WACKY WEDNESDAY: Keep Popping Your Weasel

 

Pop? Goes me?

Back when I was a "musician," in the early 1980s, I used to do this schtick between songs. I'd warn the audience about the "secret drug lyrics" in the beloved children's song -- you guessed it -- "Pop! Goes the Weasel."

In a phony stern voice, in which I tried to sound like a weird cross between Jack Webb, Paul Harvey and Sonny Bono (from that weird anti-marijuana movie they made us watch at Santa Fe Mid High -- I'd recite the lyrics that threatened our children.

"Around around the mulberry bush" I'd say, usually using air quotes for those last two words.

"The monkey, meaning the monkey on your back, chased The Weasel, who apparently is some sort of drug dealer or pimp,

"The monkey thought it all was good fun"  Again, dripping with sarcasm.

Then I'd jab an imaginary hypodermic into my left arm.

"Pop goes the weasel," I'd say, half singing the line.

But wait, there's more!

"A penny for a spool of thread," I'd say,  again with the air quotes, as if I'm explaining drug lingo. Then my voice would turn ominous: "A penny for a needle,

"That's the way the money goes ..."

Then again the fake jab"

"Pop goes the weasel," with my sing-song voice drifting off as if from some dope stupor.

Yep, it all was good fun. Fortunately there are no known recordings of me doing that.

"Pop! Goes the Weasel," probably my favorite song with an exclamation point in the title, has a long history, documented in a 2022 article in American Songwriter by Jake Uitti.

1937 sheet music

Pop! Goes the Weasel” is a traditional English-language nursery rhyme and singing game. It’s become so popular and stood the test of time when it comes to the enjoyment of young children, that the melody is often used in Jack-in-the-box toys to this day.

While there are many different versions of the rhyme today, in England, where the song originated, most understand the basic verse to be:

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,

Half a pound of treacle.

That’s the way the money goes,

Pop! Goes the weasel.

Tuppenny rice? Treacle? Them Brits sure have some weird food. (Uitti explained, "Tuppenny rice is cheap starch and treacle is a cheap sweetener. Doesn't make it sound any less disgusting.)

In many early versions the "mulberry bush" was a "cobbler's bench." And, instead of the "penny for a spool of thread" part, some versions have this refrain:

Up and down the City Road,

In and out the Eagle,

That’s the way the money goes,

Pop! Goes the weasel.

The Eagle Tavern supposedly was a swinging joint in London that's still around today. The webpage for The Eagle at the Know Your London site even includes an interpretation of the lyrics:

One explanation is that the word ‘weasel’ was slang for a tailor’s iron and the word ‘pop’ was slang for pawning goods. The lyrics basically allude to pawning items in order to gain money for alcohol and loose-living. They date from the 1850s. Another explanation claims that ‘weasel’ refers to a purse made of weasel-skin, which opened and closed with a snap or ‘pop’. The ‘popping of the weasel’ in the song, therefore, refers to the opening of the purse, and consequent spending of money. 

That's kind of like my old drug dealer interpretation.

In 1852 there was a dance craze in England. They didn't yet know the Twist or the Funky Chicken, but all the cool Brits were doing the "Pop! Goes the Weasel." 

In a Library of Congress Performing Arts Blog blog post in 2016, Sharon McKinley wrote of sheet music from 1856 she had found. "What I found amusing was that it had exhaustive dance directions printed on the last page," McKinley wrote.

She also talks about earlier sheet music from 1853, which also had dance instructions and said "the dance has been `lately introduced at Her Majesty’s and Nobilities balls' in England ..."

Again from McKinley:

By the time the rhyme and tune arrived on [American] shores, I’m sure the origin of the text had already been lost. The words developed in various ways here, as they did back in England. From an English nonsense rhyme with any number of verses, it turned into an American blackface minstrel song with equally nonsensical verses. We own a few different arrangements of this version. Charley Twiggs’s 1855 song includes what seem to be the “standard” minstrel show verses, with the addition of a few more verses with topical political overtones.

Uitti's article lists several versions of the lyrics. I like these he found in autobiographical novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiographical Pioneer Girl, which Wilder wrote for her daughter in 1930.

All around the cobbler’s bench,

The monkey chased the weasel.

The preacher kissed the cobbler’s wife—

Pop! goes the weasel!

Early recordings are hard to find. Here's an instrumental version by British-born, French-named American violinist Charles D'Almaine. The usually reliable Discogs dates the record to 1904, though whoever posted it on Archives.org says it's from 1909. D'Almaine's version includes some nice Irish reels.

Naturally The Three Stooges were fans of the song. In their 1934 short Punch Drunks,  Curley goes wild -- and apparently gets supernatural strength -- every time he hears the song. Here's the climax of that exciting Stooge adventure.

Bill Haley & The Comets in 1952 did a rock 'n' roll version of a Weasel variant called "Stop Beatin' Around the Mulberry Bush" which had been recorded a couple of decades earlier by Les Brown, Tommy Dorsey and others. It's different words to a different melody (basically the kiddy song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush", but close your eyes and you'll see a monkey chasing the weasel:)

The ever-cool Anthony Newley in 1963 performed this swinging version of Weasel, using the British lyrics, in 1963:

The Beatles recorded this instrumental for the BBC radio show Pop Go The Beatles in 1963:

In the early '90s, the forgotten white rap group 3rd Base brought "Weasel" into the hip-hop universe. Supposedly the Weasel in this version was 3rd Base's arch rival Vanilla Ice, who was depicted in this video by Henry Rollins:

And finally, Andy Kaufman in the '70s used to lipsych to a record of the song by something called The Crown Records Studio Group:

Check out Alan Sherman's parody of "Pop! Goes The Weasel" on this early Wacky Wednesday post

For more deep dives into songs, check out The Stephen W. Terrell Web Log Songbook

Remembering Sinead O'Connor:

 

Sinead on stage at Lollapalooza, July 1995, Denver
Photo by Steve Terrell

I'm still pretty shook about the death of Sinead O'Connor.

As I wrote on social media yesterday, I got to see her in person twice -- once at Lollapalooza 1995 in Denver and ten a few years later when she opened for The Chieftains at Red Rocks. Both shows fantastic. 

I'd like to share a couple of things I've written about the lady back in the 1990s.

Let's start with an excerpt from an old music column published not long after her infamous final appearance on Saturday Night Live and subsequent experience being booed off the stage at a star-studded Bob Dylan  30th Anniversary Concert Celebration in October 1992.

