Sunday, March 13, 2016 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 Here's the playlist
OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Accentuate the Positve / Things are Getting Better by NRBQ
Little Doll by The Stooges
I Got Eyes for You by The Gories
Ass Welt Boogie by The Bassholes
Bad Love by The Night Beats
Meat Juice Mustache by Made for Chickens by Robots
UFO, Please Take Her Home by The Coachwhips
Wild Man by The Mokkers
Romance by Wild Flag
Crazy for You by Dirtbombs
Dead Moon Night by Dead Moon
Voyage of the Trieste by Chocolate Watch Band
Lady Queen Bee by The Grandmothers
Bee Line by The Ugly Beats
Facebook Troll / No Xmas for John Quay by The Fall
Love is in the air in Austin next week.
And The Waco Brothers will be there too
I'm headed down to Texas once again for the festivities surrounding South by Southwest. Please bookmark this blog and watch for my posts. Hopefully, if my grandsons allow it, I'll be posting ever day, starting Wednesday morning.
No, I didn't get a badge or wristband. But as any music fiend who has attended this Spring Break for the Music Industry knows, you don't need no stinking badge! There are plenty of unofficial, unsanctioned, unspeakable events to keep you thoroughly entertained.
The last time I was there, in 2014, there was a senseless, tragic crime in the streets of Austin that left four people dead (just a few blocks from where I was at the time.) A maniac named Rashad Owens plowed through Red River Street, which was full of pedestrians, leaving four people dead. this was near the Mohawk, where some musical acts I love, including X, The Black ANgels and Les Claypool were playing.
Last November a jury found Owens guilty of capital murder. Because the state didn't seek the death penalty, he received an automatic life sentence.
If anyone gives a rodent's posterior, you can find my posts from past years, going back to 2004 HERE. And you can find a whole lot of my SXSW snapshots HERE
Someone I won't be seeing next week is the late Davy Jones of The Hickoids. Davy died of cancer in November. But I bet his spirit will be there Tuesday night when Hickoids, Beaumonts, Churchwood, Stevie Tombstone and others play The White Horse.
Friday, March 11 , 2016 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
Here's my playlist :
OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
String's Mountain Dew by Stringbean
Five Brothers by Marty Robbins
Cheatin'. Again by Whitey Morgan & The 78s
Rock my World by Jimmy & The Mustangs
Talk to Me Lonesome Heart by Miss Leslie & Her Juke Jointers
My Baby Don't Dance to Nothin' But Ernest Tubb by Junior Brown
Who Says God is Dead by Eilen Jewell
Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven by Loretta Lynn
Your Money and My Good Looks by Gene Watson & Rhonda Vincent
I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven by Eddie Dean & The Frontiersmen
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican March 11, 2016
You know from the first words Paul Burch sings on his new album, Meridian Rising, that this is going to have a lot more attitude than most records honoring any country-music immortals.
“Let me tell you all about the place I’m from/Where the police tip their hats while they’re swinging their clubs. … You best mind where you go and watch what you say/I’ll visit your ma, but I’m not going to stay.”
Yes, the sweet sunny South of romantic myth juxtaposed against the oppressive reality. I knew right then I was going to love this album.
That song “Meridian” is about Meridian, Mississippi, and the album is about that town’s most famous son, Jimmie Rodgers — America’s beloved “Singing Brakeman,” often called the “father of country music.”
But Burch, a honky-tonkin’ alt-country hero for more than 20 years, swings down the club on any notion that this is anything like any Rodgers tribute you’ve heard before. (And there have been some fine ones, such as Merle Haggard’s Same Train,A Different Time, Steve Forbert’s Any Old Time, and the Bob Dylan-instigated various-artist spectacular, The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers.) For one thing, there are no actual Jimmie songs here, though most the tunes are played in the Rodgers style that blends hillbilly, blues, and jazz.
Instead of merely covering his songs, Burch tells the story of Rodgers’ life — not as a literal biography, but with songs from Rodgers’ point of view in various situations. You find Rodgers on tour like a Depression-era rock star on “US Rte 49” — traveling, picking, drinking, womanizing. “They put me up in a house after the show/The mayor’s wife and daughter came in the back door. … Girls did alright by me but I had to leave ’em on Rte 49.”
But the stories Burch tells aren’t all fun and games. “Poor Don’t Vote” shows Rodgers’ working-class sympathy with those hit hardest by the Depression — and his anger at politicians who exploited and looked down on them. “You think you’re safe ’cause the poor don’t vote. … You’d better be kind to this rabble/’Cause if you got my vote or not may be the least of your troubles.”
Jimmie likes it
Rodgers’ death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five is foreshadowed in several tunes — even in the good-time “US Rte. 49,” there’s a quick road stop in a hospital.
