ROUNDHOUSE ROUND-UP: SGT. RICHARDSON's LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
(Devout readers of this blog will recognize this column had its roots in here.)

I thought I was on vacation last week in Austin attending the South by Southwest Music Festival. But last Thursday morning, while walking around the SXSW trade show, I learned that even in Texas, the eyes of Bill Richardson are upon you.

One of the first booths I stumbled upon at the trade show -- right there among others hawking guitar strings, record labels, music software and rock 'n' roll magazines -- was one manned by Jon Hendry and Mike Stauffer from the New Mexico Tourism Department. And on a colorful cardboard poster behind them was the smiling face of the omnipresent governor.

Hendry and Stauffer were in the Live Music Capital of the World extolling the virtues of the Land of Enchantment's musical attractions. They also attended the SXSW film and interactive-media festivals, which preceded the music shindig.

"All our new surveys show an increased interest by visitors in new experiences, including music and food," Hendry said Wednesday. A recent Tourism Department focus group in New York showed potential visitors are interested in what New Mexico has to offer in terms of night life, Hendry said.

"We passed out a lot of tourist guides and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival posters," Hendry said of SXSW.

Also, the two were giving out a poster titled "New Mexico Musical Enchantment," featuring a Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-like collage with the Roundhouse in the background and the state seal on a bass drum in the center of a whole gaggle of musicians and other famous folks with some connection to the state.

Among them are John Denver (he was born in Alamogordo), Glen Campbell (he played in an Albuquerque country band with his uncle Dick Bills), Michael Martin Murphey, Randy Travis, Roy Rogers, María Benítez, the Manzanares Brothers, Eliza Gilkyson, Paris Hilton (her grandfather Conrad was born in San Antonio, N.M.), former Sen. Harrison Schmitt in full astronaut regalia and -- you guessed it -- Bill Richardson, in a Cab Calloway-type white jacket.

What? No Buddy Holly, who recorded his greatest work in Clovis in the 1950s?

No Jim Morrison, who lived in Albuquerque as a child and who, according to his own legend, was possessed by the spirit of an Indian road-construction worker who died in a car wreck north of the Duke City?

No Roger Miller or Al Hurricane or Robert Mirabal or Terry Allen?

This poster, Hendry said, is a "work in progress." He said New Mexico musicians are welcome to send in head shots to be included on its next version.

Hendry has other ideas for promoting New Mexico music.

He wants to set up a program in which musicians from the state can have Web sites on the Tourism Department's site. There, he said, musicians could promote themselves and sell their music.

He wants to start an Internet database where event organizers in the state could find musical entertainment appropriate for their events.

He also said he wants to work with the city of Santa Fe to start concerts on the Plaza every night during the summer.

As for the South by Southwest Music Festival, Hendry said next year he'd like for the state to host a New Mexico Night in one of the area's downtown bars during the festival, which includes several themed showcases such as Japan Night or Australia Night.

He also said he'd like to produce a compact disc of original music by New Mexican artists that the Tourism Department could hand out at events such as SXSW.

Interested musicians should e-mail Hendry at jon@newmexico.org

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: XIU XIU 'NUFF

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
April 18, 2008

Here’s some of the craziest but most enticing music I’ve heard in a long time. Women as Lovers, the new album by northern California avant-garde rockers Xiu Xiu, pushes boundaries I didn’t even know were there. And the band will be pushing them in Santa Fe at a Monday night, April 7, show at the College of Santa Fe.

Xiu Xiu (pronounced “shoe shoe”) might remind listeners of the San Francisco band Deerhoof. The two bands have collaborated in the past, and Deerhoof’s drummer and keyboardist Greg Saunier plays on Women as Lovers. I also detect a certain kinship with another San Francisco experimental rock band, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. There’s a similarity in some of the batty sounds, although Xiu Xiu’s music lacks the lighthearted, goofball quality of the Thinking Fellers. And then there’s Mr. Bungle, another Bay Area weirdo, kitchen-sink band. Xiu Xiu’s Ches Smith was a member of that group.

Singer Jamie Stewart has one of those morose, sobbing, 4 a.m.-suicide voices that sometimes get on my nerves (he’s been compared with The Cure’s Robert Smith). Stewart’s voice gives a definite gravity to Xiu Xiu’s eccentric, eclectic musical assault, which can include sax, vibraphone, chimes, banjo, flute, harmonium, glockenspiel, bells and whistles, all sorts of electronic gadgetry, and — on their best songs — loud, maniacal drumming.