From Terrell’s Tune-up, Santa Fe New Mexican, 10-30-92

O'Connor recently tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live , causing one of the biggest public backlashes against a rock singer since John Lennon declared The Beatles bigger than Jesus.

... Public reaction was swift and predictable. Even Madonna got in on the act, saying O'Comnnor's action was tasteless ...

… But the supreme irony was when O’Connor was booed at the recent Bob Dylan tribute concert. 

Those self-righteous Dylan fans apparently don’t remember their hero getting booed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by prissy folkies who didn’t like the fact that Dylan had taken up the electric guitar.

Kris Kristofferson showed what he was made of when he comforted O’Connor on stage.

My question is why didn’t Dylan himself say anything to the crowd?

Did the great one not want to offend his pay-per-view television audience?

[concerning her Saturday Night Live controversy}] a…one thing you’ve got to admit, is that O’Connor illustrated the long dormant potential for excitement in live television.

She illustrated that point better than anyone since Jack Ruby. …

And yes, after reading about Kristofferson coming out on stage to comfort Sinead, my regard for Kris, which already was tremendous, tripled.

Just a few years later I saw Sinead in person at Lollapalooza 1995 in Denver. I was there mostlyb for Sonic Youth and Beck, but Sinead's performance was the biggest surprise for me:

From "No Love Lost for Courtney," Santa Fe New Mexican, 7-30-95

One of the most intriguing aspects of this Lollapalooza traveling rock festival line-up was that it featured two women who each have been considered The Wicked Witch of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Courtney Love and Sinead O’Connor. …

You know the attributes of Wicked Witch. Her evil spells cause the morals of the nation’s youth to decline. Sometimes they lead male rockers to stray. They cause crops to fail and cattle to die.

The position of Wicked Witch was first assumed by Yoko Ono in the late 1960s, though I suppose some could argue that the concept had its origins with Marianne Faith (the naked girl at The Rolling Stones’ drug bust!)

At the beginning of this decade, the witch’s proverbial broom had been passed to O’Connor.

When her record company wanted to market her sexuality, she angrily shaved her head – just like one of them Manson girls! She refused to have “The Star Spangled Banner” played before one of her shows. She tore up a picture of the pope right there on national TV.

After that, Sinead seemed to play fade away, while a new witch – who was even more wicked arose – Courtney Love …

[I go on to bash Courtney’s predictable shtick at Lollapalooza before getting back to Sinead]

… In her long white dress and her newly grown hair, the diminutive singer looked more like a Celtic goddess than an angry, unsmiling being she once had been. And she sang as beautifully as she looked.

No, O’Connor hasn’t become Little Mary Sunshine. Some of her rage remains, as apparent in her rap song that compares her native Ireland with an abused child. [“Famine” from her then-latest album Universal Mother] 

And she’s still got guts. It took courage to do a pretty a capella song for a crowd more attune with The Jesus Lizard and Sonic Youth. But she pulled it off. [I can’t swear to this, but that song might have been "Tiny Grief Song," which is on Universal Mother.] 

In short, a listener felt uplifted after O’Connor’s performance. One can only hope Courtney caught a couple of O’Connor’s sets [on the tour]. She could learn a lot

Here is my favorite song that Sinead performed on Lollapalooza that day. This is a more recent version: 

Thank YOU, Sinead!

This is a photo of a mural in Dublin I saw a few years ago.

WACKY WEDNESDAY: The Musical Legacy of Randy "Macho Man" Savage

Interesting fact: I used to have this purple T-shirt. I bought it when I saw the

Macho Man wrestle at Tingley Coliseum in Albuquerque circa early '90s.

When some people think of music and "Macho Man," they might be thinking of an old Village People song.

But people who think that are wrong. Instead, they should immediately think of the music of the late great Randy Mario Poffo, better known as Randy "Macho Man" Savage, whose contributions to popular music are not quite as well known as his contributions to professional wrestling.

Or Slim Jims.

But those of us who truly cherish the memory of the Macho Man also appreciate his contributions to music, specifically hip hop. He was a major force in White Rap, as evidenced in songs like this (which is aimed at longtime rival Hulk Hogan)

Here's another:

Here's a tribute, by one Mike Diva, to the wrestling, the music, the Slim Jims of Randy, who died in 2011.

But, surprisingly, Randy had his detractors. One was a radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge, who spent many years as Hulk Hogan's leading sycophant, who even let the Hulkster have sex with his wife. 

But that stupid tune does nothing to diminish the glory that was Randy Savage, who was so mighty, British composer honored him with this piece in 1901 -- More than 50 years before Savage was born. And Savage was humbled enough to use it for his entrance music.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Walter Brennan's Musical Legacy

Dag nabbit, it's Walter Brennan's birthday! He was born 125 years ago today in Lynn, Mass,

Happy birthday, Walter!

He was one of the country's best -known character actors starting back in the 1930s, winning his first Oscar for his role as Swedish lumberjack Swan Bostrom in a film called Come and Get It. 

He's become best-known for being the crusty sidekick of cowboy heroes like Gary Cooper (The Westerner and others) and  John Wayne (Rio Bravo and others). And I first knew him as Grandpappy Amos in a TV sitcom, The Real McCoys, which ran from 1957 to 1963.

But he also was a recording artist, a pioneer of white rap (or maybe, in Brennan's case, we should call it "clip-clop" music

Here are some of his tunes:



Mel Tillis wrote it, Kenny Rogers made it a hit. But Walter nailed it:



You have to have known that Walter would have at least one maudlin mama song


And this one actually was a huge hit in 1962:

WACKY WEDNESDAY: Further Adventures in White Rap

Yo, homebodies!

A couple of years ago on a quiet Wacky Wednesday I posted an introduction into the world of White Rap. You can find that masterpiece HERE.

There I quoted Irwin Chusid from his liner notes for the classic 1994 Spy Magazine compilation White Men Can't Wrap.

White rap is a centuries-old tradition; the original white rappers were square-dance callers improvising rhymes for Saturday-night barn parties in America's rural backwaters. Like today's rappers, they were seen as debauchers, imperiling the morals of the young. The fiddle was "the instrument of the devil"; church leaders banned it. The callers' freestyle rhymes teased with erotic innuendos ("Duck for the oyster/Dig for the clam/Knock a hole in the old tin can").  ... it was all about sex and forbidden behavior! It was the roots of today's white rap culture."


