Saturday, December 17, 2005

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, December 16, 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
Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Pretty Boy Floyd by The Byrds
Anacostia by Son Volt
Burn, Burn, Burn by Ronny Elliott
Master of Diaster by John Hiatt
Crazy as a Loon by John Prine
For Too Long by Eric Hisaw

The First Christmas by Nancy Apple & Rob McNurlin
Walking the Floor Over You by Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Cocktails by Robbie Fulks
Pair of Goats by The Gourds
Let's Leave it Alone by Kelly Hogan
Three-Teared Cake by Margaret Burke & Jim Terr
Five Fingers to Spare by Marti Brom
Caryl Chessman by Country Johnny Mathis
Can Man Christmas by Joe West & Mike the Can Man
Blue Christmas Lights by Chris & Herb

Candy Man by Mississippi John Hurt
Angels Laid Him Away by Lucinda Williams
My Creole Belle by Taj Mahall
Dupree's Diamond Blues by The Grateful Dead
Betty and Dupree by Brownie McGee
Angel Band by Bethleham & Eggs
Gabriel's Call by Hazel & Alice
Angels in the Street by Hank Webster

There's No Place Like Home For the Holidays by Leon Redbone
Blue Wing by The Tom Russell Band
Big Boy Can't You Move 'em by Clothesline Revival with "Uncle" Bradley Eberhard
Wilderness by Peter Case
It's Not My Time to Go by Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks
Nothing But a Child by Steve Earle with Maria McKee
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

Friday, December 16, 2005

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: LENNON'S "WORST ALBUM" RECONSIDERED

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
December 16, 2005


Imagine this scenario. It’s December, 1971 and President Richard Nixon is sweating like a maniac in some underground White House bunker. He’s just read a FBI report on a concert in Ann Arbor. Mich. -- 15,000 screaming hippies raising their unwashed fists and singing along with an ex-Beatle to demand that some pot-smoking anti-war crank be sprung from prison. The president shivers as he reads every word the FBI agent had written down: “…"gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta set him free."

It wouldn’t end there. Nixon knows that bastard John Lennon was intent on uniting with crazy radicals and marijuana addicts. Not just to disrupt the convention and lead the youth vote against him in next year’s election like some sinister foreign pied piper, but to force him to strip naked and dance with Mao Tse-tung.

He had to be stopped. The FBI was trying, but they weren’t doing enough. The INS were a bunch of impotent gimps. Liddy and the boys were busy with other projects.

There was only one he could turn to, someone who had warned him years ago about those nefarious Beatles, their drugs and their communistic ways. Someone who had offered to help and had already been commissioned as a special law enforcement officer.

Nixon calls in Ron Zeigler and beats him with a flyswatter until he draws blood. That feels better, Nixon sighs. He picks up the phone to make the call.

“Rosemary, get me Elvis Presley.”

XXXXXXXXXXX

Last week, on the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination, I awoke to a radio interview on Democracy Now with Jon Weiner, a history professor at the University of California who has written two books about Lennon’s political activism in the early ‘70s and the Nixon administration’s attempts to have Lennon deported.

“He wanted to be part of what was going on,” Weiner told Amy Goodman. “What was going on in New York was the anti-war movement, and he became friends with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale and other activists … That's what got him in trouble with the Nixon administration.

And yes, according to Weiner an undercover FBI agent actually attended a “Free John Sinclair” concert starring Lennon and actually “wrote down every word John Lennon said, including all the words to the song (“John Sinclair”) , including `gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta set him free.’ ” (Sinclair was the manager of the MC5 and leader of a group called he White Panthers. He’d been sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two joints of marijuana.)

After hearing the interview, I knew that I gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta get myself a copy of Some Time in New York City, which was re-released last month on CD. So I did.

This work, in which Yoko Ono wrote and sang about half the songs, generally is reviled as Lennon’s worst album.

The basic rap on the record is that a mighty Beatle, the mad genius responsible for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus” had been reduced to writing third-rate, radical chic political screeds.

It’s true, writing protest songs is tricky business. Recently I received a CD called Christmas in Fallujah by someone called Jefferson Pepper. I can’t figure out how someone could make a song about the ravages of war sound so smug and banal.

