SANTA FE OPRY PLAY LIST

The Santa Fe Opry
Friday, August 13, 2004
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Now Webcasting
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays MDT
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Shakin' the Blues by Gail Davies & Robbie Fulks
The Boys From Alabama by Drive-By Truckers
New Fashioned Imperialist by Jason Ringenberg
King of Fools by Billy Joe Shaver
Pigeon Heart by Marah
Union Square by Eric Ambel
Innocent When You Dream by Elvis Costello
They Call The Wind Mariah by The Buckerettes

Sputnik 57 by Jon Langford
Blinding Sheets of Rain by The Old 97s
Robot Moving by Jon Dee Graham
Madman by Chrissy Flatt
Stranger in the Mirror by Jody Reynolds & Bobbie Gentry
Are You Still My Girl? by Joe West
Been a While by ThaMuseMeant
On the Sea of Galilee by Emmylou Harris & The Peasall Sisters
The Bum Hotel by Uncle Dave Macon

Crow Hollow Blues by Stan Ridgway
My Sister's Tiny Hands by The Handsome Family
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Gene Pitney
Richland Woman Blues by Maria Muldaur
Uncle Smoochface by Michael Hurley
New White House Blues by Peter Stampfel & The Bottle Caps
Shake That Thing by Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions
I Love Onions by Susan Christie

Beautiful Dreamer by Raul Malo
Wild Irish Rose by George Jones
Foot of the Bed by Tres Chicas
Green Green Rocky Road by Dave Van Ronk
Single Girl by 16 Horsepower
That's the Way Love Goes by The Harmony Sisters
Jacob's Ladder by Greg Brown
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

NADER'S NEW HELPER: ROD ADAIR

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
Aug. 13, 2004


Although backers of Ralph Nader’s bid to get on the New Mexico ballot say they’re confident he’ll make it, a prominent conservative Republican is trying to help make sure Nader can overcome Democratic efforts to block him.

State Sen. Rod Adair, R-Roswell, on Thursday asked the nearly 24,000 recipients of his e-mail newsletter to sign petitions seeking a ballot slot for Nader, who is running as an independent presidential candidate.

“We happen to believe that every candidate — right or left of center — should be on the ballot,” Adair wrote, attaching a download of the official Nader petition for his readers to sign and distribute.

The national Democratic Party, fearing Nader will be a spoiler for their presidential candidate in a close race with incumbent Republican George Bush, has lined up an army of volunteers in 20 states to fight Nader’s ballot efforts by challenging the validity of petition signatures.

Nader supporters abandoned their effort to get him on the ballot in Arizona after Democrats challenged thousands of petition signatures there. In New Mexico, the Nader campaign has to gather more than 14,527 valid signatures by Sept. 7 to force election officials to list his name among the presidential choices.

Nader’s New Mexico coordinator, Carol Miller, said Thursday she is responsible for about 100 volunteers who have been traveling the state gathering petition signatures.

“We got about 100 signatures at the recent Ani DiFranco concert (in Santa Fe),” she said. Referring to the left-wing singer’s fans, Miller said, “I don’t think there were many Republicans in that crowd.”

Adair said Thursday that he decided to distribute the petitions because he didn’t like the way television news reports were handling stories of Republicans helping Nader get on the ballot.

“If the Republicans were trying to keep the Libertarians off the ballot,” he said, “we’d get fried.”

Adair said Nader’s presence helps the Bush ticket. But he said other parties, including the Libertarians, aid the Democratic ticket headed by John Kerry.

Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik has secured a spot on the New Mexico ballot.

Adair wrote in his e-mail that “the Republicans have never tried to block the Libertarian Party in New Mexico — and there is little doubt their votes in 2000 cost President Bush New Mexico’s five electoral votes.”

Libertarian candidate Harry Browne got just over 2,000 votes in New Mexico four years ago, when Bush lost to Al Gore by 366 votes.

State Democratic Chairman John Wertheim on Thursday said Adair’s mass e-mail “demonstrates conclusively that Ralph Nader’s effort to get on the ballot is not a legitimate effort. It’s an effort orchestrated by the Republican Party.”

Miller, Nader coordinator, said she believes state Democratic officials are following the advice of former U.S. Rep. Toby Moffett.

Moffett, a former ally of Nader's, told the New Mexico delegation to last month’s Democratic National Convention that polls show the best argument to use with potential Nader voters is: “Ralph is in bed with Republicans.”

RIDGWAY IN SANTA FE

As Published in the Santa Fe New Mexican
Aug. 13, 2004

To paraphrase one of his songs, Stan Ridgway is just a little too smart for a big dumb music industry.