Let's start off with the works of three classic rockers who, in the 1980s, proved they were down with the hippity hop.

First there's Rappin' Randy.



Lou Reed declared himself "The Original Wrapper."



And there's no denying that when Brian Wilson raps, he's still a genius. A very stable genius. Paging Dr. Landy!



Just for the heck of it, here's one of the classic old hillbilly "white rap" tunes like Chusid talked about. This song by Seven Foot Dilly & His Dill Pickles is from a cool compilation called The Roots of Rap.



But there is not, nor will there ever be a white rapper greater than the one and only Devastatin' Dave (the Turntable Slave). Here he is with a positive message for the youth.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Songs for the Truck Stop

An overflow crowd at a public meeting in Santa Fe showed up to protest a proposed Flying J truck stop off I-25 south of the city.

According to a news story by my Santa Fe New Mexican colleague Justin Horwath, residents of the nearby Rancho Viejo neighborhood claimed the truck stop would bring unwanted traffic, crime and pollution. One guy even warned of the danger of light pollution coming from a 24 truck stop.

In other words, a fairly typical Santa Fe NIMBY battle. I must have covered a million of 'em back when I had the City Hall beat.

But for a lover of vintage country music, there just seems something un-American about attacking a truck stop,

As any serious country music fan knows, a truck stop is a hallowed place, an oasis on the highway, where a pretty waitress will pour you another cup of coffee (for it is the best in the land!)

A truck stop is where the brave men and women who bring the food to our supermarkets, and other goods to our stores can take a shower, grab a burger and a piece of pie and share a little face-to-face conversation with fellow humans to relieve the tedium that white-line brings.

Surely that outweighs a little light pollution.

Whenever someone protests a truck stop, somewhere out on the Lost Highway, the ghost of Big Joe sheds a quiet tear as he drives his Phantom 309 through the shadows.

O.K., I'll stop. Enjoy some classic American truck driver songs. Most of these have been banging around in my head since I read Justin's story,

I first heard "Truck Drivin' Man" done by Buck Owens. But it was written and first recorded back in 1954 by an Alabama-born singer named Terry Fell.

UPDATE 7-8-17: Wow! Just a couple of weeks after I posted this, someone yanked the Terry Fell version off of YouTube. So I guess we'll just have to settle for the Buck Owens cover.



Dave Dudley --  born David Darwin Pedruska in Spencer, Wisc. -- is best known for his truck-driver songs in the 1960s. His best-known song is this hit from 1963.



Red Simpson was a pioneer of the Bakersfield Sound as well as an important purveyor of truck driving songs. "Roll, Truck Roll" is my favorite Simpson tune.



Kitty Wells, one of the giants of 1950s country music, sang a sweet testimonial to truck stop waitresses



Dick Curless, a New Englander who wrote many truck driving songs in the 1960s, did this song about "truck stops with swingin' chicks" in this tune called "Chick Inspector."//



Here's another Red, Woodrow Wilson "Red" Sovine, who made it big with truck driver tunes. He's responsible for the spooky "Big Joe & The Phantom 309." This maudlin little weeper, also a "talking" song -- or maybe you can call it "white rap" -- was even a bigger hit for Sovine. It's about a guy who drives a truck called the "Giddy Up Go."



But this one is my favorite truck driving song of all time. I prefer the version by New Mexico's own Last Mile Ramblers, who performed and recorded it back in the '70s. But a Texan named Doye O'Dell was the first to record "Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves" back in 1952. The song features a hotshot steel guitarist named Speedy West.



You can bet your bottom dollar that I'm going to play a big load of truck driver songs on The Santa Fe Opry Friday night on KSFR.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: In Praise of American Epic

Will Shade with The Memphis Jug Band

OK, my advice to you is to quit reading this blog post and go sit yourself in front of your TV -- or your iPad or whatever you use for a TV these days -- and start watching the PBS series American Epic. 

It's a 3-part series about American roots music in the early 20th Century, co-produced by Jack White and T-Bone Burnett and narrated by Robert Redford. There is lots of rare footage and photos, a soundtrack full of spooky old country, blues and folk classics and interviews with living musicians -- Charlie Musselwhite, Taj Mahal, Willie Nelson etc. -- talking about how this music enriched their lives.

Episode 1 of the series is already available. "The Big Bang" focuses on two great acts from the 1920s, The Carter Family and The Memphis Jug Band, discovered by Ralph Peer, the Columbia Records A&R man who traveled the south seeking recording artists, black and white, to appeal to rural audiences.  (You can watch on your computer HERE.)

Below is a trailer for the series, followed by some songs that are featured in that first episode.





Here's Jimmie Rodgers, foreshadowing MTV by 50 years or so,



Here are Maybelle and Sara Carter reunited on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970. Johnny says it's their first time performing together in 27 years (though actually they'd recorded together in 1963 and did a bunch of shows together in the '60s.)



I love whoever decided to film this song by Whistler's Jug Band way back when.


In American Epic, the rapper Nas compares jug band music with gangsta rap. “These guys are talking about carrying guns, shooting something, protecting their honor, chasing after some woman who’s done them dirty. It didn’t start with hip-hop. It started a long time ago. It started with America.”

Here's The Memphis Jug Band singing about what Kinky Friedman calls "Peruvian Marching Powder."



And here's American Epic: The Soundtrack on Spotify. But listen to it after you watch the show!

WACKY WEDNESDAY: Got Plenty of Lemon, Got Plenty of Wine

Well, it's a good good wine,
 It really make you feel so fine

Today I'm going to salute, and hopefully turn a few people on to one of my favorite lesser-known, under-rated and unsung (actually, it was sung) Frank Zappa songs of all time:

"WPLJ" -- (That's White Port and Lemon Juice for all you squares) -- which was the opening track on The Mother of Invention's 1970 album Burnt Weenie Sandwich.

I was a student at Santa Fe High School when Burnt Weenie first came out and WPLJ immediately became part of the jukebox of my mind the first time I heard it.

It's one of Zappa's over-the-top doo-wop extravaganzas. I almost wonder whether this was an outtake from Cruising with Ruben & The Jets, released just a couple of years before. Burnt Weenie Sandwich ends with another Rubenesque number called "Valerie" (originally recorded by Jackie & The Starlites.)

