THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Laurell Reynolds substituted for me on The SF Opry Tonight so I could go to the Thirsty Ear Festival.

She e-mailed me her playlist:

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
BJ Thomas-Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head
Elvis Presley-Don't Cry Daddy
Jerry Reed-Guitar Man
Stephen Terrell-Solar Broken Home
Neil Young-Here We Are In the Years
-Lookin For a Leader
Jannette & Joe Carter-Through the Eyes Of an Eagle
John Denver-The Eagle and the Hawk

Merle Haggard-I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can
Roseanne Cash-Lovin Him Was Easier...
Hank Williams-Men With Broken Hearts
Freakwater-Smokin'Daddy
Tarnation-Yellow Birds
Eleni Mandell-Don't Touch Me
Hazard County Girls-Knoxville Boy
Neko Case-Set Out Runnin'

Johnny Cash-You Wild Colorado
John Prine-Some Humans Ain't Human
Billy Joe Shaver-Live Forever
Iron & Wine-Naked As We Came
Tom Rush-No Regrets
Linda Ronstadt-Go Away From My Window

Pete Seeger-Black Is the Color
Ian Campbell Folk Group-Liverpool Lullaby
Cordelia's Dad-Three Babes
Clarence 'Tom' Ashley-Coo Coo Bird
Fred Cockerham-Little Maggie
Dirk Powell-The Keys To the Kingdom
Lizzie Miles-I Hate A Man Like You
Sippie Wallace-I'm A Mighty Tight Woman
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

THEY FIRED THE DEAN!

Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock critics has been fired by the evil corporate Huns at The Village Voice. He had been at the paper for 30 some years.

Writes Christgau:

We both believed I had won myself some kind of niche as gray
eminence. So I was surprised Tuesday when I was among the eight Voice employees (five editorial, three art) who were instructed to bring their union reps to a meeting with upper management today. But I certainly wasn't shocked--my approach to music coverage has neverbeen much like that of the New Times papers.

Read more HERE and HERE.

NASCAR CANDIDATES

Longshot, dark horse, maverick Republican Congressional candidate Ron Dolin might face an uphill battle in his quest to unseat popular Democrat Tom Udall. And true, his blunt and often non-party-line talk about the issues has resulted in the state GOP establishment practically disowning him.

But Dolin continues to send the most clever and enjoyable press releases of the 2006 campaign.

This morning Dolin e-mailed his modest proposal for campaign finance reform:

The massive unchecked flow of money from corporations, lobbyist, unions, PACs, and financers to politicians has exploded in recent years. This legal, but potentially unethical, method of influence peddling mimics corporate sponsorship of sporting events.

"In sports," Dolin explained, "you know who the sponsors are because they name stadiums after corporations or place advertising logos around the venues. In politics, it is far less clear."

Dr. Dolin wants to help voters wade through the murky quagmire of political sponsorship by requiring all political letterheads, websites, emails, and campaign literature to prominently display the logos of their primary sponsors in a manner similar to the logo system used by NASCAR. This would also apply to newsletters incumbents send out under the auspices of legislative updates.

Having politicians publicly recognize their sponsors helps voters better anticipate how a candidate may vote on future legislation. At the same time, this NASCAR logo-like system helps explain an incumbent’s past voting record. ...

If implemented, political media would take on the artistic flare of a NASCAR automobile.

"The larger the sponsorship the larger the logo." Dolin said. "That way voters get visual confirmation of who a politician’s major sponsors are."

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: BROWN & ALVIN

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
September 1, 2006

Two artists with impossibly deep voices and a ruggedness not usually associated with the often precious and wimpy singer-songwriter and folk genres are appearing this weekend at the Thirsty Ear Festival.

Greg Brown, surely the finest songwriter to emerge from the jungles of Iowa, is playing at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 2, and Dave Alvin, lead guitarist of the Blasters in the early 1980s, is playing at 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 3, with his band the Guilty Men. Both have terrific new albums and are bound to perform material from them at the festival.

Brown’s new album, The Evening Call, produced by longtime guitar crony Bo Ramsey, is a punch in the face with a velvet fist. It’s a blues-drenched collection of wry, wistful, and sometimes weary songs that might remind a listener of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. That’s most obvious on Brown’s song “Bucket” (“Write it in your journal or prop it in a nook/It oughta be illegal when you give me that look”). With its recurring guitar blue note and standup bass, this song is a musical grandchild of Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain.”