Ridgway is known to weave elements of jazz, techno-pop, horror-movie music, blues and country into his sometimes dark, sometimes funny, sometimes outright lovely songs. The basic sound is rooted in the spooky, New-Wave, Wall of Voodoo rock from which he sprang and often colored by his trademark chromatic harmonica. But listing the ingredients hardly does justice to his sound. He’s hard pressed to describe it himself.

“As one plays more music and gets older, all music comes together,” Ridgway said in a phone interview last week. “Unless you’re into marketing.

“At this point in my life I just play the music I like,” he said. “But I should probably think of a clever little label for it. Metropolitan Rodeo? Neo-Neanderthal? Fuzzy Folk?”

Ridgway will play Santa Fe Saturday as part of a “broken elemental trio,” with his wife Pietra Wexstun (of the band Hecate’s Angels) on keyboards and Rick King on guitar and slide.

Twenty-plus years after a fling with national fame when his old band Wall of Voodoo’s pioneering music video became an early staple of MTV, Ridgway is still best known as the guy who sang “Mexican Radio.”

One recent article about Ridgway called “Mexican Radio” an “albatross” around the singer’s neck, claiming the artist is burdened by the song‘s success.

“Music is all about hits for some people,” he said. “I read an interview with Randy Newman where someone asked him what he’d be remembered for. He said `Short People.’ Sure, people who like him know Randy Newman’s got all sorts of great songs. But most people will remember him for `Short People’ because that was the hit.”

He still performs his MTV hit. “But we do it in a different way,” he said without elaborating.

But even back in the New Wave era, Ridgway already was showing big hints of his deeper talents. On Wall of Voodoo’s Call of The West, the album containing “Mexican Radio,” there was a low-key little heartbreaker called “Lost Weekend,” a sad dialogue between a couple who’s just lost everything they had in Las Vegas. You couldn’t pogo to it, and it never got its own video, but “Lost Weekend” was a punch in the gut.

The truth is, he ought to be famous for his impressive, iconoclastic musical output since the Wall of Voodoo came tumbling down -- seven albums of original music under his own name, another one of big-band standards and show tunes, one under the name of Drywall (he swears a follow-up to Drywall‘s Work the Dumb Oracle is just around the corner), an album of otherworldly instrumentals in collaboration with his wife, a bunch of live albums available only on the internet, an out-of-print compilation of his soundtrack music … and I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a few so obscure even I haven’t heard of.

But even more that his unique brew of musical styles and influences, Ridgway’s greatest strength is his story-telling. He sings of losers, loners, small-time crooks, drifters, screw-ups and the women they love. He tells tales of bartenders suffering mid-life crisises, low-level smugglers, street vendors who sell newspapers, lonely kids listening to train whistles, old women too scared to leave their homes.

Not to mention “fuzzy folk” ballads honoring Johnny Cash, CIA godfather “Wild” Bill Donovan and a ghostly Marine named “Camouflage.”

Sometimes Ridgway’s lyrics tell elaborate stories. Sometimes they sound like conversations he might have overheard at a bus station.

Ridgway said he likes to write about characters on society’s margins. “Those are the stories worth telling in a song,” he said. “When you’re listening to music, you really are a solitary listener, even if you’re with other people. We’re all stuck in our own skins and you can’t get out. We’re encased in this skin and bones. When you play a song, it sings directly to your soul.

“I’m always drawn to this character,” he continued. “He’s got bits of me and people I know.”

Of some of the recurring themes in his songs -- the drifter arriving in a strange new town, the man on the highway, running from the law -- Ridgway said, “Sometimes my songs are obsessions. I start writing it and I find myself saying `Here I go again.’ “

Ridgway would be rich if he had a buck for every story about him that compared him with Los Angeles detective writer Raymond Chandler. That probably started because the title song of his first solo album, The Big Heat was about a private eye.

“I’m not arguing about being compared with Raymond Chandler,” he said. “It’s better than being called the Pinky Lee of Rock, or, as one reviewer called me, `The Porky Pig of Rock ‘n’ Roll.’ That was something to do with my voice.”

Ah yes, the Ridgway voice, an acquired taste to be sure. The All Music Guide describes it as an “unforgettable adenoidal vocal delivery that makes him sound like a low-level wise guy in one of those old Warner Bros. gangster films of the '30s.”

“The first time I heard my own voice it was just horrible,” Ridgway said. “I thought, `What a creep! What a jerk!’ “

Ridgway’s latest album, Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads & Fugitive Songs, has backwoods stompers, a sad cocktail jazz ballad called “Our Manhattan Moment,” a Civil War love song, a couple of songs that really are about fugitives and a sinister-sounding cover of an obscure Mose Allison tune (“Monsters of the Id“).