Xiu Xiu songs have a way of sneaking up on you. The opening tune, “I Do What I Want, When I Want,” has a slow, plodding, ominous beat, punctuated by what sounds like kazoos. Eventually the song drifts into a strange section of whistles and gongs, like an amusement park boat ride drifting into a forbidden area of It’s a Small World, and by the end there’s a wild, jazzy sax (by guest Howard Wiley).

Sometimes the lyrics are as bizarre as the music. “Crush a pastry into your breast ... crush an ashtray into your breast,” Stewart croons on “In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall.”

But don’t think they’re not serious. “Black Keyboard” deals with child sexual abuse in a direct and shocking manner. “Why would a mother say such things? Why add tongue to a kiss good night?” Stewart sings over an acoustic guitar.

Xiu Xiu takes a stab at politics with “Guantanamo Canto,” which in spots sounds almost like a Javanese gamelan piece. “My country needs this freedom to contradict your humanness,” Stewart sings. One of the highlights of the album is a cover of David Bowie’s and Queen’s “Under Pressure” that features guest vocals by Swans’ Michael Gira and Wiley’s explosive sax.

Sometimes the slower songs on Women as Lovers get way too shoegazey for my tastes. “Master of the Bump” (“If you say my dancing is effeminate I will never dance again.”) is about a guy whose masculinity is being questioned. I guess the slow, weepy arrangement is supposed to reinforce those questions. And I might have fallen asleep during “Black Keyboard” had that first line, quoted above, not jolted me so. I vastly prefer the full New Year’s Eve-in-the-nuthouse mode, with the vibes clinking, drums crashing, horns blaring, and synths screeching.

Women as Lovers demands repeat listens. You’ll discover new textures and unexplored corridors almost every time you play it.

Xiu Xiu, with opening act Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down, is scheduled to play at the College of Santa Fe SUB, in St. Michael’s Hall, 1600 St. Michael’s Drive, at 8 p.m. on Monday, April 7. The show is free for CSF students and $8 at the door for the rest of us. Call 473-6217 for information.

Say it ain’t so, Tony!

Here’s some shocking news from state government: Tony Orlando is no longer a New Mexico music commissioner.

During a recent shake-up on the New Mexico Music Commission, Mr. “Knock Three Times” didn’t see the yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree, so he stayed on the bus and kept riding. He was one of about a dozen members of the 26-person commission who was replaced at the beginning of the year. Strangely, there was no press release announcing the changes.

Speaking of strange, the appointment of Orlando to the state panel in 2005 was one of the most mysterious appointments of the whole Richardson administration. Orlando doesn’t live in New Mexico. He’s not from New Mexico. He doesn’t play here much, not even the casinos. He’s never recorded any songs by Al Hurricane or Joe West. He hasn’t had a hit in almost 30 years. And, of course, he never attended any commission meetings or did anything to advance New Mexico music as far as anyone could tell.

Still, I’m going to miss the cheap punch lines he often provided me with.

Here’s the good news: the new commissioners include a gaggle of New Mexicans actually involved in music here. Among them are a couple of Santa Fe folk who have done great work with the community in general as well as with musicians — Ana Gallegos y Reinhardt, the force behind Warehouse 21, and David Lescht, who started the Outside In, which has brought good music to nursing homes and hospitals and provided guitar lessons to kids in jail.

One drawback with Gallegos y Reinhardt and Lescht: neither ever hosted a weekly variety show in the ’70s on national TV. But with a little encouragement, I’ll bet they can overcome this handicap.

The Music Commission, with or without Tony, has been busy. It’s responsible for a television show called New Mexico Southwest Sounds that airs on KOAT-TV, Channel 7. (The last one featured Jimmy Stadler, Micky Cruz, Wayne Johnson, and Poor Man’s Ferrari.) You can see videos of past shows HERE

And, according to commissioner George Adelo, commission executive director Nancy Laflin referred the producers of the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men to musician Michael Sanchez, who wrote a mariachi song used in the movie.

The commission has a good Web site too: CLICK HERE.

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: GRASSROOTS ROCK

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
June 9, 2006


I’m a writer, not a gardener. So I had to look up the word Zoysia, the title of the new Bottle Rockets album. It’s a type of grass used in suburban lawns. I thought it was a breakaway Soviet republic.