Let's take a listen, shall we:



Like I say, I loved "WPLJ," from the start. The sheer absurdity of going on and on in praising this low-rent drink always made me laugh. But what really made the tune was the finish, that  crazy Spanish rap by Mother Roy Estrada at the end of the song:

  “The modern-day pachuco refuses to die.”
Ruben Sano:

Por qué no consigues tu . . . tu carnal que nos compre some wine ese, ándale, pinche bato, puto, hombre, no te hagas nalga, hombre . . . (chale!) no seas tan denso, hombre (chale!), ándale, dile, porque no merecer, ándale, pinche vino, más sua . . . más suave es, más . . . más lindo que la chingada, hombre, ándale, pinche bato, hombre, quiere tu carnal, hombre, tu carnal ese, tú, tú sabes, tú sabes esto de la movida, tú sabes la movida, ese, tú sabes cómo es, tú sabes, pinche vino, puta, ándale, pinche bato, cabrón, ándale ... (Transcription from  Zappa Wiki Jawaka) 

To me it sounded like Santa Fe in 1970! I had tons of friends who talked just like that.

By the way, I ran this through Google Translate and came up with the English version:

Why not get your. . . your carnal buy us some wine that, go ahead, click bato, fucking, man, do not get your butt, man. . . (chale!) Do not be so dense, man (chale!), go ahead, tell, because they deserve, go ahead, click wine, more sua. . . softer, more. . . cuter than a bitch, man, go ahead, click bato man wants your carnal man your carnal that, you, you know, you know this from the move, the move you know, that, you know how it is, you you know, fucking wine, whore, go ahead, click bato, bastard, go ahead

I'm sure that's 100 percent correct.

But "WPLJ" was not a Zappa original. He was covering an obscure Salinas, California doo-wop group called The 4 Deuces, who recorded as a B-side in 1956. The song was used in an ad for for Italian Swiss Colony, a company that produced white port.

Here's how that sounded:



But notice, the Deuces don't include the magical Spanish spoken-word performance at the end. I always wondered what inspired Zappa to do that.

Then in 2002, Arhoolie Records released a bitchen compilation called Pachuco Boogie full of Mexican-American hipster jazz between 1948 and 1950, mainly in Los Angeles. A big chunk of the selections, including the title song were by one  Edmundo Martínez Tostado, an El Paso native better known by his stage name: Don Tosti.

Tosti and his group also recorded under the names Don Ramone Sr. y su Orquesta and Cuarteto de Ramon Martinez.

Whatever he called his band, these two songs make me thirsty for some white port and lemon juice and hungry for a burnt weenie sandwich.

I'd say mystery solved.

WACKY WEDNESDAY: The Secret History of White Rap

I'm not talking Vanilla Ice here ...

Decades before before The Sugar Hill Gang -- years before The Last Poets or Gil Scott Heron even -- courageous, (or at least shameless) Caucasians created their own forms of rap music that swept the nation.

Or at least made for some pretty weird novelty records.

The late, lamented Spy Magazine released a hilarious compilation called White Men Can't Wrap, which showcased many of the classics of the genre, some of which are included below.

The collection included liner notes by none other than Irwin Chusid, perhaps the nation's greatest expert on "outsider" music, and a major fan of all sorts of strange and wonderful songs.
Chusid sayeth:

White rap is a centuries-old tradition; the original white rappers were square-dance callers improvising rhymes for Saturday-night barn parties in America's rural backwaters. Like today's rappers, they were seen as debauchers, imperiling the morals of the young. The fiddle was "the instrument of the devil"; church leaders banned it. The callers' freestyle rhymes teased with erotic innuendos ("Duck for the oyster/Dig for the clam/Knock a hole in the old tin can").

The stuff they taught you in the grade-school gymnasium, that cornball mountain music with the do-si-dos - it was all about sex and forbidden behavior! It was the roots of today's white rap culture. Herewith, a tribute." (Thanks to the ever-excellent Music for Maniacs blog for transcribing that for their post about White Men Can't Wrap a few years ago.)

Besides its roots in square-dance calling as Chusid notes, another major manifestation of white rap was "talking blues," Folksingers like woody Guthrie and the young Bob Dylan loved the style and included several talking blues tunes in their repertoires.

But the style goes back at least to the mid-20s. South Carolina entertainer Chris Bouchillon recorded a song called "Talking Blues' in 1926. His song "Born in Hard Luck" is even better.


Hank Williams played his own style of talking blues also, in is guise as Luke the Drifter.



But hillbilly singers were not the only purveyors of white rap. In the late '50s comedian Lenny Bruce made this beatnik-jazz contribution.



By the 1960s, white rap was in full blossom. There were big radio hits like "Big Bad John" by Jimmy Dean, "Old Rivers by Walter Brennan," "Ringo by Lorne Green and "Gallant Men," a patriotic march by Everett McKinley Dirksen, whose day job at the time was minority leader of the U.S. Senate. (I posted a YouTube of that on a previous Wacky Wednesday.)

But the greatest white rapper of them all in the 1960s was not an actor or senator. He was Napoleon XIV (real name: Jerry Samuels)  who recorded this sensitive take on behavioral-health issues called "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" This track actually was a crude form of hip hop, just a guy reciting lyrics over a beat and an ominous siren. Why has Napoleon XIV not been sampled more?



Finally, I know that technically he doesn't qualify for this category, but for his 1967 song "Don't Blame the Children," I believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. should be considered at least an honorary  white rapper.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: New Ones from Dowd and Slackeye

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
Feb. 13, 2015

Johnny Dowd writes his songs like a sniper aims his gun. Sometimes his songs are like a captured serial killer’s confession. They’re full of regret, shame, venom, horrifying humor, and uncomfortable truths.

Dowd’s new album, That’s Your Wife on the Back of My Horse, has a title based on one of the most cocky, swaggering lines in the history of the blues, from Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love”: “The Sheriff says, ‘Is you Guitar Watson?’ in a very deep voice/I say, ‘Yes sir, brother Sheriff, and that’s your wife on the back of my horse.’ ”

This time out, Dowd played virtually all the instruments himself — exceptions are vocal contributions from Anna Coogan, who sounds so much like Dowd’s old bandmate Kim Sherwood-Caso it’s spooky; a guitar solo on “Words Are Birds” from Mike Cook; and a brief appearance by Dowd’s regular band on the end of “Teardrops.”

Dowd himself has compared the record to his first one, Wrong Side of Memphis. That late-1990s album is also mostly just Dowd on a variety of instruments. But it is more acoustic and rootsy, based in country and blues. On this new one, the music behind the lyrics is crazier than ever: low-tech electronica; rasty, distorted guitar licks; insane beats from an ancient drum machine over Dowd’s growling drawl and Coogan’s angelic melodies. It’s “New Year’s Eve in the nuthouse,” as Archie Bunker would say.