Ridgway was happy when he learned that Allison had performed “Monsters” last month at his Santa Fe concert. He said he sent Allison’s son a copy of the cover. “He played it for his dad right before Christmas,” Ridgway said. Allison’s song told Ridgway Allison’s reaction was “Stan got it right.”

Then there’s “Afghan/Forklift,” which deals with a warehouse worker who stumbles on to a terrible secret that compels him to unsuccessfully attempt to warn the president.

But like Bobbie Gentry holding on telling anyone what Billy Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, Ridgway demurs when asked what was in those mysterious crates bound for Afghanistan.

“All I can say is that it was once a much longer song,” he said. “I chopped it up and lost some verses.”

Ridgway, 50, apparently has had his sense of drama ever since he was a kid growing up Barstow, Calif.

Even before he got involved with rock ‘n’ roll, he said, he’d spend hours producing homemade “radio shows” with his brother and making 8mm movies of plastic models of werewolves being set on fire.

“We’d do anything having to do with ghost stories, myths, monsters,” Ridgway said. “I have a theory why people our age liked those Universal monsters so much -- Frankenstein, The Wolfman. … Those monsters were like overgrown children. They weren’t normal. They were looking for friends and trying to do the good thing, but they’d always make a big mistake and got the whole populace to rise up against them. Just like being a teenager.”

When: 8 p.m. Saturday Aug. 14
Where: The Paramount Lounge & Nightclub, 331 Sandoval St.
How much: Tickets are $15 at CD Cafe, The Candyman, Bar B (after 5:00 p.m.), the Lensic Box office (988-1234) and online at Tickets.com.

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: SHOUT FOR THE ISLEY BROTHERS

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
August 13, 2004

For 40 years or so the songs of The Isley Brothers have popped up unexpectedly on the soundtrack of the collective consciousness of America.

The highlights of the Isleys’ lengthy career can be found on the new two-disc collection The Essential Isley Brothers.

Back in 1958 there was that primal "Shout," in which the three oldest brothers Ronald, O’Kelly and Rudolph followed the Ray Charles gospel/soul road to a joyful destination.

A few years later during one of those teen dance craze phases, they reemerged with "Twist and Shout," inspiring a certain British quartet whose later version became more famous.

There was a brief fling with Motown, producing a minor hit "This Old Heart of Mine," that sounds a whole lot like the Four Tops. There was a period where they had a young guitarist sideman who would later become famous as Jimi Hendrix.

Then in the late ‘60s The Isleys reemerged with a new crop of younger brothers, guitarist Ernie and bassist Marvin and Isley in-law Chris Jasper on keyboards.

With the cool and funky "It’s Your Thing," the group showed that they weren’t some nostalgia act.

By the mid ‘70s the Isleys had completely reinvented themselves as the funkiest of the funky. Their album covers and publicity photos of that era show that they were right up there with Parliament and Earth, Wind & Fire in the wild multi-color Afrosheen, Superfly/Superpimp/Superhero fashion stratosphere.

But more importantly their music also was in the same league as the funksters whose music remains timeless.

With 1973‘s "Who’s That Lady," Ernie Isley established himself as a guitarist for the ages.

And if you think Public Enemy came up with the concept of "Fight the Power," think again. The brothers’ 2-part, 5-minute gurgling soul workout from 1975 was an unusual call-to-arms during the relatively sedate Gerald Ford era. Even though the lyrics of the song protest people who complain about Ronald playing his music too loud, the rebelliousness is refreshing.

The above listed tunes are on The Essential Isley Brothers, as is the relatively obscure -- an, actualy inconsequential -- "Move Over and Let Me Dance," an early ‘60s track featuring Hendrix on guitar.)

There are plenty of lesser-known Isley cuts here. "Keep On Doin’ " and, especially "Freedom," both from 1969, are great examples of the Isleys transforming from the soul shouters of their earliest incarnation to the Funkytown champs of their later years.

And one thing I’ve always loved about the Isley Brothers is their incredible knack of taking lightweight pop and turning it into burning soul. Carol King’s "Brother Brother" and Seals & Crofts’ "Summer Breeze," are prime examples here.
As strong as the music is on this collection, I’ve still got a few quibbles with the compilation.

First of all, there’s the whole issue of rampant repackaging that grips the music industry. The mighty Sony Empire released a fine 3-disc Isley retrospective It’s Your Thing just a few years ago. I guess the new Essential package is for the benefit of those who can afford a two-disc set but can’t afford a three-disc set.

Secondly, this collection is extremely skimpy on early Isley material. There’s just a handful of pre-1969 songs. While it’s certainly true that the funky early ‘70s were the Isley Brothers’ greatest period, more from their formative years would have given more context. (It also would have helped had the selections been in at least a rough chronological order.)

