TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, May 13, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
NEW: email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Fire on the Moon by The BellRays
Go Betty Go by The A-Bones
Destination X by Dead Moon
Bad Seed by Wayne Kramer
Giant Robot Rock 'n' Roll by The Goblins
Voodoobilly Man by Deadbolt
The Bad Stuff by The Fall
High Class by The Buzzards
Get Me to the World On Time by The Electric Prunes

We're Not Alone by Dinosaur Jr.
Free and Freaky by The Stooges
Letter to Memphis by The Pixies
My Friends Have by Marianne Faithful
To Bring You My Love by P.J. Harvey
Straight to Hell by The Clash
Pow Pow by Dengue Fever

Honeybee (Let's Fly to Mars) by Grinderman
It's So Easy by Willie DeVille
You'll Never Change by Detroit Cobras
Ana by Los Straitjackets with Little Willie G
I Need Someone by Thee Midnighters
Neighbor Neighbor by Roy Head
I Got a Lot to Learn by Esquerita
Satisfied Fool by Nathaniel Meyer
I Can't Control Myself by The Strawberry Zots

Hotrods to Honolulu by The Blue Hawaiians
Flaming Cheese by The Red Elvises
Gamagaj by Cankisou
Breath by Pere Ubu
Eyes Behind Your Head by John Hammond
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

RECENT RICHARDSON STORIES

My story about other presidential candidates who got contributions from New Mexico can be found HERE. (Looks like Hillary is winning the Maloof battle.)

But the strangest tale from the Richardson campaign finance report actually came from a Waco brother. The Waco Tribune-Herald reported that someone used a name very similar to that of a Republican Texas judge -- as well as the judge's former address -- to make a $2,300 contribution to the Richardson campaign. If that's a joke, it's a pretty bizarre one -- not to mention expensive! The judge said he didn't make the contribution. We don't know who did, but the story strongly implies someone made the contribution using a false name.

Meanwhile, back in Santa Fe, Tom Sharpe did a story about Richardson's real estate holdings in exclusive north-side Santa Fe. CLICK HERE

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, May 11, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
NEW: email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
I've Got a Lot of Livin' to Do by Cornell Hurd featuring Blackie White
I Wouldn't Live in New York City If They Gave Me The Whole Dang Town by Buck Owens
Poor Litle Racoon by Angry Johnny & The Killbillies
Magia Blanca by Los Straitjackets with Big Sandy
Love Me Again by Mike Montiel
I Love the Way You Do It by Zeno Tornado
I've Got a Passion by Gurf Morlix
What a Fool I Was by The Watzloves

Naked Fool by Michael Fracasso
The Blue Side of Lonesome by John Prine & Mac Wiseman
The End of the Line by Bill Hearne's Roadhouse Revue featuring Cathy Faber
My Way of Rockin' by Wild Bob Burgos
You Took My Thing and Put it In Your Place by C.W. Stoneking
My Bucket's Got a Hole in It by Johnny Horton
River of Happiness by Dolly Parton
Country Bumpkin by Cal Smith

Ry Cooder set
All songs by Ry Cooder
J. Edgar
Footprints in the Snow
On a Monday
Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now
Mexican Divorce
Stand By Me
Hank Williams
Down in Mississippi (Vocals by Terry Evans, Bobby King, Willie Green, Jr.)
There's a Bright Side Somewhere

Yellow Mama by Dale Watson
Hangover Tavern by Hank Thompson
Curtain in the Window by Johnny Bush & Justin Trevino
Please Help Me I'm Falling by Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn'
Still Doing Time by George Jones
Miracle of Five by Eleni Mandell
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: RY & BUDDY

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
May 11, 2007

“People don’t know this history anymore. ... All these young parents and these little kids, they live in almost total ignorance of American history, which is very rich and colorful and sort of mysterious — poignant really. So I got to thinking, ‘How would you go about telling them about it? ...The ideal setting for this ... is where the little kid says, ‘Mommy, why is Buddy in jail?’ And then the mommy says, ‘Well, there was a miner’s strike.’ And the little kid says, ‘Mommy, what’s a miner’s strike?’ And the parent goes, ‘Well, let’s see. Let’s look into this a little.’”

— Ry Cooder interview with Bill Fiskics-Warren, No Depression, March-April 2007

I suppose I was thinking along the same lines as Ry Cooder last summer when, coming back from a trip to Denver with my teenage son, I made a little side trip off Interstate 25 to visit the site of the Ludlow Massacre.

They didn’t teach about the Ludlow Massacre when I was in school, and my son had never heard about it either.

