Saturday, May 27, 2006

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, May 26, 2006
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell


OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Street Walkin' Woman by Billy Joe Shaver
Motorcycle Mama by I See Hawks in L.A.
My Pretty Quadroon by Jerry Lee Lewis
Crawfishin' by Marcia Ball
We Shall Overcome by Bruce Springsteen
River of Love by T-Bone Burnett
Divers Are Out Tonight by Porter Wagoner

Johnny Armstrong by Michael Martin Murphey
What Am I Doing Hangin' Round by The Monkees
Big Beaver by Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys
Pussy Pussy Pussy by The Light Crust Doughboys
Smoke Smoke Smoke That Cigarette by Tex Williams & His Western Caravan
Stranger in Your Mind by Miss Leslie & Her Juke Jointers
You Only Kiss Me When We Say Goodbye by Cornell Hurd
Stalin Kicked the Bucket by Johnny Dilks
Lead Me On by Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty

Matthew 24 is Knocking at the Door/Girl in Saskatoon/If Jesus Ever Loved a Woman by Johnny Cash
Tiffany Anastasia Lowe by June Carter Cash
Your Great Journey by The Handsome Family
Seeds and Candy by Boris & The Saltlicks
Assembly of Dog by Hundred Year Flood
Rubberball by ThaMuseMeant
Say a Little Prayer by Mary & Mars

But I Love You by Albert & Gage
I Know You're Married (But I Love You Still) by Don Reno & Bill Harrell & The Tennessee Cut-Ups
The Silver Tongued Devil & I by Shooter Jennings
The Window Up Above by George Jones
Poor Old Tom by Richard Buckner
Blue Dreams by Ronny Elliott
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list

Friday, May 26, 2006

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: NEW CACHE OF CASH

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New MexicanMay 19, 2006

Johnny Cash’s decades-spanning career produced a humongous catalog, which even before his death had been heading toward the same mindless route of recycling, repackaging, and regurgitation previously suffered by The Beach Boys and Elvis.

So when I first opened the envelope containing a new double-disc compilation of Cash material called Personal File, I was less than excited.

Until I looked at the song list and realized I hadn’t heard most of these 49 tunes, at least not by Johnny Cash. It turns out that this is a collection of home recordings, just Cash and his guitar, mostly from the mid-’70s, though there are a few stray tunes from the early ’80s. It was a period just past Cash’s height of popularity, a time when he was sliding toward the bitter sidelines of Nashville’s music-industrial complex.

Apparently these are from tapes uncovered, after the singer’s death, in a storeroom in Cash’s home studio. The ones included in this collection — and apparently more collections will follow, as there were “hundreds of boxes” of tapes, according to the press release — are from a group of white boxes marked “Personal File.”

No, it wasn’t a great era for the Man in Black. But this is a powerful collection of music for those of us who loved him. It’s almost as if Johnny Cash is singing songs from beyond the grave for a troubled world that still needs him.

There are a bunch of sentimental songs about home and Mama. There’s a smattering of Irish songs (“I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen,” “Galway Bay”), a set of Alaska (!) songs, capped off by a five-minute recitation of a Robert Service poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”; there are covers of country classics like the Louvin Brothers’ “When I Stop Dreaming,” the Kershaw Brothers’ “Louisiana Man,” and John Prine’s “Paradise.” The recordings also include a tune by Cash’s stepdaughter (and former Santa Fe resident) Carlene Carter, “It Takes One to Know Me,” and “Missouri Waltz,” the state song of Missouri. (Sorry, but I can’t listen to this track without recalling a weird ditty my mama taught me that used the same melody. It starts off, “Mary Margaret Truman is the daughter of the pres/lives up in the White House with her father, Harry S.”)

And there’s an entire disc of gospel songs, including a couple of traditional tunes (“Farther Along,” “Have Thine Own Way Lord”) but also a whole slew of original Cash tunes that never were released before. These are the most important discoveries of Personal File.

He gets downright apocalyptic on a couple of songs. “Look Unto the East,” another Cash original, has such an abundance of alluring alliteration it could cause Kris Kristofferson to croak. “The teacher of truth told tales of troubled times that would begin/And the cynical sower sowed the sorrowful seeds of seven sins.”

The next track is “Matthew 24 (Is Knocking at the Door),” which Cash wrote with his son John Carter Cash in the early ’80s. The title refers to a chapter in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus warns of false Messiahs, wars and rumors of wars, famines, pestilence, and earthquakes — the beginning of the end.

“I heard on the radio rumors of war/People gettin’ ready for battle/And there may be just one more,” Cash sings here. The image of “the great bear from the northland” seems almost quaint now. (For you post-Cold War kids, the “great bear” was Russia, which people my age were supposed to fear and despise.)

Maybe the apocalypse Cash envisioned here didn’t happen right away. But no doubt about it, these are troubling times, and more troubles are certainly ahead.

