THROWBACK THURSDAY: Great American Dog Songs

As I wrote yesterday, I'm dealing with the loss of my dear old mutt, my friend and security dog, Rocco Rococo. On Wacky Wednesday I posted some great old  novelty tunes about man's best friend (plus a pretty cool houserocker by Hound Dog Taylor). Today I'm posting some classic American songs about dogs.

In 1853, Stephen Foster revealed himself to be a major dog lover with his sentimental song "Old Dog Tray."

Old dog Tray's ever faithful,
Grief cannot drive him away,
He's gentle, he is kind;
I'll never, never find
A better friend than old dog Tray.

My favorite version is by Peter Stampfel, singing here with The Bottle Caps.



Here's one that would have been appropriate for Wacky Wednesday as well as Throwback Thursday, "Quit Kickin' My Dig Around" by Gid Tanner & The Skillet Lickers.



Another old favorite is "Old Blue," which has been recorded by many folks. (The Byrds did a great cover on their album Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde. But here's an older recording by Memphis bluesman Furry Lewis.



Hank Williams knew what it was like to be in the doghouse. Here's "Move it On Over."



Even sadder than "Old Dog Tray" is "Old Shep." Hands down, the greatest version of this tearjerker is Elvis Presley's 1956 cover, I posted that on my Facebook page the day Rocco died. But the original was by Red Foley. "I cried so I scarcely could see ..."

Rocco Ralph Rococo, 2002-2017

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: SKELETONS IN AMERICA'S MUSICAL CLOSET

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
July 21, 2006

I’ve just stumbled across a weird little corner of the Internet that’s twisted my honky head off, causing me to re-examine some of my long-cherished attitudes about music.

I’ve always argued that music has been a positive force in our culture. I believe that rock ’n’ roll played a role in ending segregation, cutting short the carnage in Vietnam, and tearing down the Berlin Wall; that Woody Guthrie’s guitar killed fascists; that somewhere in heaven Louie Armstrong still blows his trumpet, standing on a corner beside a celestial Jimmie Rodgers singing “Blue Yodel No. 9” for all the assembled saints.


During the past couple of years I’ve written in this very column about songs pertaining to issues such as the death penalty and Mexican immigration, offering the theory that the songs of America reflect a more compassionate and humanistic vision than the modern political rhetoric concerning those topics.

However, there’s a cache of musical weirdities from about 100 years ago that makes that theory seem naive and Pollyanna-ish. Spending time downloading songs in an innocuous-sounding section of the Internet Audio Archive called 78RPMs forces you to consider an era in which music was used as a tool of oppression.

This “collection of 78 rpm records released in the early part of the 20th century contributed by Archive users” includes several recording artists you should have heard of — such as Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Enrico Caruso — and early recordings of songs that are revered cornerstones of American music: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Ain’t We Got Fun?,” “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” and other chestnuts.

But there are also weird and even frightening recordings to be uncovered here — some funny, some strangely beautiful, and some outright despicable stuff -- what was referred to at the time as “coon songs.”

Yes, it’s what you think it is. These are recordings from around the turn of the 20th century that stereotyped African American life. They were popular until around the time of World War I. And yes, they’re as bad as you think they are. I’ve always known these tunes were out there. But actually listening to them in their original form and realizing how popular they were with mainstream America is a startling revelation.

Coon songs were born out of blackface minstrel acts, an art form that goes back to pre-Civil War times. With the rise of the recording industry in the late 1800s, coon songs were a popular genre. An advertisement for singer Arthur Collins in a Victor Records catalog from that era says, “The charm of this special kind of art seems to have a never-ending appeal for the American public.” The Internet Audio Archive has some examples of Collins’ work. He recorded a version of one of the most notorious of these songs, “All Coons Look Alike to Me.”

Collins also performed on “A Possum Supper at the Darktown Church,” which consists mainly of dialogue in an incomprehensible, phony dialect The supposed love of eating possum was a preoccupation of the coon songsters. “Carve Dat Possum” by Peerless Quartet with Harry C. Browne (dated 1917) is a more musical number. “The possum meat am good to eat/you always find it good and sweet,” Browne sings. The chorus — “Carve dat possum, carve dat possum, chillun” — is majestic in a troubling way, a prototype for the soundtrack of Disney’s Song of the South.

But there’s nothing quite like “The Whistling Coon.” I found two versions: the original 1896 cylinder recording by George W. Johnson, the author of the song (which unfortunately is so scratchy and lo-fi it’s barely listenable), and a much clearer 1911 version by Billy Murray.


The song is about “a colored individual” who doesn’t talk much and always whistles. Well, OK, the image of the simple, easygoing black man with musical proclivities is just a little racist, but then the song gets uglier as the singer describes the whistler’s appearance strictly within the confines of racist cartoon images (which Robert Crumb later would sardonically appropriate).

“Oh he’s got a pair of lips like a pound of liver split and a nose like an Indian rubber shoe. ... He’s an independent, free and easy, fat and greasy ham with a cranium like a big baboon.”

What’s truly shocking is that Murray doesn’t sound hateful. There’s no peckerwood sneer like that found in 1960s Ku Klux Klan records by “Johnny Reb” or “James Crow.” Murray sounds almost loving as he sings the gentle, catchy melody — the way you might sing about the antics of a favorite dog.

But, in the last verse, when “a fella hit him with a brick upon the mouth,” the singer doesn’t seem to condemn the attacker — or even explain the attack. All we know is that the singer is impressed that the man just keeps whistling, even though “his face swelled like a big balloon.”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as ignorant but ultimately harmless humor. However, as Richard Crawford observes in his book America’s Musical Life, these songs emerged during “a time when black Americans felt increasingly under political siege, with racial segregation established as law in the South and lynching on the increase.”

Indeed, in 1915, toward the end of the golden age of the coon song, the Ku Klux Klan would officially begin its second act, and the movie Birth of a Nation would reinforce white America’s fear of the black man.

It’s significant that the namesake of the “Jim Crow” laws was a character out of minstrelry — credited to Thomas Dartmouth Rice and made famous in the 1836 song “Jump Jim Crow.” But even more puzzling is the fact that Johnson, the man who wrote “The Whistling Coon,” was a former slave who became one of the pioneer African American recording artists of the 1890s.

Johnson wasn’t alone. “All Coons Look Alike to Me” was written by Ernest Hogan, another black songwriter of the era. He got famous for the song, but reportedly said on his deathbed he regretted ever writing it. (The song was published in 1896 by M. Witmark & Sons, the same company that would publish Bob Dylan’s early music in the 1960s.)

As Crawford explains in American Musical Life, “Any African American who worked in show business was faced with the conflict between pleasing an audience and knowing that many standard crowd-pleasing devices reinforced the racial divide.”

Johnson, Hogan, and others were carrying on a tradition that began earlier in the 19th century with minstrelry. Though it started with white performers in blackface parodying the music and dialect of black slaves, beginning about 1855, black singers donning the blackface mask of burnt cork joined in.

Minstrelry, according to author and jazz critic Stanley Crouch, was on its way out by the end of the Civil War.

But the coming of black performers ironically revitalized the art form. “They came and reinforced the bars on their cages,” Crouch said in an interview on the DVD of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a 2000 film that takes a hard look at minstrelry, coon songs, and other racist images of African Americans in American culture.

If there is a bright side to this ugly period, it’s the fact that it served as fertilizer for good, serious American art.

Scott Joplin, the father of ragtime, started out as a minstrel. W.C. Handy, the bandleader whose “St. Louis Blues” introduced the blues to mainstream America in 1914, started out in a black minstrel show. Handy said his most famous song was a love story, told “in the humorous spirit of bygone coon songs.”

As tempting as it is to assign coon songs and minstrelry to a shameful footnote of American musical history, some say the spirit lives on. Music writer Nick Tosches wrote in his book Country, “Years later, the Rolling Stones gave us a new sort of minstrelry. It was minstrelry without blackface, but minstrelry just the same.” And in Lee’s Bamboozled, fictional hip-hop troupe The Mau Maus are just as ignorant and stereotypical as the shuffling coon singers of centuries past.

Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields said of gangsta rap in a 2004 interview with Salon.com, “I think it’s shocking that we’re not allowed to play coon songs anymore, but people, both white and black, behave in more vicious caricatures of African Americans than they had in the 19th century. It’s grotesque. Presumably it’s just a character, and that person doesn’t actually talk that way, but that accent, that vocal presentation, would not have been out of place in the Christy Minstrels. In fact, it would probably have been considered too tasteless for the Christy Minstrels.”