On the other hand, the Iraq war has produced several top-notch protest songs -- Terry Evans’ “My Baby Joined the Army” (written by Ry Cooder), “Can’t Make Here,” by James McMurtry” Robert Cray’s “20.” It’s also shown that a good protest song can be timeless. Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,“ Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and Mose Allison’s surreal “Monsters of the ID” (revived recently by Stan Ridgway) with lyrics about “goblins and their hags … out there waving’ flags…” still resonate.

For the most part, Lennon and Ono’s lyrics to these songs fall well short of “Masters of War” or “Monsters of the ID.”

Only a few of them are outright embarrassing. The worst undoubtedly is “Angela” about jailed radical professor Angela Davis. With a goopy, string-sweetened arrangement, Lennon sings, “They gave you coffee/They gave you tea/They gave you everything but equality.”)

However, Some Time in New York City isn’t nearly as bad as detractors say. And some of the songs are good old-fashioned kick-ass rockers.

Lennon’s band here was a gritty and greasy New York group called Elephant’s Memory, led by sax maniac Stan Bronstein.

“John Sinclair” and “Attica State” are high-powered stompers featuring Lennon on a mean National guitar. “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” about the troubles in Northern Ireland, might also have its roots in Lennon’s rivalry with Paul McCartney. McCartney had recently released a tepid and polite tune called “Give Ireland Back to the Irish.” Lennon’s song, aided by Yoko’s weird warble and Bronstein’s sax, blew McCartney’s song to smithereens. And the autobiographical “New York City” is good, mindless fun.

The oft-vilified Ono even has a couple of good contributions here. “Sisters O Sisters” is the type retro girl-group charmer that would have fit in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. But her song “We’re All Water” with its great beat and crazy images -- “There may not be much difference between Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon/If you strip them naked” -- should have made everyone forgive her for breaking up The Beatles.

There’s some wonderful live bonus material here, including a powerful “Cold Turkey.” My only beef here is that in this release Capitol Records cut some of the Lennon jams with Frank Zappa, which appeared on previous versions of Some Time In New York City, replacing it with a bland Yoko song “Listen the Snow is Falling” and “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” This is a great holiday hit, but it’s already included on who knows how many Lennon compilations.

In the end, Tricky Dick didn’t really have much to worry about in regard to John Lennon. But what a time of wonder, when a rock ‘n’ roll star could make a president shake.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

HIGH-FLYIN' SID

In regard to today's column, a reader just pointed out that while Jack Schmitt is indeed the only New Mexican to ever walk on the moon, he is not our only astronaut.

Sid Gutierrez is another high flying New Mexican. He's a space shuttle pilot, having flown two shuttle missions.

He's from Albuquerque and works at Sandia National Laboratories.

ROUNDHOUSE ROUND-UP: N.M. TAKES UP SPACE

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
December 15, 2005



At a star-studded event at the Eldorado Hotel (well, Victoria Principal of Dallas fame was there) Wednesday morning, Sir Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Companies (and star of his own reality t.v. show) joined Sir Bill Richardson to announce a plan to build a $225 million space port in southern New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic is already selling $200,000 tickets for two-and-a half hour trips to space. Principal has already has paid for the first flight.

Of course the guv has to go through the formality of convincing the Legislature to go along with setting aside $100 million over the next three years for the project. Legislative leaders at the announcement seemed agreeable. But even if the Legislature approves, Richardson will have to convince the voters in conservative southern New Mexico counties to approve a sales tax increase to help fund what Richardson is calling “The Second Space Age.”

After the presentation, I asked the Rebel Billionaire a question that apparently no state official thought to ask:

Will there be discounts for New Mexicans for space rides?


After all, we’re paying for the space port. And we’’d even allow Virgin Galactic to install a huge replica of one of Branson’s irises — which is part of the logo for the company — which would be visible from outer space.

Branson chuckled. “I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll consider it.”

Return to the Moon: Only one New Mexican has any first-hand experience in space travel. That’s former U.S. Sen. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt. In 1974, as an Apollo 17 crew member, Schmitt was the last man to step on the moon.

Schmitt, a geologist by profession, is a long-time supporter of private industry leading the way into outer space. But in a telephone interview Wednesday, Schmitt said the state should be very careful about investing millions of taxpayer dollars in space ventures.

“Ultimately the value has to be sufficient to support private investment,” he said. “If the investors believe they’ll get a return on their investment. I don’t see that the taxpayers, in general terms, should be investing.”

