Welcome to the first Big Enchilada of 2018, a brand new hillbilly episode that travels to the heart of the mythological Old West for another rollicking hillbilly episode. I know it's January but this show is hotter than a pistol at the O.K. Corral.
Sunday, Jan. 28, 2018 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
Email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
Here's my playlist :
OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Girlfriend by Ty Segall
Jon Henry by Snakefarm
Jesus' Chariot by Neil Young & Crazy Hourse
St. James Infirmary Blues / Red River Valley by Johnny Dowd
Cocaine Lil by The Mekons
It Ain't Gonna Save Me by Jay Reatard
Pain by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
Too Many People / Hey Joe by The Leaves
Mad as Hell (in the White Night) by Jean Caffeine
Haunted House by Bazooka
We're Not Alone by Mean Motor Scooter
Late Night by Dinola
Poor Beast, Marginal Man by Rattanson
Closer to Fine by Sicko
Psycho Babe by Bee Bee Sea
All songs by The Fall
New Big Prinz
Mexico Wax Solvent
Cruiser's Creek
Dead Beat Descendant
Last Exit to Brooklyn (Last Chance to Turn Around)
Gibbus Gibson
The Man Whose Head Expanded
Glam Racket - Star
Cab it Up
My Baby Joined the Army by Terry Evans
Call on God by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
Don't You Ever Let Nobody Drag Yo' Spirit Down by Linda Tillery with Wilson Pickett & Eric Bibb CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
Friday, Jan. , 2018 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
Sally Was a Good Old Girl by Don Rich
Skip a Rope by Kentucky Headhunters
Pipe Bomb Dream by Turnpike Troubadours
Diggy Liggy Lo by Doug & Rusty Kershaw
Bang Bang Bang by Eilen Jewell
Callin' My Name by Lara Hope
Miss Jesse Lee / When I See You by Billy Hancock
Crazy Mixed Emotions by Rosie Flores
Devil on My Shoulder by Kim Lenz
I'm Coming Home by Johnny Horton
Ghost Train Four-Oh-Ten by Marty Stuart
Fryin' Pan by Salty Pajamas
Wolves in the Street by Dinosaur Truckers
Ocean of Diamonds by Jimmy Martin
Truck Drivin' Man by Twang Bangers
I'm Tired of Pretending by Hank Thompson
Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don't by Sarah Shook & The Disarmers
Oh My Darling, Clementine by Johnny Dowd
Pinball Machine by The Fall
Ugly Woman by Hasil Adkins
War Whoop by Legendary Shack Shakers
Fire Dream b y J,D, Wilkes
Wicked Path of Sin by Dad Horse Experience
The Grand Ole Opry Ain't So Grand by Hank Williams III
Beatin' My Head by Jayke Orvis
Don't You Think This Outlaw Bit's Done Got Out of Hand by Waylon Jennings
After the Fire Is Gone by Tracy Nelson with Willie Nelson
As Soon as I Hang Up the Phone by Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn
Tryin' to Untangle My Mind by Chris Stapleton
Paradise Etc. by Peter Case
I've Got a Tender Heart by Merle Haggard
Back in My Day by The Handsome Family
Drift Away by Shake Russell & Michael Hearne CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets
Want to keep this hoedown going after I sign off at midnight? Check out The Big Enchilada Podcast Hillbilly Episode Archive where there are hours of shows where I play music like you hear on the SF Opry.
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican Jan. 26, 2018
I love great old American folk songs and other hoary tunes from past centuries. And I love radical reinterpretations of great American folk songs, ancient murder ballads, epic love ballads, supernatural weirdness, field hollers, proto-Tin Pan Alley standards, Stephen Foster classics, and spirituals.
Neil Young’s Americana, with its fearsome take on “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” (retitled “Jesus’ Chariot” and recast as an appeal to our space-alien forefathers), is a prime example of this. Lesser known is Snakefarm’s Songs From My Funeral, in which singer Anna Domino puts a funky, electronic, atmospheric twist on spooky old tunes like “St. James Infirmary Blues,” “Banks of the Ohio,” and “House of the Rising Sun.”
If stodgy old purists balked at these efforts, Johnny Dowd’s new album Twinkle, Twinkle should give them all heart attacks. Dowd doesn’t bring these songs into the present. He doesn’t take them to the future. He takes them straight to hell — and listeners not only will feel the heat, they’ll smell the devil’s breath.
With Dowd on vocals, guitar (torturing the poor thing), keyboards, and other instruments, plus backing vocals by Anna Coogan and Michael Edmondson, most of the songs here will take on different shades, spotlight hidden corners, and reveal strange new meanings. It’s like a dream in which familiar things — in this case, the lyrics of the songs — melt into menacing new forms. The closest comparison I can come up with is The Residents, those mysterious masked mutants who have applied their strange craft to the works of Elvis, Hank Williams Sr., James Brown, and others. Dowd sounds downright Residential on this album.
Dowd’s prominent drawl is not affected. He was raised in Texas and Oklahoma. But for the last few decades he has resided in Ithaca, New York, where he has earned his daily bread operating a moving company. He didn’t start recording until he was nearly fifty, when he released his 1998 debut, Wrong Side of Memphis, full of off-kilter original murder ballads and other tales of the underbelly.
Starting off Twinkle, Twinkle with an original song called “Execute American Folklore, Again” (an obvious reference to the title of his previous album), Dowd lays out his purpose. And while you’re still scratching your head over that one, he goes into the title song, a version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with industrial percussion, Coogan singing a surreal soprano, and a demonic electronic voice that seems to be mocking Dowd’s earnest recitation.
That’s followed by a Dada-like take on one of my favorite folk songs. Even before Dowd got his hands on it, “The Cuckoo” was filled with mystery, with its seemingly unconnected references to Independence Day (“She never hollers cuckoo ’til the fourth day of July”) and the Jack of Diamonds robbing you of your silver and your gold. It’s an old British ballad that I suspect has evolved into a patchwork of two or three songs. It became a folk-scene standard in the ’50s when Harry Smith put Clarence Ashley’s version of it on his Anthology of American Folk Music. There are great versions by Doc Watson, The Holy Modal Rounders, Taj Mahal, Dave Alvin, and — perhaps my favorite — by Big Brother & The Holding Company. But Dowd does the most cuckoo “Cuckoo.” He makes this bird holler louder than anyone (and several months before the fourth of July).
Dowd’s take on the New Orleans classic “St. James Infirmary Blues” sounds even more ominous than a song about viewing your sweetheart’s corpse in a hospital morgue is supposed to sound. He includes an opening-verse framing device that Cab Calloway and others omitted:
“... Old Joe’s barroom, it was on the corner of the square./The usual crowd was assembled, and Big Joe McKinney was there./He was standing by my shoulder. His eyes were bloodshot red/He turned to the crowd around him and these are the words he said.”
When Dowd sings the part in which the narrator fantasizes about his own funeral, he changes a line, perhaps to add cosmic significance: “Put a $20 gold piece on my watch chain/So that God will know I died standing pat.”
Other highlights of Twinkle, Twinkle include what sounds like a Martian hip-hop interpretation of “Rock of Ages.” Dowd punctuates the versions saying “Rock! I said Rock!” with a crazy guitar twang coming in behind him. On “John the Revelator,” Dowd delivers each line as if he’s relaying information that could get him killed. “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” sounds like a road trip into another dimension. Yes, it’s strange, but I bet Woody Guthrie would have gotten a kick out of it.
And there’s “Tom Dooley,” in which Dowd ends the song by singing a verse of “Jesus Loves Me.” And on “Oh, My Darling, Clementine,” Dowd actually sings the melody, backed up by Coogan on the choruses. This is about as straight as he plays it, at least until the last minute or so of the song — in which the music gets stranger and “Jesus Loves Me” makes a return.