But the image of suburban lawns is at the metaphorical center of this album by Brian Henneman and his trusty band of blue-collar rockers. “But in the meantime, life just goes on/We pay our bills, we mow our lawns.”

Zoysia can be seen as a loose-knit concept album about yearning for normalcy and moderation — yearnings not normally associated with rock ’n’ roll. Sure, artists like John Hiatt have been here before, but Henneman is one of the first rockers who came of age in the ’90s to deal with middle age, middle-class values, and trying to maintain middle ground in divisive political times.

One of the songs here is even called “Middle Man,” which has Henneman grousing, “If I could be a little bit happier/If I could be a little more cranky/If I could be a little more Dixie/If I could be a little more Yankee ...” (Henneman is from Missouri, a Civil War border state).

In “Align Yourself,” Henneman mocks those who give up their individuality to groups and movements. Singing through an electronic filter that almost sounds like a bullhorn, he recites an alphabet soup of various special interests, religions, political parties, and football conferences. “NRA, KKK, Adventists Seventh Day ... FFA, PLO, choose your partner there you go/NAMBLA, PETA, People’s Temple.”

While members of Future Farmers of America might resent being lumped in with the North American Man/Boy Love Association, the message of the song is in the refrain: “Align yourself, define yourself/When you don’t know who you are, you can remind yourself.”

On “Blind,” a slow, twangy tune (complete with mandolin and slide guitar played by Rockets string man John Horton), Henneman sermonizes about the pitfalls of judging people by race and appearance and takes a cheap shot at the American Idol/Britney Spears pop universe. “If we all were blind/would we be surprised at who’d become important in our eyes?”

The most moving track is the title song, which comes at the end of the album. “In my neck of the woods, the town where I live/It’s out in the sticks and conservative/Got lots of churches, we’ve got lots of bars/And the kids ’round here, they fight our wars.”

The lyrics of the bridge remind me of driving through Santa Fe neighborhoods during election season: “Out on the lawns we got campaign signs/We always know when it’s election time/The guy next door, his signs are not like mine/But he’s all right/We get along fine.”

Then there’s that image of the grass, a metaphor of interconnection among people who live close to one another: “If your neighbor gets the zoysia grass, buddy you get zoysia too/And maybe if you hurt yourself, he’ll mow the lawn for you.”

Musically, Zoysia shows the Rockets doing what they do best. They roar like Southern-rock warriors on “Better Than Broken” and “Mountain to Climb” and burn on the Neil Youngish “Happy Anniversary.” They’re also perfectly capable of good-time country, as in “Blind” and “Feeling Down.”

The biggest musical surprise here — and by a landslide the prettiest song on the album — is “Where I’m From,” a slow, mainly acoustic song with trippy chord changes that recall The Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa.

While not breaking much new ground — and not likely to set the commercial woods on fire — Zoysia shows Henneman and The Bottle Rockets living up to that self-description in “Middle Man”: invisible and reliable.

Also recommended:
En Este Momento by Cordero: Fans of Los Lobos and Calexico definitely should check out Cordero. This is a four-piece band (guitar, bass, drums, and trumpet) that specializes in minimalist, Mexicano-influenced rock.

Singer Ani Cordero, who also wrote all the songs, is from Brooklyn by way of Georgia, where she played drums for a side project of the old space/surf group Man or Astro-man? She has also spent time in Arizona, where she got some recording help from Giant Sand man Howe Gelb.

Cordero’s warm vocals are the main draw here; she sings mainly in Spanish. But trumpeter Omar Little and drummer Chris Verene (Cordero’s husband) are indispensable. Verene shows his stuff on percussion-heavy songs like “Come on Dear” and “María Elisa.”

My favorite songs here include “Don’t Let Them Destroy You,” which has an early-’60s girl-group feel (Shangri-Las go south of the border?); “Matadora,” which would have fit in on the first Los Super Seven album; “La Piedra,” a quiet, acoustic waltz that threatens to explode in thunder; the upbeat “Don Julio,” which Al Hurricane should cover; and “Mamá Ven a Buscarme,” which could almost be part of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

For more information on Cordero and The Bottle Rockets, check out www.bloodshotrecords.com.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: SOLOMON COUNTRY

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
December 22, 2006


It seems only natural that Solomon Burke, the under-appreciated ’60s soul man, would record a top-notch country album. After all, way back when, as he was making the transition from gospel singer to R & B star, he first charted with a cover of a country song “Just Out of Reach (of My Two Empty Arms).” And one of his early hits was a high-charged take on “Down in the Valley.”