The album kicks off with the title song, Dowd reciting the lyrics that serve as a taunting invocation:
“That’s your wife on the back of my horse/That’s my hand in your pocket/Around my neck is your mother’s locket/Your sisters will dance at my wake/Your brother will blow out the candles on my birthday cake/That’s your wife on the back of my horse.”

This is followed by a funky, boastful rap, “White Dolemite,” a salute to the heroic persona of “party” record artist and blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore. “I live the life men dream about/Stand up, people, give me a shout,” Dowd declares, as Coogan responds, “Hot pants! He needs a spanking.”

J. Dowd
Photo by Kat Dalton

On “The Devil Don’t Bother Me,” Dowd sounds like a death-row inmate contemplating theology while awaiting injection. “An angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other/Jesus, He’s my savior, but the devil is my brother.”

And that's just one of Dowd’s characters who seem like a coiled snake about to strike. On “Nasty Mouth,” Dowd’s narrator spews harsh judgment about a woman, who, I would guess, rejected him. “I’m just trying to forget the words that came out of your nasty mouth,” he spits over ambient blips and bleeps and a dangerous fuzz guitar.

Another favorite here include “Female Jesus,” which has a bluesy, swampy groove and is about a rural Okie prostitute who, Dowd says, “satisfied my body/She purified my brain/Then she called the undertaker and put my casket on a train.” Easily the album’s most melodic track, The song “Why?” sounds like a ’60s soul ballad left in the forest to be eaten by wolves, while the upbeat “Sunglasses” could have been a summertime pop hit … on the planet Neptune. (“Boys who wear sunglasses get laid,” Coogan informs us.)

At the end of the last song, “Teardrops,” a slow, dreamy (well, nightmarish) dirge about the fall of a powerful man (“In a world of little men, I walked like a giant/If I’d have been a lawyer, God would’ve been my client”), Dowd thanks his audience and an announcer says, “The ultrascary troubadour has left the building. With your wife. On the back of his horse.”

Left the building? Well, maybe. But I bet he actually just went to the dark alley behind the building.

Where he’s waiting ...

Also recommended

* Giving My Bones to the Western Lands by Slackeye Slim. Joe Frankland is another singer-songwriter who likes to explore the shadows, though his music is rooted in the country, folk, and spaghetti-western realms. Under the name Slackeye Slim, Frankland’s songs frequently are cast in an Old West setting, though his themes of sin, redemption, loneliness, desperation, and freedom are universal.

It’s been four years since his previous album, El Santo Grial: La Pistola Piadosa, which I compared to Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. Since then, he’s moved from Montana to a ranch near Mesa, Colorado. He says he recorded this album in “dilapidated buildings” as well as on his front porch, “as hundreds of cattle grazed quietly just a few yards away.”

The body count on Giving My Bones isn’t nearly as high as it was on El Santo Grial, even though the second song, “Don Houston,” is about a guy who, for no apparent reason, shoots a stranger in the face. “Every time he pulled the trigger, it was the most beautiful thing you ever saw,” the narrator explains. “It was an art. His brush was a bullet, his paint was blood, his canvas was the earth, the rocks, the trees, and the dirt.”

Don Houston and El Santo Grial’s antihero, Drake Savage, would have a lot to talk about. Assuming they didn’t kill each other first.

But not every song on the new Slackeye album deals with crazy violence. One recurring theme here is psychological healing.

Take the sadly beautiful “I’m Going Home.” (I’ll be extremely surprised if anyone comes up with a prettier song than this one this year — or in the next decade.) Accompanied only by a banjo, a harmonica, and his stomping foot, Slackeye’s foghorn voice is perfectly suited to this tale of a lonesome journey to the nadir of his life. Riffing on lines from the old song “Hesitation Blues,” he sings, “Whiskey was the river and me, I was the duck/I lived down at the bottom and I could not get up/At first I thought I’d found it, a place where I belonged/But I had no home.”

Then, on “Cowboy Song” — a herky-jerky waltz that, with a few Balkan embellishments, could almost be a Beirut song — riding the range is the prescription that rebuilds a broken soul: “A man alone in the wilderness/That’s where his soul is born/As long as he’s singing his cowboy song.”

Keep singing, Slackeye.

You can listen to and/or name your own buying price for Giving My Bones to the Western Lands at www.slackeyeslim.bandcamp.com. But even though you can snag it for free, pay him something. Don’t be a jerk!

It's Video time!

Here's the title song from Johnny Dowd's new album



And here's a song called "Cadillac Hearse" from that album



And here are a couple of my favorite new Slackeye Slim songs





And here's a latter-day version of "Gangster of Love" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: Happy Birthday, Old Man Zimmerman!

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
May 20, 2011


Bob Dylan turns 70 years old on Tuesday, May 24.

Seventy years old.

I’m not going to gush here about what Old Man Zimmerman’s music has meant to me — how hearing the riddle-ridden, six-minute “Like a Rolling Stone” and The Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” on AM radio in Oklahoma in 1965 was like hearing the call of oracles; how hearing him sing “Girl From the North Country” with Johnny Cash in 1969 filled me with optimism for a divided nation; how the bartender used to always play “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” by Bob Dylan and The Band every Sunday at the end of my set when I used to play in a local bar called Faces in the late ’70s; how spooky it felt the time I walked into the old Lincoln County courthouse and someone was playing an instrumental song from Dylan’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack; how I laughed when Dylan had to cut short a show in Albuquerque because dozens of teenagers, including my daughter, spontaneously joined him onstage to help him with the chorus, “Everybody must get stoned.”

Naw, I’m not going to get into all that.

I’m just going to say happy birthday, Bob, and share my list of a dozen of my favorite Dylan covers by a whole mess of artists who surely have their own Dylan stories to tell.

The Dylan dozen: my favorite Bob covers

1. “Blind Willie McTell” by The Band. This is one of Dylan’s greatest tunes. A wise critic once wrote that it’s “one of those weird Dylan tunes that, a listener might suspect, contains the entire mystery of America secretly encoded in its lyrics.” Originally recorded for his 1983 Infidels album (and left off, perhaps because it didn’t fit the level of mediocrity Dylan was shooting for with that record), it wasn’t released until his first Bootleg Series box set in 1991. Three years later it appeared on The Band’s first album without Robbie Robertson, Jericho. New Orleans blues great “Champion” Jack Dupree sat in on piano while Levon Helm and Rick Danko shared lead vocals.