Richardson said that two studies have shown the proposed spaceport would bring thousands of jobs to the state and have an economic impact of $750 million. But Schmitt said the state should have the studies reviewed by an independent company.

Schmitt was a consultant for the state about 10 years ago when New Mexico first started talking about a space port. “I supported the idea of building an airport in southern New Mexico that also could serve as a space port,” he said. An airport would pay for a spaceport, he said.

Several years ago, he helped start a company called Interlune-Intermars Initiative Inc. to attract investors to fund a project to mine the moon. The moon, he says, contains a form of helium called Helium 3, which he says could be used to create a clean energy-source through nuclear fusion.

Schmitt’s book, Return to the Moon, which deals with lunar mining, was published last month.

Monkeys and moon walks: A media handout package at the Virgin Galactic announcement included a “New Mexico Space History Timeline.”

It mentioned Robert Goddard, who moved to Roswell in 1929 to build and test rockets and Werner von Braun, who launched a V-2 rocket into space from White Sands Missile Range in 1946. It even mentioned Enos, the space chimp who orbited the Earth in 1961. Enos was trained at Holloman Air Force Base.

But somehow, the list didn’t mention the only New Mexican to go to the moon.

House Speaker Ben Lujan, however, paid verbal tribute to Schmitt, saying his moon trip was inspiring to all New Mexicans.

Indeed, that moon walk was taken very seriously by voters.

Republican Schmitt beat Democrat incumbent Sen. Joe Montoya in the 1976 election. Many political observers believed the turning point in the race was when Montoya gave a speech mocking Schmitt, saying that a monkey could be trained to go into space.

Schmitt lost to Democrat Jeff Bingaman in 1982.

Back to Earth: Eric Serna’s not the only politico around here who knows how to throw a fundraiser.

Art mogul/real-estate baron/would-be-casino operator/former state Board of Finance member and major Bill Richardson money-man Gerald Peters is throwing a benefit for Tax and Revenue Secretary Jan Goodwin.

Richardson is listed as host on the invitation, along with Peters and his wife. Co-hosts include New Mexico Finance Authority Chairman Steve Flance, Transportation Commission member Johnny Cope and longtime Richardson ally Butch Maki.

Goodwin ran for state treasurer in 2002, losing in the Democratic primary to Robert Vigil — who went on to get indicted on federal extortion and money-laundering charges and resign. She said Wednesday her campaign debt is about $71,500.

The Dec. 21 fundraiser starts out with cocktails at Peters’ gallery — which costs $500 a head. A buffet dinner at Peters’ home will cost $1,000.

Asked whether Goodwin will be running for treasurer again next year, Goodwin said, “I like my job. I’m very happy where I am.”

Of course, that didn’t stop her from applying for the treasurer’s job after Vigil quit.

Monday, December 12, 2005

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, December 11, 2005
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell


OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
We're All Water by Yoko Ono
The Alibi Room by Drywall
Straight Street by The Fiery Furnaces
King of the Rodeo by Kings of Leon
Night Light by Sleater-Kinney
Necrophiliac in Love by The Blood-Drained Cows
Silent Night by Bad Religion

Pray for Pills by The Dirtbombs
Monkeyheart by Kevin Coyne & The Pine Valley Cosmonauts
Here Come the Bastards by Primus
Shelter from the Storm by Bob Dylan
She Looks Like a Woman by The Fleshtones
Kratae by Johnny's Guitar
A Small Demand by The (International) Noise Conspiracy
Christmas is a Special Day by Fats Domino

Members Only by Abdul Rasheed with The House Rockers
Bo Meets the Monster by Bo Diddley
Mamma's Got a Friend by Otis Taylor
Out on the Water Coast by Sonny Boy Williamson & The Yardbirds
I Don't Care No More by Sonny Boy Williamson & The Animals
Backwater Blues by Irma Thomas
I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got by Bettye LaVette
Jumper on the Line by R.L. Burnside
Hole in the Wall by The King Edward Blues Band

Secret For a Song by Mercury Rev
John Wayne Gacy Jr. by Sufjan Stevens
Man of God by Neil Diamond
My Pet Rat St. Michael by Mark Eitzel
We Both Go Down Together by The Decemberists
The Wanderer by U2 with Johnny Cash
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, April 28, 2024 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM, 101.1 FM  Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrel...