TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, July 22, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

Now Simulcasting 90.7 FM, and out new, stronger signal, 101.1 FM

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Hard to Be Human by The Mekons
Guest Informant by The Fall
Wonderlust King by Gogol Bordello
Of Whales and Woe by Les Claypool
Pedro Bound by Mike Watt
Chocolate Out by The Boredoms
Jet Ninjin by Go! Go! 7188
Bumble Bee Zombie by Roky Erikson

Surfin' Down the Rio Grande by Sir Richard & The Knights
Lost in the Bayou by The Surf Lords
Liberteens in My Scene by The Dirty Novels
Nicole Told Me by Half Japanese
Plot Against the President by The Dick Nixons
Catch Hell Blues by The White Stripes
Stabbing Trilogy by The Gluey Brothers
Boys Don't Cry by Mummy the Peepshow

SWAMP DOGG SET
They Crowned an Idiot King
California is Drowning and I Live By The River
Surfin' in Harlem
America is Bleeding
God Bless America for What?
F**k the Bomb, Ban the Drugs
Crawdad Hole

Here Comes Terry by NRBQ
Peter's Trip by The Electric Flag
I Feel a Little Spaced Out by Os Mutantes
Qu'ran by Brian Eno & David Byrne
Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon by The Jefferson Airplane
Last Kiss by Pearl Jam
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, July 20, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

Now Simulcasting 90.7 FM, and our new, stronger signal, 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Good BBQ by The Riptones
Come on Home to Houston by Cornell Hurd
Moon Gone Down by The Gourds
Long Haired Country Boy by Charlie Daniels
Waymore's Blues by Waylon Jennings with John Anderson
Wolverton Mountain by Southern Culture on the Skids
Old Black Joe by Jerry Lee Lewis
Shake That Thing by Big Al Anderson
She Got the House by NRBQ

Peach Blossom by Hundred Year Flood
Starry Eyes by Roky Erickson with Luanne Barton
You're Humbuggin' Me by Lefty Frizzell
Philadelphia Lawyer by Rose Maddox
Scraps From Your Table by Hazel Dickens
Happy Hour by Ted Hawkins
Gimme a Ride to Heaven by Terry Allen

Phantom Riders by King Richard & The Knights
Wicked Game by The Surf Lords
Old Chunk of Coal by Billy Joe Shaver
Worthless by Tony Gilkyson
Wildcat Tamer by John Schooley
Eleven Cent Cotton by Porter Wagoner
The Night Porter Wagoner Came to Town by Tabby Crabb
Back Home by Dolly Parton

Up the Country Blues by Maria Muldaur
I'm So Lonesome Without You by Hazeldine
Prodigal Son by John Egenes
Don't Go Back to Sleep by Patty Booker
Next Time You're Drifting My Way by ThaMuseMeant
Mean Old Wind Die Down by North Mississippi Allstars
Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

BACK TO REALITY

Yes, Santa Fe is REALITY ...

I'm back from my vacation to Texas. We visited my daughter and son-in-law, made a side trip to Waco to see the Branch Davidian compound (I always make my children visit crime scenes and massacre sites) and the not-so-fabulous Dr. Pepper Museum (cheap pricks don't even give free samples!)

And we got to see Hundred Year Flood at the Saxon Pub.

Check out my FLICKR site for my vacation photos. (Thanks to FLICKR I don't have to come to your house and give you a personal slide show.)

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: SWAMP DIGGITY DOGG!

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
July 20, 2007

Nobody has ever accused Swamp Dogg of being too subtle. The cover of his new album, Resurrection, features a picture of the singer nailed to a cross, clad only in an American flag loincloth and a cap that reads "Witness Protection Program." Above his head a sign reads "Program Failure."

Yep, it’s a Swamp Dogg album all right, and it’s Swamp Dogg through and through, with songs of love, lust, and cranky political ranting.