Some say we should suppress coon songs, metaphorically burn this music like right-wingers torching the Dixie Chicks. But I say listen to these songs and shake your head. Then watch Bamboozled and listen to Howlin’ Wolf’s defiant musical commentary, “Coon on the Moon”:

“You know they call us coons/Say we don’t have no sense/You gonna wake up one morning/And the old coon gonna be the president.”

Other fun songs in the 78s archive:

* “My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle” sung by Frank Crumit (1920). A shipwreck never sounded so sexy. “But by heck there never was a wreck like the wreck she made of me/For all she wore was a great big Zulu smile.”

* “O’Brien Is Tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” by Horace Wright (1917) A twofer for ethnic humor, this one is sung in a phony brogue with that cool slack-key guitar that was sweeping the nation back then.

* “Navajo” by The Columbia Band with Billy Murray (1903) written by Egbert Van Alstyne and Harry Williams for a Broadway play called Nancy Brown. There’s a tom-tom beat at the very beginning, but not much else “Indian” about this tune. It’s about a guy in love with a Navajo woman. At least, unlike that other Murray song, nobody hits her in the face with a brick.

* “I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am” by Harry Champion (1911) Yes, this song was around way before Herman’s Hermits. Champion, born William Crump, was an English music-hall star known for singing cockney songs. In this version, he still marries the widow next door, but the second verse is not same as the first.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Songs That Taj Taught Us

As a young music dog growing up in the 1960s, I first became acquainted with great American blues artists due to the noble efforts of British rockers like The Rolling Stones and The Animals. And later my appreciation of blues from bygone eras grew deeper -- especially country blues artists -- thanks to the noble efforts of contemporary musicians like Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, better know to the free world as Taj Mahal.

Taj is still kicking at the age of 78. And some of those old songs he recorded are immortal. Here are just a few of them.

Let's start out with this Sleepy John Estes tune called "Diving Duck Blues." (Taj's version is HERE)

The opening line of the song, "If the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck" has been used in some adaptations of another song, "Hesitation Blues," (sometimes called "If the River Was Whiskey,") which Taj also covered. This is a 1930 version of that by hillbilly giant, Charlie Poole:

Taj loved Robert Johnson and covered his song "Walkin' Blues."

This probably is my favorite Taj song ever. He got it from Henry Thomas, a Texas-born bluesman who recorded it in 1928. Before I was familiar with Taj's version of "Fishing Blues," I'd already heard The Lovin' Spoonful's stab at it. Taj's version though sounded true and authentic.

And, leaving the realm of country blues, Taj did a funky version (with Linda Tillery) of R&B titan Louis Jordan's "Beans and Cornbread."

Check out Taj versions of older songs on The Stephen W. Terrell Web Log Song Book:

Black Jack Davy

The Cuckoo

 If you enjoyed this, checkout some similar posts on this blog:

Songs That The Wheel Taught Us
Songs That Cooder Taught Us
Songs That Crumb Taught Us
Songs That Kweskin Taught Us
Songs That Leon Taught Us
Songs That Tiny Taught Us
Songs That Herman Taught Us

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: RECENT ALT-COUNTRY (WHATEVER THAT IS)

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
September 9, 2005

No Depression magazine is celebrating its 10th anniversary, which means that the concept of "alternative country" has been around for more than a decade.

It never became the next big thing as some people predicted for about 10 minutes in the mid 90s, but there are still some fine alternative country artists out there. Here’s a round-up of some recent examples:

* Freedom and Weep by The Waco Brothers. Starting out as a side project for Mekon Jon Langford, the wonderful Wacos have been around for about as long as No Depression magazine.

In the mid ‘90s some of their songs were full of snide references to President Clinton. ("Dollar Bill the Cowboy" for instance.) But these days another president has won the Wacos’ hearts. In the liner notes of Freedom and Weep, Brother Dean Schlabowske’s thank-you list concludes with, "Most of all, thanks to W for all the material."

No, President Bush’s name isn’t mentioned once in the lyrics. There are some lines that could be interpreted as rage against the White House. "Loaves and fishes, drugs & guns -- One for all and all for one/Dumb boy the patriot -- one day, one day, you’ll run out of luck," Langford spits in "Chosen One."

Or there’s the election-night depression of "Rest of the World," where Schlabowske sings "The champagne’s still on ice/Might as well down it tonight/It ain’t gonna wait four more years/Nor will your rights."

But mostly its an atmosphere of political malaise that permeates the songs of Freedom and Weep. "If you’re think you’re getting screwed, join the club," sings steel guitarist Mark Durante on the closing song. "If you’re sick and tired of being used, join the club."

But while the words speak of a nation shrinking in liberty and prosperity, the music here is classic hard-charging, hard-chugging Waco Brothers. Truly this is music to dance on the ashes by.

*Cold Roses by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals. Some have said this double-disc set is Adams’ ode to The Grateful Dead -- at least the psychedelic-country Workingman’s Dead/ American Beauty -era Grateful Dead.

It’s true, there are some very Dead-like tunes here -- the opening cut "Magnolia Mountain" for instance -- that surely have Jerry Garcia grinning in the Great Beyond.

But to me this album isn’t so much a Dead tribute as it is a return to Whiskeytown. This is the closest Adams has come to that "damned country band" he started "because punk rock is too hard to sing."

The sound of Cold Roses is more country than anything he’s done since his first solo album Heartbreaker. On a song called "Cherry Lane," Adams even sounds he’s attempting a Hank Williams yodel.

Much of the credit for the country feel here should go to his band, especially steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar, an Austin veteran who has played with Asleep at the Wheel among others.

Some songs are practically begging for some mainstream country star to turn into schlock, such as the gorgeous "When Will You Come Back Home." Of course these are balanced by songs like "Beautiful Sorta," which rocks with a rockabilly swagger.

* Red Dog Tracks by Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez. Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris set the standard for male/female country duets. I’m not saying that Chip and Carrie reach that pinnacle, but if anyone deserves the Gram & Emmylou Award this year, it has to be this duo.

Taylor is a grizzled veteran of the music world. His biggest contribution to western civilization is the ‘60s garage-band classic "Wild Thing," (Yes, someone actually wrote "Wild Thing." It didn‘t just burst forth from the Forbidden Cavern as you might have assumed.) He also wrote "Angel of the Morning," a sexual-guilt hit full for both Marilee Rush and Juice Newton.

Rodriguez doesn’t have that history, but she’s sure got the talent. Her voice is a sultry, sexy drawl, comparable in some ways to Lucinda Williams, but sweeter. She’s also a fine fiddler, showing off that talent in the bluegrassy instrumental "Elzick's Farewell."

The strongest songs here are the slow, longing, dreamy ones that show off not only the irresistible vocal harmonies but guest picker Bill Frisell’s guitar as well These include "Private Thoughts," "Once Again, One Day … Will You Be Mine." and "Big Moon Shinin’," which has one of the best country metaphors I’ve heard in awhile: "I am a 12-year-old Macallan scotch -- on the third shelf of the bar/ waitin’ for you to just … drink me up."

A couple of Hank Williams songs here ("My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It" and "I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)" are well and good, but seem like filler. If Taylor’s still writing this impressively all these years after "Wild Thing" there’s surely a couple of spare originals that would have been better.

* Iron Flowers by Grey DeLisle. Someday historians will surely debate which was worse -- "Stairway to Heaven" by Dolly Parton or "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Grey DeLisle.

But despite that weird misstep, which kicks off the album, DeLisle has released another album of aural delight.

Her last effort, The Graceful Ghost lived up to its name in spookiness and ethereality. There are hints of that spirit here, most obviously on quite songs like the title number "Sweet Little Bluebird."

But on Iron Flowers she’s backed on most songs by a full band and sounds much tougher. In fact, on some songs like the rockabilly gospel of "God’s Got It," and the fierce acoustic romp called "The Bloody Bucket," she even shows evidence of a Wanda Jackson growl. And on "Blueheart," backed by a fuzz tone-loving band called The Amazements, she sounds outright grungy.

