and newspaper columnist, has been a vocal critic of Richardson through the years. The state Republican Party has run radio ads mocking Richardson at least three times since last June.

Here’s a look at the recent Richardson radio ad, which can be heard HERE :

Title: “Order”
Duration: 30 seconds
Sound: Over foreboding guitar and percussion, a narrator talks in somber tones about Dendahl.
Text: (spoken by a narrator) A secret meeting … the order is delivered … and the political candidate quietly goes away. Is it the Third World? The Middle East? Eastern Europe? No — it’s the New Mexico Republican Party Central Committee and John Dendahl.

First, John Dendahl sets up a meeting with Republican nominee for governor, J.R. Damron, and his wife. Dendahl tells Damron to pull out of the race. Within days, Damron is gone, and John Dendahl is the Republican candidate for governor.

Forget about elections. Forget about the voter. That’s the way John Dendahl wants it, and that’s the way it is.

And it’s not the first time. In the past, John Dendahl made six-figure cash offers to the Green Party to, in his own words, manipulate elections. He made TV commercials using doctored videotape. John Dendahl’s made false attacks in the past against Democrats and Republicans alike. This time, don’t let him get away with it.

Accuracy: While the basic chronology of the Damron/Dendahl meetings is correct, Damron, a Santa Fe radiologist, insists he wasn’t pressured to leave the race. The central committee meeting where Dendahl was nominated had been announced, though reporters were barred.

The “six-figure cash offers to the Green Party” refers to a 2002 incident in which Dendahl, then party chairman, offered Green leaders a large sum to field candidates in two Congressional districts. The Federal Election Commission investigated the matter and found no wrongdoing.
Richardson’s “fact sheet” quotes an Albuquerque Journal article in which Dendahl was quoted saying, “I am in the business of manipulating elections.” Dendahl said Thursday that he doesn’t remember the remark but said, “I was certainly in the business of trying to influence elections.”

The “doctored videotapes,” according to the Web site, refers to a 2002 commercial that never aired but was released to reporters by Dendahl at the outset of the gubernatorial campaign.

The ad showed Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., at a 2000 hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, lambasting Richardson, then U.S. Energy Department secretary, for skipping a hearing the week before.

Byrd accused Richardson of “supreme arrogance” and “contempt of Congress” and said the Senate would never again support him for any appointed office.

In a written statement in 2002, Byrd said he was “outraged that Republicans would take my remarks out of context and use them for a political attack ad against Bill Richardson.” However, nobody at the time claimed the tapes were “doctored.”

The “false attacks” against Democrats and Republicans, according to the Web site, refers to several races involving campaign material from the state GOP during Dendahl’s tenure as party chairman. In the 1999 Albuquerque city elections, Democratic Mayor Martin Chavez and Republican City Councilor Tim Cummins said attack ads against them were false. In 2001 Albuquerque City Councilor Tim Kline said a GOP mailer about his record was misleading. The “fact sheet” also cites a 1996 legislative race in which defeated Democrat incumbent Sen. Janice Paster said a GOP flier portrayed her as “soft on rape and other crimes.”

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: LOOK TO THE EAST

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 30, 2006

If you’re a little sick of the music you’ve been listening to and are looking for sounds that are exotic and a little crazy but not precious and tame like the “world music” favored by your world-beat weenie friends, here’s my advice: look to the East.

I’ve been on one of my stranger musical kicks lately — wild Asian rock and pop. It probably started a few months ago when I downloaded from eMusic an album called Thai Beat a Go-Go Volume 1, a compilation of Vietnam War-era bar-band music — basically whore-house rock — from Thailand, where American GIs used to go for rest and relaxation. (There are two other volumes, one of which I just downloaded from eMusic.)

Here’s a look at some far-out sounds from the Far East I’ve been enjoying lately:

* Radio Phnom Penh recorded, assembled, and edited by Alan Bishop for Sublime Frequencies. This has to be one of the weirdest albums I’ve ever purchased. It’s a collection of music, commercials, newscasts, and other chatter (in at least three languages) from Cambodian radio, some of which goes back to the late ’60s. You hear the definite influence of Western pop and rock. In fact, in a couple of the tracks (most the “songs” here are stitched-together medleys) you can make out Cambodian versions of “A Hard Day’s Night” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa” (which started out as a Peruvian folk song).