In case you didn’t learn about Ludlow in your history class, on April 20, 1914, at least 18 miners and members of their families, according to the official monument, were killed by Colorado National Guard troops called out on behalf of John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. “Not one of the perpetrators of the slaughter [was] ever punished, but scores of miners and their leaders were arrested and blackballed from the coal industry,” the United Mine Workers Web site says.

The Ludlow monument isn’t exactly a tourist trap. No gift shop; no snack bar. Just a monument and some historical text and old newspaper clippings behind glass. And there’s a cellar in which two women and 11 children were burned to death. You can descend a ladder into the empty cellar. Nothing’s there — unless your imagination takes you back to that terrible day.

There’s no dark and violent imagery in Cooder’s new album My Name is Buddy, though it does express an old-time, Western-state, union-man worldview, a universe populated by the likes of Joe Hill, Tom Joad, Woody Guthrie, and the Industrial Workers of the World, aka the Wobblies (or, as folksinger and card-carrying Wobblie Dave Van Ronk called it, “the I trouble ya, trouble ya”).

But the story told in this song cycle (folk opera?) concerns talking animals — a mouse named Lefty, Rev. Tom Toad, and a red cat named Buddy. The CD comes with a fun little storybook with illustrations by San Antonio artist Vincent Valdez. But don’t expect a Disney cartoon version to follow.

My Name is Buddy is like a musical cross between Animal Farm and The Grapes of Wrath. Buddy and Lefty are itinerant workers and hobos, while Tom Toad is a blind preacher. They get arrested, they flee racists, they praise radicals, and they mock J. Edgar Hoover.

To be honest, as a registered adult I find Cooder’s animal concept a little cutesy and cloying at times. (Cooder says he got the idea when a friend sent him a Photoshopped picture of a cat’s head on Leadbelly’s body.) But he’s telling important American stories here, and you tend to forget the narrator is a talking cat.

The music is so good, it’s hard to hold that against him.

In many ways, Buddy is a return to Cooder’s classic 1970s albums like Chicken Skin Music (my personal favorite), Into the Purple Valley, Paradise and Lunch, and so on. Back then, Cooder was known as a hip and innovative interpreter of various strains of American music — folk, blues, Tex-Mex, Hawaiian. Cooder knew what “ditty wah ditty” meant. He helped introduce the My Generation to the likes of Flaco Jimenez, Earl “Fatha” Hines, and Gabby Pahinui. But more importantly, he found ways to mix up these sounds and have it sound natural.

Cooder went through a decade or so of doing virtually nothing but movie soundtracks, then started a series of collaborations with international musicians such as Ali Farka Toure and, most famously, master Cuban jazzmen in Buena Vista Social Club. Like Buddy, his Latin-flavored 2005 release Chavez Ravine was a concept album dealing with social injustice. It was a strong work, but it didn’t sound much like Chicken Skin.

On the new album Cooder brings back some of his finest sidemen from years past. Jimenez plays accordion on several numbers, and soul men Terry Evans and Bobby King sing on “Sundown Town (The Reverend Tom Toad).” Plus you’ll hear chief Chieftain Paddy Moloney on tin whistle and uilleann pipes, bluegrass mandolinist Roland White, Mike Seeger on fiddle and banjo (and his brother Pete playing banjo on one song), Van Dyke Parks on piano, and Jim Keltner and Cooder’s son Joachim on drums.

Given the setting of the story, it’s only natural that the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads is the foundation of the basic sound of most of the songs. It’s fun to try to trace the echoes of Americana and Irish folk melodies in many of the tunes. “Christmas in Southgate,” for instance, sounds a lot like Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” And if you didn’t get it, Cooder even borrows a phrase from that song: “Well the telephone rang and it jumped off the wall.”

But as much as I love the old Cooder sound, some of the most interesting cuts here are when he strays from it. “Three Chords and the Truth” is a hard-edged blues rocker that pays tribute to persecuted leftist troubadours Joe Hill, Paul Robeson, and Pete Seeger.

It’s obvious that Cooder is emulating these singers with My Name is Buddy. I hope the story of this ramblin’ red cat gets told to a lot of people — children and adults alike.

A big shot of Ry
Hear a long stretch of Cooder — Buddy songs and older works — from 10 p.m. to midnight Friday, May 11, on The Santa Fe Opry, country music as the good Lord intended it to sound, on KSFR-FM 90.7. (I’ll start the Cooder segment shortly after 11 p.m.)

And don’t forget Terrell’s Sound World, free-form, weirdo radio, same time, same station, Sunday night.