While the notion of “cult artist” is overused, it fits Swamp Dogg (aka Jerry Williams). While he’s been releasing records for nearly 40 years, he’s never been a mainstream success. As he said in a June 2007 interview in the London newspaper The Guardian, “I’m not a down-and-out R & B singer. I’m not a used-to-be because I never was. I am so glad now that I didn’t become a great R & B hit in the ’60s, because I may still be in the ... ’60s, running around singing ‘Baby You’re My Everything’ and ‘I’m the Lover Man.’”

One of the things I love most about this singer is that he embodies so many contradictions. He’s known as a musical renegade and iconoclast who bolted the big-label, music-industrial complex and started his own independent label (Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group) years before it was fashionable. And yet his music, instrumentally at least, is basically conservative — old-fashioned, late ’60s/early ’70s soul that sounds as if George Clinton, Prince, and hip-hop never happened.

Although Dogg’s a soulster through and through, his biggest songwriting success is “She’s All I Got,” a country hit for Johnny Paycheck in the early ’70s.

And then there’s the matter of his lyrics. You’d probably expect him to be a fire-breathing, radical militant judging by the cover of this album; the titles of some of the songs (“America is Bleeding” and “They Crowned an Idiot King,” a one-fingered salute to the current chief executive); and his comfort with casual profanity and liberal use of the N word (Swamp Dogg obviously didn’t go to the recent NAACP “funeral” for the offensive epithet).

It’s true Swamp Dogg is anti-war and anti-Bush, and he believes racism is alive and well in modern America. But from his lyrics you also learn he opposes abortion and gay marriage, doesn’t like Mexican immigrants using Civil Rights-era slogans, and wants to keep God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

By my count, his politics are pretty close to those of Merle Haggard, which I personally find far more fascinating than those of the straight paint-by-numbers, talking-point liberal or conservative.

The 12-minute title song is a tour de force of Swamp Dogg’s political theory. Starting off with the rumbling of thunder he evokes the days of slavery, comparing it with the crucifixion. He praises Martin Luther King Jr. as “the messenger.”

Soon some of his social conservatism becomes apparent. Swamp Dogg denounces the welfare system, saying it encourages fatherless families. He blasts drugs, espousing a just-say-no policy. “You don’t have to do nothing about it, just leave it the hell alone and it will go away/It’s a proven fact that if a product is not being consumed the supplier will soon move on to other things.”

Swamp Dogg offers some sound economic advice to African Americans (or anyone else for that matter): “Start putting $10 to $15 a week into a savings account until it becomes big enough to buy a six-month certificate of deposit at 9 percent then continuously roll it over and don’t touch it and buy no damned Christmas presents!”

He also advises his people to put aside frivolous reading and “read a copy of Black Enterprise, Forbes, Money, and Fortune/Discover what the upscale black is doing and what the white man is planning to build in a year on the same site where you’re renting.”

He works himself into an emotional frenzy by the end of the song. “I will see you when you come out of the tomb!” he shouts. “ I will see you when you rise!”

Besides politics, the other major topic on Resurrection is love, specifically his recent marriage. “Today I Got Married” is a string-sweetened, tinkly-piano tribute to his wife, with a refrain that goes, “She knows how to fight to funk/She knows how to lift a [N word] up.” He promises to “do the things that make a marriage work/Bring my money home, get my lovin’ at home, and spend more time in church.”

This is a man who is passionate about and believes in everything he sings. It makes his music a true pleasure.


Also recommended:

* Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions by James Blood Ulmer. Here’s another 60-something black musician who has a way with angry protest songs.

Ulmer is a jazzman who has played with the likes of Ornette Coleman and Art Blakey. But in recent years his art has taken him deeper and deeper into the blues. I loved his 2005 album Birthright, but this new one is even more exciting. It was recorded in New Orleans’ Piety Street studios with a full band.