But if you believe in Cash’s vision of Christianity, the answer is not to head for the hills — it’s to help and love each other. The songs here I like best are those that express Cash’s brand of Christian love and tolerance. In “If Jesus Ever Loved a Woman,” a song about Mary Magdalene (Holy Da Vinci Code, Batman!), Cash says of Jesus, “He never did condemn a man or woman just for being man or woman/and he always will forgive if someone tells him that they’re really truly sorry/but couldn’t stand the hypocrite, a person who’d pretend that they were holy and were not/I think he’d love someone like Mary Magdalene quite a lot.” This song is uncredited, at least on the advance copy I have. But I suspect, if it’s not an original, it might have been written by June Carter Cash. The phrasing, meter, and rhyme scheme remind me of some of her songs such as “Tiffany Anastasia Lowe.”

“Sanctified” seems to be a dialogue between a joyful, religious man and his inner demon. Cash plays both roles, speaking in his gruffest baritone for the voice of doubt and temptation and singing his better self’s response. “I don’t believe in God,” the lower voice mocks. “Well God bless you/you ain’t got no argument for what I feel inside,” the singer responds.

“No Earthly Good,” which has a melody eerily similar to “The Times They Are a Changin’,” razzes the holier-than-thou who are “so Heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good,” charging them to help the “hungry hands reaching up here from the ground.”

Similarly, on “What on Earth (Will You Do for Heaven’s Sake)” he asks, “Did you feed the poor in spirit and befriend the persecuted?” The song, he explains in the spoken introduction, was inspired by looking at the stars through a telescope from his home in Jamaica. “God cares for each and every one of us,” he says. “I guess he’s as small as we want him to be or as big as we want him to be. Although we’re earthbound, we can still be more like him if we try.”

Some say this country is headed toward theocracy. I sure hope that’s not true, and I’m pretty sure Cash wouldn’t want it that way. Maybe the antidote is the Gospel According to Johnny.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

ROUNDHOUSE ROUND-UP: DGA WON'T SAY WHERE AMERIQUEST CATERED

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
May 25, 2006


A spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association contacted me to inform me that last week’s column about an in-kind $102,000 contribution to the DGA from a mortgage company that just settled a multimillion-dollar deceptive-practices class-action suit with New Mexico and 48 other states contained an error.

The contribution from Ameriquest — which according to a federal disclosure report was for “catering and facilities” — was not used for a spring DGA conference in Arizona, spokesman Jon Summers said.

The dates of in-kind contributions listed on the disclosure reports, Summers explained, are the dates on letters from the contributors listing the value of the contributions — and usually are different from the dates when the contributions were used.

In this case, the listed date of the contribution, March 31, coincided with the DGA conference in Phoenix.

So I erred in connecting those dots.

Ameriquest is a company founded by DGA chairman Gov. Bill Richardson’s friend Roland Arnall, who now is ambassador to The Netherlands. Many Democrats opposed his nomination last year because of the class-action suit, which was prompted by thousands of consumer complaints around the country. That didn’t stop Richardson from endorsing him for the post last year, even while New Mexico was suing his company.

So if the $102,000 worth of catering and facility rental didn’t go for the Arizona shindig, what was it used for?

The DGA isn’t saying. “We won’t go beyond what is on the report,” Summers said this week.

Frozen Lightning: Here’s the perfect gift for the opposition research operative on your shopping list.

Frozen Lightning, subtitled "Bill Richardson’s Strike on the Political Landscape of New Mexico," is a quality paperback written by “Bill Althouse & a Thousand and One New Mexicans.”

Althouse is a Santa Fe author and longtime Richardson critic. The index cites works by everyone I know in the press corps, including yours truly. The book, whose cover is a photo of Richardson with lightning coming out of his underarms and a mushroom cloud exploding from below his belt — is scathing.

“Richardson rules his empire much like a prison warden,” Althouse writes, “walling off his enemies by stripping them of rank and placing them in a kind of solitary confinement that is the political equivalent of purgatory.”

And that’s just Page 1.

Almost any Richardson flap, foible or fumble you can think of can be found in Frozen Lightning. Wen Ho Lee; Guy Riordan; Eric Serna; Gerald Peters; the gov-ex-temp employees; Milton Sanchez and the Retiree Health Care Authority; the hiring of a good chunk of the state press corps; Sen. John Grubesic’s “flabby king” op-ed; the Hollywood connections; Billy the Kid; trains, planes, speeding sport-utility vehicles and spacecraft.

There are recaps of well-known stories and outright innuendo from anonymous sources that you haven’t read anywhere else (and probably never will).

Sometimes the rhetoric goes way overboard, such as calling Richardson a “tool for fascism” and “a politician driven to evil by his presidential aspirations.”

But anyone interested in New Mexico politics will have fun reading it.


And an inside color photo of the governor surrounded by a bevy of buxom belly dancers is itself almost worth the $12.95 price tag.

Election notes: The e-mail arrived too late to include it in my secretary of state candidate profiles Wednesday.

But a couple of groups active in election reform — VerifiedVotingNM and United Voters of New Mexico — made a joint endorsement of Stephanie Gonzales in that Democratic primary.