2. “Every Grain of Sand” by Giant Sand. Dylan released a higher percentage of crap in the ’80s than he did in any other decade. But there were some jewels among the garbage, and this song, from his 1981 album Shot of Love, is one of them. Howe Gelb and his Arizona cohorts are known for getting goofy, but here, backed by the band Poi Dog Pondering, Howe played it straight with this near-8-minute gospel-tinged opus, and it’s nothing short of soulful.

3. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” by The Byrds. Dylan covers made up a huge chunk of the early Byrds’ repertoire. Their first hit was an abbreviated version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” And their version of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” is the definitive version. But their greatest Dylan song was “Baby Blue.” They did a jangly folk-rock version in the early days, but they got it right with the slow, mournful take on their unjustly overlooked Clarence White-era 1969 album The Ballad of Easy Rider. (Runners-up on this song: 13th Floor Elevators, Them.)

4. “Stepchild” by Solomon Burke. “Anything you ask, I’m willin’, I just can’t beat Bob Dylan,” Burke ad-libs in this song on the late soul giant’s 2002 masterpiece Don’t Give Up On Me. I bet Dylan disagrees. This Dylan blues rarity never appeared on any of his own releases.


5. “Billy 1” by Los Lobos. This song, originally on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, becomes a drunken cantina stomp in the hands of David Hidalgo and the boys. You can find it on another soundtrack album, the I’m Not There soundtrack, which is full of fine Dylan covers. This track is a good companion for “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power),” another Mexican-marinated song on that soundtrack, performed by Willie Nelson and Calexico.

6. “Absolutely Sweet Marie” by Jason and The Scorchers. This is country rock with an emphasis on the rock. A close runner-up is C.J. Chenier’s zydeco-flavored take on this song on Blues on Blonde on Blonde.

7. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” by Richie Havens. Backed by a sweet steel guitar, Havens pours his guts into this song. Nobody, including Dylan, ever did it better. It’s on the long-out-of-print album Richard P. Havens, 1983 (which was actually released in 1969.)

8. “Saved” by The Mighty Clouds of Joy. I didn’t appreciate Dylan’s much-reviled late ’70s-early ’80s “born again” era until I heard the excellent 2003 compilation Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan. The Clouds’ contribution is probably the most energetic track on the album.

9. “Like a Rolling Stone” by Johnny Thunders and Wayne Kramer. Ex-New York Dolls Thunders teamed up with former MC5 member Kramer (who was fresh out of prison on a drug rap) to form a punk-rock supergroup. They made this Dylan classic bleed. Runner-up: the version by Drive-By Truckers.

10. “Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts” by Mary Lee’s Corvette. Back in 2002, this New York roots-rock band performed all the songs from Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks from start to finish and released it as a CD. This 10-minute romp captures the spirit of the original. On the first verse singer Mary Lee Kortes let a drunken audience member do a bad Dylan impersonation. She wisely took back the mike.

11. “My Back Pages” by The Magokoro Brothers. Yes, Dylan is big in Japan. This tune, sung in Japanese, is from the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack.

12. “Wallflower” by Doug Sahm. This country waltz is a highlight from the 1973 country-rock classic Doug Sahm and Band. Sir Doug is joined by Dr. John on organ, David Bromberg on dobro, and Dylan himself on harmony vocals and lead guitar.

Oh, did I mention that this is a baker’s dozen?

13. “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix. This one’s so obvious I almost didn’t list it. Dylan liked Hendrix’s version better than his own. I do too.

* My own Dylan birthday tribute: Hear some of the music mentioned above and more. A whole lotta Bob! 10 p.m. Sunday night on Terrell’s Sound World, Santa Fe public radio, KSFR-FM 101.1 and streaming live at www.ksfr.org

UPDATE: My former colleague Jason, who's even more learned in Giant Sandlore than I am, pointed out that it's the group Poi Dog Pondering backing Howe Gelb on "Every Grain of sand." So I added that above.

BLOG BONUS!


Here's some Dylan covers that didn't make my list and which you won't hear on my radio show (unless I get in a twisted mood.)





And the undisputed King of the Golden Throats ...

Terrell's Tuneup: Death Takes an Encore

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
January 28, 2011


With its new album, Spiritual Mental Physical, the Detroit proto-punk trio known in the mid-’70s as Death has a sequel to its unlikely debut CD, ... For the Whole World to See — which was postponed for about 35 years.

One of the saddest commentaries on the music of the ’70s is that about the only racially integrated bands that anyone remembers are Frank Zappa’s The Mothers of Invention and the Village People.

For all the great sounds that came out of the Me Decade, the ugly truth was that this was a period of segregation. For the most part, white people played “rock” — and awful singer-songwriter dreck — while black people played soul and funk — disco and rap coming later in the decade.

That’s why, in the early ’80s, a band like The BusBoys was refreshing — though it was telling that many considered the group a novelty. As The BusBoys sang in “Did You See Me”: “Bet you never heard music like this by spades.”

But, of course, there were exceptions. One was a band from Detroit called Death. No, you wouldn’t have heard the group on the radio, at least not back then. “We didn’t fit in at all,” bass player and singer Bobby Hackney said in an interview with NPR last year:

 “The rock bands that we identified with ... we didn’t hang out with those guys. We were in the inner city, on the east side, in the black community. Most of the bands were doing stuff like Al Green; Earth, Wind & Fire; The Isley Brothers. Being in the black community and having a rock band, people just looked at us like we was weird. After we got done with a song, instead of cheering and clapping, people would just be looking at us.” 

Death identified with Michigan groups and performers like The Stooges, The MC5, Alice Cooper (before he went on Hollywood Squares), and Bob Seeger’s groups (before he became “classic rock”).

Death, in its original incarnation, consisted of three Hackney brothers — Bobby, drummer Dannis, and the late David, who played guitar — and was called Rock Fire Funk Express (I have to admit, I like that name better). As Bobby tells it, there was a record company that was interested, but “the man with the big cigar” was put off by the morbid name the group went by at the time. The band refused to sell out and change its name again, so the record deal was off. The group broke up in 1977, and the Hackney brothers moved to Vermont.

But just a year ago, Bobby Hackney Jr. discovered dad’s old demo tapes and got the seven known Death demos released as an album called ... For the Whole World to See, on the Chicago independent label Drag City.