He ends the album with some Bible verse — “Job 17: 11-17” — taking about as many liberties with the Good Book as he does with the folk songs. The Bible says, “If I wait, the grave is my house: I have made my bed in the darkness. I have said to corruption, `You are my father’: to the worm, `You are my mother, and my sister.’” Dowd adds words you never heard in the Bible: “TGIF, thank God it’s Friday, gonna have a party. ... Hey everybody, come on over to my house.”
When my kids were growing up, I warned them not to accept party invitations from strangers spouting Bible verses full of worms and death. But Dowd’s crazy party is pretty hard to resist.
Video time!
Well Hell's bells, I couldn't find any videos of Twinkle Twinkle songs to post here. But here are a few of my favorites from the past.
Here's an ode to Nancy Sinatra:
To this next song, I pledged my eternal love .
And going way way back to 1999, this one from Dowd's second album, Pictures from Life's Other Side this one still haunts my nightmares.
I'm so bummed out about the death of Mark E. Smith, the leader of The Fall, I'm just not up to doing a regular Throwback Thursday today.
Instead I'm just going to post a jumble of some of my ramblings about Smith and The Fall from various reviews I wrote of their albums (from 1989 to a couple of weeks ago.)
Then I'll post some music.
xxxx
I never thought that first (and only) time I saw The Fall in concert, back in the early ’80s, that 30 years later [now closer to 40 years later] I would:
a) be reviewing a brand new Fall album and
b) find that fact reassuring.
Although Fall guy Mark E. Smith was surprisingly open and friendly when I interviewed him over a couple of beers at Evangelo’s that night — until then I thought I might be the only person outside my small circle of friends who loved both Johnny Cash and Captain Beefheart — The Fall’s concert was confusing and even a little threatening.
As I wrote at the time, I felt like Dylan’s Mr. Jones. I knew something was happening there, but I just didn’t know what it was. It took me a couple of years to appreciate and eventually love The Fall, though I’ve never really understood them.
xxx
I had never heard of The Fall but I was intrigued by their press kit. Instead of the hyperbolic raves and slick fluff that record companies crank out to hype their artists, The Fall's press kit consisted of several pages of poorly reproduced Xerox collages of weird photos, typewritten madness and and copies of their concert and record reviews -- many of them negative ... [Smith] carried a little tape recorder to preserve, he said, funny things he had heard on The Fall's American tour. Nonsequitous snippets of conversation, street noises, motel room televisions and so on. Part of the Evangelos interview became part of that tape.
xxxx
More than a decade ago, in reviewing some Fall album or another, I wrote, “I doubt if all the CIA’s computers could crack the garbled ranting of Mark E. Smith.” In recent years I’ve been leaning toward a conspiracy-theory explanation for The Fall’s appeal to its scattered cult.
The band is actually sending coded messages to some alien/Lovecraftian sleeper cell. Some isolated Smith yelp in conjunction with some post-Standells guitar hook causes some shift in brain chemistry in some isolated listener, and next thing you know some unwitting Fall fan in Dalhart, Texas, is making a 4 a.m. drive to the Tucumcari airport to pick up a crate of something unspeakable delivered on a secret flight from Bohemian Grove.
xxx
He still sounds like a crazy old wino who loves to scream at you on the bus, his voice ranging from a menacing growl to a desperate rasp. That instrument is showing signs of wear and tear, but the craziness is still there. His current band is muscular enough to drive home Smith’s message. Whatever the heck that might be.
xxx
To the truly initiated, The Fall is everywhere. Every time you hear a car crash, a distant explosion, thunder cracking, a radio blaring static, a wino screaming profanities at nobody in particular — you hear the voice of Mark E. Smith ranting, grumbling, making rude noises in your head.
Here's some songs:
Check the record check the record, check the guy's track record. HE IS NUTS!
He's totally wired!
The Fall go country!
Now I Wanna Be Your Elf
The Fall in Norway 2006
Mark E. has left the Capitol.
And if that wasn't enough for you, here's my Spotify playlist featuring more than four hours of Fall music.
