TERRELL'S TUNEUP: The Sacred Grifter

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
April 13, 2012


I was going to start off this review of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s new album, The Grifter’s Hymnal, by saying that it’s the first great album of the year. But then I reread my review of his previous album, 2010’s A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C), in which I wrote, “This might be the first great record of the decade.”

So I guess I won't.

RWH and son Lucas at The White Horse last month

But that’s my typical reaction to Hubbard albums in recent years. His folksy, blues-soaked redneck rock ’n’ roll breaks little new musical ground, yet it’s refreshing. With his Okie drawl, Hubbard has a way of sounding wise even when he’s cracking wise. He seems highly spiritual even when he’s singing about shady nightclub characters and strippers. He sings proudly of being an upright, sober family man, yet he offers sharp insight into the carnal side of life.

I’ve probably said this before, too, but Hubbard is one of the very few musicians of his generation who has actually gotten better with age. He’s now 65 or thereabouts, and I can’t wait to hear what he sounds like when he’s 70. Truthfully, this album, plus A. Enlightenment, Snake Farm (2006), and Growl (2003) make up a body of work that, for my money, is unrivaled by any other singer/songwriter I can think of.

Chew on this: Hubbard’s albums of the last 10 years are even more consistently brilliant than Tom Waits’ output since the turn of the century.

(I’m conveniently overlooking one Hubbard album during this period that doesn’t rise to the level of his others, 2005’s Delirium Tremolos. Most of the songs on that one are covers. Despite a decent version of James McMurtry’s classic “Choctaw Bingo,” Delirium is a more mellow affair, lacking the rattlesnake blues edge of Hubbard’s other recent records.)

The Grifter’s Hymnal begins with a voodoo invocation. “Said my prayers to the old black gods./Tied some string around some chicken bones./Set ’em on fire and I cross my heart,” he sings over a stomping beat on “Coricidin Bottle.” What’s this got to do with a decongestant? Hubbard uses a Coricidin bottle as a guitar slide, a tradition that some say started with Duane Allman. Mysteriously, there’s no slide guitar on this song. But who needs it with the stinging electric guitar provided by Hubbard’s teenage son, Lucas?

Courtesy of picker Billy Cassis, there’s slide aplenty on “Lazarus,” a meditation on mortality. “Between the Devil and God/Between the first breath and last/Somewhere under Heaven with no future and a hell of a past/We’re in the mud and scum of things, moanin’, cryin’ and lyin’/At least we ain’t like Lazarus and have to think twice about dyin’.”

And Hubbard himself shows his stuff on a National Resonator guitar on “Coochy Coochy,” a song written by (and featuring some call-and-response vocals from) Ringo Starr. When I saw Hubbard play in Austin last month, he talked about how amazed he was — and still is — by the fact that he has a “fuckin' Beatle” on his album.

Like invocations to his personal pantheon of saints, Hubbard name-checks many musical heroes in his songs — venerated blues growlers like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Otis Rush as well as classic rockers like the James Gang and Neil Young and Crazy Horse. In a song called “Count My Blessings,” he tells the story of the 1964 shooting death of Sam Cooke as if it were a biblical parable.

Hubbard is not known as a political activist, but you get a peek at his leanings in some scattered spots on the album. “New Year’s Eve at the Gates of Hell” contains a reference to “Fox News whores” burning in Hades and praises Martin Luther King Jr. More pointedly, “Red Badge of Courage” is a real live antiwar song, as seen through the eyes of a young Marine in Iraq. “We’re just kids doing the dirty work for the failures of old men,” he sings.

RWH at Threadill's last month

The near-six-minute “Mother Blues,” presented as an autobiographical shaggy-dog tale, is a Hubbard tour de force. Starting off with a swampy guitar lick and a shuffling drumbeat, Hubbard says, “When I was a young man, about 21 years old, y’all, all I wanted was a stripper girlfriend and a gold-top Les Paul. Be careful of the things you wish for. You just might get ’em.”

He proceeds to sing the story of a Dallas nightclub where Lightnin’ Hopkins and Freddie King used to play that was frequented by gamblers, dealers, “young white hipsters,” and, for the after-hours parties, dancers from a nearby gentleman’s club. Hubbard meets the stripper of his dreams there. He tries to play it cool at first — he plays guitar, initially ignoring her request for “Polk Salad Annie,” until she describes how that song makes her want to rip off her clothes and dance around in her underwear.

“Down in Louisiana, where the alligators grow so mean ...” the singer responds. And a star-crossed love affair is born.

In the last verse of “Mother Blues,” Hubbard talks about how lucky he is to play music with his son and the other members of his band, even though he never “busted through the gates” and became a “big-time rock ’n’ roll star.” He concludes with some wisdom that ought to be taken as advice: “The days that I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, I have really good days.”

Grifter’s Hymnal ends with what sounds like an actual hymn. “Ask God,” featuring some devilish Coricidin slide and sounding like some long lost Blind Willie Johnson song, is built around some simple spiritual advice: “When darkness swoops down on you, ask God for some light. ... When some devil knocks you down, ask God to pick you up. ... When death comes a knocking, ask God to open the door.”

In short, The Grifter’s Hymnal points to heaven but rocks like hell.

Check out the video below. You won't see me, but  I was in the back of the room at Threadgill's World Headquarters when it was shot last month.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: Here's to the Ladies

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
April 6, 2012



Before you even listen to No Regrets, the new album from Johnny Dowd, the first thing you’ll probably notice is that every song is named for a woman.

There’s “Betty,” “Billie,” “Sherry,” “Miranda,” “Susan,” “Nancy,” “Ella,” “Abigail,” “Linda,” and “Candy.” Emily and Meryl have to share a song. And while Rita gets a song of her own, she also shares a title with Juanita. (They’re sisters, it turns out.)
Here;s to the Lad
This is something of a concept album for Dowd, with each track telling a story about a woman. “The album is about girls and women I have known, imagined, or seen on TV,” Dowd explains in a press release for the record. “I love them all.”

Dowd also says the working title for the album was “Regrets, I Have a Few.” However, “by the time I finished it, I realized I had no regrets,” he writes. The record shows he took his blows and did it his way. Like Dowd’s best work, the stories he tells here are dark, funny, sometimes tragic, and mostly twisted.

For those who are unfamiliar with the strange pleasures of Dowd, the artist was raised in Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. In recent decades he has lived in Ithaca, New York, where he is part owner of a moving company. I have always liked that Dowd and his band are true working-class heroes. He has his moving business, and singer Kim Sherwood-Caso works by day as a hairdresser. But while his feet are planted in the working world, his head is free to float into strange dimensions.

Dowd is a late bloomer as far as music goes. He didn’t start recording until he was almost 50. In 1997 he released his debut album, Wrong Side of Memphis, which was packed with murder ballads, stories of obsessive love, and the confessions of characters whose lives had long slipped out of their control.

Such themes have fueled the bulk of Dowd’s work ever since. You wouldn’t want a Dowd album without that. But one thing that has evolved is the musical backdrop behind his strange tales.

Early in his musical career, Dowd was labeled “alternative country.” He didn’t sound much like Uncle Tupelo or Whiskeytown, but he had this great Okie drawl. Plus, many of the tracks on Memphis were acoustic-based tunes with country, blues, and folk overtones, while his second album, Pictures From Life’s Other Side, had a couple of wild, mutated Hank Williams tunes. But early on, the country seemed to fade from the Dowd sound, and now there’s not much left except the drawl.

In fact, the dominant sound on No Regrets seems to be a primitive type of electronica, supplied by longtime Dowd drummer Willie B and keyboardist/bassist Michael Stark. I’ll admit, guitar-centric rustic that I am, this was a little off-putting to me the first time I heard it. But after subsequent listens, the electronic throbs and drum-machine crunching seemed to fit the songs.

And Dowd’s personality is at the center of all the music, as it should be. He still speaks most of the lyrics, rather than singing them. And there’s enough obnoxious guitar by Dowd and others to keep things interesting.

Another musical departure here is that Sherwood-Caso is no longer the sole female voice on the album. She sings on only two tracks on No Regrets. Four other singers provide the female counterpart to Dowd on various other tracks. I suppose having a variety of women singers goes along with having each song be about a different woman.

No Regrets starts off with “Betty,” a simulated telephone call in which Dowd calls an old high school sweetheart. “Hello! Is this Betty? Hi Betty, guess who this is? No ... no ... It’s Johnny. Johnny Dowd.” She’s not quite sure who he is, but he has apparently been thinking of her a lot in recent years — and not in a healthy manner.

Supposedly all the narrator wants is to get his high school letter jacket back from her. But in the course of the conversation, he lets it drop that he knows where she lives and where her children go to school. (This isn’t the first time Dowd has taken on the persona of a stalker. “Hope You Don’t Mind” from Pictures From Life’s Other Side has a similar narrator.)

Another tale to astonish is “Linda,” set to a foreboding minor-key backdrop. It’s the story of a couple — “when they were together, it was fire and gasoline.” They have two children, but the second one dies a week after he’s born. From there, it’s a descent into hell.

“She dressed in black/felt a life of fantasy/She dressed two kids each morning/Only one that she could see.” The unnamed husband is “talking murder” and dreaming of suicide, while the poor daughter is doing her best to cope with the domestic tinderbox her family situation has become. The songs ends before any atrocity occurs, but a listener is pretty sure that something terrible is in store.