It didn’t become a big hit, but it got a great “underground” buzz. NPR did a feature, and Death was reborn with a new guitarist, Bobbie Duncan. The group played at South by Southwest in Austin last year. I was fortunate enough to see Death in New York last summer at a free show called The Detroit Breakdown. With a poster of David Hackney on the stage, the band was loud, proud, and rocking. (For videos of the show, check this out: CLICK HERE.)

My advice to those who haven’t been touched by Death: Before you get this album, definitely pick up the first. Like ... For the Whole World to See, Spiritual Mental Physical consists of demos. But they’re not as listener-ready as the ones on the first album. These sound more like home practice tapes — muddier, tinnier. Also, there are just more than 28 minutes of music here.

There are a few fun tunes. The album starts off strong with “Views,” a crazy rocker with falsetto vocals. Some songs are clearly derivative. “The Masks” plays upon the hook from The Beatles’ “Got to Get You Into My Life,” while “People Look Away” sounds suspiciously close to the teenage wasteland of The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly.”

There are noodling instrumentals such as “The Change,” as well as three solo spots — “David’s Dream,” “Bobby Bassing It,” and “Dannis on the Motor City Drums.” (Yes, it’s a drum solo. This is from the ’70s, remember.) The group redeems itself with “Can You Give Me a Thrill?” It’s the most Stoogey cut on the album. True, it goes on for nearly six minutes, but what the heck?

I’m pretty sure Drag City has scraped the bottom of the Death vaults by now. So I’m hoping that, for the next album — and I’m hoping there is a next album — the guys do some fresh recordings.

Also recommended:

* Like a Knife Through an Egg by Kilimanjaro Yak Attack. I normally don’t review CDs by kids of my friends or friends of my kids, but I’ve always gotten a real kick out of these young yaks. Even if Oscar Oswald (who sings, plays bass, and writes songs) weren’t the son of my brother in journalism Mark Oswald, I’d still like Yak Attack.


The band’s music is full of noisy punk spirit. But there’s also a clever, quirky undertone. Listening to the rubbery “Knabonga” from the new CD while driving down Cerrillos Road the other night, I almost thought I’d stumbled upon a long-lost song from the early days of The Talking Heads — back before David Byrne started taking himself too seriously.

These guys started out in Santa  Fe, but one of their members now lives in Portland, Oregon, and Oscar’s going to school in Nevada, so they’re scattered throughout the West. I hope they’ll play some gigs here this summer.

Among my favorites here are “Mummy,” which is basically a psychedelic freakout, and “Pocket Calculator,” which has a little Captain Beefheart in it, as well as a little Television.

Then the boys get a little folk-rocky with “Munkar & Nakir.”

I also like the fact that on their MySpace page they described their music as “healing & easy listening.” Yup, this is real “lifestyle” stuff.

(There are songs by Death as well as Kilimanjaro Yak Attack on the latest episode of The Big Enchilada.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: SONGS FOR THE SEASON

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
December 17, 2010

Ten years ago this week, I wrote in this column a list of my Top 10 favorite Christmas songs, which may have been based on a previous version that was published about a decade before that.

Everyone’s tastes change a little through the years, but looking over that list, I’ll stand by those selections. I still play those songs at home and on my radio shows every year.

But there is lots of great Christmas music out there. So here’s a new list of my favorite Christmas songs that I cherish almost as much as the ones on the old list.

1. “Santa Doesn’t Cop Out on Dope” by Sonic Youth. The band made up of Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley has never been known for its humor. So it’s not going out on much of a limb to declare that this is hands down the funniest song they ever recorded. It’s a Martin Mull tune, originally recorded by the singer-comic in the mid-’70s as a parody of smug moralists trying to use “hep lingo” to rap to the youth about drugs and such. Sonic Youth adds a few layers of absurdism, not to mention crazy noise.

2. “All For Gloria” by Elastica. This is a rock ’n’ roll reimagining of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” by a predominantly female band that burned out way too quickly in the ’90s. The recording is from a John Peel BBC Christmas show, which ended up on an album called Elastica: The Radio One Sessions. But I bet most American fans first heard it on Just Say Noël (on which it was called “Gloria”) — the same 1996 Geffen Christmas collection that featured the Sonic Youth song mentioned above. On Radio One, Elastica also does a pretty cool version of “We Three Kings” called “I Wanna Be a King of Orient Aah.”

3. “Must Be Santa” by Brave Combo. Bob Dylan took Combo’s crazy pumped-up polka arrangement of this old kiddie song for his Christmas album last year (and made a hilarious video that was an internet sensation). I like the original better.

4. “White Christmas” by Otis Redding. Nobody should have even attempted to sing this Christmas chestnut after Redding worked it over. Like he did with practically everything he ever recorded, the man just sang his guts out.

5. “Eggnog” by The Rockin’ Guys. The Guys are a punk band from Conway, Arkansas, which I never would have discovered except for the goodwill of a former colleague who’s an Arkie expat. The song is a tender reminiscence of the singer’s “poor old peg-leg pappy” and how the family would get together at Christmas and “decorate his stump.”

6. “Blue Christmas Lights” by Chris Hillman & Herb Pedersen. Buck Owens co-wrote and recorded this sad Yuletide honky-tonker. But Hillman & Pedersen, who covered it in the ’90s, make it haunting with their harmonies.

7. “Christmas in the Trenches” by John McCutcheon. This is a touching ballad about the famous 1914 Christmas truce during World War I. British and German troops spontaneously laid down their arms to sings carols and celebrate the holiday before getting back to the serious work of killing one another the next day.

8. “Can Man Christmas” by Joe West with Mike “The Can Man” Burney. Burney — who collects aluminum cans around the Lone Butte area for recycling — narrates a couple of anecdotes involving his Santa Claus suit as West and his band play a slow, sad melody.

9. “Star of Wonder” by The Roches. Unaccompanied, sisters Maggie, Suzzy, and Terre sing otherwordly harmonies on this tune written by Terre.

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10. “Christmas Boogie” by Canned Heat with Alvin & The Chipmunks. Yes, a melding of two great bands. Guitarist Henry “The Sunflower” Vestine is amazing, even in a weird novelty like this. And Bobby “The Bear” Hite learns not to call chipmunks “mice.”


In the spirit of Christmas recycling, here’s my December 2000 Christmas Top 10.