So Burke’s new album, Nashville, is something of a homecoming for the gentle giant. Produced by Buddy Miller, this is an album of country and country-flavored rock backed by some cool pickin’ Nashville cats — including Al Perkins on steel guitar, Sam Bush on fiddle and violin, and Miller on guitar. The album features several impressive duets with the likes of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Pattys Loveless and Griffin.

It would have been an experience to be in the same room at the same time with Dolly and Solomon, such titans of American music. But Burke isn’t the type to be overwhelmed by mere mortal guest stars. It’s his vocal delivery that carries this album.

In fact, my favorite song here is the most stripped down — the opening cut, “That’s How I Got to Memphis.” This is a classic Tom T. Hall song. There are excellent covers of this tune by Kelly Willis and Miller. But, backed only by Miller’s acoustic guitar and Byron House’s stand-up bass, Burke makes the song his own. It sounds like a lonesome prayer.

But there are other breathtaking moments. The Dolly duet “Tomorrow Is Forever” is nice and churchy. Even prettier is Welch’s “Valley of Tears.” Gillian wrote the song, but she wisely keeps her background vocals low, letting Burke make love to the melody. “Everybody wants to send me down to the valley of tears,” he sings like a condemned man contemplating the lethal-injection table.

Burke seems to be having fun on this album. “You all done went hog crazy here,” Burke exclaims at the end of a riotous version of “Ain’t Got You,” (the Bruce Springsteen Tunnel of Love song) as the other people in the studio laugh. “What the heck was going on in this place here? Is you all got religion!”

But Nashville ends like it starts — on a somber note. “’Til I Get It Right” is a smooth countrypolitan-style song, complete with a string section. It’s about love, but on another level, it could be seen as a meditation on Burke’s career. “If I try my wings and try long enough, I’m bound to learn how to fly,” he moans.

He pretty much got this right.

Also recommended:
*After the Rain by Irma Thomas. “My house is a lonely house, but it once was a happy house,” Thomas sings on the album’s first song, “In the Middle of It All.” When she sings this song, an old Arthur Alexander tune, it’s not just a metaphor. Thomas’ New Orleans house was severely damaged last year in the big storm.

The album was recorded in Louisiana a few months after Katrina. The liner notes insist that all but one of the songs were selected before the catastrophe — despite the words of the opening track and the obvious connection in the closing number, Stevie Wonder’s “Shelter in the Rain.”

But there is a song directly about the great hurricane. This is “Another Man Done Gone,” a rewrite of an old folk song. In its original form, this was a terrifying song about kidnappings and lynchings, sung by blacks of the rural South. But Thomas created new verses. “Another storm has come, the people on the run ... the water’s at his door, he couldn’t stay no more ... I didn’t know his name, so many fled that day ... another thousand gone, running away from home.” It’s a snarling rootsy blues rocker with Sonny Landreth on slide guitar and Dirk Powell on fretless banjo.

This album is full of great songs. There’s a down-home version of Skip James’ “Soul of a Man” (featuring a guest appearance by Corey Harris on guitar); an aching country weeper written by one of my current favorites Eleni Mandell (”Another Lonely Heart”); and even a sad DWI song, “Flowers.” Written by Kevin Gordon and Gwill Owen, “Flowers” has verses concerning the victims of a drunk-driving accident and one just as sad about the family of the killer drunk.

One of my favorites here is a cover of Nina Simone’s anthemic signature “I Wish That I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” This won’t replace Nina’s version in our hearts and souls, but Irma gives it her all. And that’s a lot.

(Photo of Irma Thomas from Robert Mugge's film New Orleans Music in Exile.)

*Rise by Chris Thomas King. King is another Louisiana artist personally affected by last year’s hurricanes. He lost his home in New Orleans. The album is full of tunes with titles like “Baptized in Dirty Water,” “Like a Hurricane (Ghost of Marie Laveau),” and “Flow Mississippi Flow.”

The first song — “What Would Jesus Do?” — is sung from the perspective of a man who’s seen his wife swept away in the flood. He’s starving but he’s having moral qualms about looting. “Standing outside of Walgreens with a stone in my hand, I ask myself would Jesus understand.”