A real sense of foreboding runs through the album. “The world we’ve made scares the hell out of me,” he confesses in “Eugene,” a spoken-word song about getting away from civilization and fishing in places where cellphones don’t work.

This existential dread is apparent in songs like “Treat Each Other Right,” which has some horrifying images (“Somebody killed a bunch of children, said it was about their godly way”) but ends on a note of uneasy hope (“My friend had a dream, it about made me cry/He said he saw two stone Buddhas rising where those towers had filled the sky.”

In “Cold & Dark & Wet,” Brown puts himself in the role of worried man and political cynic. “Jobs I guess are like wild geese/They went flying overseas ... Morning in America is cold and dark and wet.” But his humor is never far away. The song starts out with bitter memories of a “twisted girl” he’d loved. “She found a new man on the Internet/Wham I’m spam and it’s cold and dark and wet.”

“Kokomo” is a contemporary hobo ballad. Over a musical backdrop reminiscent of James McMurtry’s “Too Long in the Wasteland,” Brown growls, “With a payday loan and a migraine I crossed Contrary Creek/Looking for a gal that I knew as Sal, we were married once for a week.” Later in the song he sings of another woman. “You know she was just my type: deranged, middle-aged, and crude.”

In several places Brown is looking back on his rough and rowdy days. “I had my fun, my fun had me,” he sings in the title song. In “Pound It On Down,” he’s having a “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” moment. “I’m drinking one drink for each one tonight,” he sings.

One verse in “Joy Tears” just has to be about Brown’s wife, Iris DeMent. “When you start your singing, honey, the heavens open up with grace.”

But the album ends on a sweet if somewhat uneasy note. “Whippoorwill” is a love song, but it starts out on a pessimistic note: “If you ever leave, and I imagine you will ...”

Jolting, yes. But it’s that unpredictable quality in Brown’s lyrics that makes fans love him.

Dave Alvin’s new CD, West of the West, is a tribute to songwriters from his home state of California. He covers a lot of ground here, from Merle Haggard to Brian Wilson. There are songs by Alvin pals like Tom Russell and David Hidalgo and icons like Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia, Jackson Browne, Kate Wolf, and John Fogerty.

Fittingly, one of the best tracks here is “Between the Cracks,” a conjunto-flavored tale of crime and poverty co-written by Alvin and Russell. It’s the only songwriting contribution Alvin makes to this project. Although his skills as a songwriter have been impressive in recent years, Alvin seems to be conserving his original material. In the past decade he’s released two live albums, two cover albums (this one and Public Domain, a 2000 collection of old folk songs) and two albums of mainly original tunes (2004’s Ashgrove and 1998’s Blackjack David). But what an original idea it is to honor songwriters from a single state. (Someone should do that for New Mexico.)

My favorites are Alvin’s cool-blues-shuffle rendition of Browne’s “Redneck Friend” and a snazzy, doo-woppy “I Am Bewildered,” written by Los Angeles R & B giant Richard Berry (whose best-known tune was “Louie, Louie”) and Joe Josea.

Alvin does impressive interpretations of Los Lobos’ “Down on the Riverbed” and of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s gambling tale “Loser.”

But the best is Fogerty’s “Don’t Look Now,” which Alvin does as a Chicago blues number. Though it wasn’t a hit single, this is one of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s most poignant songs. When it appeared on Willie and the Poor Boys in 1969, it was a jab at the underlying antagonism between the self-satisfied hip and working-class reality (“Who’ll take the coal from the mine? Who’ll take the salt from the earth? ... Don’t look now, it ain’t you or me”). Now it sounds more like a cold look at globalization (“Who’ll make the shoes for your feet/Who’ll make the clothes that you wear?”).

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP: RICHARDSON FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
August 31, 2006

We all know Gov. Bill Richardson is becoming quite fond of New Hampshire, home of the nation’s first presidential primary. But could he like it enough to be running for governor of the Granite State?

A strange document popped up Wednesday on a blog called New Mexico Matters, published by Gideon Elliot, a past deputy executive director of the state Democratic Party.

