XXX COUNTRY & GARAGEPUNK COMPILATIONS

Two new compilations of cool tunes came out this week.

Today, Shooter Jennings unleashed Volume Two of his Southern  Independent  XXX Country collection. Among the 14 tracks are songs by The North Mississippi Allstars, Black Oak, Arkansas (that group's first recording in more than a decade), John Carter Cash, Whitey Morgan, Honky Tonk Hustlas, Joecephus & The George Jones Town Massacre and more.

And hey, New Mexico, The Imperial Rooster from Espanola, N.M. is there too, right between  Jason Isbell and Joey Allcorn,

Also there is "Hootchie Kootchie Man" by true-life outlaw Jerry McGill. This was recorded years ago at Sun Studio with a band including Waylon Jennings and Jim Dickinson.

It's all free. Just go HERE and download away. And if you don't have Volume 1, it's still available. Just scroll down.

But wait, there's more!

Earlier this week the latest volume of the infamous GaragePunk Hideout compilation series was released. This is Hidden Tracks: The Best of the GaragePunk Hideout Vol. 5.

Like the previous volumes, this has a wide variety of trashy sounds from all over the world. There's several artists who have graced The Big Enchilada podcast as well as Terrell's Sound World, including Persian Claws, Lothat and The Laundramats, plus many more. 22 tracks in all.

This is free to active members of The GaragePunk Hideout. And for those who don't want to join a club that would accept someone like me, you can buy it at the usual download joints at a reasonable price. (Hint, Amazon sells it for $6.99, while iTunes is $9.99.)

Click HERE to get info on joining the GaragePunk Hideout and HERE for the track listing.

The Roots of Picnic Time For Potatoheads

Here's a fun little exercise in self indulgence.

I've put together a Spotify playlist of songs that were parodied, stolen, alluded to, mentioned in passing in or somehow have a spiritual connection with songs on my 1981 album Picnic Time For Potatoheads. If the album actually ever had been successful, here are some of the lawsuits I would have faced.


Spotify members can find it The rest of you, get with it! Get yerself to Spotify and request an invitation. Once you're in, you can find my profile and all my playlists at spotify:user:robotclaw .


I came up with most of these while driving to Austin, Texas. It's a long drive. 


Here's a list of those songs:


* "Teddy Bear's Picnic" by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. It's obvious that the title song of the album was inspired by this children's classic. But the arrangement was heavily influenced by The Dirt Band's chaotic late-'60s version. Back when I was in junior high in Oklahoma, my band, The Ramhorn City Go-Go Squad & Uptight Washtub Tub Band, covered this tune, trying to imitate the NGDB.


* "El Mosquito" by Eddie Dimas. This is where David Borrego's guitar solo in "Cook Yer Enchiladas" comes from. My old college roommate Dave Vigil and I used to play this song when we crashed parties. He played lead, I played rhythm.


* "Louisiana Man" by Doug Kershaw. Doug launched countless Cajun clones.


* "Endless Sleep" by Jody Reynolds. I envisioned "I Lost My Baby to a Satan Cult" as a cross between this song and  "Pumpin' " by Patti Smith, though by the time we recorded it, the song had evolved into a quasi-Canned Heat-style boogie. Back when I used to gig a lot, I'd sometimes slow "Satan Cult" down to the spooky, swampy Jody Reynolds rhythm.


* "Holding Things Together" by Merle Haggard. Several of those who reviewed Potatoheads caught the fact that the title song came from "Teddy Bears Picnic" and "Satan Cult" sprang from "Endless Sleep." Fewer recognized the huge debt "Solar Broken Home" owes to this song, which should have been a bigger hit for Hag.


* "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals. I think the Wolfboy's tattooed-lady mother used to work out of the House of the Rising Sun.


* "Donald and Lydia" by John Prine. Prine's song provided the basic structure for "Silly Sally and the Phantom of the Opera." The characters in my song were based on actual street people who were hanging out in Santa Fe in the late '70s. I actually did see them both at the same time in Sambo's on Cerrillos Road late one night circa 1979. They weren't together, at least while I was there.


* "Miracle Man" by Elvis Costello. This song was on heavy rotation on my personal Pandemonium Jukebox when I wrote "The Bozo Buck Stops Here." And by the way, Costello's "Goon Squad" inspired the melody of my "Nuclear Powered Castle," (which I never recorded.)


* "Heart Like a Wheel" by Linda Rondstadt. This is the song I was making fun of on the spoken interlude on "Bozo Bucks." But I have to admit, as hard as I may try, I'll never sing like Linda Rondstadt either.


* "Edwin" by Steeleye Span. "Child of the Falling Star" is a sweet song I wrote for my daughter a few days after she was born. (Yes, I did see a crazy big falling star while driving her mother to the hospital a few hours before she arrived.) "Edwin" is an old British folk song about a poor sailor who gets his head chopped off by his girlfriend's crazy parents. The two songs don't really have anything in common -- except one little four-note guitar riff.


* "My True Story" by The Jive Five. This song itself didn't directly inspire "The Green Weenie," but it's part of the great Doo-Wop Collective Consciousness that did. (I was disappointed that the Frank Zappa catalogue is not on Spotify. My first choice would have been a Ruben & The Jets tune in honor of the late Jimmy Carl Black, who played on "The Green Weenie.")


* "Love Will Keep Us Together" by The Captain & Tennille. This is the song Taffy the peep-show girl hums in "Naked Girls."


* "Shake Your Booty" by K.C. & The Sunshine Band. Those naked girls go for the cheesy sounds. They don't feel any guilt. Besides the songs alluded to in the lyrics, what really dates this song is the fact that when I wrote it, $2.50 a beer was a little ourageous.