King takes you right back to those days of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” in the song “Faith.”

“President Bush flying around/Oh, looking down from us from the air/They say he pity the poor people/But does he really care?”

But the album ends on a strangely optimistic note — a sweet cover of Louis Armstrong’s pop classic “What a Wonderful World” without a trace of irony.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, July 19, 2020
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
9 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
Email me during the show! terrell(at)ksfr.org

Here's my playlist :

OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Don’t Try it by The Devil Dogs
Go-Go Girls by Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs
I’m Just a Mops by The Mops
Let Go by Gino & The Goons
Cretin Family by The Ramones
Despot by Sleeve Cannon
Those Fabulous 60s by Christopher Guest
Dead Pool by Mission of Burma

Eye of the Zombie by John Fogerty
Opus I: Unintended Consequences by Johnny Dowd
Everybody Out by Al Scorch
Laugh at Me by Frontier Dan & The Hickoids
All Night Cowboy by The Legendary Stardust Cowboy
Turnin’ Blue by The Candy Snatchers
English Scheme by The Fall
Money (That’s What I Want) by The Backbeat Band
Nutbush City Limits by Ike & Tina Turner

Evil! By Grinderman
Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness) by The Raconteurs
The Same by Grey City Passengers
Baby in a Well by Scott H. Biram
Huntsville by Tex Offenders
Love Me Two Times by Reverend Beat-Man & Izobel Garcia
Wir Sind Keine Menschen by Bonaparte
Honky Tonky Rhythm by Bobby Sisco
The Last Meal by Hurricane Harry

Have Love Will Travel by Big Sandy
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark by The Nightbeats
Dirty Robber by The Sonics
I’m Not Playing Your Games by Miss Ludella Black & The Masonics
Meet Me by The Garbage Can by Waylon Thornton & The Heavy Hands
I Love Living’ in the City by Fear
Funky Old Man by Bobby Rush
Centerfold by Beach Balls
Robot Drone by Holly Wood

Pinon Lurker by The Gluey Brothers
Behemoth by TAD
Candyass by The Dirtbombs
Dark Lonely Street by Bloodshot Bill
So Sad About Us by Dex Romweber Duo
Gaslight by Hamell on Trial
Death Wears an Overcoat by Bichos
Bread and Butter by The Newbeats
Yippee Hippee by Teri & The Librettos

Dusty Plain by Little Sparta with Sally Timms
There are Things by The Mekons
Sadness Malaise and Other Southwestern Tragedies by Alien Space Kitchen
Jesus in Pajamas by Kinky Friedman
Oh Fuck It by Pete Krebbs & Danny Barnes
She Walks Too Close to the Sun by Nick Vulture
New Skateboard by William Elliott Whitmore
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

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TERRELL'S TUNEUP: Five Recent Songs I Love

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
May 16,  2014

Usually in this column I write about new, or at least recent albums.

But this week I’m going to try something different and write about a bunch of new — or at least recent — songs.

Langford looks for drones during a Waco Bros. set

* “Drone Operator” by Jon Langford & Skull Orchard. For centuries, going back at least as far as “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” there have been anti-war protest songs written about the warriors themselves, portraying scared and lonesome soldiers barely hanging on in the hellish environment that is war.

But Langford’s tune, from his latest album, Here Be Monsters, is a different kind of war protest, which make sense, because it’s a different kind of war, with a different kind of warrior.

The drone campaigns in all the various theaters in this "war on terror" are designed to, as Langford sings, “stem the flow of body bags the politicians find so hard to explain."

As the narrator (and title character) explains, “I’m not really a soldier. I’m more likely to die/By car wreck or cancer/or that eye in the sky.” No, he’s not dodging bullets or improvised explosive devices. He’s just another guy at the office, complaining about the traffic on the way to work, drinking coffee, and when the workday’s done having a beer and watching some basketball with his co-workers.

“Yeah, I’m a drone operator. I am part of the team/While I study my monitor, wipe some dust from the screen." Of course, things don’t always go smoothly: “It didn’t look like a wedding. It really wasn’t my call.”

Being so far physically removed from the drone he’s operating seems to play with the narrator’s psyche, though. At one point in the song, he declares, “I’m like a god with a thunderbolt sitting on a big white cloud.”