Ulmer performs several fresh-sounding covers of songs by Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and Junior Kimbrough. But New Orleans — particularly, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — is never far from Ulmer’s mind. Songs include “Survivors of the Hurricane,” “Katrina,” “Let’s Talk About Jesus,” and “Backwater Blues,” a traditional blues number that in Ulmer’s hands sounds like a prophecy.

Ulmer’s main strength is that he captures the mysteriousness of the blues. Even when the band is rocking, you can imagine the husky-voiced singer in a graveyard, sitting on a tombstone, playing his guitar, and shouting melodies that double as secret incantations and dark warnings.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, July 15, 2007
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
Now Simulcasting 90.7 FM, and out new, stronger signal, 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org


(This is the pre-recorded show I left for Sunday. Tom Adler filled in for me on The Santa Fe Opry Friday.)

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Conquest by The White Stripes
Fire Engine by 13th Story Elevators
Memos from Purgatory by The Chesterfield Kings
My Dawgy Heap by The A-Bones
Pinon Lurker by The Gluey Brothers
Come Back Baby by Rev. Beat Man & The Unbelievers
Step Aside by Sleater-Kinney
Mi Saxophone by Al Hurricane

Forty Dollars by The Twilight Singers
Big Shoe Head by Buick MacKain
Lonesome Cowboy Bill by The Velvet Underground
Ask The Angels by Patti Smith
Where Were You by The Mekons
Road Runner by Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
Motorcycle Irene by Moby Grape
Violenza Domestica by Mr. Bungle

Budokan Tape Try (500 Tapes High) by The Boredoms
Moon I'm Coming Home by Pere Ubu
I'm Insane by Sonic Youth
I Live in a Split Level Head by Napoleon XIV
The Torture Never Stops by Frank Zappa

Love is All Around by The Troggs
Sad Days, Lonely Nights by James Blood Ulmer
Hookers in the Street by Otis Taylor
Hiawatha by Laurie Anderson
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

COLD TURKEY

Julia recently wrote about taking a "mini-vacation" from the internets, as did Mario.

Looks I'm doing the same thing -- but not on purpose. I took off for my vacation yesterday and even though I got my laptop into its carrying case, I never got it to the car. I discovered that fact when checking into a motel in Abilene last night.

I'm in the motel lobby now. Fortunately I had the Terrell's Tune-up (immediately below) prepared to go.

But for the most part I'll be without the Internet for the next week or so. And for someone as addicted as me, that's going to be a challenge.

Wish me luck ....

TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: A GOOD THUMPIN'

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
July 14, 2007

I was prepared to be disappointed by The White Stripes’ new album, Icky Thump.

It’s not just because Jack White somehow turned into a movie-star-dating, model-marrying rock star. It was the music. After four exciting, enchanting, and exuberant albums, the band’s 2005 effort, Get Behind Me Satan, was a frustrating mess that never quite jelled. And White’s subsequent side project, The Raconteurs, was just plain bland.

Oh well, I figured, maybe it was time for The White Stripes to fade away. Four good-to-great albums isn’t a bad run for a band, especially for a duo — a duo! — performing high-charged, Zepped-out covers of old Son House and Robert Johnson tunes. And besides, Jack White will always have that album he produced for Loretta Lynn and those cool hillbilly songs on the Cold Mountain soundtrack. You can’t take those away from him.

So I was just hoping that the new album wouldn’t do any permanent damage to The White Stripes’ memory.

Guess what? As Hazel, would say, Icky Thump is a doozy. Jack and his ex-wife, Meg, have returned to their basic guitar/drum attack. In fact, some songs, like the nasty slide-guitar-driven “Catch Hell Blues,” seem to be a conscious return to the Stripes’ early sound. However, many songs are fortified by touches of instrumental weirdness that show the Whites looking forward.

Jack sounds truly happy to be here, playing his guitar like a maniac and warbling like the reincarnation of Marc Bolan hopped up on trucker crank. Meg is playing drums less like Moe Tucker and more like the Mighty Thor.