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP: MONEY, MUSIC, POLITICS

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
May 10, 2007

On Wednesday, I reported on 29 of 33 state Cabinet officials donating nearly $50,000 to Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign.

But Cabinet members aren’t the only ones who contributed. The Associated Press already has reported that New Mexico state employees gave the Richardson campaign at least $271,000. That includes the executive branch, the courts and state universities.

More than 40 state employees contributed $2,300, the maximum amount allowed by federal law.

Among those are Lt. Governor Diane Denish (whose husband, Herb, also kicked in $2,300); state budget Director Dannette Burch; Jay Czar, director of the state Mortgage Finance Authority; acting University of New Mexico president David Harris; Hillary Tompkins, chief counsel for the governor’s office; Jim Noel, director of the Judicial Standards Commission (and husband of deputy campaign manager Amanda Cooper); state Racing Commission director Julian Luna; Gary Giron, deputy director of the state Transportation Department; Ricardo Campos, Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Transportation Department; Manuel Tijerina, chief of the Risk Management Legal Bureau; and Interstate Stream Commission Director Estevan Lopez.

What about the primary states?: Richardson, according to his report filed with the Federal Election Commission last month, raised almost $2.8 million from nearly 2,000 individuals in New Mexico, nearly half of his reported $6.1 million. This state by far gave him more than any other for his White House quest.

But what about those states that might actually determine the Democratic nominee? According to PoliticalMoneyLine.com, a Web site operated by Congressional Quarterly, Richardson isn’t doing that well.

In Iowa, only six people gave him a total of $5,750 as of late March. In New Hampshire, Richardson reported $6,600 from nine individuals. He’s doing slightly better In Nevada, where he got 23 individual contributions totaling just over $32,000. In South Carolina, he picked up just shy of $20,000 from 19 individual contributions.

Richardson is doing better in Florida, which recently threw a monkey wrench into the whole selection process by moving up its primary to Jan. 29 next year (the same day as South Carolina’s). In the Sunshine State, Richardson has collected nearly $195,000 from 186 individual contributions.

However, he’s well behind the top-tier candidate there. Hillary Clinton raised more than $1.8 million, Barak Obama more than $1 million and John Edwards $499,000 from individual Florida contributors.

Musical contributions: There’s one prominent name in music on Richardson’s contributor list that will be familiar to fans of indie rock. Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of the influential Seattle label Sub Pop. Sub Pop gave the world Nirvana, and now Poneman gave the governor two contributions totaling $500.

I bet Richardson didn’t tell Poneman he’s a fan of The Eagles.

Popular Hispanic singer Darren Cordova gave Richardson’s campaign $2,300. It’s already been reported that country music star and New Mexico Music Commission member Randy Travis donated $2,300 to Richardson, as did his wife, Elizabeth, also a music commissioner.

However, there’s no record of any contribution from another celebrity music commissioner: Tony Orlando.

This proves you don’t have to contribute to the campaign to get appointed by the governor to the Music Commission. Some would argue that Orlando’s presence proves you can sometimes get an appointment for no apparent reason at all.

Speaking of the Music Commission: Executive Director Nancy Laflin said Wednesday that the commission has produced a 30-minute television show featuring performances by New Mexico musicians that will air at noon Saturday on KOAT Channel 7.

The pilot for New Mexico Southwest Sounds will feature Latin performer Ramon Bermudez, American Indian flutist Ronald Roybal, the Ben Martinez Project and The Dirty Novels (an Albuquerque band). An upcoming show will feature Tobias Rene, Daybreak Express and Jenny Marlowe.

Laflin said the plan is to produce a weekly show for state musicians.

Funny ads: There’s already been a huge reaction in political Internet circles to two new humorous television commercials the Richardson campaign plans to air in Iowa — and already showing on YouTube. The ads show Richardson at a “job interview” with what appears to be a bored potential employer, who acts disinterested while the governor discusses his lengthy résumé.

Most of the reaction I’ve seen has been positive.

“We’re sure Richardson’s opponents will say the ads are too cute by half and don’t exactly scream ‘presidential,” said Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post on his blog The Fix. “But they cut through the clutter that is surely to come. And the ads are winners in my mind simply because they are different.”

But the funniest reaction was from the blog Wonkette:

“There has never been a presidential campaign ad anything like this one. Every single campaign director and political reporter and media specialist and pollster is currently slumped in their chair, slack-jawed, wondering what it all means. Thank you, Bill Richardson. Thank you for whatever weird path you’ve just put the nation on. It will end in disaster — terrible disaster, for everyone — but it had to happen. It was our destiny.”