On “Fast Fuse Blues,” the singer notes “Later’s coming earlier every day,” and makes a last request: “Take me to Coney Island, so the last thing in my eye/Is you way up on the Wonder Wheel waving me goodbye.” Indeed, Rodgers visited Coney Island the day before he died.
The beauty of these songs — the stories they tell and the emotions behind them — is that they stand on their own even if a listener knows nothing about Rodgers.
In the end, Meridian Rising makes me better appreciate both Rodgers and Paul Burch. Also recommended
* Got Myself Together (Ten Years Later) by Danny Barnes. Banjo maniac Barnes first got famous — well, maybe not actually famous, but he achieved a certain level of underground acclaim — with the pioneering Texas alt/punk/weirdo-bluegrass outfit called Bad Livers in the 1990s.
The Livers broke up around the turn of the century after their commercially disastrous final album, Blood and Mood, basically scared and/or angered much of the Americana crowd. In my review back then I wrote, “Had Beck been raised in Mayberry as the abused stepson of Gomer Pyle …”
In other words, I loved it.
After that, Barnes left Austin for Washington State and began a solo career, sometimes collaborating with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and even Dave Matthews — yes, that Dave Matthews — and others.
In 2005, Barnes released a record called Get Myself Together. “It was kinda my last acoustic type effort heretofore (I launched pretty heavily into my electronic period),” Barnes wrote on his website.
I’m not exactly sure why he decided to release a new version of that album, but somehow I missed the original when it came out, so I’m glad he did. (Unfortunately, he left off his bluegrass version of “Sympathy for the Devil,” which was on the 2005 album, though he does have a new version of Bad Livers’ “I’m Convicted” as a bonus track on the new one.)
Barnes does most of these tunes solo, mainly just voice and banjo. His wry lyrics and his vocal phrasing make him sound like a modern John Hartford. You can hear that in the song “Wasted Mind,” a disdainful look at some kid going nowhere fast.
“He ain’t the first boy standing round a beat-up Chevy/Want to sing like Eminem,” Barnes sings while his fingers fly around his banjo. “On a first name basis at the police station/Where you spend a lot of lonely nights/Standin’ in the line-up lights.”
Incarceration for stupidity is the theme of another highlight here, “Get Me Out of Jail.” It begins “Well, I got drunk this morning/And I went off to work/By nine or ten I cashed it in/And threw up on my shirt/Then I lost your house keys/So I broke in with a rock/I keep my OxyContin baby/Way down in my sock.”
And things get worse from there.
If you’re interested in Danny Barnes, check out this 2009 Bad Livers’ reunion show HERE.
Video Time:
Here's a live performance of "Meridian" by Paul Burch
Here's "Fast Fuse Blues"
Here's Jimmie Rodgers -- at least that's the name on the tail of his shirt. And yes, that's Louis Armstrong on the cornet and his wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano.
Here's Danny Barnes singing "Get Me Out of Jail" with Mimi Naja on mandolin and drummer Tyler Thompson live in Oregon last November.
And just for old time's snake, here's "Fist Magnet," my favorite song from The Bad Livers' crazed final album, Blood & Mood
Last Saturday, March 5, marked the 53rd anniversary of a plane crash that killed
three major country stars of the day: Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Patsy
Cline. It was country music's equivalent to the crash a few years before that
killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper
These days, everyone knows Patsy. But Copas and Hawkins are far less known.
Lloyd "Cowboy" Copas, an Ohio native first achieved stardom in the 1940s when he
replaced Eddie Arnold in Pee Wee King's band. (I just played one of his hits,
"Hangman's Boogie" on
my latest Big Enchilada podcast.) Copas began his solo recording career King Records in Cincinnati.
That influential label in 1948 also signed long tall Harold Franklin Hawkins,
better known as "Hawkshaw." Hawkins. whose wife was country singer Jean Shepard,
began singing professionally after World War II. (An Army vet, Hawkins fought in
the Battle of the Bulge.) Like Copas and Cline, he was a member of the Grand Old
Opry.
I probably don't need to tell you about Patsy. At the time of her death she was
one of the biggest stars of country music.
At the time of the crash, the three were returning from a benefit concert in
Kansas City -- a show to raise money for the family of a disc jockey who had
died a few months earlier. Also killed in the crash was the pilot, Randy Hughes,
who was Cline's manager and Copas' father-in-law.
This story,
published Saturday in The Tennessean, tells the story of the crash
and their loved ones who survived them. (Check out the video interview of
Jean Shepard, who confesses to being resentful of the fact that Cline's death
overshadowed that of her husband's.)
But first enjoy some music from these three country greats. We're fortunate that
YouTube has live clips from all three. Here's Cowboy Copas.
Enjoy some Hawkshaw Hawkins:
Here's a fairly obscure -- but downright gorgeous -- Patsy Cline tune:
And finally, here's a rather maudlin tribute to Patsy, Hawkshaw and the
Cowboy: "Three Country Stars" by Dick Heil
