ALEX MAGOCSI & DEEP ELLUM

I just got an e-mail from a Dallas documentary maker named Phil Lee, who recently learned of Alex's death.

Alex appeared in a short doc Phil did in 1991 about Dallas' Deep Ellum district. It's on YouTube and is just over 8 minutes long.

Phil was hoping to find Alex for another documentary he's working on when he came upon my obit.

"I will never be able to watch that Deep Ellum project again the same way, knowing that Alex is gone," Phil wrote. "He was an intelligent, caring soul, and he will be greatly missed."

All of Alex's friends have to watch this.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, June 10, 2007
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
Poor Poor Pitiful Me by Warren Zevon
Marie Doucer by Marie LaForet
Fall of the Kingfish by Gas Hufffer
The Interview by Deadbolt
Mercy Mercy by The Remains
Sea of Blasphemy by The Black Lips
Murder in My Heart for the Judge by Moby Grape
Evil Eye by Pussy Galore
Paper by The Kilimanjaro Yak Attack
The End of Christianity by The Stooges

We Repell Each Other by The Reigning Sound
Devil Dance by the A-Bones
Running Through My Nightmares by The Chesterfield Kings
Searching by The Monsters
Depth Charge Ethel by Grinderman
Viva del Santo by Southern Culture on the Skids
Don't Tease Me by ? & The Mysterians
The Rock Around by Esquerita

All the Nation's Airports by The Archers of Loaf
Love Jet by The Harry Perry Band
Funny Funny a Go-go by The Brothers Hawk
I'm 16 by Dengue Fever
Whiskey 'n' Women by The Clone Defects
Niki Hoeky by Bobby Rush
Are You Angry by Thee Midnighters
Coach and Horses by The Fall
The Ball Game by Sister Wynona Carr

Hate to Say Goodnight by Goshen
The Barren Fields by Hundred Year Flood
It's Me by Dinosaur Jr.
Come on in This House by John Hammond
Outlaw Blues by Bob Dylan
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, June 8, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Crazed Country Rebel by Hank Williams III
Progressive Country Music For a Hollywood Flapper by Hank Penny
High and Wild by Ray Condo & His Ricochets
Snatch It and Grab It by Deke Dickerson
Have Love Will Travel by The Sharps with Duane Eddy
Drinkin' Wine Spo-De-O-Dee by Malcom Yelvington
Miss Froggy by Warren Smith
Nervous Breakdown by Eddie Cochran
Buddy I Ain't Buyin' by Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
Old Man From the Mountain by The Gourds

Jesus Loves a Jezebel by Goshen
Rich Man's War by Hundred Year Flood
Trotsky's Blues by Joe West
Standin' So Still by Boris McCutcheon
Room 100 by Ronny Elliott
Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain by Carla Bozulich


Intro/The Border/Moving Back Home # 2/ $87 and a Guilty Conscience That Gets Worse the Longer I Go by Richmond Fontaine
Slow Hearse by Son Volt
Madalyn's Bones by Gurf Morlix
Four Strong Winds by Neil Young with Nicolette Larson
You Don't Care by Mike Monteil
Wine Me Up by Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue
Brown Liquor by John Anderson
The Ghost and Honest Joe by Pee Wee King

Opportunity to Cry by Willie Nelson
The River Bed by Ray Wylie Hubbard
Sorry Willie by Roger Miller
Jason Fleming by The Sadies with Neko Case
Ain't No God in Mexico by Waylon Jennings
Round the Bend by John Egenes
In Good Old Days When Times Were Bad by Dolly Parton
The River Hymn by The Band
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

COFFEE WITH CHARLIE, PUNCH IN THE SENATE

Tampa rocker Ronny Elliott writes about an encounter with the great Charlie Louvin on a cool little Web site called The Brink.

Last time I saw Ronny we were in the Austin airport. He was standing in line for ice cream and he'd just seen Karl Rove. But that's another story.

Speaking of political encounters, I wish the New Mexico Legislature was as fun as the Alabama state Senate yesterday.

Check out this story and make sure to watch the video. It might make us New Mexicans long for a rematch between Rod Adair and Raymond Sanchez.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: SONGS FOR DESERT ROADS

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 8, 2007

In some respects, Thirteen Cities, the new album by the Portland, Ore.-based band Richmond Fontaine, sounds like a soundtrack record. Not for a movie; maybe for a book. Fontaine singer Willy Vlautin is a novelist whose book, The Motel Life, was recently published by Harper Perennial.

The title of the book is referenced in the song “Westward Ho”: “The Rancho and Sutro, the Time Zone and don’t forget/The Everybody’s Inn or the Monte Carlo/Motel life ain’t much of a life, and a motel ain’t much of a home/But I found out years ago that a house ain’t either.”

I haven’t read the book, but if it’s anything like Thirteen Cities, it has to be a cross between Steinbeck, Bukowski, and — I dunno — Gram Parsons?

This album is a literary work in itself. It’s a song cycle (alt-country opera?) about that motel life — character sketches and short stories, mostly in first person, of drifters adrift in the American West. Vlautin strips away all romantic notions of the West, portraying a dusty, windblown world of truck drivers, aimless hitchhikers, fugitives, illegal immigrants, tough bars, and mixed-up kids.

Musically the band sounds something like Wilco (Vlautin’s voice calls to mind Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy) colored by Calexico. There are reasons for that. Calexico’s Joey Burns plays bass and accordion on some songs, and that band’s Jacob Valenzuela lends his trumpet on some numbers. The album was recorded in Tucson, Ariz., so it’s only natural that local alt-rock godfather and Giant Sand-man Howe Gelb guests on piano on one song. There’s lots of moody steel guitar, giving a ghostly edge to sad melodies.

After a short instrumental prelude, Thirteen Cities’ first full-fledged song, “Moving Back Home #2,” with its quick rhythm and blaring trumpets, is more upbeat than most of the others, but the lyrics set the emotional mood. The narrator has been living in his mother’s basement, constantly bickering with her, and losing money at off-track betting. He is sitting on top of a parking garage and contemplating suicide. You know he won’t be in Mom’s house much longer, but there’s no real hope that a change of scenery will improve his outlook.

The characters in these songs don’t burn, burn, burn like Kerouac’s mad highway angels. They’re sad refugees from oppressors who are never quite identified, seeking some better place that’s most likely a desert mirage.

"I started having dreams of the desert so real they haunted me/Always sunny and never gray no noise just wind and sage,” Vlautin sings in one song. “I began taking vacation days and driving out as far as I could/The people around me said I drew away that a ghost I became.”

One song, “$87 and a Guilty Conscience That Gets Worse the Longer I Go,” takes place partly in New Mexico. It starts out at a boxing match in Albuquerque. “The referee wouldn’t stop the bout/The kid’s blood hit the fifth row ... that was the night I gave up the fights.” The narrator and his traveling companion encounter an overturned semitrailer on Interstate 25 near Las Cruces. “We pushed in the windshield and pulled the guy out/ We left him on the side of the road/My friend said we had to leave before the cops showed/What he’d done I didn’t know.”

By the next verse the travelers are in Arizona, where they pick up a teenage hitchhiker. "Saddest eyes and rotten teeth/Said she was only 16.” The narrator’s friend stops at a motel and gets a room for himself and the girl — an act that outrages the narrator and effectively ends the friendship. You don’t know whether it’s moral outrage or jealousy. All you know is that he feels guilty when he calls the police.

Vlautin looks at the ugly current that rages inside the national immigration debate on a song called “The Disappearance of Ray Norton.” It’s spoken-word song over a wistful backdrop of guitar, bass, and clarinet; in it the narrator tells of a friend who hated Mexicans. “He started going on and on about it, how they’re all moving in, buying and renting all the houses around us, how they’re ruining the property values, how they’re ruining everything. He’d get real upset about it, start saying crazy things.” Ray, the friend, moves in with “a group of guys ... they all had shaved heads and tattoos.” That arrangement ends badly and eventually Ray disappears, shunned by his father, his employer, and his ex-girlfriend. But you get the feeling that the next time anyone hears of Ray Norton, it’s going to be tragic and ugly.

Immigration is the subject of another song, “I Fell Into Painting Houses in Phoenix, Arizona.” The narrator quits his job when he realizes an undocumented co-worker was stiffed by his employers for five days of work. The song ends with reflections on headlines dealing with “a family left in the trunk of a car, or a family abandoned in the desert alone.”

There’s a ray of hope in the upbeat “Four Walls.” The narrator is in love and wants nothing to do with anything from the outside world: “We’ll just lay around and our hearts will sing like mariachis.”

But that mood quickly dissolves in the last song, “Lost in This World,” in which Vlautin moans over Burns’ stark piano, “I barely know where I am/I’m sorry I ain’t called you in days/Maybe I’ll never get over Wes and the hospital/And now I don’t even have bus fare home.”

But you know he’s out there on some highway in Utah or Wyoming, nursing a beer and a broken heart, sweeping the floor in some back-road joint, playing the horses, and wondering if he’ll ever get back home — living the motel life and wondering how long it’s going to last.