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: Bloodhounds and Stompin', Gut-Bucket Blues

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
November 21, 2014

It doesn't sound that thrilling on paper. A band plays basic, unfettered, rocking blues — closer to gutbucket than to the smooth, tame uptown stuff — cranks it up, adds a little rockabilly sneer, and in the process of honoring ascended masters like Hound Dog Taylor and Howlin’ Wolf, also pays sly homage to The Yardbirds and maybe even the Count Five and other ’60s garage crazies.

Yes, that’s been done before. And yet, when it’s done right with plenty of spirit, there isn’t much that can beat it. This is the case with a new band called The Bloodhounds. Their debut album, Let Loose!, despite all its obvious roots in the past, is some of the freshest-sounding music I’ve heard lately.

The Hounds are a predominantly Chicano band from East L.A. — which means they’re undoubtedly getting a little tired of the obvious comparison to early-1980s Los Lobos. But the comparison is apt. Let Loose!, especially the faster songs, reminds me a lot of ... And a Time to Dance, the 1983 EP that introduced Los Lobos to the rock ’n’ roll world. None of The Bloodhounds are up to David Hidalgo’s level as a songwriter yet. But give them time. (All the songs here are originals, credited to the four band members, except one Bo Diddley song and one by Otis Redding.)

The album comes bucking out of the stall with “Indian Highway,” which has an irresistible, bluesy guitar hook that evokes Bob Dylan’s “Obviously Five Believers.” As singer Aaron “Little Rock” Piedraita belts out the lyrics and guitarist Branden Santos makes his sonic offering to the voodoo loas of rock ’n’ roll, a listener knows it’s going to be a joyful journey.

The next tune, “Wild Little Rider,” starts off slow, like a sweet Mexican song. There are even marimbas in the background. But then, the sleepy cantina explodes. It’s on this track that The Bloodhounds reveal one of their most lethal weapons, the rave-up harmonica. (Three members are listed in the credits as playing harp, so I’m not sure who is playing on this song.)

On “The Wolf,” the musicians prove that they are perfectly capable of slowing it down to a swampy groove. With Santos playing spooky Hubert Sumlin licks and Piedraita name checking various Howlin’ Wolf song titles, this sounds like “Wang Dang Doodle” for a new generation. There’s one song here that might someday end up as an advertising jingle in, say, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, or Alaska. That’s “Try a Little Reefer,” which features a cool Hammond organ.

Besides their rocking side, The Bloodhounds sometimes slip into jug-band or skiffle mode. On songs like “Dusty Bibles and Silver Spoons,” “Hey Lonnie,” and the goofball “Olderbudwiser,” the group includes instruments like washtub bass, banjo, rub board, spoons, and kazoo. It’s good fun, and I’m a jug-band fan, but with three such tunes on one album, the novelty wears a little thin.

But even with that nitpicking, Let Loose! is a dandy debut. I hope these Bloodhounds keep sniffing.

Here are some other recent punk, garage, gutbucket blues, and rock albums I’ve been enjoying:

* The Man Who Rode the Mule Around the World by John Schooley. It filled my heart with joy to see a new John Schooley album — on Voodoo Rhythm Records, no less. It’s his first since 2007’s One Man Against the World.

Hailing from Austin, Schooley is a venerated pioneer of the punk-blues one-man-band movement. On this album, he plays nearly everything: guitars — electric and otherwise — banjo, and drums, though Austin harmonica player Walter Daniels joins him on several cuts. (Daniels and Schooley have another new album together, Dead Mall Blues, which I just learned about.)

Some cuts sound like crazed blues, while others, like “Cluck Old Hen,” might be bluegrass from the Red Planet. Then there is “Poor Boy Got the K.C. Blues,” in which Schooley sounds like he’s been listening to John Fahey (though Fahey never used drums miked nearly that high).

The title song comes from a great American trouba-dour and legendary drunkard, Charlie Poole. It’s a surreal little hillbilly classic with lyrics like “Oh, she’s my daisy, she’s black-eyed and she’s crazy/The prettiest girl I thought I ever saw/Now her breath smells sweet, but I’d rather smell her feet/She’s my freckle-faced, consumptive Sara Jane.” Schooley and Daniels soup it up into an eardrum blaster, jamming like madmen until the last minute or so. It’s sheer feedback squall. Charlie Poole meets Metal Machine Music. I love it!

* Man Monkey by O Lendário Chucrobillyman & His Trash Tropical One Band Orquestra. Speaking of one-man bands, this is the new album by Chucrobillyman (real name Klaus Koti), my very favorite Brazilian one-man punk/blues assault team. According to his website, he was “born in the depths of the Amazon jungle, spent his childhood listening to the frenzied roar of the beasts of the forest” and to “old albums of songs from rock-and-roll, blues, post punk, and youthful music.” (That’s from a Google translation of the original Portuguese.)

Truly, this is my kind of youthful music from the jungle. It’s even denser, crazier, and more voodoo-fueled than The Chicken Album, his previous record from Off Label Records (a German company specializing in wild sounds from across the planet). The new album actually has just as many chicken songs (“Chicken Style,” “Chicken Groove,” and “Fried Chicken Blues”) as The Chicken Album.

The poultry-obsessed Chucrobillyman also likes jungle songs. Here we have “Midnight Jungle,” an instrumental featuring wild rhythms and animal noises, and “She Lives in the Jungle,” a spooky blues stomper.

My favorite on Man Monkey is another jungle tune called “The Trip of Kambo.” Kambo refers to a traditional shamanic medicine made from the secretions of a giant monkey frog, which has been used for thousands of years by native tribes in the Amazon. Kambo sounds downright psychedelic with this musical backdrop that reminds me of some of Louisiana hoodoo rocker C.C. Adcock or Tony Joe White’s swampier excursions.

Enjoy some videos, starting with The Bloodhounds live on Halloween



And here they are again.



Here's John Schooley live at Beer Land in Austin, where I saw him play with Walter Daniels and Ralph White a few years ago.



And here's Chucrobillyman playing "Rollercoaster Love."

eMUSIC OCTOBER

* Pachuco Cadaver by The Jack and Jim Show. So you didn't think it was possible to make Captain Beefheart sound even weirder?

Well take a bite out of this little tribute album by guitar mutant Eugene Chadbourne and Frank Zappa's late original Mothers drummer Jimmy Carl Black. Some tunes sound like a lost congregation of hillbilly snake handlers somehow got hold of Beefheart's songbook and turned them into insane hymns and, in some cases like "Dropout Boogie," surreal comedy routines.

Black's gruff voice is perfect for the bluesier tunes here like "Sure 'Nuff Yes I Do," and "Willie the Pimp," done here as a Delta blues with Chadbourne playing slide.

When Beefheart did "I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby" it was a blues growler. But here it's a pilgrimage  into the Dark Dimension, featuring the insect hum of a didgeridoo,  a jazzy basson and other instruments played by guests. Chadbourne plays banjo on this, as he does on several other tunes here, most notable, the seven-minute version of "Clear Spot" and the stompin' "Steal Softly Through Sunshine Steal Softly Through Snow."

I was lucky enough to see The Jim & Jack Show live in Albuquerque about a year before Jimmy died.  He lived in Germany the last years of his life and his trips to the states weren't that frequent.

A bunch of Jimmy's children came up from El Paso and Anthony to see the show. Both he and Chadbourne seemed to be having a great time. And they even did a couple of Beefheart songs -- "Willie the Pimp" and "The Dust Blows Forward and the Dust Blows Back" .


And I never miss an opportunity to brag that when I did Picnic Time for Potatoheads in the early 80s, Jimmy Carl Black was the Indian of my group. Hear his magic drums on "The Green Weenie" HERE. (It's the second song down.)

* Rockabilly Frenzy by Various Artists. Here's 53 tracks for $5.99. You do the math. It's a great bargain, like other cool compilations on the Rock-a-Billy label available at eMusic. (I've previously picked up 50s Rockabilly Hellraisers and 1950s Rock N' Roll & Rockabilly Rare Masters. I just can't get enough.) Many of the selections seem more hardcore honky tonk than rockabilly, but who's gonna quibble?

Frenzy concentrates mostly on unknown performers, though "Corky Jones," the rockabilly alter ego of   Buck Owens, is here with his shoulda-been-a-hit "Rhythm & Booze."