1. “Little Drummer Boy” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Jett wasn’t the first rocker to do this song. Remember David Bowie’s duet with Bing Crosby? I don’t think Der Bingle would have attempted this version.

2. “Merry Christmas From the Family” by Robert Earl Keen. A lovable if somewhat dysfunctional family — with all its addictions, prejudices, and stepchildren — sits down for a hilarious Yuletide feast.

3. “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl. A saga of a love gone wrong: a boozy Irish immigrant lands in the drunk tank, haunted by the curses of his fed-up wife (“Merry Christmas, my ass. I pray God its our last!”) and the carols of a police choir.

4. “We Three Kings of Orient Are” by The Beach Boys. The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album, recorded in the early 1960s, contains some raw dreck, but the boys’ trademark harmonies on this tune are near-mystical.

5. “Old Toy Trains” by Roger Miller. This song, written for his son Dean, who was a toddler at the time, is a rare public glimpse of Miller’s sweet side.

6. “2,000 Miles” by The Pretenders. The grand finale to Learning to Crawl, the group’s last great album, “2,000 Miles” is a sad but beautiful winter song.

7. “Father Christmas” by The Kinks. Santa, bring me some class warfare!

8. “Santa Can’t Stay” by Dwight Yoakam. On one level this tune is hilarious: a drunken father dons a Santa suit and barges in on Mama and her new beau as the mystified children look on. But any divorced guy who can remember his first Christmas after the split-up can’t help but feel pangs of horror listening to this.

9. “Merry Christmas Baby” by Elvis Presley. “Blue Christmas” is much better known, but this is Elvis at his bluesy best.

10. “The Chipmunk Song” by David Seville and The Chipmunks. Dang, I can actually remember when this first came out one Christmas season in the late 1950s. It was the very first single by Alvin and his brothers, and it has a certain youthful innocence lacking in the group’s later work. After all, this was when The Chipmunks were young and hungry — before they sold out.

* The Steve Terrell Christmas Special: Hear a bunch of these songs and so much more at 10 p.m. to midnight Sunday, Dec. 19, on KSFR-FM, 101.1 FM.

* Enchiladas roasting on an open fire: More music to ruin any Christmas party! Hear my podcast Xmas special HERE

Blog Bonus: Here's three short reviews of recent Christmas music I reviewed for Pasatiempo which have been published, or will be published this month.

Angry Johnny & The Killbillies
Bang Bang Baby Bang Bang Merry Christmas (Pete’s Pig Parts)

From the darkest backwoods of Massachusetts comes Angry Johnny with a sleighfull of songs about all those things that make Christmas the most wonderful time of the year — Santa Claus, drinking, snow, depression, shopping, gunplay, jingle bells and homicide.

In other words, all the elements of a good Angry Johnny album — plus all the Christmas wrappings.
Killbilly cultists have known for a long time that the Angry one had a soft spot for the holidays. Several years ago he released a free MP3 on his Web site of a song called “Six Bullets For Christmas.” That classic is included on this album.

The basic theme of “Six Bullets” — killing a loved on Christmas Day as payment for infidelity — is revisited here on the title song. But this time there’s a twist, a happy ending of sorts, at least for most of the characters involved.

Of course, Christmas is for the children. Therefore it’s appropriate that the opening tune, “Shootin’ Snowmen” is about innocent, if dangerous youthful Yuletide tradition. “Christmas carol from both barrels and the snowman is history ...”

With songs like “Slaughter in a Winter Wonderland” and “Santa Gets His,” this album is not for the squeamish. But for those who get tired of holiday fluff, this is more fun than swatting a sugarplum fairy.

The Polkaholics
Jingle Bells, Schmingle Bells (Self released)

It’s Christmas time in Crazytown and who better to provide the soundtrack than that polka-powerpunk trio,The Polkaholics. No, this isn’t your grandfathers polka band. No accordions, no tubas. Dandy Don Hedeker, Jolly James Wallace and Stylin’ Steve Glover play frenzied guitar rock with a hopped-up oom-pah-pah beat.

With this 7-song EP, the boys infuse some holiday classics with polka culture, adding references to beer, kishka, Old Spice, sauerkraut, kielbasa and more beer. Thus we have “Yakov the Polka Reindeer” (guess why his nose is so shiny), “White Christmas” redone as “Polka Christmas” and, instead of “Jingle Bells,” The Polkaholics sing “Sausage Balls.”

And if the genre-blending isn’t enough with the polka, punk and Christmas music, “The Polkaholics Are Comin’ to Town” starts off as a surf rocker. There are other musical non sequiturs, such as the guitar riff from “Day Tripper” opening the song “Drinkin’ With Santa.” And “In Excelsis Polka” is a wild polkafied mash-up of Bach, Van Morrison, Patti Smith and — for reasons I’m still trying to understand, “Sympathy for The Devil.”

The entire EP is only 20 minutes long. But dancing to it provides quite an aerobic work-off — the better to work off all that beer and sausage.

Good news! You can download all seven songs for free until Dec. 31 RIGHT HERE!.

Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks

Crazy For Christmas (Surfdog)

Old smoothie Dan Hicks has been Christmas music for decades. He’s part of the San Francisco-based Christmas Jug, whose song “Somebody Stole My Santa Suit” appeared on Rhino Records’ wonderful Bummed Out Christmas compilation CD back in 1989. He re-recorded that one, a reimagining of “Somebody Stole My Gal” for this album, though jug fans probably will prefer the original.

Longtime Hicks fans will have a flash of familiarity when they hear the first song, “Christmas Mornin’” on this album. It doesn’t become obvious until he starts singing, but it’s a funny re-write of an already funny Hicks standard, “Where’s the Money?”

There’s plenty of Christmasizing old songs here. Louis Jordan’s hit “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” becomes “Santa Got a Choo Choo,” while the jugband chestnut “Beedle Um Bum” — a song Hicks performs in concert — magically transforms into “Santa Workshop,” a story of an elf named McGerkin.

And there’s some covers of Christmas classics here — “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “I Saw Mommy Kissin’ Santa Claus,” Chuck Berry’s “Run Run Rudolf” — done in the acoustic swinging Hot Licks style. My favorites of these are is “Carol of the Bells” sung scat style by Hicks and his Lickettes (The kazoos sound pretty snazzy here too) and “Cool Yule,” a song written by Steve Allen and made famous by Louis Armstrong.

Hicks make Yule sound cooler than ever. 

Here's a Hicks video featuring singing squirrels and aliens