There’s a discernible wartime vibe in many of the selections, an urgency of a nation being torn apart. This is an album The Clash would have understood, a spiritual cousin of Sandinista! and even Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come.

“At its peak in the late ’60s/early ’70s, the Cambodians were a musical Superpower,” Bishop writes in the liner notes. But after the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, many musicians were executed. Most of the original tapes, smuggled out of the country, survived. And many of them, after the genocidal regime was driven from power, were remixed by radio programmers. FM stations play the remixed versions and new Cambodian pop, while the official state AM station plays the old stuff. This album is a mixture of AM and FM.

My only complaint is that none of the musicians or bands are named. (Same goes for the album reviewed next.) Most of us probably wouldn’t recognize any of the artists. Still, they deserve credit.

This smacks of musical imperialism. I guess that makes this a guilty pleasure. But it’s still a pleasure.

*Radio Pyongyang compiled by Christiaan Virant. This album, also from the Sublime Frequencies label, is subtitled “Commie Funk and Agit Pop From the Hermit Kingdom.” It’s even stranger than Radio Phnom Penh, though not nearly as enjoyable. If the other album is all urgency and upheaval, this is the sound of mind-numbing obedience.

Virant, who used to listen to official North Korean state shortwave broadcasts from his home in Hong Kong, describes this album best in his liner notes: “Schmaltzy synthpop, Revolutionary rock, Cheeky child rap, and a healthy dose of hagiography for Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il ... a heady mix of Stalin opera, Tokyo karaoke and brooding Impressionism...”

And some of it sounds like a bad Korean high school production of The King and I.

The track “New Model Army” (anyone remember the band by that name?) starts out with what sounds like a Korean ABBA. “Motherland Megamix” has brief passages that almost sound like Axis of Evil blues riffs, though they quickly dissolve into military music and disco anthems. And on a few tracks you hear what sounds like a polka-style accordion.

Then there’s the jolting “Start ’Em Young,” sung by a kiddy choir. To paraphrase a question posed by Sting in the ’80s: “Do the North Koreans love their children too?” I’ll bet they do, though that doesn’t mean I love hearing them sing.

*Escape From the Dragon House by Dengue Fever. This is one of the most amazing albums I’ve heard all year. It’s an Orange County, Calif., band fronted by Cambodian pop singer Ch'hom Nimol, who comes from a well-known Cambodian musical family. As the story goes, the band, led by brothers Zac and Ethan Holzman, discovered Nimol singing at a Long Beach joint called the Dragon House.

The boys play a tasty garage/psychedelic/surf rock, with Ethan standing out on Farfisa organ and Nimol enchanting in her native tongue.

* The Voice of Geisha Doll by Umekichi. This Japanese singer and samisen (a three-stringed Japanese lute) player plays traditional geisha music, but on the most interesting tracks here she mixes it up with Western pop, rock, and jazz. “Samisen Boogiewoogie,” grounded in ’50s malt-shop rock, sounds like the centerpiece of an imaginary David Lynch soundtrack.


*Dancing With Petty Booka. On this record, America’s favorite Japanese ukulele ladies, Petty Booka, branch out from their usual Hawaiian/country/bluegrass repertoire to play their version of mambo, samba, rumba, and cha cha. They also rock out with the “Desanoyo Twist” and go ska, Japanese style, on their cover of “My Boy Lollipop.”

Still, my favorite here is a country-sounding track called “Sho-Jo-Ji/The Hungry Raccoon,” featuring a dreamy steel guitar.

*The Rodeo Carburettor. This is nothing but good, loud, metallic punk rock by a leather-clad Japanese trio led by singer/guitarist Takeshi Kaji.

A few songs seem concerned with motorcycles. Reading the lyrics is a lot of fun. The song “Motor Head,” for instance, which I assume is a tribute to Lemmy and the boys from Motörhead, is nothing but Japanese characters in the midst of which is one English word, rockers.

For some reason, the company sent me a couple of extra copies of this CD. So I’ll send one to the first two readers who e-mail me at robotclaww@msn.com. Include your mailing address, and put “RODEO CARB” in the subject line.

UPDATE: We have two winners! Congratulations Mark and Kristina.

Be sure to tune into Terrell's Soundworld on KSFR Sunday night. At about 11 p.m. I'll do a set of the above music and more Asian rock. That's 90.7 FM for Santa Fe area and http://www.KSFR.org on the web.