Speaking of booze, this album is overflowing with songs about alcoholic beverages. There's "Set Up Antother Drink" by Carl Phillips, "Booze Party" by Three Aces and a Joker (The Cramps covered this),  "Flop Top Beer" by Buddy Meredith, "Moonshine" by Montie Jones, "I'm Drinkin' Bourbon" by Billy Starr, "Wine Wine Wine" by Bobby Osbourne, "Whiskey Women and Wilid Living" by Tommy W. Pedigo, "Moonshine Still" by Jack Holt and "Pink Elephant" by Wally Willet.

What kind of message does this send to the children? I feel almost drunk after listening to all these.

But wait, there's more ...

There's a not-bad cover of George Jones' "White Lightning" by a band called The Valley Serenaders. But that's not nearly as remarkable as "White Lightning Cherokee" by Onie Wheeler. No, it's not a politically incorrect look at Native American alcoholism. It's about a guy who gets a better thrill from kissing his Indian girlfriend than drinking his pappy's brew. But he has no intention of giving up either.

And there's not one not two but three versions of a song called "Beer Drinkin' Blues." One's by Eddie Novak, another by Rocky Bill Ford. Johnny Champion calls his song "Beer Drinkin' Daddy." All deal with a hard-drinking alcoholic whose drinking is interfering with his marriage. Ford plays it sad, while Novak seems more comical. My favorite though is Champion's. It's an upbeat song with a snazzy organ solo. He seems almost defiant about his beer drinkin'.

* Mississippi Masters: Early American Blues Classics 1927-1935 by Various Artists. The Mekons led me to this one. On their latest album Ancient & Modern, Sally Timms sings a song called "Geeshie," a spooky, bluesy little number I said sounds as if it came from "a speakeasy near the gates of Hell." The group based this song on an obscure blues song called "Last Kind Words" by a woman named Geeshie Wiley.

When I read that, I searched for the song on eMusic and found it here in this Yazoo Records collection, along with two other Geeshie tunes, "Skinny Legs Blues." (Look out, Joe Tex, the ghost of Geeshie is looking for you!) and "Pick Poor Robin Clean," which sounds like a crazy cousin of "Salty Dog" sung with Elvie Thomas.

Wiley is fairly obscure, but she might be the best known artist on this album. There's King Soloman Hill, who has a piercing voice that might remind you of Skip James. Blind Joe Reynolds does "Outside Woman Blues," a song revived in the '60s by Cream. I know now where Canned Heat got the "Bullfrog Blues." (It's by a guy named William Harris, who does that and two other tunes here.)

And Mattie Delaney was singing "Tallahatchie River Blues" decades before Bobbie Gentry and Billy Joe were throwing stuff off the bridge.

ALSO


* The final five tracks of Fire of Love by The Gun Club. As I said last month when I downloaded the first six tracks, I came to this band decades too late.

I don't regret that. In fact it's pretty cool that I left some great musical surprises for my old age.

This was the first album by Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the boys and it just gets better after each listening.  There's some pumped up version of old Mississippi blues -- Robert Johnson's "Preaching the Blues" and a six minute wrestling match with Tommy Johnson's "Cool Drink of Water."

But Pierce's originals are powerful in their own right. "Ghost on the Highway," "Black Train" and "Good Bye Johnny" are raw and wild. Even though I'm a new initiate, it's hard to imagine rock 'n' roll without these songs.

* "Rainmaker" by Eliza Gilkyson. I stumbled across this song a few weeks ago when looking for songs by New Mexico artists for one of my Spotify playlists. Released on a 2005 Gilkyson compilation called RetroSpecto, this is one of her earliest recorded songs, released in the late '60s or early '70s under the name of Tusker, a Santa Fe band that Gilkyson fronted back when she was known as "Lisa. Along with my personal favorite group of that era, The Family Lotus, Tusker represented the best of New Mexico hippie music.

The lyrics are pure hippie-dippie wanna-be Indian: "We can dance, people, bring that rain down from the sky/We don't have to let the land go hungry or run dry/We can dance and bring Rainmaker back before we die ..." But it sure brings back great memories.

WEEKEND MUSIC IN SANTA FE

What a treat Friday night's concert at the Lensic was --the Drive-By Truckers in their not-really-unplugged "The Dirt Underneath" version and Alejandro Escovedo with a good tight band.

And what a cool show Dengue Fever put on at the College of Santa Fe Saturday despite being hampered by an act of God. I'll rave about the music, though the weird snow-in-May weather made for a terrible day for an outdoor concert.

First Friday's Lensic show:

Alejandro opened the show. I've seen him several times both in Santa Fe and in Austin at various configurations -- with his full "orchestra"; with his "string quartet"; with Richard Buckner; with Buick MacKane (!) and playing informally with various pals at Maria's Taco Xpress at the party he used to throw there at South by Southwest.

But I hadn't seen him since his comeback after his near-fatal bout with Hepatitis C. I wasn't sure what to expect. So I was very happy when I realized Alejandro's playing as strong, if not stronger than ever. Part of the credit goes to his band. Longtime cello player Brian Standerfer (from Albuquerque) has become an integral part of Alejandro's sound and he shined last night. And guitarist David Polkingham is perfect for Alejandro. He can go from breathtakingly pretty Mexican and even flamenco sounds on acoustic guitar to growling electric craziness. Somewhere in there I thought I heard some Willie Nelson licks.

Alejandro started deceptively somber. The first part of his set seemed to concentrate on tunes from his latest album The Boxing Mirror. I've got to confess, that album didn't do much for me when it was released last year, but after last night's versions of "Arizona" and "Deer Head on the Wall," I think I'd better give it a second chance.

But by the end of his time on stage, Alejandro was rocking. One of my favorite tunes he did all night was "Everybody Loves Me" (which was even better than Charlie Musselwhite's version on Por Vida, the Escovedo tribute album.) "Castanets" always is fun. And I'm willing to bet that this was the first time "Now I Wanna Be Your Dog" has ever been played in the genteel Lensic.

But my absolute favorite had to be "Rosalie," which is one of my favorite Escovedo tunes anyway. It was a slower version than I'm familiar with. It was gorgeous.

All in all a soulful performance by a great American artist.

XXXXX

I also loved the DBT's performance, though as Patterson Hood explained in my interview (scroll down a couple of posts) this was not a normal Truckers show. "The Dirt Underneath" is a stripped-down, kinder/gentler version of the usual ferocious, electric Truckers concert. Southern-soul architect Spooner Oldham played keyboards, guitarist John Neff played pedal steel on most songs and Hood and Mike Cooley played acoustic guitars.

Last night it hit me how tough it can be for a band known for its high-energy performances to try something mellower. This was illustrated when after a stunning and poignant version of "The Sands of Iwo Jima," some drunken doofus in the audience screamed out a request for "The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town." I cringed. And at one point early in the show, someone yelled, "Turn it up!" But the band played on.

Part of the reason for this tour was to try out new songs being considered for the upcoming album, which they're supposed to start recording next month. They played a few of these, though I didn't catch the titles.

The one that stood out was "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife," which Hood sang in memory of Bryan Harvey and his family, who were murdered in their Richmond, Va. home on New Year's Day last year. (Harvey was the singer in a cool '80s band called House of Freaks.) My brother said he couldn't make out the lyrics to the song. My problem was that it I started thinking about the murders and the horrible details (another Richmond family was murdered by the Harvey killers that same week), so I wasn't really paying attention to the lyrics. But the melody and Hood's raspy voice were haunting.

The band also reached way back to play a bunch of old tunes I've never heard them do live before. I counted at least three songs from their second album Pizza Deliverance. No "G.G. Allin" but a fantastic version of "Bulldozers and Dirt."

We also were treated to a pair of songs about Skynyrd from Southern Rock Opera -- "Shut Up and Get on the Plane" and "Angels and Fuselage."

Of course my favorite Truckers album is The Dirty South. "The Sands of Iwo Jima" is from that one. Hood's "Puttin' People on the Moon" was a rocking highlight Friday, as was Cooley's "Where the Devil Don't Stay" and "Carl Perkins' Cadillac." I wouldn't have minded hearing "Cottonseed" or "Daddy's Cup."

Ultimately I was craving the high-voltage DBT classic mode. But I'm sure there will be plenty of those shows in the future (and hopefully some will be here.) But "The Dirt Underneath" certainly was a memorable show.

