TERRELL'S TUNEUP: VIVA LOS PEYOTES!

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
October 24, 2008

Back in the mid ’60s, when “96 Tears” and “Wooly Bully” ruled the airwaves, the heroes of the sound that would later be termed “garage rock” were Hispanics. Question Mark and all of his Mysterians were Chicanos. So was Domingo Samudio, better known as Sam the Sham, who with The Pharaohs blended Tex-Mex and Memphis soul into an exciting sound.

And even though Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers were gringos, their Sir Douglas Quintet, which included drummer Johnny Perez, also capitalized on the Tex-Mex sound. They might have tried to pass as British, but there was no way to miss the San Antonio in their music.

So with that history, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of the most exciting contemporary bands propagating the garage-band sound come from Spanish-speaking territory. There’s The Hollywood Sinners and Wau y Los Arrrghs from Spain. And from the great nation of Argentina comes Los Peyotes, who recently released their debut album — Introducing Los Peyotes — on London’s Dirty Water Records (also home to The Hollywood Sinners).

These guys have the basic fuzz-Farfisa-and-frantic-rhythm sound down pat. They even get surfy now and then, like on the instrumental opening song, “El Corredor Quemado,” and on “Psicosis V.”

The singer, who goes by the name David Peyote, sometimes sings in English as well as in Spanish. “Action, action ... oh, gimme your love!” he sings in “Action.” Those are some of the only decipherable lyrics in the tune, but really, what more do you need to know?

Just in time for Halloween, there are some good, fun horror hits (well, they ought to be hits) here. My favorite part of “Vampiro” is when the wild bongos come in toward the end. Then there’s “Scream,” which features a recurring screech playing off a frantic guitar.

To show their great debt to the original American garage-band sound, Los Peyotes have a song called “No Puedo Hacerte Mia.” Yes, it’s a Spanish version of The Seeds’ “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine.” (The original has recently been excavated for an Axe body spray commercial.) Los Peyotes do the song justice. You’d think Sky Saxon had changed his name to Sky Sanchez.

Consumer note: Introducing Los Peyotes is available on amazon.com as an import. But you can get it cheaper through Dirty Water’s American distributor, Get Hip Recordings. (Click the link, then click “store,” then “exclusive labels,” then “Dirty Water” — you probably can figure it out from there.) Of course it’s even cheaper from your favorite download vendor — eMusic, Amazon, iTunes.

Also recommended:

* Smash Hits by Figures of Light. This is a bizarre little project from Norton Records. The original Figures of Light was a stripped-down prepunk band from New York City led by singer Wheeler Winston Dixon and guitarist Michael Downey. They were influenced by a lot of the usual suspects — early Stones and Who, The Troggs, The Stooges, The Pretty Things, Blue Cheer, etc. (And though Figures of Light doesn’t list them in the liner notes, it’s obvious The Velvet Underground had a lot to do with their sound as well.)

At the band’s first concert in 1970, they destroyed 15 television sets onstage at Rutgers University. An early poster for FOL described their show as “a rock ’n’ roll violence sonata.”

In 1972, they released their first and only single, “It’s Lame,” backed with “I Jes Wanna Go to Bed.” They pressed 100 copies.

It flopped.

Figures of Light broke up and never looked back.

Until a couple of years ago, that is, when Miriam Linna, high priestess of Norton Records, came across one of the original Figures of Light singles at a swap meet. She tracked down Dixon, now a professor of film studies at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Dixon contacted Downey for the first time in 25 years or so, and Figures of Light was reborn.

After all those years, the group was back in the studio, aided by Linna on drums, her A-Bones bandmate Marcus “The Carcass” Natale on bass, and guitarist Matt Verta-Ray (Jon Spencer’s partner in Heavy Trash). They recorded six new tracks in one day.

Smash Hits includes those songs, some recent live and studio recordings, the original two songs from the “It’s Lame” single, and the infamous “Ritual TV Smashing Finale,” recorded live in 1970. (According to the liner notes, Norton honcho Billy Miller said of this recording, “You guys make ‘Sister Ray’ sound like ‘MacArthur Park.’” He wasn’t far off.)

Basically, this is primitive rock ’n’ roll at its most stripped-down. Even the new recordings capture the lo-fi spirit. Like the punk rock that would erupt after the original FOL folded, the songs are full of a certain nihilism and angst leavened with wicked humor. You know they’re just joking on the 45-second “Why Not Knock Yourself Off”: “If you feel like a chronic complainer, why not knock yourself off?/They’ll put you in a 6-foot container. Why not knock yourself off?”

You’re kidding, right, guys?

My favorite cut has to be “Seething Psychosexual Conflict Blues.” Dixon sings, “Sometimes I feel like a woman; sometimes I feel like a man/I got these seething psychosexual conflicts that you won’t understand, oh no!”

Also worthy is “I Got Spies Watching You,” a reckless rocker with a cool tremolo guitar that was recorded as a demo at a Lincoln, Nebraska, studio in 2007. It’s all raw, crazy, and irresistible to those of us who like it that way.

UH OH!

EMILIO'S HEALTH IMPROVING

Former Rio Arriba County political strongman Emilio Naranjo remained hospitalized at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, but one of his sons told me Wednesday night that he is doing better.

Naranjo, 92, was hospitalized about a week ago because of dizziness and possible heart problems, his son Benny Naranjo, a prosecutor with the 13th Judicial District, said. "He's doing a lot better."

Benny Naranjo said he voted early Wednesday and was wearing his "I Voted" sticker on his tie when he visited his father in the hospital. "He saw that sticker and said, 'Way to go," the younger Naranjo said.

Emilio is a former state senator, county sheriff and longtime Rio Arriba County Democratic Party chairman. He was the top political figure in Rio Arriba for more than 40 years beginning in the 1950s.

I first found out about Emilio being in the hospital on Monday and wrote about it HERE.

I interviewed Emilio nearly 25 years ago for a lengthy cover story in The Santa Fe Reporter. I wish I had that in an electronic form so I could post it on the blog.

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP: HOW TO IMPROVE THE DEBATES

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
Octobber 23, 2008

Is anyone out there not sick of candidate debates yet?

In recent weeks, we’ve seen three presidential, one vice presidential, two U.S. Senate, and I’m not sure how many Congressional debates.

Last week, we even had a double-header — the last Barack Obama/John McCain debate followed minutes later by the first Tom Udall/Steve Pearce debate.

As always, there have been a variety of formats and a plethora of rules. Frequently you see the candidates questioned by a panel of journalists, sometimes just a lone moderator.

Often there are questions from audience members (or e-mailed questions from television viewers). Sometimes the candidates have their own podiums or stools or they have to sit together at the same table.

Some formats discourage interaction between candidates. I remember a 2006 state land commissioner debate between Pat Lyons and Jim Baca in which both seemed eager to challenge each other. It could have been an interesting night, but the candidates kept getting interrupted by a moderator who insisted on sticking with the boring rules and kept going on to the next question instead of allowing Lyons and Baca to go at it.

Then there was the state Public Regulation Commission forum sponsored by business organizations this week in which the candidates got the questions in advance and read from scripts. Nobody better complain about “gotcha” questions there.

Here’s a few things I’d do if I ran the debates:

* First, I’d have a single moderator. It would have to be someone knowledgeable on the issues. And most important, it would have to be someone with enough guts to interrupt and say, “Please answer the question,” to any candidate who started giving a stump speech instead of sticking to the topic at hand.

* The first part of the debate would be a town-hall format with questions from unaffiliated voters. But, unlike the recent presidential town-hall forum in Nashville, Tenn., the questions would not be pre-screened and pre-approved by anyone. Trust the people! Sure, you’ll get some pointed questions, maybe even a few rude ones. You might even get a stray nut ball now and then. But seeing how the candidates handle those unpredictable questions would tell us far more than their canned answers to canned questions.

* The second part would be the candidates questioning one another. These segments hands down have been the most interesting part of the debates between Udall and Pearce. Udall made Pearce praise George Bush, while Pearce socked Udall with an unexpected question about some child-porn bill. Back in 2006, it was a question from Heather Wilson about raising taxes that stumped her Congressional opponent Patricia Madrid — and may have helped cost Madrid the election.

* The final third would be a feature I’ve never seen on any debate, though it’s almost always done these days during post-debate coverage by television networks: fact-checking. You’d have to have a team of journalists frantically Googling during the early parts of the debate to see who got what wrong. The moderator would then confront the erring candidate. If there weren’t enough provable errors, then the rest of the time could be filled by more questions from the audience — or by the candidates.

Of course, if one candidate got his facts wrong significantly more than the other, his supporters would complain that “the media” was biased against him. But chances are, they’re going to make that claim anyway so let ‘em squawk.

Mr. White Bucks doesn’t buck White: Here’s one of the stranger celebrity endorsements I’ve seen lately.

Actually, it’s not technically an endorsement, but the 1st District Congressional campaign of Republican Darren White on Wednesday released a statement announcing that singer Pat Boone had presented White with an Honorary Guardian of Seniors’ Rights award.

Boone is national spokesman for a group called the 60 Plus Association — “a non-partisan seniors advocacy group with a free enterprise, less government, less taxes approach to seniors issues,” according to the group’s Web site.

“I am pleased to present this award to Darren White,” Boone said in a statement. “He is a tax cutter, protecting the pocket books of senior citizens. 60 Plus calls on nearly 5 million seniors for support so I believe I can speak on behalf of seniors when I say that they can count on Darren White. Clearly, seniors will have no finer friend in Congress than Darren White.”

Boone praised White for opposing “the death tax,” which actually is called the estate tax.

But the most interesting claim on the news release was the description of Boone — “a recording artist, movie and TV star second to none in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.”

Second to none? Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few dozen others might take issue with that — and that’s just dealing with the ’50s.

Blog Bonus: I wonder if Pat Boone would groove on the cop-rock band that was second to none in the early 90s, Darren White & The Force.



Where the heck is Bill Richardson? The traveling governor was on the campaign trail again this week, this time in Florida.

He was there Tuesday and Wednesday, attending Obama campaign events in Palm Beach, Immokalee, Port Charlotte, Tampa and Kissimmee. This is according to various online newspaper reports. The governor’s office doesn’t make public announcements of when the governor leaves the state.

Next week, according to The Sandusky Register, Richardson will be in Erie County, Ohio.

DEBATE MANIA

I meant to post this on Sunday, but my article about Saturday night's debate between Tom Udall and Steve Pearce can be found HERE.

Kate Nash covered the CD3 debate for us Sunday night. You can find her story HERE.

Two weeks and one day left, folks!