And by the end of the song, it’s clear that he’s in a bar bragging about his work to some prospective paramour. And apparently he’s thinking of other uses for the drone technology beyond fighting the evildoers: "In through your window. You’ll never know./You’ll never know. I’ll follow you home.”

After a near-metallic guitar blast that kicks off the song, “Drone Operator" turns into a gentle, lilting song with a melody that somehow reminds me of a lost Fred Neil song from the early '60s. Langford is backed by an angelic chorus featuring Tawny Newsome and Jean Cook, who also plays violin.

Besides creating the best anti-war song I’ve heard in years, Langford (best known for his work with pioneering British punks The Mekons and insurgent country heroes The Waco Brothers) and director Hassan Amejal have created one of the most artful music videos I’ve seen in years, featuring a slightly different arrangement of “Drone Operator.” Check it out below.



* “Another Murder in New Orleans” by Bobby Rush with Dr. John. Whoever thought that a song that started out as a Crime Stoppers benefit could have so much soul?

Then again, no one would doubt that a Marvel Team-Up between the old chitlin'-circuit charmer Rush and the hoodoo-fried piano professor known as the Night Tripper would be anything less than soulful.

It’s true that Rush and Dr. John (backed by a tight little blues unit called Blinddog Smokin’) did this song to benefit the organization that pays cash rewards for anonymous tips that lead to arrests and convictions.

“When I heard the lyric, I thought, ‘You’re talking about New Orleans, my town?'” Rush told The New Orleans Times-Picayune last year. “Let me be a part of this. I want to be part of something to stop the crime.'”

The song’s lyrics deal with the rise in violent crime in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. It’s available on Rush’s new album, Decisions.



* “Box of Pine” by Black Eyed Vermillion. It’s been nearly five years since this “underground country,” "punk-roots,” whatever band, fronted by Gary Lindsey (a former sideman of Hank 3, aka Hank Williams III), released its debut album, Hymns for Heretics.

I was beginning to give up hope on the gravel-voiced Lindsey. But now comes this song, an inspired collaboration with Stevie Tombstone (formerly of The Tombstones).

It’s a gritty but catchy, minor-key barroom sing-along with Eastern European overtones, and if you can listen to it without thinking of Tom Waits, you could probably hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

It's got a great video also:



* “Superstar” by Alice Bag. Here’s the best Jesus Christ Superstar cover since that golden era when the Afghan Whigs did a deadly version of “The Temple” and Scratch Acid performed a punked-up “Damned for all Time.”

Ms. Bag

Ms. Bag (Alicia Armendariz), best known as a singer with the first-wave Los Angeles punk band The Bags, posted this last month on her SoundCloud page as a free download, along with the message:  “This one goes out to all my homegirls from Sacred Heart of Mary HIgh School. Happy Easter.”

I didn’t attend any Catholic girls school, but back in my senior year at Santa Fe High, everybody was into Jesus Christ Superstar. My friend Jake even wrote an obscene version of this song about one of his teachers.

But I like Alice’s better, with its slow, funky groove.

But here's the bad news: The darn thing has disappeared from Bag's SoundCloud page. I'm lucky I downloaded this when I did. Oh well, at you can still find Alice’s moving version of “Angel Baby,” dedicated to her late sister, there. And I'll play "Superstar

Here's "Angel Baby."




* “That Lucky Old Sun” by Leon Russell. This song is from Russell’s new album, Life Journey. Written by Haven Gillespie and Beasley Smith back in the ‘40s, it’s definitely my favorite one on the record.

I’ve said it before. When I was just a grade school kid and heard Ray Charles’ version of this old Frankie Laine hit, it was one of the first times that music actually made me sad. Even a little kid could sense the sorrow and frustration through al the overblown orchestration when Charles sang, “I fuss with my woman and toil for my kids/Sweat ’til I’m wrinkled and gray.” It was the sound of a man going nowhere, and it was painful.

I still like Charles’ “Lucky Old Sun” best, though the lesser-known take by Jerry Lee Lewis, which was a true solo effort (unreleased until decades after it was recorded), just the Killer at his piano, is up there too.

But while Russell’s cover doesn’t displace those versions, it’s a noble effort and, like Russell’s best, it’s full of Okie soul. Greg Leisz’s subtle steel guitar adds some texture. But what gives it power is Russell’s voice, which is getting a bit ragged with age but full of emotion.

I couldn't find Leon's version, so you'll just have to settle for Ray Charles.