One final shoutout for the DBT's favorite artist Wes Freed, who did the covers and inside artwork for the past several albums. Two of Freed's black demon-swan creatures with glowing red eyes framed the stage while an evil moon of Freed's design hung overhead.

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I feel for the good folks at College of Santa Fe trying to plan an outdoor concert here in May. (Organizers are saying next year's might be in September.) Three of the past four Quadstocks have been marred by foul weather, organizers said.

I had a sick kid, so I missed all the opening acts (as well as the Clovis Tornado benefit at Santa Fe Brewing Company, to which I'd also intended to drop by.)

But I wasn't going to miss Dengue Fever, one of the most original bands going today.

For those who haven't heard, this is a group based in southern California fronted by Cambodian-born singer Chhom Nimol. The band plays a hopped-up garage/psychedelic sound -- complete with a real live Farfisa organ and a funky sax -- with southeast Asian overtones, while Chhom sings mostly in her native Khmer tongue.

Much of their music, such as the mysterious "One Thousand Tears Of A Tarantula," sounds as if it's from a soundtrack of a Quentin Tarantino movie yet to be made.

Thanks to the weather, there turnout was terrible. But a couple of dozen of the faithful huddled together on the concrete slab in front of the bandstand and enjoyed a show that was spirited in spite of the cold.

Though the band seemed rather shocked to have to be bundling up in winter clothes (after one song, guitarist Zac Holtzman asked if anyone had any whiskey he cold pour on his left hand), they're pros and they gave it their all.

Several fans told band members after the show to please come back when it's warm. I fully endorse that sentiment.

WACKY WEDNESDAY: Eat a Hot Dog!

I had this friend named Big Norm back in college. Sometimes he misunderstood lyrics to popular songs. Sometimes I think he did it on purpose. For instance, at the dawn of the disco scourge, Big Norm thought that the spoken refrain of Van McCoy's "Do the Hustle" was "Eat a Hot dog!"

Goofy, I know. But sometimes when I'm craving a good old American frankfurter, deep in my skull I hear Van McCoy's music and Big Norm's voice telling me what to do.

And sometimes I think of some of the great American songs about hot dogs posted below. Except some of these might not actually be about food, per se.

Let's kick it off with a rockabilly classic by one Corky Jones, which was a pseudonym for the one and only Buck Owens. (Back in the '50s, Buck tried to conceal his identity as not to offend his country fans. But by the end of the 80s he re-recorded this song under his own name and made it a title song of one of hi last studio albums.)




In the mid 1920s, Butterbeans & Susie always had hot dogs on their menu.



Bessie Smith had a similar idea a few years later.



Then there was Hasil Adkins



And this song by The Detroit Cobras practically could be the theme song for the American Wiener Institute.

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: HANDSOME SOUNDS

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 23, 2006

The thing I like best about The Handsome Family is how they create these deceptively sweet country melodies that invite you to drift along — but somewhere along the line, the lyrics take unexpected twists and lead you into strange realms.

A vibrant but alien spirit world will be uncovered, gurgling just below mundane surfaces. Ancient myths are re-enacted by helpless mortals. Or sometimes the song turns into a tale in which humans behave bizarrely, sometimes atrociously.

This holds true with the Albuquerque couple’s latest album, Last Days of Wonder. Not only is Rennie Sparks’ songwriting as mysterious and funny as ever, but this album also might just be the group’s strongest musically. Brett Sparks’ baritone, as always, is the perfect narrative vehicle for his wife’s lyrics. (I once wrote that he sings like you’d imagine Abe Lincoln would.) But the instrumentation makes for one sonically pleasing experience. Most of it is done by Brett, but some is supplied by members of Albuquerque’s Rivet Gang, which includes Brett’s brother Darrell Sparks.

The record starts off with a slow, cowboy-sounding tune called “Your Great Journey.” This is basically a poetic rewrite of Louis Jordan’s “Jack, You Dead.”

“When automatic sinks in airports/no longer see your hands/and elevator doors close on you/when buses drive right past./When the only voice that answers/is the whir of a ceiling fan/your great journey has begun.”

There’s “Tesla’s Hotel Room,” a biographical ode to the inventor and engineer who discovered alternating current and who died impoverished in 1943. The Wikipedia entry on Nikola Tesla says, “In his later years, Tesla was regarded as a mad scientist and became noted for making bizarre claims about possible scientific developments. ... Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and New Age occultism.”

But The Handsome Family is kinder, calling Tesla’s final days “the last days of wonder/when spirits still flew round bubbling test tubes in half-darkened rooms.” They show Tesla eating only saltines, nursing sick pigeons, and “dreaming of God as an X-ray machine.”

There’s “Flapping Your Broken Wings,” a song that, as Brett told me in an interview last year, is about “golf course vandalism.” The first line is a classic: “I can still see you there/in your grass-stained underwear/Dancing crooked circles across the golf course green.” It’s a happy tune about a drunken couple trespassing on a golf course at 3 a.m. just for a crazy frolic. By the last verse, consequences portend: “Like jewels on your green dress, my lady of the golf course/running in your underwear to greet the cops who’d driven up.” (I don’t think this song is autobiographical, but the Sparkses do live near a nine-hole golf course.)

Probably the prettiest song here is “Beautiful William,” where Brett’s guitar is accompanied by ghostly synths. It’s about a man who mysteriously disappears: “Was he given a package by a man on a train?/We found his car by the roadside later that day.” But even more mysterious is the reaction of William’s friends. “Rose smashed his windows till the glass/was all gone. Polly broke the back door/and she screamed down the hall./But no answer sounded but the wind flying/through as we tore up the green lawn/and torched all the rooms.”

“Hunter Green,” one of the rare songs on which Rennie sings lead, alludes to Celtic mythology and William Butler Yeats. A hunter kills a deer that turns into “my true love ... in a dress of darkest green” and then reverts back into a deer.

My favorite here is “After We Shot the Grizzly,” a breezy little tune with dark lyrics about castaways. But this ain’t Gilligan’s Island. “We built a raft from skin and bones./Only five could safely float. The others stood/upon the shore. They screamed and threw sharp stones ...”

Whether they’re singing of legendary seas, sad little forgotten graveyards, bowling alleys, golf courses, airports, or drive-in restaurants, The Handsome Family leads their listeners to magic. Are these not still the days of wonder?

CD-release party: The Handsome Family performs on Saturday, June 24, at the Launchpad, 618 Central Ave. S.W., Albuquerque, with Fast Heart Mart and The Rivet Gang. Doors open at 8 p.m. It’s only $7! For more information, call 505-764-8887.

Also recommended:

The Time Is Now by The Rivet Gang. The latest album by this Albuquerque band is a fine showcase for its off-kilter, laid-back, acoustic brand of country. Featuring the songwriting talents of Darrell Sparks and Eric Johnson — and the cool picking of Dave Gutierrez — this record is perfect for your car CD player on a long drive into the desert.

There’s even a song called “Sunday Drive” that starts out: “My car is my church ... Mary Magdalene is a hula dancer/dancing to my favorite hymn, the sound of the wheels going round and round ...”

My favorite tune here is “Scar on Her Cheek,” an accordion (by Brett Sparks) and mandolin waltz with the refrain, “The scar on her cheek are the secrets we keep/Some things too real are hard to reveal/The scar on her cheek are the secrets we keep/I know where she walks her dog.”
There’s one cover song here — the bluegrassy “Spider and I,” a Brian Eno song that fits right in with the Gang’s originals.

Belated congratulations: to the Jimmy Stadler Band. Jimmy and the boys (drummer Craig Neil and bassist Dave Toland) last month won the New Mexico Music Award for CD of the Year for last year’s release, Sagebrush Alley. That album also featured New Mexico Music Award winners “Let’s Go See Daddy” (Best Song) and “Bad Habit” (Best Novelty/Humorous Song).

Bonus!

In honor of The Handsome Family, here's the story I did for New Mexico Magazine on alternative country in this state, published earlier this year, featuring them Handsomes, Terry Allen and Joe West.

A version of this was published in New Mexico Magazine
March, 2006

For a couple of weeks in the mid 1990s “alternative country,” often abbreviated to the more computer-friendly “alt. country,” was supposed to be the next big thing in the music world.

To the relief of many of its fans and leading lights -- definitely a crowd that doesn‘t place much value on trendiness -- it didn’t happen. Whatever “the next big thing” turned out to be, it didn’t have much of a twang.