And finally, from the you-can’t-please-everyone department, there are a few missed gems that should have been in this collection.

An obvious omission is the Isleys’ cover of Curtis Mayfield’s "I’m So Proud," which is one of their most gorgeous tunes.

And an obscurity that I’d have loved to have seen here is the group’s cover of Crosby, Still, Nash & Young’s "Ohio," the song about the Kent State killings, which appeared on the Isleys‘ 1971 Givin‘ It Back, done as a 9-minute medley with Hendrix‘s "Machine Gun."

At the time they were criticized because they deviated from the original opening line, "Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming," instead singing "Tin soldiers with guns they’re coming."

It’s not clear why they changed it. Some assumed they didn’t want to offend Republican Isley fans, but if that was the case, why do that song in the first place?
Perhaps they wanted to make the song more timeless. Even without the image of Dick Nixon, the Isley version of Ohio is a bone-chiller. While Neil Young captured the rage and anger in the original, the Isleys captured the fear of watching a government violently turn against its own people.

Also Recommended:

*Live It Up by The Isley Brothers. Two of the eight tracks of this recently re-released 1974 record appear on The Essential Isley Brothers.

But this one’s worth it if only for their gut-wrenching, Isaac Hayes-inspired cover of Todd Rundgren’s signature song "Hello, It’s Me."

Not only that, there’s a bonus cut -- a version of the title song as performed on The Dinah Shore Show in 1974. Yes, the Isleys in the kitchen with Dinah. When the hostess proclaims, "I really felt that!" at the end, you know it had to be true.

Hear some Isleys this week on Terrell’s Sound World, 10 p.m. Sunday on KSFR, 90.7 FM -- now web casting on http://www.ksfr.org/. And don’t forget The Santa Fe Opry -- same time, same station Friday.

ROUNDHOUSE ROUND-UP: SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

As published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
August 12, 2004

At the seemingly neverending campaign appearances in New Mexico by the national candidates, event organizers for both major political parties have made a sharp separation between the national and local press.

There are separate seating areas (although at Wednesday’s Albuquerque visit by George Bush, Dan Balz of The Washington Post sat with the local yokels). Sometimes there are separate entrances.

At last month’s rally for John Kerry and John Edwards at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, New Mexico reporters were kept away from a post-speech food spread for reporters traveling with the national ticket.

At Bush’s Albuquerque campaign event at Eclipse Aviation, however, the division went even further.

When this writer stepped out of the building to use the restroom, there was a friendly Bush volunteer assigned to escort people to the facilities.

“Are you local press or national press?” she asked.

Yes, it’s true. Separate-but-equal portable toilets for the local and national press.

Attempts to get an explanation from the Bush campaign about the reason for separate toilets were not successful.

Presidential speeds: The next time there’s a complaint about Gov. Bill Richardson speeding on the state’s streets and highways, Richardson can say he only was acting “presidential.”

According to a White House press pool reporter, quoted in the Washington Times’ online Insider section, an “uneventful motorcade to the airport” with President Bush last Sunday in Kennebunkport, Maine, turned out to be a pretty wild ride.

The reporter, Edwin Chen of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that “at various points along the way, the presidential motorcade traveled at speeds that exceeded 75 mph, according to the speedometer. And this was mostly on a narrow, curving, and sometimes hilly two-lane road — sans sidewalk. More than once, we could hear tires squealing.”

Chen continued, “Adding to the thrill of the chase were the occasional clusters of people — including children — obviously out to catch a fleeting glimpse of (Bush). Among them, at one point, were more than a dozen seniors, in wheelchairs.”

Chen wrote that people in the press vehicle clocked the van’s speed at various points at 50 mph (in a 25 mph zone), 60 mph (in a 35 mph zone) and above 75 mph (in a 45 mph zone.) “The white-knuckles ride lasted about 25 minutes,” Chen reported.

According to The Washington Times account, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the reason for the high speeds was “to minimize the motorcade’s inconvenience to the local residents.”

Unlike Richardson’s spokesmen, the White House didn’t say the speeding was done for security’s sake.

American Indians for Kerry:

About the time that Kerry and Edwards were speaking Sunday at the 83rd annual Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Pow Wow in Gallup, their campaign released a list of 39 American Indian leaders who have endorsed the Democratic ticket.

Among them are three New Mexicans, including Santa Fe lawyer — and former acting state Democratic Party chairman — David Gomez, a member of Taos Pueblo.

The other two listed by the Kerry campaign are LaDonna Harris, president of Americans for Indian Opportunity and a member of the Comanche Tribe who lives at Santa Ana Pueblo, and her daughter Laura Harris, executive director of Americans for Indian Opportunity. Laura Harris also is daughter of former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris.