THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, October 31, 2008
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell@ksfr.org

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Mr. Undertaker by Angry Johnny & The Killbillies
Wild and Free by Hank Williams III
Jungle Fever by Charlie Feathers
Hillbilly Monster by James Richard Oliver
Wouldn't You Know by Billy Lee Riley
Penny Instead by Charlie Pickett
Bullet in My Mind by Zeno Tornado & The Boney Google Brothers
Hush Money by The Collins Kids
The Hydrogen Bomb by Al Rogers & The Rocky Mountain Boys

North to Alaska by Johnny Horton
Hillbilly Fever by Little Jimmy Dickens
Crazy Arms by Jerry Lee Lewis
5,000 Country Music Songs by Ry Cooder
Indeed You Do by Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs
TV Party by The Asylum Street Spankers
I'm a Fool to Fool Around With You by Hank Thompson
Ghost Woman Blues by George Carter

Down Thru the Holler by Hundred Year Flood
The Wicked Things by Boris McCutcheon & The Saltlicks
How Will You Shine by The Gourds
Million Dollar Funeral by Califone
Forbidden Angel by Mel Street
Snatch It and Grab It by Freddy Hart
Pilgrim on a Train by Gann Brewer
The Bum Hotel by Uncle Dave Macon

Werewolf by Michael Hurley
Murder's Crossed My Mind by Desdemona Finch
Everything is Broken by Bob Dylan
The Gallows by Possessed by Paul James
You Can't Trust Them by Fred Eaglesmith
Something to Think About by Willie Nelson
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

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

OH, A WISE GUY, EH?

Admittedly, I have a hard time envisioning Barack Obama as Moe, but I'm a sucker for the Stooges, so I'm going to post this thing.

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: BACK TO BERLIN

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
October 31, 2008

Lou Reed’s Berlin is known as the most depressing album in rock ’n’ roll history.

It was released in 1973, and the critics hated it, calling it bloated and overblown and a huge downer. The public ignored it nearly as thoroughly as did the radio industry, which had made a daring and unlikely hit out of Reed’s gay-life celebration “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Indeed, Berlin was a full-force dive into the wild side. It’s a song cycle about a drug-doomed young couple that involves bad dope, domestic violence, crazy promiscuity, the Child Protective Services, and ultimately, suicide.

As Terry Allen would sing, “Ain’t no Top 40 song.”

And yet Berlin has held up amazingly well through the years. Harrowing lines like “somebody else would have broken both of her arms” and “Caroline says as she gets up from the floor/‘You can hit me all you want to/But I don’t love you anymore’” are no less politically incorrect now than they were 35 years ago, but the sad story of Caroline and Jim is an unflinching look at the dark impulses of love and obsession.

In December 2006, Reed and film director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) recorded a concert film over a five-night stint in Brooklyn. The DVD, called Lou Reed: Berlin, and the CD, titled Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse, were released this month.

The original Berlin band was basically a rock-royalty supergroup that included bassists Jack Bruce and Tony Levin, Steve Winwood on organ and harmonium, and drummer Aynsley Dunbar. There are some great players on the new version, too, including original Berlin guitarist Steve Hunter and two bassists, longtime sideman Fernando Saunders and Rob Wassermann. Reed’s backup chorus includes soul belter Sharon Jones and bizarro warbler Antony Hegarty. There are strings and horns and even the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

The emotional punch is still there.

The thing about Berlin is that it doesn’t waste a lot of time focusing on the happy times between Jim and Caroline. By the time the ironic “Happy Birthday” segment in the intro plays, grim reality is starting to overshadow any giddy romance. The title song is a bittersweet memory of a small café. The guitar and a bluesy piano add a sad counterpoint to Reed, who wearily intones, “It was very nice, oh honey, it was paradise.”

“Lady Day,” which Reed has kept in his live repertoire for years, still sounds potent, with Reed spitting out his description of the hotel Caroline called home. “It had greenish walls/A bathroom in the hall.” You’d thinking he was singing about hell’s most horrible pit.

If anything, the new version of “Oh Jim” is even stronger than the original. Drummer Tony “Thunder” Smith lives up to his nickname in the song’s intro. There’s a tense guitar conversation between Reed and Hunter and a cool call-and-response with Reed and Jones.

But the real core of Berlin has always been the final three songs.

“The Kids,” which deals with the government removing Caroline’s children from her home, is the one that always gets to me. On the St. Ann’s version, Reed fully gets into the character of Jim, practically shouting the lines, “Because number one was the girlfriend from Paris/The things that they did, ah, they didn’t have to ask us/And then the Welshman from India, who came here to stay.” By the end of the song he’s railing against “that miserable rotten slut.”

As in the original, the song ends with a recording of crying children shouting “Mommy! Mommy!” (A weird little tale about the original song from the All Music Guide: “To ensure that the horror of the song truly hit home, producer Bob Ezrin set up a tape recorder in his own home, then, when his children returned from school, told them that their mother was dead. At least, that’s the legend.”)

This is followed by “The Bed,” a somber, almost whispered, suicide song. “This is the place where she lay her head when she went to bed at night/And this is the place our children were conceived/candles lit the room brightly at night/And that odd and fateful night.”

In the new version, the Brooklyn Youth Choir adds eerie, angelic background sounds. Watching the DVD and seeing the sweet faces, you’re almost tempted to scream, “Get those kids outta there! That’s no place for children!”

But unlike the original album, Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse doesn’t stop at “Sad Song.” It includes the encores — “Candy Says” (vocals by Hegarty) and, because this is a Lou Reed concert, after all, a rousing “Sweet Jane.”

But fitting in best with the mood of Berlin is “Rock Minuet,” an overlooked tune from Reed’s 2000 album Ecstasy. It’s an eight-minute descent into sexual violence and murder — an acoustic number occasionally fortified by some truly monstrous electric-guitar solos.

The new Berlin: come for the drugs and suicide, stay for the back-alley throat slashing.

UDALL AHEAD BY 15 PERCENTAGE POINTS

Republican Steve Pearce might have been aided by the televised debates between him and Democrat Tom Udall. According to Rasmussen Reports, Pearce gained five percentage points on Udall in the past two weeks.

However, that's just a dent. Udall still leads Pearce 56 percent to 41 percent, according to Rasmussen.

Since Rasmussen's last poll, which was conducted on Oct. 13, Udall lost a little and Pearce gained a little in the favorability ratings.

Udall is now viewed favorably by 58% of voters, down from 64% two weeks ago. Forty percent (40%) view the Democrat unfavorably, up from 33%. Pearce is viewed favorably by 49%, up from 43% two weeks ago. The Republican is viewed unfavorably by 47%, down from 53% in the last poll.

As reported in today's Roundhouse Roundup, Rasmussen found Barack Obama beating John McCain 54-44 percent. (Click HERE for more info.)

According to the poll, (500 likely voters interviewed Tuesday), Gov. Bill Richardson gets good or excellent ratings from 48 percent of New Mexico voters , while 20 percent give him a poor rating.

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP:

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
October 1, 2008

San Miguel County Clerk Paul Maez made the latest issue of Rolling Stone — and it’s not a review of his band Wyld Country.

And no, it has nothing to do with the controversy surrounding Maez’s association with a certain Public Regulation Commission candidate, although the headline of the article is “Block the Vote.”

The article, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, is about voter disenfranchisement and it tells about the disaster that was the Democratic Party Caucus in February.

The article starts out with an anecdote involving Maez and providing a description of Las Vegas, N.M., that I don’t believe came from the Chamber of Commerce:

“These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.”

Kennedy and Palast go on to say that in the caucus, “one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists.”

It’s worth noting that the caucus was not run by the state or the various counties, but by the Democratic Party itself. The party did get its lists from the state, but nobody ever has explained what caused the problems, which led to thousands of provisional ballots being cast, which led to the final results not being known for two weeks. (Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by just a hair.) The party in April canceled a scheduled summit to discuss the problems.