But even though alt. country didn’t become the juggernaut that some predicted, there are plenty of country music fans who believe that the slick, sanitized mainstream music played on commercial country stations today isn’t traditional enough, isn’t rough enough, isn’t dark enough, isn’t weird enough.

Thus, there’s still a market for “alternative country.” And it’s a field in which New Mexico has made its mark.

The state has attracted some musicians who had already made their mark before moving to New Mexico. These include Terry Allen, a major don in what’s known as “The Lubbock Mafia,” who has lived in Santa Fe since the late ‘80s and The Handsome Family, who moved from Chicago to Albuquerque in 2001.

And the state can claim at least one homegrown musician -- singer/songwriter/latter-day rhinestone cowboy Joe West of Santa Fe -- whose fandom is growing beyond New Mexico’s borders.

There’s been much ink devoted to pondering what exactly alt. country is. Until last year, No Depression magazine, a national publication devoted to the sound, described itself as the “alternative country (whatever that is) bi-monthly.”

I take the big-tent approach to defining alt. country, or, as the music is sometimes referred to, “Americana.”

Let’s include rock bands with a country or rootsy sound, aging outlaws and cosmic cowboys, edgy singer songwriters with drawls in their voices and country in their souls, renegade rockabillies, retro-honky tonkers and insurgent bluegrassers who are too country for country radio, and basically any singer or picker who knows the secret connections between Hank and Hendrix.

From at least the time of the “Outlaw Era” of the early to mid ‘70s, there has been a traditional underground country/folk “trade route” between Austin, Texas and New Mexico. Austin’s cosmic cowboys -- icons like Willie Nelson or Jerry Jeff Walker as well as lesser-known acts.


And some even moved here. The ski town of Red River has been home to Ray Wylie Hubbard and Bill & Bonnie Hearne -- a blind Texas honky-tonk couple who lived in Red River before settling in Santa Fe, where they have lived for more than 20 years.


Another Texan to rise from the Outlaw Era was Michael Martin Murphey, who lived near Taos for most the ‘80s and ‘90s.

And while he didn’t perform here much, northern New Mexico was a place of retreat and relaxation for Doug Sahm, who died in Taos in 1999.

But the Austin/New Mexico route is a two-way street. The state’s ever-struggling music scene -- in long-defunct bars like The Golden Inn, The Thunderbird in Placitas, The Bourbon & Blues and The Turf Club in Santa Fe -- has produced a handful of artists who went on to bigger things in Austin.

Jamie Brown, who attended high school in Santa Fe, played here in the ‘70s with a band called The Last Mile Ramblers before becoming famous as “Junior Brown,” melding elements of Ernest Tubb and Jimi Hendrix in Austin’s Continental Club.

Eliza Gilkyson, who has become a respected singer/songwriter, was another fixture in the Santa Fe music scene from the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s, where she was known as Lisa Gilkyson. The daughter of song writer Terry Gilkyson (“The Bear Necessities,” “Memories Are Made of This”), she has been an Austin resident for several years. Her brother Tony Gilkyson moved west to Los Angeles, where he was a guitarist for the 1980s roots-rock band Lone Justice, as well as L.A. punk giants X.

In the mid 1990s a female-dominated band called Hazeldine rose from the streets of Albuquerque -- in fact they were named for a street in Albuquerque -- to become an important influence in the national alt. country scene.

Today the state is home to many impressive musicians who could be considered alt. country. Nels Andrews plays his dark brooding tunes with his band The El Paso Eyepatch in Albuquerque, while Chipper Thompson creates his bluegrass-drenched “folk ’n’ roll in Taos. Septuagenarian Kell Robertson comes out of his Santa Fe County chicken coop ever so often to sing his beatnik/cowboy tunes. In Silver City Bayou Seco plays a sweet blend of Cajun, New Mexican and country music.

Here’s a look at some major alt. country heroes currently living in New Mexico.

XXX

Terry Allen is not your typical musician -- alt. country or otherwise. He’s more like a mad scientist who uses music, painting, sculpture, film, video, and just about all aspects of theater in his art. He’ll get an idea and sometimes it will involve words, paintings, and often, music.


Of his various disciplines he said “They feed each other so much,” he said, “It depends on what I’m curious about and what the ideas are at the time I’m working. I kind of let the work dictate where it goes, whatever form it takes.”

Still, he’s one of the most respected songwriters in the country music underground. Allen’s 1979 album Lubbock on Everything, a roadhouse rocker (the first to feature his Panhandle Mystery Band) with hilarious, sardonic and often poignant stories of West Texas characters -- generally is considered one of the seminal country-rock albums of all time. His songs have been covered by Doug Sahm, Bobby Bare, Little Feat, Robert Earl Keene, Cracker and others.

Allen is from Lubbock, Texas and his name is synonymous with the music of Lubbock -- a scene that gave the world Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.

But for the past 18 years he’s lived in Santa Fe with his wife of 40 some years, Jo Harvey Allen, an actress and performance artist whose voice frequently pops up on Terry’s albums.

For the past three years, the thrust of Allen’s musical output “at least CD-wise,” he said, has been reissues of some of his lesser-known work from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Among the recent re-issues are Juarez (originally released in 1975) a wild, violent, desperate, often funny but ultimately tragic tour of the underbelly of the Southwest; Amerasia, a soundtrack for Wolf-Eckart Bühler’s 1985 film, which dealt with Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War and the Americans who stayed there after the war; and The Silent Majority, which Allen describes as “a compilation of out-takes, in-takes, mis-takes, work tapes, added tos, taken froms, omissions and foreign materials.” The original album cover was a photo of Allen with Nancy Reagan taken at the in Washington, D.C. where Allen had won a National Gallery award for video arts.

While you won’t find it in record stores, another Allen CD can be found in the book version of Dug Out, a multi-media work that involves writing, painting, video and sculpture installations, and a theater presentation. The work, Allen said, is loosely based on the lives of his father -- a one-time pro-baseball player who promoted wrestling matches and rock ‘n‘ roll shows in Lubbock in the ‘50s -- and his mother, a professional jazz pianist. The CD is a recording of a live recording of the Dugout theater piece broadcast on National Public Radio.

Soon to be reissued is Pedal Steal, originally commissioned as a soundtrack by the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company in the ‘80s.

The song cycle revolves around true stories a steel guitarist named Wayne Gayley, who toured in bands around Texas and New Mexico and died of a drug overdose in the late 70s. “It came from a bunch of stories that a guy named Roxy Gordon told me,“ he said, referring to the American Indian artist, musician and writer who for a brief time in the ‘70s published Picking Up the Tempo, a paper in Albuquerque dedicated to country music.

Allen has no current plans for a CD of new material. “I steadily write songs, but not necessarily songs to put out on a CD,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done that, just sit down and try to write a CD.”

But who knows when a play or a painting could bloom into a full-blown new Terry Allen album?

XXX

The Handsome Family sing melodies that sound as if they came out of scratchy old cowboy records or dusty hymnals secretly smuggled out of backwoods churches. And the lyrics take you to mysterious places, telling strange tales of ghosts, dead children, murders, supernatural animals, drunken domestic disputes, uneasy little victories and somber little defeats.

The Family is actually just a couple -- Brett and Rennie Sparks, who live and record at their home in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill.

Rennie writes the lyrics to the songs and plays instruments including the autoharp, which adds an old-timey Carter Family sound. Brett is the lead vocalist. “He sings like you’d imagine Abe Lincoln would sing,” a wise critic once wrote.

Though they usually are identified as a Chicago act, and they say they make most of their money touring in the United Kingdom, Brett has roots in New Mexico.

“I grew up in the Southwest,” he said in a recent interview. “I was raised in Texas and New Mexico. I was born in a little town, Perryton, Texas up near the Oklahoma border. My father worked in the oil fields. We lived in Bush country, Odessa, Midland. And we lived in Farmington. I graduated from UNM. I was there in Albuquerque for five years in the 80s.”

Moving to New Mexico has affected Rennie’s songwriting.

“Chicago was a dark, gloomy place with terrible weather,” she said. “There was no sense of being in the natural world living in Chicago.”

But New Mexico, she said, has been good for her mental health. “No matter how bad the day’s been there’s always going to be a good sunset,” she said. “Here there’s more songs with the color gold and the color red. In Chicago there were more songs about snow.”

In recent years, The Handsome Family was in Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a captivating documentary by Andrew Douglas, an Englishman who, along with singer Jim White as a tour guide explores whiskey-soaked honky tonks, backwoods Pentecostal churches, truckstops, swamps, coal mines, prisons and barber shops of the South. Not only did they perform their music, but Douglas inserted a conversation between Brett and Rennie talking in the car about the significance of blood in Southern literature, music and religion.

Meanwhile, Rennie contributed a chapter to a 2004 collection of essays called The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. She wrote about the classic American murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” which is the story of a woman stabbed to death in the woods by her lover.

The group’s most recent album, 2003’s Singing Bones, showed a definite southwestern influence. There was much desert imagery -- red-rock deserts, dusty mesas, rattlesnakes and mountain cats -- and even hints of Mexican music here and there.

“I’m writing a song about all these strange little graveyards you find in Albuquerque tucked away where the city’s grown around them,” Rennie said.

Added Brett, “We’ve got songs about a bowling alley bar, about deer hunting, about golf course vandalism …” The couple lives near a golf course, he explained.

The New Mexico landscape is a perfect backdrop for The Handsome Family’s stark, spooky and sometimes tragic songs.

Brett pointed out that there’s a long tradition of such themes in country music.

“I believe fundamentally that any work of art that doesn’t acknowledge the fact that we’re all mortal is incomplete or childish,” Rennie said. “I try to encompass that in my songs, even happy songs. That doesn’t mean that I’m obsessed by suicide and murder. Everybody’s had a dream where you’ve killed someone. That doesn’t mean you want to go out and murder people in your waking life.

“It doesn’t mean you should be paralyzed by fear and loathing,” she said. “You should appreciate things for their ephemeral nature. It’s nothing to be scared of.”

XXX

Joe West recently experienced a “One of Our 50 is Missing” moment. During an interview on Scottish BBC during his Fall 2005 tour of the British Isles, a radio host was praising West’s song “Trotsky’s Blues,” a surreal little rocker in which the singer sees the Russian revolutionary at Santa Fe’s Bert’s Burger Bowl.

The interviewer stated that Leon Trotsky had been killed in New Mexico and asked whether there was a “Trotsky visitor center” in Santa Fe. (Trotsky was assassinated near Mexico City.) At first West thought he was joking. “By the time I realized what he was saying, I had to play a song,” West said in a recent interview.

Maybe it’s just a testament to West’s songwriting. Even his funniest numbers ring true. A listener is tempted to believe even his wilder fantasies.

Many of West’s songs are down-to-earth tales of real-live working folks -- “Mike the Can Man,” about a neighbor of West’s who earns a living recycling trash; “Anita Pita” a single mom who cleans art galleries; “Rehab Girl,” who works at a substance-abuse treatment center and “likes her men shady.”

Many of his songs are strong on social commentary, such as “$2,000 Navajo Rug,” which lampoons Santa Fe excess.

Then there’s a whole body of Joe West “Jamie” songs, dealing with West’s mythical composite lost-love muse, who has survived domestic violence, alcoholism and untold stupid love affairs. “But the truth of the matter is I ain’t never loved a girl like her before,” West sings of Jamie on “Reprimand.”

And in his live show, you’ll be treated to West versions of cheesy ‘70s pop-country hits. At his CD release party for Human Cannonball at Santa Fe’s Tiny’s Lounge last year, he had the whole crowd singing along with every word of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

West, 38, the son of Santa Fe artist Jerry West, has deep roots in Santa Fe. After his parents’ divorce, he split most of his school years between Santa Fe and South Dakota, where his mother had moved.

“I went to a different school almost every year,” West said. He graduated from high school in South Dakota. He graduated from the University of South Dakota, where he majored in theater.

After college in 1991 he went to New York City to pursue a career in theater. There he hooked up with a gaggle of bluegrass musicians.

“I started playing in subways,” he said. “I evolved from being a theater person to being a musician full time.”

West had dabbled in music much earlier. “When I was in junior high I got very much into punk rock, and tried to start a punk rock band, which sounded very much like an alternative folk country band,” he said. “As hard as I tried I never quite became a punk rocker.

West moved to Austin, Texas in the late ‘90s where he formed a band called Joe West & The Sinners.

But before his move to Austin, West was hanging out in Santa Fe. He befriended members of a band called ThaMuseMeant and recorded his first proper CD, Trip to Roswell New Mexico.

When West moved back to Santa Fe in 2001, ThaMuseMeant introduced him to a whole community of musicians including bands like Hundred Year Flood and Goshen who formed the nucleus of what became Frogville Records.

West has recorded two albums for the label, South Dakota Hairdo and Human Cannonball.

But he’s got outside projects as well. He’s a member of a Santa Fe gospel group called Bethleham and Eggs. And for more experimental music he’s got this contraption called The Intergalactic Honky-Tonk Machine, which West says is a "time traveling music device," which includes a drum machine, electronic tape loops and a smoke machine.

And he’s talking about doing a concept album about an “androgynous time-traveler space character” who claims to be the love child of a glam-rock star, conceived in New Mexico during the filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Now that’s alternative country!

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: ROCKING & MOANING

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
Feruary 18, 2005

In recent years a minimalist rock ‘n’ roll sound has emerged. Thanks mainly to The White Stripes and The Black Keys, we have the power duo -- just guitar and drums.

There were antecedents, of course. Back in the late ‘80s there was House of Freaks, a guitar-drum duo that had a high energy, yet very melodic sound. In the mid ‘90s there was Doo Rag, an Arizona blues twosome that sounded like Hound Dog Taylor caught in a meth lab explosion.

Melissa Swingle with Trailer Bride

One might even argue that the true forefather of the power duo was Lee Michaels, whose band, for a time in the early ‘70s, consisted of only himself (on keyboards) and a drummer.

A new addition to the guitar/drums sound movement is The Moaners, the new band led by singer/guitarist Melissa Swingle, the force behind the late, lamented Trailer Bride. They’ve got a new album on Yep Roc called Dark Snack.

Joined by drummer Laura King, Swingle rocks and roars with a power rarely heard in more country sounding Trailer Bride. Dark Snack’s very first tune, “Heart Attack” starts out with a blast of feedback screech, as if to announce, “Warning: This is not a Trailer Bride album.”

(Could economics rather than artistic aesthetics have something to do with Swingle‘s new band? “A 4-piece band just won’t make ends meet/ tonight, baby, it’s you and me,” she sings on “Hard Times.” )

And yet, there’s much about The Moaners that will appeal to Trailer Bride fan’s -- namely Swingle’s voice, that unique, laconic, cool-as-a-raspberry-Slurpee North Carolina drawl, and Swingle’s writing.

She pays tribute to folk/blues icon Libby Cotton by retitling a strong, grinding version of “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” as “Elizabeth Cotton’s Song,” and to southern author Flannery O’Connor in “Flannery Said.”

“You can't get any poorer than dead / Yeah that's what Flannery said," Swingle sings over her distorted guitar.

The Moaners get political on “Hard Times,” which features a spacey quasi-jug band guitar riff .

“Why do they love to fight these wars?/ Hard times keep me pacing the floor/ It’s hard to proud to be American/ when our country’s being run by rich, greedy men,”

And yet she gets goofy and playful on the hard crunching “Terrier,” where she discusses the advantages and disadvantages of various breeds of dogs.

“Hound dogs are lazy but they ain’t mean/ poodles are pussy, they don’t bother me/ beagles are stinky, I wouldn’t have one/ but there’s just one kind to stay away from …”

Of course, the funniest line in the song is when Swingle snaps, “Get off my leg.”

The last song on Dark Snack, “Chasing Down the Moon,” is a slow ethereal instrumental, less than two minutes long, featuring Swingle’s musical saw sounding like a distant ghost. It only goes to show, ou can take the girl out of Trailer Bride, but you can’t take Trailer Bride out of the girl.


Also Recommended

*Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough by Various Artists. One trouble with many tribute albums -- blues tributes in particular -- is that the various artists involved tend to be too reverent towards the subject of the tribute. Fortunately this isn’t the case with this Fat Possum tribute to the late Mississippi blues giant.

Of course Kimbrough, who died in 1998 at the age of 67, never lent himself to conventional reverence. His songs were rough and often outright lecherous, and even when he sang about the ravages of age, as he did on “Done Got Old” you can tell his biggest regret was that he was no longer as credible as he was when he sang songs like “Pull Your Clothes Off.”