On the first song, the title track, I was almost afraid the Stripes were going political by interjecting themselves in the immigration debate. In the middle of lyrics about a “redheaded señorita” in Mexico comes a provocative verse: “White Americans, what?/Nothing better to do?/Why don’t you kick yourself out/You’re an immigrant too.”

Not that I mind political songs, but that wouldn’t seem to be a strength of the Stripes. This verse seems to be an anomaly on this album. People are going to remember the song for the crazy balloon-rubbing guitar noises and the explosive drums. There don’t seem to be other overt political themes unless “St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air)” is an oblique reference to Iraq.

I’m having fun spotting subtle salutes to older songs. The hook on “300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues” might remind you of the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” while the acoustic guitar chords on “Effect & Cause” is right out of The Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

Did I say something about instrumental weirdness? “Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn” features some Cold Mountain mandolin and droning bagpipes (not to mention Meg’s drums, which make a subliminal suggestion that a Scottish army is about to come down from the hills and pillage the town). That’s immediately followed by “St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air),” another bagpipe-and-drum song with Meg reciting some strange prayer (“This battle is in the air/I’m looking upwards/St. Andrew, don’t forsake me”) and White blasting bizarre, electronically altered guitar licks straight out of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

But even this pair of tunes isn’t as delightfully strange as “Conquest,” a twisted cover of an old Patti Page song. Jack and Meg, aided by trumpeter Regulo Aldama, turn the song into an electric bullfight. White pours himself into the melodramatic lyrics, “The hunted became the huntress, the hunter became the prey” (making the final “became” into a five- or six-syllable word). But I think the Frank Zappa-like Munchkins-in-the-dungeon background vocals are my favorite part of the song.

At this writing my favorite song on Icky Thump is “Rag and Bone,” a partly sung but mostly spoken tune in which we find Jack and Meg scavenging for old junk — “a broken trumpet or a telephone ... turntables and gramophones.” It’s not clear if they’re supposed to be cruising yard sales or just going through trash outside peoples’ houses. Whatever the case, a listener wants to be with them. During the song Jack goes into a rap (with Meg responding, “Uh huh,” in agreement) that could almost be interpreted as the band’s philosophy of music as well: “It’s just things that you don’t want, I can use ’em. Meg can use ’em. We’ll do something with ’em. We’ll make something out of ’em. We’ll make some money out of ’em at least.”

I hope they make lots of money and stick around for a long time.

Also recommended:



*Listen My Friends: The Best of Moby Grape. MG is a San Francisco Summer of Love band whose name is spoken with reverence in rock criticdom — or at least without the condescending sneer reserved for other bands of the hippie era. And in truth, the Grape deserves major respect. The group’s first, self-titled album (pictured here) was nothing short of a masterpiece, and the songs “Omaha” and “Hey Grandma” from that album are timeless rockers that still thrill those with ears to hear, while “8:05” is a sweet heartbreaker that ranks with the finest of country rock.

Unfortunately, after that wild creative burst things started falling apart for MG. Part of that was due to singer/guitarist Skip Spence’s descent into schizophrenia.

The follow-up Wow was sprawling and self-consciously artsy but had some great moments. Their subsequent work was almost completely forgettable.

This collection includes six impeccable songs from the first album (including those named above) and some of the better tunes from Wow, including the brilliant “Murder in My Heart for the Judge” and “Can’t Be So Bad,” a rampaging blues number that slows down at the end of every verse for some inexplicable days-of-old-when-knights-were-bold trumpets.

Most of the remaining songs are pretty mediocre except “Sweet Ride (Never Again),” which shows traces of the first album’s spark, and Spence’s “Seeing,” which starts slow and builds into an intense psychedelic workout.

I just wish that Sony/BMG would have instead rereleased Moby Grape and Wow, now available only in overpriced versions on the obscure San Francisco Sound label.