It’s a New Hampshire political committee registration form dated Aug. 7, 2006, for a political committee called Richardson for Governor.

The chairman is one David Contarino, who is chairing the governor’s re-election effort in this state.

And no, the governor of New Mexico isn’t really trying to govern two states, said Richard Bouley of Concord, N.H., who is listed as treasurer of the committee.

“It’s the (political action committee) he’s established in New Hampshire,” Bouley said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “It was set up if he wants to give to candidate committees here.”

So far, Richardson for Governor has contributed $2,500 to the New Hampshire Senate Democratic Caucus, said Bouley, who said he’s a longtime friend of Richardson’s.

Bouley also said the committee isn’t a precursor to a Richardson for President committee. “He has not announced he’s running for president,” Bouley said.

A Thousand Percent: Those of us old enough to remember the brutal 1972 presidential election know what “1,000 percent” means.

Only days after ’72 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern nominated Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate, news broke that Eagleton had received electro-shock therapy for depression and exhaustion.

Initially, McGovern stood by his man, declaring in front of television cameras that he was behind Eagleton “1,000 percent.”

Days later, Eagleton was dumped from the ticket. From that point on, supporters of President Nixon’s re-election used the phrase to mock McGovern.

Last week, New Mexico Democratic chairman John Wertheim had a “1,000 percent” moment.

When political blogger Joe Monahan published rumors that something was about to break that could drive Democratic state auditor candidate Jeff Armijo off the ticket, Wertheim sent an e-mail to reporters declaring the party “does not comment on unsubstantiated and unattributed rumors in the blogosphere.”

Fair enough. And probably a good idea.

But the chairman took it a step further: We affirm what we know to be true: that Jeff Armijo will be the next Auditor of the State of New Mexico.”

When the Albuquerque Tribune on Saturday published a story about police reports by two women who claimed Armijo made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances toward them, Wertheim, of course, had to backpedal.

And of course by Tuesday, following a meeting with Richardson, Armijo had hit the Eagleton Highway.

So why did Wertheim make such a bold statement about Armijo being the next treasurer?

I can’t believe Wertheim knew about the damaging allegations and hoped nobody would find out.

So that leaves two choices.

Either Wertheim had asked Armijo about the “unsubstantiated and unattributed rumors in the blogosphere” and Armijo lied and said there was nothing.

Or perhaps Wertheim had so much faith in his candidate that he couldn’t conceive of any possible problem, and that faith was so strong, he didn’t bother to check it out.

Unfortunately for him and Armijo — who after all, hasn’t been charged with any crime — newspaper reporters did check it out.

Another AG flier: Once again, there’s a full-color flier from Attorney General Patricia Madrid landing in New Mexico mailboxes.

Once again Republicans are saying the mailer — this one dealing with how to avoid scams — amounts to nothing more than campaign literature paid for by the public for Madrid’s Congressional race against Republican incumbent Heather Wilson.

Like the previous Madrid mailers — which concerned prescription drugs and Internet sex predators — the flier titled Don’t Get Burned has a prominent photo of the attorney general.

In the new one, she’s wearing the same outfit and pearl necklace she wears on the photo of her campaign Web site.

Like the fliers that came before, the new one advertises a new publication by the AG’s office, this one called, Don’t Get Burned: How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off.

However the new flier is just a single double-sided sheet, unlike the previous four-page mailers.

And the previous ones indeed were more like campaign brochures, featuring glowing comments about Madrid from news media.

On the previous mailer, Madrid’s name appeared 11 times. On the new one, only four times.

And on the bottom of the back page is a disclaimer: “Taxpayer money was not used for the printing or distribution of this flier. "

Like the others, the anti-scam flier was paid for with money from a settlement in a class action lawsuit against Microsoft.

Once again, the AG’s office argues that the settlement money isn’t “taxpayer” money because it didn’t come directly from taxes — though others argued it’s public money that was won by tax-paid lawyers for the benefit of the citizens of the state.

“As someone who had shares in Microsoft, it was my money,” joked Sam Thompson, a spokeswoman for the attorney general.

The anti-scam book can be downloaded HERE. For a hard copy, call (505) 222-9000.