ROBERT MUGGE'S MUSICAL SPIRIT

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
December 2, 2005

To filmmaker Robert Mugge, music is a metaphor for the human spirit.

“It’s beneath the surface in every film I’ve made,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Music is a leaping-off place for discussions of social issues, cultural issues, political issues, even religious issues.”


Mugge, who will be in town to present three of his music documentaries at the Santa Fe Film Festival, is enmeshed in a project to document the effects of Hurricane Katrina on a city that is a major wellspring of American music. Mugge is making the Katrina movie for the cable network Starz.

“The story of what’s happening in New Orleans is so big,” Mugge said, “you can turn on a camera anywhere there and get something interesting. You can talk to anyone you see on the street and get a great story. So music makes it a manageable focus.”

Music has been a metaphor for Mugge’s spirit since his early childhood in North Carolina in the early 1950s, when a radio introduced him to the strange and alluring world of American music — country, gospel, and rock ’n’ roll.

Mugge began studying film in the early ’70s at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. By the end of the ’70s he’d made documentaries about Frostburg, Md. (an Appalachian mining town where he’d gone to college in the 1960s), and controversial Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo. George Crumb: Voice of The Whale (1976), a portrait of the contemporary avant-garde composer, was Mugge’s first music movie.

In 1978 Mugge began filming Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, a portrait of the Alabama-born jazz spaceman. From then on, music, musicians, and places where music is made have been his focus.

Music isn’t shortchanged in Mugge’s movies. Unlike many music documentaries that interrupt great performances for inane fan chatter or irrelevant observations, Mugge frequently allows the whole song to play and let the music speak for itself. And his interview segments almost always go straight to the core.

Mugge has made documentaries about bluegrass, reggae, and Hawaiian music and has done films centered on Rubén Blades, Sonny Rollins, Robert Johnson, and Gil Scott-Heron. In 1984’s Gospel According to Al Green, Mugge became the first interviewer to get the soul singer to open up about a terrible night in which a spurned girlfriend threw a pot of boiling grits on him — causing second-degree burns — then went into a bedroom and fatally shot herself.

He’s done several movies on the blues, three of which are showing at the film festival. Deep Blues, a 1991 film narrated by Arkansas music writer Robert Palmer, features performances by Mississippi masters R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough — captured on film well before they became cult heroes on Fat Possum records — as well as lesser-known worthies like Jessie Mae Hemphill (both solo and with her fife-and-drum band), Roosevelt “Booba” Barnes, and Big Jack Johnson.

Mugge said that a major point of Deep Blues was that pockets of authentic Mississippi blues were alive and well. But by 1999, when he made Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson, “I started to sense (Mississippi blues) was beginning to die. A lot of performers were dying, and jukes were closing down.”

That concern prompted him in 2003 to make Last of the Mississippi Jukes, which also is showing at the film festival. While it’s full of high-powered performances by Alvin Youngblood Hart, Chris Thomas King, Vasti Jackson, Bobby Rush, and Patrice Moncell, it’s ultimately a sad film.

It starts off with a brand-new juke joint in Clarksdale, Miss., the Ground Zero Blues Club, which is co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman. But it ends at the Subway Lounge in Jackson, Miss., shortly before the club closed. At the end of the film there’s hope that the Subway would be renovated and revived. However, due to structural problems, the building has since been demolished.

The third film Mugge presents in Santa Fe is Rhythm ’N’ Bayous: A Road Map to Louisiana Music, originally released in 2000. Mugge said the purpose of this film was to show the impressive breadth of music in Louisiana — Cajun, zydeco, Creole, gospel, country, blues, soul, funk, jazz, rock ’n’ roll — and not just focus on “the same people” usually chosen to represent Louisiana music.

Among those featured in the movie are jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, rockabilly artist Dale Hawkins, New Orleans rocker Frankie “Sea Cruise” Ford, and blues pianist Henry Butler.

Rhythm ’N’ Bayous can be considered a preamble to his new project about Katrina’s effect on New Orleans music, a joyful picture of “before” that will provide a sad contrast with the “after” that Mugge is documenting.

In the days before his interview with Pasatiempo, Mugge had been in New Orleans and other locales in the South talking with and filming performances of New Orleans musicians. He found cars on top of houses and in swimming pools, and he saw mysterious men dressed in black patrolling the neighborhoods at night. He filmed in clubs with no running water and unspeakably foul restrooms.

