eMUSIC JUNE

Here's how I spent my 90 eMusic downloads for the month of June.

* Dial "M" For Motherfucker by Pussy Galore. Jon Spencer is an obscene maniac. That's why I like him. This 1989 album came shortly before Spencer would form his Blues Explosion. In Dial M could be considered the fuse that led to that Explosion -- tasty guitar slop riffs, crazy caveman drums and no bass. The vocals, mainly by Spencer are buried, but the joy is naked.


*Sun Spots, vol. 2: Oddities and Obscurities by Various artists. You normally think of Sun Records as the wellspring of rockabilly. But before Elvis and Jerry Lee, Sun mainly dealt with blues and R&B artists from the Memphis area. Some well-known blues and R&B names are here -- Honeyboy Edwards, Sleepy John Estes, Little Milton and Ike Turner, performing with his first wife (or at least an early wife, Bonnie). There's also some cool hardcore hillbilly, gospel and rockabilly, mostly by folks you've never heard of. (Malcom Yelvington did a pretty good "Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee.") . The Killer's spirit is all over the place, even though there's not any songs of his. There's a song by a young Linda Gail Lewis, There's one of those tacky cut-and-paste fake "interview" novelty songs, "The Return of Jerry Lee" in which questions about Jerry Lee's infamous trip to London and his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin are answered by clips of the singer's tunes and there's that famous religious discussion between Sam Phillips and Jerry Lee in Sun Studios. "HOW CAN THE DEVIL SAVE SOULS? WHAT ARE YOU TALKIN' ABOUT?"


*The Original Rockabilly Album by Ray Campi. Speaking of cool rockabilly, I recently saw a good little documentary on Netflix called Rebel Beat: The Story of L.A. Rockabilly. One of the featured artists was Campi, who inspired me to download this album.

I can't find much info about this album except that it was released in 2002 on a label called Magnum Force and earlier in England. The recordings sound pretty ancient, rough and raw, like rockabilly ought to be. According to one source all these songs were recorded in 1957 -- except obviously the spoken introduction to the first song "Catepillar," which was Campi's first rockabilly record, where Campi talks about the old days.

There's some familiar songs -- Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me" and Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" -- but my favorite is a lo-fi wonder called "My Screamin' Screamin' Mimi."


* Pop A Paris: Rock N Roll Mini Skirts - Compilation 1 . The French have a saying:

"Ooo la la!"

That's a good way of describing the music from this album, a collection of rock and pop from the great nation of France in the swingin' a-go-go '60s. These mostly are covers of rock and pop hits from the U.S. and England. My favorites are Marie Laforet's "Marie Douceur Marie Colere," which you'll recognize as "Paint it Black," and "Ces Bottes Sont Faites Pour Marcher" a version of Nancy Sinatra's biggest hit by someone called Eileen.


UPDATE: I forgot to mention, there's a song here by Brigitte Bardot! It's a mod-a-go-go ditty called "Tu Veux Ou Tu Veux Pas." I still like "Boots" and "Paint it Black" better.


* Live at Maxwell's by The Reigning Sound . This is a raw 40-minute set n which the band plays on desite the fact that guitarist Greg Cartwright keeps breaking strings. (thinking back to my own performing days, I can sympathize.) By the last song he's down to three strings.

Most the songs are relentless rockers. But the group slows down for a sweet version of Sam Cooke's "I Need You Now." That's not the only soul cover they do. The album starts off with a ragged, savage take on Sam & Dave's "You Got Me Hummin'."



*A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble . This is an 8-song CD that H&H recorded with a group of Hungarian folk musicians, who add instruments including brass, woodwinds and Hungarian bagpipes.

My favorite song here is called "Zozobra," a quick-stepping duet with Jeremy Barnes (on accordion and percussion) and Balázs Unger on cymbalom, an instrument that sounds like a hammer dulcimer.

If you buy the actual CD, I understand, it comes with a DVD about A Hawk and Hacksaw.

* Several tracks from Greatest Hits of the National Lampoon. There's some great parodies of '60s and '70s rock stars, which I hadn't heard since my college days, by the likes of Christopher Guest, Gilda Radner, Tony Hendra and Chevy Case. No Beatles fan should be without Hendra's primal-scream Lennon spoof "Magical Misery Tour."

