THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, November 17, 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
Wildwood Flower by Mike Ness
Muleskinner Blues by The Cramps
Medley: Ghost Riders in the Sky/Rawhide/The Ballad of Palladin by Chuck Maultsby & His Old Band
The Ballad of Thunder Road by Robert Mitchum
Wreck of the Old 97 by Johnny Cash
Over the Cliff by Jon Langford
Rockin' in the Congo by Hank Thompson
Las Vegas by The Texas Sapphires
One Meatball by Dave Van Ronk

Tomorrow is Forever by Solomon Burke with Dolly Parton
Green Green Grass of Home by Ted Hawkins
Little Old Wine Drinker Me by Miss Leslie & Her Juke Jointers
Cold, Cold World by Blaze Foley
Almost Thanksgiving Day by Graham Parker
Rambunctious Boy by John Fogerty
The Only Trouble With Me by Merle Haggard
11 Months and 29 Days by Johnny Paycheck

I Love the Way You Do It by Zeno Tornado
A Little More Cocaine Please by Splitlip Rayfield
Get Your Biscuits in the Oven by Kevin Fowler
The Pony to Bet On by The Legendary Shack Shakers
Kung Foo Cowboy by Alan Vega
Boxwine Ruth E by Ramsay Midwood
Raining in Port Arthur by The Gourds
Mean and Wicked Boogie by Maddox Brothers & Rose

I Ain't Marching Anymore by Richard Thompson
Salt Truck by Eleni Mandell
Be My Love by NRBQ
Better Word For Love by Big Al Anderson
Things Change by Lonesome Bob with Allison Mohrer
The Pilgrim Chapter 33 by Kris Kristofferson
You Should Have Wrote a Book by Dan Reeder
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

JERRY LAWSON IS STILL PERSUASIVE

I just got an e-mail yesterday from Jerry Lawson, longtime leader of The Persuasions, that great a cappella band of yore.

Jerry moved to Arizona a few years ago after splitting from The Persuasions. That makes us neighbors. Kind of.

Luckily, it didn't take him long to hook up with another band, Talk of the Town.

An album is in the works and judging from the tracks on his My Space site, it's gonna be a good one. I especially like "River of Dreams." Check it out.

PILLOW TO GIVE BIRTH IN SANTA FE

A few months ago I posted about New Mexican Web editor Stefan Dill doing the soundtrack for an Indian art film, Birth of a Pillow which, according to a press release, is -- "a film with no dialogue portraying personal responses to sexuality in present-day India. At the juncture of external stimulus, sociocultural conditioning, and personal drive lies the deepest human cores of fear, guilt, loneliness, power, weakness, pain, and denial."

Yikes!

HERE is the orginal link for information on that film. Check it out. it's got a bunch of good links I'm too lazy to re-post here.

But here's the news. The film is coming to Santa Fe as part of the Santa Fe Film Festival.

Birth of a Pillow will be screened Sunday, Dec 3, 2:00 p.m. at the Santa Fe Film Center, 1616 St. Michael's Drive in the St. Michael's Village West Mall.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: WATCHING THE MUSIC

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
November 17, 2006

Here’s a bunch of music DVDs I’ve been enjoying lately, including two from some of my favorite indie record labels and two featuring ascended masters of rock ’n’ roll.

*Bloodied but Unbowed: Bloodshot Records’ Life in the Trenches This is an extensive collection of live performances, music videos, a few interviews, and assorted madness by the Chicago company that invented the concept of “insurgent country.”

Fortunately the DVD doesn’t get hung up on the actual biography of the Bloodshot label. Sticking with the spirit of the company, any commentary about Bloodshot’s history, philosophy, or influence is strictly irreverent and usually drunken.

Among the artists you’ll find here are Ryan Adams, Alejandro Escovedo, Neko Case, Wayne “The Train” Hancock, Robbie Fulks, the Old 97’s, Trailer Bride, Kelly Hogan, The Sadies, The Detroit Cobras, and those wascally Waco Brothers.

It wouldn’t be a Bloodshot party without the Wacos. There are three songs by Bloodshot’s flagship of fools, live concert and studio footage, and a bunch of stills — including some photos that look a lot like snapshots I’ve taken at various Waco shows at South by Southwest in Austin through the years.

I have to admit, part of the fun of this DVD for me is that I was at some of these performances, such as those by Jon Langford, The Meat Purveyors, and Paul Burch.

While the live stuff is the best stuff on Bloodied but Unbowed, there are some videos that, to use a Waco Brothers title, are “Out There a Ways.” One-man blues stomper Scott H. Biram has a video for his song “Hit the Road” that includes disturbing footage of auto-accident carnage. And the grainy black-and-white video for The Unholy Trio’s backwoods cover of Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” could almost be classified as hillbilly soft-core porn.

One of my favorite features here is the Bloodshot tribute on Chic-a-Go-Go, a Chicago dance show modeled after American Bandstand, Soul Train, and the local versions of such shows that used to pop up on Chicago-area TV stations in the ’60s and ’70s and featured lip-syncing bands and dancing teens. Case sings “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” in a foofy blonde wig featuring a band with Sally Timms on electric guitar, and Escovedo lip-syncs Langford’s vocals on “California Blues.”

(Songs from this DVD are available through iTunes and eMusic.)

*Voodoo Rhythm: The Gospel of Primitive Rock ’n’ Roll You’ll never again think of Switzerland in terms of chocolate, cuckoo clocks, army knives, or bankers.

Every so often we Americans need foreigners to remind us how magical but dangerous rock ’n’ roll should be.

One of the craziest messengers of the power of rock ’n’ roll and one of the true modern prophets of rock’s slimy underbelly is a Swiss fanatic who calls himself the Reverend Beat-Man. Not only is he a musician — both a harsh-voiced one-man psychobilly band and leader of a fierce garage group called The Monsters; he’s a record mogul, the founding father of Voodoo Rhythm Records.

“I have to get up in the morning out of the bed and I have to play guitar,” he says in an interview in this film. “I have to go to the office and put out records that nobody buys. I just have to do it. I don’t know why.”

On the DVD you meet not only Beat-Man and his Monsters but a wide array of musical misfits on his label. There’s some country acts — Zeno Tornado and the Louisiana-born DM Bob, who, with his accordion-playing, German girlfriend, Silky, is in a band called The Watzloves. (Silky’s a visual artist who does wonderful work based on carnival freak-show art.)

My favorite new discovery here is King Kahn, a Canadian soul belter who has taken up Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ skull scepter, fronting a noisy, horn-fortified soul/punk band that reminds me a little of The Contortions.

But the most mysterious — and most musical of all — are The Dead Brothers, a “psycho Slavic funeral orchestra.” It’s a group led by a bug-eyed Charlie Manson-looking singer that features accordion, tuba, and sometimes banjo playing spooky acoustic tunes.

My only complaint here is that director Marc Littler should have taken a cue from the Bloodshot DVD: less talk and more music would have been better. But there’s lots to love about the Voodoo Rhythm stable.

*Roy Orbison: In Dreams This is a good little documentary about the life of one of the greatest rock singers of all times. It goes back to Roy’s roots in Wink, Texas, through his rockabilly years at Sun records; his “Only the Lonely”/“Oh Pretty Woman” years of glory in the early ’60s; his lean years — a time of horrible tragedy (his wife died in a motorcycle accident, two of his sons were killed in a fire); his bad career moves (anyone remember the movie The Fastest Guitar Alive?); and his great comeback in the late ’80s, cut short by a fatal heart attack.
I wasn’t ready for the film to end. I was looking for someone to wrap up his life and bemoan the cosmic injustice of his passing. But the interviews — including plenty with Roy and fans from Johnny Cash to David Lynch — are good, and the music is great.


* Johnny Cash at San Quentin Legacy Recordings just released an expanded version of Cash’s second prison album. Along with the two CDs, there’s a DVD of a 1969 documentary about the San Quentin concert.

It’s not a concert film — there’s far too little music, and the sound quality’s pretty awful. Plus there’s an introduction by a guy with a British accent that somehow relates the myth of the cowboy loner to Cash and his prison audience.

However, some of the interviews with the inmates are eye-opening. One death-row resident tells a story of a sexual encounter with a woman who cried rape when her 12-year-old son walked in and found them on the couch. He murdered both of them.

“I don’t know why I done it,” he says.

Just to watch ’em die?

The San Quentin set and the Orbison DVD are available at http://www.legacyrecordings.com.

BUT WHAT COLOR DO WE GET?

The National Journal's Chuck Todd argues that we need to start thinking in terms of a new political map.

Forget "red" and "blue." The country is basically divided into four voting blocs: the Democratic Northeast, the Republican South, the populist Midwest and the libertarian West. Democrats probably have a decent grip on those populist Midwest voters for a while (at least until the area transforms completely into a new economy). As for the libertarian West (home of the first state -- Arizona -- to reject a gay marriage ban), this is a region that is more up for grabs than it should be. And it's because the Republican Party has grown more religious and more pro-government which turns off these "leave me alone," small-government libertarian Republicans.

The entire column can be found HERE.