Mugge convinced the Army Corps of Engineers to take him up in a helicopter for an aerial perspective of the city and of landmarks such as Fats Domino’s house. Mugge’s co-producer, Diane Zelman, convinced a voodoo priestess to allow the crew to shoot a voodoo ceremony in a neighborhood where electricity hadn’t been restored. At the climax of the ritual — whose purpose was “to bring the city back to life,” Mugge said — the lights suddenly came back on, evoking nervous laughter from all involved.

Mugge filmed a gig at Grant Street Music Hall in Lafayette in which Marcia Ball presented fellow pianist Eddie Bo with a new electronic keyboard to replace the one he’d lost in the hurricane.

He shot an unknown guitarist playing an unplugged electric guitar on the roof of his mother’s home.

“We filmed Irma Thomas going back to her home, which is now gutted,” Mugge said, speaking of the venerated soul singer. “We went with her to her nightclub, the Lion’s Den, which was destroyed. She pointed to these Christmas lights on the wall and said, ‘You guys put those there 12 years ago’” when Mugge filmed Thomas for True Believers, a film about Rounder Records.

The new Thomas footage as well as that of Ruffins, whom he tracked down in Houston, will be interspersed with old performance footage “from happier times.”

A major question underlying the Katrina project is whether New Orleans will survive as a living, thriving music center. It’s a question Mugge has yet to answer.

“Cyril Neville believes there’s a real conspiracy among white financial people to do away with the black, impoverished neighborhoods,” Mugge said. “That’s where the people get this culture that’s responsible for this music.”

But even people who are less conspiracy-minded fear that New Orleans will be rebuilt as a Disneyfied version of its former self, perhaps something like Beale Street in Memphis, once a bucket-of-blood crucible of the blues, now an upscale tourist district offering safe, sanitized blues.

“People want to make sure that the city (government) doesn’t sell them out and don’t try to turn it into a new Las Vegas,” Mugge said.

Many New Orleans musicians have fled and might not return. Ruffins is Houston, Eddie Bo in Lafayette, and Neville in Austin, Texas. “These guys are really good and they’re still New Orleans musicians,” Mugge said. “But if New Orleans ceases to be New Orleans, there’s no place for them. If every city in the country has its own New Orleans musician, are they truly New Orleans musicians if the city’s ceased to function?”

New Orleans, Mugge says, “is like a body without a spirit. The music itself is the spirit.”

(The photo way above is Robert Mugge with Jack Owens during the filming of Deep Blues.)

Schedule for Mugge Films at Santa Fe Film Festival

Deep Blues 7:30 p.m Thursday Dec. 8
Rhythm 'N' Bayous 2:30 p.m. Friday Dec. 9
Last of the Mississippi Jukes 2:30 p.m. Sunday Dec. 11
(All at CCA Cinematheque, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe NM 87505, phone: 505 982 1338)

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, November 4, 2005
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Hogs on the Highway by The Bad Livers
Pick Me Up on Your Way Down by Jimmie Dale Gilmore
The Old Man Down the Road by John Fogerty
No Place in History by Big Al Anderson
Two Step Too by Delbert McClinton
Don't Ya Tell Henry by The Band
The White Trash Song by Steve Young
Please Don't Bury Me by John Prine

River, Road or Rail by Nancy Apple & Rob McNurlin
Hurricane Season by Tom Russell Band
Joe Citizen Blues by Son Volt
The End by Marah
Doreen by The Old 97s
Party Lights by Junior Brown
Crimson and Clover by Dolly Parton
Black Sheep by Mark Weber

Keep Going by Boozoo Bajou with Tony Joe White
All You Rounders Better Lie Down by Clothesline Revival
Mother Prays Loud in Her Sleep by Flatt & Scruggs
The Waltzing Ladies by Josh Lederman & Los Diablos
Turn Row Blues by Bobby Earl Smith
Burn That Broken Bed by Iron & Wine with Calexico
Polk Salad Annie by Tony Joe White

I Don't Wanna Play House by Tammy Wynette
Weighted Down (The Prison Song) by Alexander Spence
Glasgow Girl by Rodney Crowell
Down Here Where I Am by Blaze Foley
Funny How Time Slips Away by Willie Nelson
Shine on Harvest Moon by Bobby Bare
3 Hearts Later by Marti Brom
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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