Video Tribute to Jerry Lieber

Leiber on the left, Stoller on the right, some
singer they apparently worked with in the middle.

I didn't seriously get into rock 'n' roll until I was much older  -- third grade -- but the very first songs I remember as a toddler -- yes, I remember hearing them back in the '50s -- were "Charlie Brown" and "Yackety Yak" by The Coasters and "Peggy Sue" by Buddy Holley.

Two out of three of those were written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. As the years went by, I realized Leiber & Stoller were perhaps the greatest songwriter team to ever grace popular music. They had soul, they had humor, and they wrote songs that still stand today.

Leiber died Monday at the age of  78. If there's a Heaven, Leiber and Carl Gardner of The Coasters, who died in June are causing a lot of yakety yak.

Here's the New York Times obit 

And below are some of his immortal compositions.











On a hitchhiking trip in the summer of 1975 I visited my pals Dick and Joe who were in Kansas City. I convinced them to take me to the corner of 12th Street and Vine. Unfortunately, it didn't exist. Vine intersected with other nearby numbered streets, but there was a housing project where the intersection of 12th and Vine should have been. (I later forgave Leiber & Stoller for that.) Now there's some kind of park there commemorating the song and the hot jazz scene that was centered there all those decades ago.



Shout out to the Twin Eagle Drum Group of Zuni Pueblo, NM who appear on this.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, August 14, 2011
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell


Webcasting!
101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell(at)ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
Little Girl by Hollywood Sinners
I Must Be the Devil by Glambilly
I Hate My Job by Butthole Surfers
I Wanna Know About You by The International Noise Conspiracy
I Had A Dream by The Gibson Bros.
Nights in White Satin by The Dickies
Slow Lightning by Junior Kimbrough & The Soul Blues Boys
Green Eyed Lady by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
Juke Joint In The Sky by The Juke Joint Pimps

Stop Using Me by Howlin' Wolf
Stop Trying to Break Me Down by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
Cannibal Girl by The Hydes
Born With a Tail by The Supersuckers
Rock City by Joe Buck Yourself
Bulldog by Doo Rag
My Shark by King Automatic
Nobody But You by The Dead Heats
Wild About That Thing by Sharon Jones

Noc-a-homa by The Black Lips
Scrap Collectin' Man by Crankshaft & The Geargrinders
Bomb Squad by Gas Huffer
The Dozens by Eddie "One String" Jones
Devil's Motorcycle by The Chocolate Watchband
Savior City by Death of Samantha
Bingo Master by The Fall
I've Got The Devil Inside by Rev. Beat-Man
Seasons in the Sun by Too Much Joy
West Of The Wall by Toni Fisher & The Wayne Shanklin Orchestra

Ballad Of Dwight Fry/Sun Arise by Alice Cooper
The Throne by The Pussywarmers
Ngol Jimol by Afrisippi
It's Not My Birthday by They Might Be Giants
Lucky Day by Tom Waits
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
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My Spotify Playlists

I was just getting used to the Amazon and Google music clouds when along comes Spotify. For the past couple of weeks or so, this is where I've been listening to most of my music.

And creating playlists has become one of the most addictive internet time-wasters I've ever  indulged in.

Basically Spotify allows you to stream about 15 million (!) songs. The whole song, not just 30-second clips. And not just well known groups -- lots of bitchen obscurities.

If you're on the free plan, which I am at this point,you have to endure an occasional audio ad. (Most of these currently are house ads telling you about various features of Spotify and urging you to upgrade to a pay plan. A few spots by record companies turn up

Other people have written better beginners' guides to Spotify than I could do. (Here's one).

I just wanted to post links to my playlists. Subscribe to your favorites. Most of them will be evolving as new stuff is added. Here they are:

* Big Enchilada Super Smashes:  A sampling of songs that have been played on The Big Enchilada podcast.

* Psychedelic '60s: An hour or so of late '60s psychedelia, mainly stuff they played on the radio in 67-68.

* Psychobilly Madness: Greasy punks with stand-up basses. Hotrods! Switchblades!  Zombies!

* Rock 'n' Soul: Everywhere I go from Kansas City up to Maine, Rock 'n' Soul Music's driving people insane!

* Frank Furter's Fave: A tribute to the American hotdog.

* The Great Country Albums: From Marty Robbins to The Waco Brothers, some of my favorite country albums of all time. (No "greatest hits" compilations here. These are all albums that were meant to be heard as such.) 11 hours of music here!

*  Country Underground : Call it underground country, call it XXX country, call it the music Nashville does NOT want you to hear (hey, that sounds familiar!) Here's an hour or so of the stuff

* '70s Country Jukebox: An hour's worth of country classics (and some shoulda-been classics) that they actually used to play on AM country stations.

* Alt Country, The First Generation: This is country rock from the mid '60s through the mid 70s.

* Gospel Glory: I went nuts with this one. Six hours of Lord-praising, soul-saving Black gospel, mostly from the 40s and 50s, though I've got some great Staples Singers tunes in here.

* Remember the Fabulous '90s: Grunge and more. Mostly early '90s stuff.

* Songs I Heard on My Transistor Radio: I almost called this my "Measles Mix" because when I caught the measles in the early '60s (I was in third grade) I found solace and discovered a whole new world of music in a little transistor radio my mom gave me. It wasn't much bigger than my iPod is now. At first it was just a way to escape the boredom of having to stay home from school but being too sick to hang out with friends. The music became an obsession. Come to think of it, it still is. Here are some of the songs from the pre-Beatles '60s that led me to become the rock 'n' roll maniac I am today.

Update: 8-14-2011 I just created Waiting for Waits, a collection of Tom Waits covers. (Unfortunately the Richie Cole song of that name wasn't available on Spotify)