* "Gendhing and Ladrang Galagothang" a 20-minute track of gamelon music from The Sultan's Pleasure, Javanese Gamelan And Vocal Music From The Palace Of Yogyakarta. I guess you could say this is Java's version of The Gong Show.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, June 17, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Jackrabbit by Goshen
Black Shiny Beast by Buick MacKane
Death is the Only Real Thing by The Chesterfield Kings
Interstellar Hard Drive by Man or Astro-Man
Hand on the Hot Wire by Key
Guitar Shop Asshole by The Oblivians
Hippie Hippie Hoorah by The Black Lips
Rebel on the Run by Davy Allan & The Arrows
P-S-Y-C-H-O by Ben Vaughan

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead by Warren Zevon
I, Zombie by White Zombie
Mumbo Jumbo by The A-Bones
Love Train by The Yayhoos
Say You're Sorry by The Remains
For Crying Out Loud by Scratch Acid
Love Bomb by Grinderman
Fuzz Gun 2001 by Mudhoney

Stool Pigeon by The Soul Deacons
Can You Feel It? by The Dynamites featuring Charles Walker
Snake Eyes by David Holmes
Maybe Your Baby by The Dirtbombs
Chicken Heads by Bobby Rush
Dealin' With the Devil by Muddy Waters, Johnny Winters & James Cotton
Can Blue Men Sing the Whites by Bonzo Dog Band
Since I Stole the Blues by Mose Allison

Monsters of the Id by Stan Ridgway
Lady Madonna-Yuuutunaru Spider by Love Psychedelico
Martha Cecilia by Andres Landeros
Future Kings by Gogol Bordello
Anna by Arthur Alexander
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, June 15, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Absolutely Sweet Marie by Jason & The Scorchers
Bonnie Blue by John Anderson
Julia by The Flatlanders
Food, Water, Shelter & Love by Gurf Morlix
Action by Son Volt
Road Too Long by Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue
Waitin' In Your Welfare Line by Buck Owens
Tater Pie by Carolina Cotton with Tex Williams

Cracker Jack by Janis Martin
Snake Man by Ronnie Dawson
My Screamin' Screamin' Mimi by Ray Campi
You Are My Sunshine by Jerry Lee Lewis
Witchdoctor's Curse by The Frantic Flattops
Hi-Billy Music by Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
No Good Robin Hood by Delbert Barker
Big Dwarf Rodeo by The Rev. Horton Heat
Peroxide Blonde by Hank Penny
Bottle Up and Go by Sleepy LaBeef
Let's Have a Party by Wanda Jackson

Unprotected by ThaMuseMeant
Understand Under by Nathan Moore
Don't Go by Hundred Year Flood
Seeds and Candy by Boris & The Saltlicks
Son of a Gun by Goshen
Are You Still My Girl? by Joe West
After the Gunfight by Mike Montiel

The Beautiful Waitress by Terry Allen
Million Dollars Bail by Peter Case
A Ghost i Became by Richmond Fontaine
The Losing Kind by John Doe
My Eyes by Tony Gilkyson
Ballpeen Hammer by Chris Whitley
8:05 by Moby Grape
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

HEY THAT'S MY SIDE OF THE STREET

Joe Monahan points out that a New Republic blogger is suggesting a campaign theme song for Gov. Bill Richardson.

Ahem! I said AHEM!

But Michael Crowley is suggesting a song that neither I not the readers who responded to my original column had thought of.

Bill Richardson advisor Steve Murphy just defended his boss on MSNBC. Asked by Tucker Carlson about the opening anecdote in Ryan Lizza's new TNR piece, in which Richardson bizarrely tickles the head of a woman he's never met at a baseball game, Murphy declared: "Everybody touches everybody!"

Here's the campaign theme Crowley suggested:

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: PLAY THOSE DEAD MEN'S SONGS

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 15, 2007

Writer Carl Hiaasen sums it up best in the liner notes: “One of the most heinous crimes in rock ’n’ roll was the suppression, intentional or otherwise, of Warren Zevon’s mind-blowing Stand in the Fire.”

I’m not sure if it ranks up there with the murder of John Lennon and the fatal stabbing at Altamont, but the weird failure to release Zevon’s definitive live album on CD for all these years — who knows, and who cares why — indeed is a dirty, rotten shame.

But now, nearly four years after Zevon’s death, that wrong has been righted. Now, at a time when some music-biz pundits are actually contemplating the death of the CD format, Stand in the Fire is finally on CD. At his favorite barstool in Rock ’n’ Roll Hell, Zevon chuckles.

I can’t say it was “worth the wait,” but, dang, it’s great to hear this album in its entirety again (plus some bonus tracks). Every song is a jewel, and most of them just make me wish I had louder speakers.

One of the stranger ironies of Zevon’s twisted career is that while he sang wicked and brutal songs of murder, mercenaries, extremism, and vice, he sprang out of the ’70s Los Angeles wimp-rock scene. His truest champion was Mr. Sensitive, himself, Jackson Browne. And I’m sure more people are familiar with Linda Ronstadt’s renditions of “Mohammed’s Radio” and “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” than with Zevon’s. (That’s unfortunate, but as Zevon says in his introduction to “Hasten Down the Wind,” “This is the song that came along and intervened between me and starvation, thanks to Miss Ronstadt.”)

Zevon’s 1970s music established him as a respectable maniac as far as lyrics went. But his production, featuring elite Southern California studio cats, was restrained and subdued, not that much different from records by Browne, Ronstadt, The Eagles, etc.

But Stand in the Fire, released in 1981, mostly featured — instead of his regular sidemen — members of Boulder, a little-known Colorado bar band that reportedly specialized in Zevon covers. The result was ferocious. The Stand in the Fire versions are the way that songs like “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” should be heard. “Get up and dance or I’ll kill ya!” he shouts at his road manager in the frenzied final minute of the latter song. He sounded like he meant business. It could be the motto of the entire album.

Even “Mohammed’s Radio,” the only “slow” song on the original version of the album, crackles with a crazy, clunky energy it never had before. There’s even some offbeat political commentary on events of the day: “Ayatollah’s got his problems too/And even Jimmy Carter’s got them highway blues.” Most of the tunes here probably could be considered Zevon’s “greatest hits,” but there also are some Zevon tunes that aren’t on any other albums, such as the title song and “The Sin,” one of the most rocked-out assaults he ever recorded.

On the original LP, the closing number was a crunching cover of “Bo Diddley’s a Gunslinger.” That seemed like a fitting summation — Zevon neatly identifying himself with a founding father of rock with a song some might consider politically incorrect. But the CD has four bonus tracks following “Gunslinger.”

That messes with the symmetry a bit; perhaps some of them should have been interspersed among the original selections. But I’m glad to have these tunes on the album. The best bonus song is the underappreciated “Play It All Night Long,” a snarling insult to Southern living. “‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ play that dead band’s song,” goes the backhanded tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd that serves as the refrain.

Stand in the Fire’s new closer is “Hasten Down the Wind.” The band is gone, and it’s just Zevon at the piano. His voice is haggard, sometimes breathless, and you can almost smell the sweat. Grudgingly, I have to admit it’s a more satisfying conclusion than “Bo Diddley’s a Gunslinger.”

As the audience cheers, Zevon bids his fans goodnight. “Thank you very much,” he says. “Keep on rocking. And take my lung. And vaya con Dios.” A proper farewell and words to live by.

Also recommended:
*The Future Is Unwritten by Joe Strummer. Strummer’s another rocker who left too early. But, unlike Zevon, there’s been no major lapse in reissuing and recycling just about everything that he recorded with The Clash.

This album is a soundtrack for an upcoming documentary about Strummer, who died in 2002. It’s a strange little collection. Many of the songs here are songs by other artists — Nina Simone, MC5, Tim Hardin, Eddie Cochran — with introductions by Strummer on his BBC radio show. (My favorites are Elvis Presley’s “Crawfish,” a bluesy tune from the King Creole soundtrack, and the accordion-driven “Martha Cecilia” by Colombian singer Andres Landeros.)

Some previously unreleased versions of Clash tunes are here. But special treats are songs by other Strummer bands. “Keys to Your Heart” is a peppy little number by the pre-Clash group The 101ers. But even better is “Trash City” by Latino Rockabilly War, a late ’80s Strummer band whose music featured great percussion.

His latter-day band The Mescaleros is featured on a couple of songs, the vaguely African sounding “Johnny Appleseed,” and “Willesden to Cricklewood.” The latter song could infuriate hard-core Clash fans. It sounds like a slow, dreamy lullaby. You can’t get much further from “White Riot.” I would have preferred to end the album with more Latino Rockabilly War.