These groups pushed the bill requiring paper-ballot voting in all New Mexico counties.

Roxanne Rivera, who is working for state Sen. Joe Carraro’s U.S. Senate campaign, e-mailed me saying that I was wrong to say one of Carraro’s rivals was the only GOP candidate to have paid staffers.

Rivera said she’s being paid as communications director. Plus the Albuquerque senator has a paid campaign coordinator and a paid staff to handle campaign signs.

The Lamb that roared: Former state Election Director Denise Lamb said I made a slight error in a recent article where I paraphrased a quote about her frustrations with a former Bernalillo County clerk.

I said Lamb wanted to hang the clerk out of her window at the Secretary of State’s Office. But Lamb, who originally was quoted in The Los Angeles Times, says she wanted to dangle the clerk out of the clerk’s own window.

The difference? The Secretary of State’s Office is only two stories highs. The clerk’s office in Albuquerque was on the sixth floor.

Monday, May 22, 2006

I'M NOT A CROOK

I just received a call from the New Mexican's cop reporter Jason Auslander asking if I'd been arrested over the weekend.

Apparently some poor boob with the name "Steven Terrell" was picked up Friday by the Santa Fe police. Jason didn't know what the charge was.

So if you read something about Steve Terrell getting arrested -- IT WASN'T ME! I was busy hosting The Santa Fe Opry on Friday night and taking strange pictures with my son all day Saturday.

I don't have time for jail. I'm innocent!

BOB WILLS STATUE VANDALIZED

Damn, this makes me mad!

from The Associated Press:

GRUENE, Texas -- Vandals toppled a wooden statue of the King of Western Swing. Now he has to wear a sling.

"We came in (Wednesday) morning, and he was laying on his back with his arm broken off," said Clair Devers of the Lone Star Music store in Gruene, home of the 8-foot-tall carving of Bob Wills by local musician Doug Moreland.

Gruene is about 30 miles north of San Antonio.

The music store and a radio station offered a $500 reward for information leading to an arrest. The vandalism apparently happened early Wednesday and could not have been accomplished easily.


Read Full Story HERE

BIRTH OF A PILLOW

Congratulations to my pal, New Mexican Web editor and Bubbadino veteran Stefan Dill (that's Mustafa Stefan Dill to you) for landing a soundtrack gig for an upcoming independent Indian film. Here's the press release:

The Sama' Duo (sarodist/oudist Mustafa Stefan Dill and percussionist Jefferson Voorhees) have been chosen to provide the soundtrack score for an upcoming film by independent film director Sharmy Pandey, a Bengali filmaker and writer based in Kolkata, India.

This will be Ms. Pandey's third film to date. Entitled Birth of a Pillow, it will be a " film which deals with Indian sexuality", according to a statement on a blog by a Bengali artist collective to which she belongs.

Her experimental short Ebang Falguni (2004), based on the text of a lesser known '60s alternative Bengali poet Falguni Roy, has been screened to critical acclaim at the Florence Indian Film Festival, the Alternative Film Festival, Picciano, Italy, Tirana Film festival and others.

Her second film, 29 Minutes of Loneliness has also gotten strong attention and is currently being presented at film festivals, including the Stuttgart Film Festival, July 2006.

Birth of a Pillow is currently finishing filming in and around Kolkata.

As the Sama' Duo places a lot of emphasis and experience on improvisation, the Duo will take an interesting approach by recording several passes of improvised takes (some with differing instrumentation) while watching and absorbing the film. A few area guest artists may be invited to participate in some of the passes, and several takes may appear simultaneously in the final mix.

Final post -production and synchronization will take place in Kolkata in July. Mustafa Stefan Dill will go to Kolkata to help in this phase.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, May 21, 2006
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell


OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Love Train by The Yayhoos
Compared to What by Les McCann & Eddie Harris
I Want to Take You Higher by Sly & The Family Stone with Steven Tyler & Robert Randolph
Big Wave by Pearl Jam
Ifa by Tunji Oyelana & The Benders
You're Breakin' My Heart by Harry Nilsson

Town Without Pity by Gene Pitney
The Dance by Prince
Into the Woods by My Morning Jacket
Tobacco Road by The Nashville Teens
Bubble Gum Independence (from Radio Phnom Penh)
Pencil Neck Geek by Fred Blassie

New Orleans Set
Miss New Orleans by Clay Cotton
It's All Over Now by Rebirth Brass Band
Back Water Blues by Irma Thomas
New Orleans Cookin' by Cyril Neville
Bald Headed by Dr. John
When the Saints Go Marching In by Eddie Bo
When the Saints Go Marching Back In by Kirk Whalum with Coolio etc.
Drop Me Off in New Orleans by Kermit Ruffins
Cryin' in the Streets by Buckwheat Zydeco
Mardi Gras in New Orleans by Professor Longhair
Mighty Mighty Chief by Bo Dollis & The Wild Magnolias
Louisiana 1927 by Marcia Ball
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

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