The contributors here aren’t Kimbrough’s blues peers, but acts from the alternate rock universe. Fat Possum honcho Matthew Johnson is forthright on the CD cover when he says the main purpose of this is to turn on more people to Kimbrough’s music -- much of which is available on Fat Possum.

I’ll second his motion -- go acquaint yourself with Kimbrough’s primitive, hypnotic blues -- though this album has enough good tracks to stand on its own.

Sunday Nights starts and ends with wild versions of Kimbrough’s “You Better Run,” both done by the reformed Iggy & The Stooges. It’s a crazed fantasy in which the singer rescues a rape victim, who later declares her love for him. It’s fun and raucous, even the slower, longer second version, in which Iggy risks the ire of the political-correctness police as he sings “Come along a baby, there’s a whole lot of rapin’ goin’ on.”

Most of the selections are done in this spirit -- loud raunchy guitars, primitive beats -- you know you’re in trouble when the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion has one of the mellower songs on an album.

Standout performances include The Fiery Furnaces’ psychedelic stomp version of “I’m Leaving,” Spiritualized’s “Sad Days and Lonely Nights,” which starts out with what sounds like a mellow melodica but builds up to a punched-up frenzy and Mark Lanegan’s slow-moving but dangerous “All Night Long.”

The only disappointments are Entrance and Cat Powers’ too precious and ultimately rumpless “Do the Romp,” and the two versions of “Done Got Old.”

While Jim White’s is more inventive in its Beckish kind of way with its weird tape loops, and the Heartless Bastards rock hard, neither actually sound like it’s being sung by someone fearing the advance of age. For that, check out Buddy Guy’s cover a few ago on his Sweet Tea album.

*Happy Doing What We’re Doing by Elizabeth McQueen & The Firebrands. Before there was punk rock in Great Britain, there was something called “pub rock.” Pioneered by bands like Brinsley Schwarz, Eddie & The Hotrods and Ducks Deluxe, championed by the veteran Dave Edmunds and serving as the breeding grounds for Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, Squeeze, and Elvis Costello, pub rock was an energetic mix of blues, early rock ’n’ roll, a touch of honky tonk and a whole lot of soul.

On paper it might sound like good old American bar band music. But there was something intrinsically English about the best pub rock, sometimes the melodies, sometimes the chord changes, sometimes just the attitude.

In this record, named after a Brinsley Schwarz tune, Texas country rocker Elizabeth McQueen celebrates the pub rock era, covering tunes by the above listed artists plus more obscure pub bands like Eggs Over Easy (which actually was an American band living in England) and Dr. Feelgood.

With her clear, strong, unaffected voice, McQueen (who sometimes gigs locally at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame) makes these 30-year-old songs sound fresh and vital.

McQueen’s best performances here include “All I Need is Money” (originally by Eddie & The Hotrods), which rocks like The Sir Douglas Quintet; Edmunds’ “A-1 on the Juke Box,” which could be an anthem for all alt country rockers ignored by Nashville; and Rockpile’s “You Ain’t Nothin’ But Fine,” which features a cool steel guitar solo by Jimmy Murphy.

And McQueen proves she’s got the knack for this style with “Dirty Little Secret,” which sounds like a long lost Costello or Parker , but actually it’s an original.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: Handsome Family Flees Into The Wilderness

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
May 3, 2013


Wilderness, the new album by The Handsome Family, is as mysterious, dark, and utterly alluring as fans of this band — actually an Albuquerque couple named Brett and Rennie Sparks — have come to expect.

The melodies are mostly pretty, sentimental, and frequently sad, with sweet harmonies from Mr. and Mrs. Sparks. Many tunes may remind you of old folk songs or parlor music from some century gone by.

But when you allow the lyrics to sink in, you realize there’s a lot more going on here than sweet nostalgia.

Years ago I wrote that the Handsome Family’s lyrics “take you to mysterious places, telling strange tales of ghosts, dead children, murders, supernatural animals, drunken domestic disputes, uneasy little victories, and somber little defeats.” I’ll stand by those words. Wilderness continues along that shadowy path.

Like their previous album, Honey Moon, which examines the idea and practice of love from a variety of angles, Wilderness is a concept album. Every song is named after a different animal: “Eels,” “Octopus,” “Lizard,” “Owls,” etc.

“The record is all about animals, but it’s not really about animals,” Brett said during a recent interview on my radio show, The Santa Fe Opry on KSFR-FM. “They’re about a lot of things, but I guess animals are the jumping-off point for a lot of themes.”

Rennie, who writes all the lyrics for Handsome Family songs, said, “I was thinking about it like a medieval bestiary, which are factual, but factual about the world as we know it now but not necessarily about the truth of the world.”

Several of the songs deal with humans — including historical figures from the 19th century.

There’s “Flies,’ which starts off about George Armstrong Custer, lying dead at Little Bighorn (“His red scarf tied, his black boots shined/How beautiful he looked to the flies, the happy kingdom of flies”); there’s “Wildebeest,” which deals with the lonesome death of songwriter Stephen Foster (“He smashed his head on the sink in the bitter fever of gin/A wildebeest gone crazy with thirst pulled down as he tried to drink”).

And there’s “Woodpecker,” which is about Mary Sweeney, a Wisconsin schoolmarm notorious for having manic fits and smashing windows. Her story is told in Michael Lesy’s 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip.


“That was my century. … I would have fit in,” Rennie said about the 1800s. “When the train tracks went through, everything went to heck. To me, people like Stephen Foster or Custer or Mary Sweeney were people who had one foot in the old world and one foot in the new world.”

Brett added, “We’re kind of obsessed with that turn-of-the-century kind of thing. We started this new little project called the Parlour Trio [featuring longtime Handsome colleague David Gutierrez on mandolin] where we’re playing turn-of-the-century parlor music just around Albuquerque for fun. … That was a time when everything in America maybe started becoming less European, in a way. … I think that’s an amazing period in American history and American music history.”

Wilderness also has many songs in which Rennie continues her fascination with insects and other creepy crawling things. Besides “Flies,” there are songs titled “Spider,” “Caterpillars,” and “Glow Worm.” Insects also star on several tunes on Honey Moon, my favorite being “Darling, My Darling,” told from the perspective of a lusty male insect willing to sacrifice his life to the waiting fangs of the female of the species.

One of my favorite images on the new album is the last verse of “Flies,” which takes place in some trashy vacant lot near a Wal-Mart: “Great armies of the smallest ants fight battles for the glory of their queen/Such a tiny, glorious queen.”

Behold the Sphinx Moth Larva

Asked about this apparent bug fixation, Rennie laughed. “You live in New Mexico. My God, we have some amazing insects here. … Two summers ago, we saw our first sphinx moth larva out in the yard. Once you’ve seen that, trying to wiggle their way down …” Brett interjected, “It looked like a little hot dog was crawling across the yard.”

“They look like caterpillars when they’re first born, but when they get ready to pupate, they drop all their legs off, and they look like a finger. A little finger rising from the ground,” Rennie said.

“When I first saw this thing, and I’m from New Mexico, I was like, it was one of those things where you say, Oh, my brain doesn’t want to do this — what am I seeing?” Brett said.

Asked about the battling ant army imagery in “Flies,” Rennie said, “I’ve watched great battles out in my driveway. There’s two competing ant holes.”

Brett reminded her of the time, not long after the couple first moved to Albuquerque, that Rennie, a New York native, learned the hard way that “I got ants in my pants” isn’t just a James Brown song.

“Honestly, I feel like I was a different person after I was bitten by those ants. There was a point in the middle, when I was just writhing in pain, that I could feel the queen calling me down in the earth. And I wanted nothing but to do her bidding.”

There is a CD release party for Wilderness at 9 p.m. on Saturday, May 4, at Low Spirits, 2823 Second St. N.W., Albuquerque, 505-344-9555. Tickets are $11. 

BLOG BONUS

Here's the Santa Fe Opry segment where I interviewed Brett & Rennie. I used a lot of quotes from it in the above column -- but there's lots more that I didn't write about.

The interview starts about 15 minutes into the show.

Santa Fe Opry 4-26-13 with Handsome Family interview by Steve Terrell on Mixcloud

Here's a live version of  "Woodpecker."