Not all the songs on No Regrets are dark and creepy. Some are actually upbeat. Dowd gets funky on a couple of tunes. Both “Susan” (the story of a stripper in Atlanta) and “Ella” feature funk-filled guitars and keyboards, reminding me of Midnite Vultures — the last Beck album I actually liked much. (As far as critics go, I was in the minority in my love for that underappreciated album.) Come to think of it, Kier Neuringer’s sax solo at the end of “Juanita/Rita” has a little Midnite Vultures in it too.

The prettiest song here is “Sherry.” It’s a ’50s- or ’60s-style slow dance with a cheesy organ that sounds as if it was stolen from a roller rink. You can almost imagine this being played at a high school prom — right before some poor girl gets buckets of pig blood dropped on her. “You say I’m a rat,” Dowd sings in his broken croon. “But you’re OK with that.”

My only regret with No Regrets is that Dowd didn’t include a Bizarro World cover of “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” Maybe Julio Iglesias was busy when Dowd was recording the album.

Here's a video of one of my favorite songs here:

Heal Yourself with the Latest Big Enchilada Podcast

I'm recovering from hip replacement surgery, so here's some new hip sounds, as well as some old ones, in an episode I'm calling "Music to Heal By." This music will soothe and bring joyful, positive, healing energy. Trust me. You'll be wanting to shake your hips in no time. Let the healing begin.

DOWNLOAD | SUBSCRIBE| SUBSCRIBE TO ALL GARAGEPUNK PIRATE RADIO PODCASTS

Here's the playlist:

(Background Music: Hills of Pills by Kid Congo & The Pink Monkeybirds)
Pills by The New York Dolls
Heavy Doctor by Thee Oh Sees
Shake Your Hips by Slim Harpo
Pray For Pills by The Dirtbombs
Hospitals by Acid Baby Jesus
Hips by L.C. Ulmer

(Background Music: Surgery Montage by John Zorn)
Deserted Town by The Movements
Knock You Out by Thee Butchers Orchestra
Adeline by The Nevermores
I Got a Girl by The Vicious Cycles
I Don't Mind by The Angry Dead Pirates
Linda by Johnny Dowd

(Background Music: Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard by NRBQ)

Saustex Set


Move It by T. Tex Edwards & The Saddle Tramps
Straight into The Sun by El Pathos
Metanoia by Churchwood
Body in Plastic by Glambilly
Derby Crush by The Gay Sportscasters
Candyman Blues by The Copper Gamins


 Play it here:

R.I.P. EARL SCRUGGS

Earl Scruggs, perhaps the greatest banjo picker in the history of bluegrass, is dead.

Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs

Scruggs, 88, apparently died yesterday in a Nashville hospital.

To people my age, North Carolina native Scruggs, and longtime partner Lester Flatt, were bluegrass music in the 1960s. More so than Bill Monroe or The Stanley Brothers. They brought bluegrass to living rooms all over the country every week playing the Beverly Hillbillys' theme song. (Sometimes Earl and Lester even played themselves in epsiodes.)

And later, they brought bluegrass to the Top 40 with "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" from the movie Bonnie & Clyde.

Both Flatt, who died in 1979,  and Scruggs started out with Monroe's Bluegrass Boys back in the '40s when Monroe was in the process of inventing bluegrass. Scruggs is credited for introducing his 3-finger style of picking, transferring the banjo from a rhythm instrument into a lead instrument.

He and Flatt left Monroe in 1948 establishing their Foggy Mountain Boys as a premier bluegrass act. They parted ways in 1969.

By some accounts, politics divided them. Scruggs appeared in 1969 at an anti-Vietnam war rally in Washington, D.C. Flatt, as were most most country and bluegrass artists at the time, was a supporter of the war.

U.S.A Today in its obituary noted,

"... when staunch fans of bluegrass — a genre that would not exist in a recognizable form without Scruggs' banjo — railed against stylistic experimentation, Scruggs happily jammed away with sax player King Curtis, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, piano man Elton John and anyone else whose music he fancied. 

"He was the man who melted walls, and he did it without saying three words," said his friend and acolyte Marty Stuart in 2000.

But it was in pure bluegrass where Scruggs excelled. Just last week laid up in my own hospital bed, I watched a couple of episodes on the Old Flatt & Scruggs Grand Old Opry tv show, which is offered on Netflix's streaming service. For that hour, I forgot all about what ailed me.

Rest in peace, Earl.

Here's some videos:


  

Here they are with "Little Ricly" (Skaggs!)

Free Music? Oh si!

Dueling drummers

One of my favorite new discoveries from my recent trip to Austin was Thee Oh Sees from San Francisco. (I say "new discovery" meaning that I just discovered them. They've been around for a few years.) I saw them at the new Emo's East on the same bill as The Gories and Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds.

As I suspected, Thee Oh Sees have a bunch of downloads over at WFMU's Free Music Archive.

So get over there and listen and/or. download to your heart's content. Or if you're too lazy for that, enjoy a rocking 2009 concert below.