THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, September , 2014 
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM 
Webcasting! 
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time 
Host: Steve Terrell 
101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org

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TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: What I Did on My Summer Vacation

This week's Tune-up column is a recap of all the great shows I saw in Portland last week, nearly all of it based on my accounts published here in this blog.

So I'll just post the section on Mission of Burma here (I saw them Saturday night and had to catch a plane early Sunday, so I didn't have much on them that day) then the links to the posts on the other shows. Hail Portlandia!

Mission of Burma at the Doug Fir, Aug. 30: I have to admit that after four straight nights of concerts — and knowing that I had to catch a 7:35 a.m. flight the next day — I was feeling pretty burned out just before the start of MoB’s set. I even started having troubling thoughts like “Are you getting too old for this kind of thing?”

But then I remembered that the members of this band are about my age. If they can be up there playing, I should be able to make it through a performance.

And indeed, from the opening guitar blast through the last chord of their final encore, “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” I was rejuvenated. (This feeling lasted until the alarm clock rang at 6 a.m. Sunday morning)

And the band was in top form as well. They roared; they soared; there was blood on their swords.

On a Mission in Portland

Onstage were original members Roger Miller (who looks like he could be Neil Young’s tougher little brother) on guitar, Clint Conley on bass, and Peter Prescott on drums. And somewhere offstage was longtime member Bob Weston, who does tape loops and electronic effects.

Normally classified as “post-punk” (whatever that means), the Mission sound is most like that of Hüsker Dü. Both groups released their first recordings in 1981, and both were stripped-down guitar bands playing raw, urgent music.

As I’ve written before in reviewing their last few albums, since the beginning of the second phase of their career (which began about 10 years ago, following a 20-year layoff), MoB is as fiery as ever.

OK. Here are the links to the other posts:

* The Afghan Whigs
* Southern Culture on the Skids
* Negativland

And here are some videos

The Afghan Whigs also played The Doug Fir in April. Here's a video of the opening song "Parked Outside" (They opened with it when I saw them too.)



Here is Southern Culture on the Skids in Portland -- a few years ago at the Doug Fir



And here is 49 minutes (!) of the very Negativland show I saw last week at the Crystal Ballroom. You probably can see the back of my head up front.

The Rock 'n' Roll Tourist 2014: Mission (of Burma) Accomplished

No, this is not a real review of The Mission of Burma show in Portland last night. I made the mistake of bookings flight back to New Mexico at the ungodly hour of 7:35 am the morning after a Mission of Burma show.

But suffice it for now to say that they were tremendous. I'll have more details in Friday's Terrell's Tune-up column. And HERE is my review of their most recent album.

Now back to my daze.

The Rock 'n' Roll Tourist 2014: An Evening with Negativland

PORTLAND, OREGON _ And now for something completely different ...
No, there wasn't a guitar in sight. But this was rock 'n' roll.

Negativland, a sonic-collage, multi-media, socio-political art collective from San Francisco that's well into their fourth decade as an entertainment unit, headlined a show at Portland's Crystal Ballroom Friday night. 

Negativland is an unlikely crew of revolutionaries, all four members wearing gray plaid shirts that might have come off the rack at K-Mart. But don't be fooled. They are subversive. 

Employing sound and video from TV news, radio talk shows, government training movies, commercials, old educational films, all chopped up, manipulated and distorted on top of electronic noises and sound effects, this show the group has named "Content" was thought-provoking, hilarious, incomprehensible, annoying and almost mystical  -- sometimes all at once. 

They take all these messages -- political, commercial, religious education -- that we're bombarded with constantly, throw it into an electronic blender and create new, frequently hilarious art. 


More than once an old Frank Zappa lyric popped into my overwhelmed mind: "American way, try to explain / Scab of a nation, driven insane."

Here are a few notes I pecked out on my iPhone during the show. If any of this makes some se to you, please report to the Department of Homeland Security:
"Leave the premises"

"Never forget the fact that we are all just content..."

(Footage of mashing potatoes with M.A.S.H. logo occasionally flashing. Chopping vegetables with an LP)

A bearded guy, could pass for a scientist in a 1950s B movie, talking about Congress considering a plan that involves melting the North Pole.

Report on a county fair. Guy starts talking about oil wells.

Gun toting granny on wheel chair.
An angry  woman, looks kind of like a Fox News blonde, angrily ranting that she spends all day on Facebook but NOBODY SHARES MY POSTS! At one point she yells, "Get the fuck off the Internet!"

"Guns and the bible carved this nation out of the wilderness."

"It's easy to imagine the end of the world but you cannot imagine the end of capitalism."

The word "Cadillac" is put on a loop, sped up. Becomes a bizarre chant.

A distorted ad for the Playboy Channel. Train going in and out of tunnel A Guy talks about some kind of. interference wrecking his orgasm on the Playboy Channel.

"This statement is false. This statement is true ...."

And now the voices of Negativland are stuck in my head. 

The Rock 'n' Roll Tourist 2014: Gettin' Some Culture

PORTLAND, OREGON _ I think Rick Miller was wearing the same  "Hillbilly Surf Club" T-shirt when I saw Southern Culture on the Skids 14 years ago at Santa Fe's Paramount club. Oh well. He wears it well.

Or maybe I was just having a flashback, one induced not by illegal and dangerous drugs, but by the fact that I think Southern Culture on the Skids were playing most of the same songs they played in Santa Fe all those years ago.

"Banana Puddin'," "Too Much Pork For Just One Fork,"  "House of Bamboo," "Liquored Up, Lacquered Down," "Nitty Gritty" ... All the hits, (speaking relatively, of course. Very few of the music acts around today that I like have actually had anything approaching a "hit.")

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I would have been bitterly disappointed if Mary Huff hadn't done "Daddy Was a Preacher, Mama was a Go-Go Girl" (my favorite SCOTS song of all time) or if Miller hadn't called out "Little Debbie, Little Debbie!" during "Camel Walk."

And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the fried chicken-tossing during the song "Eight Piece Box," which is a frequent ritual during a SCOTS show. Several enthusiastic audience members joined the band on stage for the fun during this. My biggest accomplishment of the evening was hitting Miller in the face with a piece of wing that had landed near my feet.

The band did perform a couple of tunes from their 2010 Kudzu Ranch album ("Bone Dry Dirt" and "Pig Pickin' "). But I wouldn't have minded if they'd done some of their more recent material like "Zombified" (maybe they save that one for Halloween) or their heartfelt cover of The Kinks' "Muswell Hillbilly" or some obscure older tunes like "The Man Who Wrestles the Bear" or "Carve That Possum."

I know I'm sounding like a finnicky, know-it-all critic here, and that misses the point of a Southern Culture on the Skids show.
This North Carolina trio, which includes drummer Dave Hartman, celebrates all the gloriously trashy things that make America great -- not just the South -- great. Greasy food; hotrods; sex; loud, twangy guitars; tacky tiki bars; voodoo ...

Their name might invoke an image of a culture in decline -- and maybe it was suppose to back in the '80s when they started. But SCOTS' upbeat, swampy mix of hillbilly, surf, rockabilly, exotica and soul actually is an expression of a culture I'm proud to be part of.