In the article, Maez blames “faulty list management by a private contractor hired by the state.”

That company is ES&S, which has denied any role in the caucus problems. “ES&S’ role related to the New Mexico voter registration database is limited to providing centralized voter registration software, working with the state to implement the centralized system and providing technical support in using the system,” a company spokeswoman told the Associated Press in February.
Another New Mexican quoted in the Rolling Stone story is state Auditor Hector Balderas, who also found his name missing from the voter list during the February caucus.

Kennedy and Palast wrote, “ ‘As a strategic consideration,’ (Balderas) notes, ‘there are those that benefit from chaos at the ballot box.’ ”

Maez has been at the center of one of the major flaps in Jerome Block Jr.’s PRC campaign.

Block admitted lying about $2,500 in public campaign funds that he reported was paid to Wyld Country. Block had maintained that the band had performed at a May 3 rally. But he later admitted the rally never took place after two band members told newspapers there never was such a performance. The New Mexico secretary of state has recommended fines totaling $11,000 for Block and has said Block should return another $10,000 of the public campaign funds he accepted.

Pied Piping: Gov. Bill Richardson on Wednesday practiced what he’s been preaching around the country — he voted early.

Perhaps he felt obligated to vote early after a headline in the South Tampa News and Tribune called him the “Pied Piper Of Early Voting.”

Columnist Joe O’Neill said Richardson gave a “boilerplate pep talk” in Tampa (he gave one of those in Santa Fe on Wednesday, too). But O’Neill said the governor was “Looking and sounding more animated and affable than when he was a presidential candidate … .”

Richardson was in Florida last week campaigning for Obama.

So if Richardson is the Pied Piper, I guess that makes me a rat.

Right after his speech, I went back to the County Courthouse and voted.

I have to bust myself for hypocrisy here. A couple of weeks ago, while covering a political event, I was asked by a nice woman to vote early and I told her something to the effect that early voting was for Communists. Election Day is a nice American tradition and I usually enjoy going to the school near my house, seeing my neighbors, etc.

But on Wednesday morning, early voting looked so quick and easy, I couldn’t resist. (That sounds like the rationalization of a smash-and-grab jewelry store window thief, I realize.)

The wait turned out to be only around five minutes. And while I didn’t see any of my neighbors, I did see several friends and acquaintances, including a certain television reporter whose voting experience took much longer than mine. He “spoiled” his first ballot by accidentally voting both ways on a judicial retention question, so he had to wait for a second ballot.

Latest from Rasmussen: Obama is leading Republican John McCain 54 percent to 44 percent in New Mexico, according to the latest Rasmussen poll released Wednesday.

In the Senate race, Democrat Tom Udall leads Republican Steve Pearce “by a wide margin,” according to the Rasmussen Web site, but the actual numbers won’t be released until today.
The telephone survey of 500 likely voters in New Mexico was conducted by Rasmussen Reports on Tuesday. The margin of error is 4.5 percent.

Got Clout? Richard Greene, host of Air America’s radio show Clout tonight will broadcast his show live from The Santa Fe Film Center, 1616 St. Michael’s Drive. The two-hour show starts at 7 p.m. and admission is free to the first 100. Air America, a liberal talk-show network, broadcasts in Santa Fe on KTRC-1260 AM.

RIPPLES

Joe the Plumber
Cedric the Entertainer
Larry the Cable Guy
Rosie the Riveter
Floyd the Barber
Popeye the Sailor
John the Baptist
Conan the Barbarian
Vlad the Impaler
Jack the Ripper
Mott the Hoople

MEASURING THE DRAPES?

Steve Clemons, a foreign-policy blogger who used to work for Jeff Bingman, blogged this:

I can't validate this and probably won't try for the time being. But I will report a reasonably high quality rumor that reached me from a high quality source.

The rumor is that McClatchy News is trying to report a story that should Barack Obama win the election, most of the key members of his Cabinet will be announced on Friday, November 7th.

And the two most likely candidates for the job of Secretary of State, according to the rumblings are. . . . .Senator John Kerry and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.

Read the whole post HERE.